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TOWARDS THE GOAL
By MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
Author of "ENGLAND'S EFFORT," etc.
With an introduction by
THE HON. THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1917
To
ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON
True Son of France
True Friend of England
I dedicate this book.
INTRODUCTION
England has in this war reached a height of achievement loftier than that which she attained in the struggle with Napoleon; and she has reached that height in a far shorter period. Her giant effort, crowned with a success as wonderful as the effort itself, is worthily described by the author of this book. Mrs. Ward writes nobly on a noble theme.
This war is the greatest the world has ever seen. The vast size of the armies, the tremendous slaughter, the loftiness of the heroism shown, and the hideous horror of the brutalities committed, the valour of the fighting men, and the extraordinary ingenuity of those who have designed and built the fighting machines, the burning patriotism of the people who defend their hearthstones, and the far-reaching complexity of the plans of the leaders—all are on a scale so huge that nothing in past history can be compared with them. The issues at stake are elemental. The free peoples of the world have banded together against tyrannous militarism and government by caste. It is not too much to say that the outcome will largely determine, for daring and liberty-loving souls, whether or not life is worth living. A Prussianised world would be as intolerable as a world ruled over by Attila or by Timur the Lame.
It is in this immense world-crisis that England has played her part; a part which has grown greater month by month. Mrs. Ward enables us to see the awakening of the national soul which rendered it possible to play this part; and she describes the works by which the faith of the soul justified itself.
What she writes is of peculiar interest to the United States. We have suffered, or are suffering, in exaggerated form, from most (not all) of the evils that were eating into the fibre of the British character three years ago—and in addition from some purely indigenous ills of our own. If we are to cure ourselves it must be by our own exertions; our destiny will certainly not be shaped for us, as was Germany's, by a few towering autocrats of genius, such as Bismarck and Moltke. Mrs. Ward shows us the people of England in the act of curing their own ills, of making good, by gigantic and self-sacrificing exertion in the present, the folly and selfishness and greed and soft slackness of the past. The fact that England, when on the brink of destruction, gathered her strength and strode resolutely back to safety, is a fact of happy omen for us in America, who are now just awaking to the folly and selfishness and greed and soft slackness that for some years we have been showing.
As in America, so in England, a surfeit of materialism had produced a lack of high spiritual purpose in the nation at large; there was much confusion of ideas and ideals; and also much triviality, which was especially offensive when it masqueraded under some high-sounding name. An unhealthy sentimentality—the antithesis of morality—has gone hand in hand with a peculiarly sordid and repulsive materialism. The result was a soil in which various noxious weeds flourished rankly; and of these the most noxious was professional pacificism. The professional pacificist has at times festered in the diseased tissue of almost every civilisation; but it is only within the last three-quarters of a century that he has been a serious menace to the peace of justice and righteousness. In consequence, decent citizens are only beginning to understand the base immorality of his preaching and practice; and he has been given entirely undeserved credit for good intentions. In England as in the United States, domestic pacificism has been the most potent ally of alien militarism. And in both countries the extreme type has shown itself profoundly unpatriotic. The damage it has done the nation has been limited only by its weakness and folly; those who have professed it have served the devil to the full extent which their limited powers permitted.
There were in England—just as there are now in America—even worse foes to national honour and efficiency. Greed and selfishness, among capitalists and among labour leaders, had to be grappled with. The sordid baseness which saw in the war only a chance for additional money profits to the employer was almost matched by the fierce selfishness which refused to consider a strike from any but the standpoint of the strikers.
But the chief obstacle to be encountered in rousing England was sheer short-sightedness. A considerable time elapsed before it was possible to make the people understand that this was a people's war, that it was a matter of vital personal concern to the people as a whole, and to all individuals as individuals. In America we are now encountering much the same difficulties, due to much the same causes.
In England the most essential thing to be done was to wake the people to their need, and to guide them in meeting the need. The next most essential was to show to them, and to the peoples in friendly lands, whether allied or neutral, how the task was done; and this both as a reason for just pride in what had been achieved and as an inspiration to further effort.
Mrs. Ward's books—her former book and her present one—accomplish both purposes. Every American who reads the present volume must feel a hearty and profound respect for the patriotism, energy, and efficiency shown by the British people when they became awake to the nature of the crisis; and furthermore, every American must feel stirred with the desire to see his country now emulate Britain's achievement.
In this volume Mrs. Ward draws a wonderful picture of the English in the full tide of their successful effort. From the beginning England's naval effort and her money effort have been extraordinary. By the time Mrs. Ward's first book was written, the work of industrial preparedness was in full blast; but it could yet not be said that England's army in the field was the equal of the huge, carefully prepared, thoroughly coordinated military machines of those against whom and beside whom it fought. Now, the English army is itself as fine and as highly efficient a military machine as the wisdom of man can devise; now, the valour and hardihood of the individual soldier are being utilised to the full under a vast and perfected system which enables those in control of the great engine to use every unit in such fashion as to aid in driving the mass forward to victory.
Even the Napoleonic contest was child's play compared to this. Never has Great Britain been put to such a test. Never since the spacious days of Elizabeth has she been in such danger. Never, in any crisis, has she risen to so lofty a height of self-sacrifice and achievement. In the giant struggle against Napoleon, England's own safety was secured by the demoralisation of the French fleet. But in this contest the German naval authorities have at their disposal a fleet of extraordinary efficiency, and have devised for use on an extended scale the most formidable and destructive of all instruments of marine warfare. In previous coalitions England has partially financed her continental allies; in this case the expenditures have been on an unheard-of scale, and in consequence England's industrial strength, in men and money, in business and mercantile and agricultural ability, has been drawn on as never before. As in the days of Marlborough and Wellington, so now, England has sent her troops to the continent; but whereas formerly her expeditionary forces, although of excellent quality, were numerically too small to be of primary importance, at present her army is already, by size as well as by excellence, a factor of prime importance, in the military situation; and its relative as well as absolute importance is steadily growing.
And to her report of the present stage of Great Britain's effort in the war, Mrs. Ward has added some letters describing from her own personal experience the ruin wrought by the Germans in towns like Senlis and Gerbéviller, and in the hundreds of villages in Northern, Central, and Eastern France that now lie wrecked and desolate. And she has told in detail, and from the evidence of eye-witnesses, some of the piteous incidents of German cruelty to the civilian population, which are already burnt into the conscience of Europe, and should never be forgotten till reparation has been made.
Mrs. Ward's book is thus of high value as a study of contemporary history. It is of at least as high value as an inspiration to constructive patriotism.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILLS,
May 1st, 1917.
CONTENTS
No. 1
England's Effort—Rapid March of Events—The Work of the Navy—A Naval
Base—What the Navy has done—The Jutland Battle—The Submarine
Peril—German Lies—Shipbuilding—Disciplined Expectancy—Crossing the
Channel—The Minister of Munitions—Dr. Addison—Increase of
Munitions—A Gigantic Task—Arrival in France—German Prisoners—A Fat
Factory—A Use for Everything—G.H.Q.—Intelligence Department—"The
Issue of the War"—An Aerodrome—The Task of the Aviators—The
Visitors' Chateau.
No. 2
A French School—Our Soldiers and French Children—Nissen Huts—Tanks—A
Primeval Plough—A Division on the March—Significant Preparations
—Increase of Ammunition—"The Fosses"—A Sacred Spot—Vimy
Ridge—The Sound of the Guns—A Talk with a General—Why the Germans
Retreat—Growth of the New Armies—Soldiers at School.
No. 3
America Joins the Allies—The British Effort—Creating an Army—L'Union
Sacrée—Registration—Accommodation—Clothing—Arms and Equipment—A
Critical Time—A Long-continued Strain—Training—O.T.C.'S—Boy
Officers—The First Three Armies—Our Wonderful Soldiers—An Advanced
Stage—The Final Result—Spectacle of the Present—Snipers and
Anti-snipers—The Result.
No. 4
Vimy Ridge—The Morale of our Men—Mons. le Maire—Ubiquitous
Soldiers—The Somme—German Letters—German Prisoners—Amiens—"Taking
Over" a Line—Poilus and Tommies—"Taking Over" Trenches—French
Trenches—Unnoticed Changes—Amiens Cathedral—German Prisoners
—Confidence.
No. 5
German Fictions—Winter Preparation—Albert—La Boisselle and
Ovillers—In the Track of War—Regained Ground—Enemy
Preparations—German Dug-outs—"There were no Stragglers"
—Contalmaison—Devastation—Retreating Germans—Death,
Victory, Work—Work of the R.E.—A Parachute—Approaching Victory.
No. 6
German Retreat—Enemy Losses—Need of Artillery—Awaiting the
Issue—Herr Zimmermann—Training—A National Idea—Training—Fighting
for Peace—Stubbornness and Discipline—Training of Officers
—Responsibility—The British Soldier—Soldiers' Humour—A Boy
Hero—"They have done their job"—Casualties—Reconnaissance—Air
Fighting—Use of Aeroplanes—Terms of Peace.
No. 7
Among the French—German Barbarities—Beauty of France—French
Families—Paris—To Senlis—Senlis—The Curé of Senlis—The German
Occupation—August 30th, 1914—Germans in Senlis—German Brutality—A
Savage Revenge—A Burning City—Murder of the Mayor—The Curé in the
Cathedral—The Abbé's Narrative—False Charges—Wanton Destruction—A
Sudden Change—Return of the French—Ermenonville—Scenes of
Battle—Vareddes.
No. 8
Battle of the Ourcq—Von Kluck's Mistake—Anniversary of the
Battle—Wreckage of War—A Burying Party—A Funeral—A Five Days'
Battle—Life-and-Death Fighting—"Salut au Drapeau"—Meaux
—Vareddes—Murders at Vareddes—Von Kluck's Approach—The
Turn of the Tide—The Old Curé—German Brutalities—Torturers
—The Curé's Sufferings—"He is a Spy"—A Weary March—Outrages
—Victims—Reparation—To Lorraine.
No. 9
Épernay-Châlons—Snow—Nancy—The French People—L'Union
Sacrée—France and England—Nancy—Hill of Léomont—The Grand
Couronné—The Lorraine Campaign—Taubes—Vitrimont—Miss Polk—A
Restored Church—Society of Friends—Gerbéviller—Soeur
Julie—Mortagne—An Inexpiable Crime—Massacre of Gerbéviller—"Les
Civils ont tiré"—Soeur Julie—The Germans come—German
Wounded—Barbarities in Hospital—Soeur Julie and Germans—The French
Return—Germans at Nancy—Nancy saved—A Warm Welcome—Adieu to Lorraine
No. 10
Doctrine of Force—Disciplined Cruelty—German Professors—Professor von
Gierke—An Orgy of Crime—Return Home—Russia—The Revolution—Liberty
like Young Wine—What will Russia do?—America joins—America and
France—The British Advance—British Successes—The Italians—A
Soldier's Letter—Aircraft and Guns—The German Effort—April
Hopes—Submarines—Tradition of the Sea—Last Threads—The Food
Situation—More Arable Land—Village Patriotism—Food Prices—The Labour
Outlook—Finance—Messines—The Tragedy of War—A Celtic Legend—Europe
and America
TOWARDS THE GOAL
No. 1
March 24th, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—It may be now frankly confessed—(you, some time ago, gave me leave to publish your original letter, as it might seem opportune)—that it was you who gave the impulse last year, which led to the writing of the first series of Letters on "England's Effort" in the war, which were published in book form in June 1916. Your appeal—that I should write a general account for America of the part played by England in the vast struggle—found me in our quiet country house, busy with quite other work, and at first I thought it impossible that I could attempt so new a task as you proposed to me. But support and encouragement came from our own authorities, and like many other thousands of English women under orders, I could only go and do my best. I spent some time in the Munition areas, watching the enormous and rapid development of our war industries and of the astonishing part played in it by women; I was allowed to visit a portion of the Fleet, and finally, to spend twelve days in France, ten of them among the great supply bases and hospital camps, with two days at the British Headquarters, and on the front, near Poperinghe, and Richebourg St. Vaast.
The result was a short book which has been translated into many foreign tongues—French, Italian, Dutch, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Japanese—which has brought me many American letters from many different States, and has been perhaps most widely read of all among our own people. For we all read newspapers, and we all forget them! In this vast and changing struggle, events huddle on each other, so that the new blurs and wipes out the old. There is always room—is there not?—for such a personal narrative as may recall to us the main outlines, and the chief determining factors of a war in which—often—everything seems to us in flux, and our eyes, amid the tumult of the stream, are apt to lose sight of the landmarks on its bank, and the signs of the approaching goal.
And now again—after a year—I have been attempting a similar task, with renewed and cordial help from our authorities at home and abroad. And I venture to address these new Letters directly to yourself, as to that American of all others to whom this second chapter on England's Effort may look for sympathy. Whither are we tending—your country and mine? Congress meets on April 1st. Before this Letter reaches you great decisions will have been taken. I will not attempt to speculate. The logic of facts will sweep our nations together in some sort of intimate union—of that I have no doubt.
How much further, then, has Great Britain marched since the Spring of last year—how much nearer is she to the end? One can but answer such questions in the most fragmentary and tentative way, relying for the most part on the opinions and information of those who know, those who are in the van of action, at home and abroad, but also on one's own personal impressions of an incomparable scene. And every day, almost, at this breathless moment, the answer of yesterday may become obsolete.
I left our Headquarters in France, for instance, some days before the news of the Russian revolution reached London, and while the Somme retirement was still in its earlier stages. Immediately afterwards the events of one short week transformed the whole political aspect of Europe, and may well prove to have changed the face of the war—although as to that, let there be no dogmatising yet! But before the pace becomes faster still, and before the unfolding of those great and perhaps final events we may now dimly foresee, let me try and seize the impressions of some memorable weeks and bring them to bear—so far as the war is concerned—on those questions which, in the present state of affairs, must interest you in America scarcely less than they interest us here. Where, in fact, do we stand?
Any kind of answer must begin with the Navy. For, in the case of Great Britain, and indeed scarcely less in the case of the Allies, that is the foundation of everything. To yourself the facts will all be familiar—but for the benefit of those innumerable friends of the Allies in Europe and America whom I would fain reach with the help of your great name, I will run through a few of the recent—the ground—facts of the past year, as I myself ran through them a few days ago, before, with an Admiralty permit, I went down to one of the most interesting naval bases on our coast and found myself amid a group of men engaged night and day in grappling with the submarine menace which threatens not only Great Britain, not only the Allies, but yourselves, and every neutral nation. It is well to go back to these facts. They are indeed worthy of this island nation, and her seaborn children.
To begin with, the personnel of the British Navy, which at the beginning of the war was 140,000, was last year 300,000. This year it is 400,000, or very nearly three times what it was before the war. Then as to ships,—"If we were strong in capital ships at the beginning of the war"—said Mr. Balfour, last September, "we are yet stronger now—absolutely and relatively—and in regard to cruisers and destroyers there is absolutely no comparison between our strength in 1914 and our strength now. There is no part of our naval strength in which we have not got a greater supply, and in some departments an incomparably greater supply than we had on August 4th, 1914…. The tonnage of the Navy has increased by well over a million tons since war began."
So Mr. Balfour, six months ago. Five months later, it fell to Sir Edward Carson to move the naval estimates, under pressure, as we all know, of the submarine anxiety. He spoke in the frankest and plainest language of that anxiety, as did the Prime Minister in his now famous speech of February 22nd, and as did the speakers in the House of Lords, Lord Lytton, Lord Curzon and Lord Beresford, on the same date. The attack is not yet checked. The danger is not over. Still again—look at some of the facts! In two years and a quarter of war—
Eight million men moved across the seas—almost without mishap.
Nine million and a half tons of explosives carried to our own armies and those of our Allies.
Over a million horses and mules; and—
Over forty-seven million gallons of petrol supplied to the armies.
And besides, twenty-five thousand ships have been examined for contraband of war, on the high seas, or in harbour, since the war began.
And at this, one must pause a moment to think—once again—what it means; to call up the familiar image of Britain's ships, large and small, scattered over the wide Atlantic and the approaches to the North Sea, watching there through winter and summer, storm and fair, and so carrying out, relentlessly, the blockade of Germany, through every circumstance often of danger and difficulty; with every consideration for neutral interests that is compatible with this desperate war, in which the very existence of England is concerned; and without the sacrifice of a single life, unless it be the lives of British sailors, often lost in these boardings of passing ships, amid the darkness and storm of winter seas. There, indeed, in these "wave-beaten" ships, as in the watching fleets of the English Admirals outside Toulon and Brest, while Napoleon was marching triumphantly about Europe, lies the root fact of the war. It is a commonplace, but one that has been "proved upon our pulses." Who does not remember the shock that went through England—and the civilised world—when the first partial news of the Battle of Jutland reached London, and we were told our own losses, before we knew either the losses of the enemy or the general result of the battle? It was neither fear, nor panic; but it was as though the nation, holding its breath, realised for the first time where, for it, lay the vital elements of being. The depths in us were stirred. We knew in very deed that we were the children of the sea!
And now again the depths are stirred. The development of the submarine attack has set us a new and stern task, and we are "straitened till it be accomplished." The great battle-ships seem almost to have left the stage. In less than three months, 626,000 tons of British, neutral and allied shipping have been destroyed. Since the beginning of the war we—Great Britain—have lost over two million tons of shipping, and our Allies and the neutrals have lost almost as much. There is a certain shortage of food in Great Britain, and a shortage of many other things besides. Writing about the middle of February, an important German newspaper raised a shout of jubilation. "The whole sea was as if swept clean at one blow"—by the announcement of the intensified "blockade" of the first of February. So the German scribe. But again the facts shoot up, hard and irreducible, through the sea of comment. While the German newspapers were shouting to each other, the sea was so far from being "swept clean," that twelve thousand ships had actually passed in and out of British ports in the first eighteen days of the "blockade." And at any moment during those days, at least 3,000 ships could have been found traversing the "danger zone," which the Germans imagined themselves to have barred. One is reminded of the Hamburger Nachrichten last year, after the Zeppelin raid in January 1916. "English industry lies in ruins," said that astonishing print. "The sea has been swept clean," says one of its brethren now. Yet all the while, there, in the danger zone, whenever, by day or night, one turns one's thoughts to it, are the three thousand ships; and there in the course of a fortnight, are the twelve thousand ships going and coming.
Yet all the same, as I have said before, there is danger and there is anxiety. The neutrals—save America—have been intimidated; they are keeping their ships in harbour; and to do without their tonnage is a serious matter for us. Meanwhile, the best brains in naval England are at work, and one can feel the sailors straining at the leash. In the first eighteen days of February, there were forty fights with submarines. The Navy talks very little about them, and says nothing of which it is not certain. But all the scientific resources, all the fighting brains of naval England are being brought to bear, and we at home—well, let us keep to our rations, the only thing we can do to help our men at sea!
How this grey estuary spread before my eyes illustrates and illuminates the figures I have been quoting! I am on the light cruiser of a famous Commodore, and I have just been creeping and climbing through a submarine. The waters round are crowded with those light craft, destroyers, submarines, mine-sweepers, trawlers, patrol boats, on which for the moment at any rate the fortunes of the naval war turns. And take notice that they are all—or almost all—new; the very latest products of British ship-yards. We have plenty of battle-ships, but "we must now build, as quickly as possible, the smaller craft, and the merchant ships we want," says Sir Edward Carson. "Not a slip in the country will be empty during the coming months. Every rivet put into a ship will contribute to the defeat of Germany. And 47 per cent, of the Merchant Service have already been armed." The riveters must indeed have been hard at work! This crowded scene carries me back to the Clyde where I was last year, to the new factories and workshops, with their ever-increasing throng of women, and to the marvellous work of the ship-yards. No talk now of strikes, of a disaffected and revolutionary minority, on the Clyde, at any rate, as there was twelve months ago. Broadly speaking, and allowing for a small, stubborn, but insignificant Pacifist section, the will of the nation, throughout all classes, has become as steel—to win the war.
Throughout England, as in these naval officers beside me, there is the same tense yet disciplined expectancy. As we lunch and talk, on this cruiser at rest, messages come in perpetually; the cruiser itself is ready for the open sea, at an hour and a half's notice; the seaplanes pass out and come in over the mouth of the harbour on their voyages of discovery and report, and these destroyers and mine-sweepers that he so quietly near us will be out again to-night in the North Sea, grappling with every difficulty and facing every danger, in the true spirit of a wonderful service, while we land-folk sleep and eat in peace;—grumbling no doubt, with our morning newspaper and coffee, when any of the German destroyers who come out from Zeebrugge are allowed to get home with a whole skin. "What on earth is the Navy about?" Well, the Navy knows. Germany is doing her very worst, and will go on doing it—for a time. The line of defensive watch in the North Sea is long; the North Sea is a big place; the Germans often have the luck of the street-boy who rings a bell and runs away, before the policeman comes up. But the Navy has no doubts. The situation, says one of my cheerful hosts, is "quite healthy" and we shall see "great things in the coming months." We had better leave it at that!
Now let us look at these destroyers in another scene. It is the last day of February, and I find myself on a military steamer, bound for a French Port, and on my way to the British Headquarters in France. With me is the same dear daughter who accompanied me last year as "dame secrétaire" on my first errand. The boat is crowded with soldiers, and before we reach the French shore we have listened to almost every song—old and new—in Tommy's repertory. There is even "Tipperary," a snatch, a ghost of "Tipperary," intermingled with many others, rising and falling, no one knows why, started now here, now there, and dying away again after a line or two. It is a draft going out to France for the first time, north countrymen, by their accent; and life-belts and submarines seem to amuse them hugely, to judge by the running fire of chaff that goes on. But, after a while, I cease to listen. I am thinking first of what awaits us on the further shore, on which the lights are coming out, and of those interesting passes inviting us to G.H.Q. as "Government Guests," which lie safe in our handbags. And then, my thoughts slip back to a conversation of the day before, with Dr. Addison, the new Minister of Munitions.
A man in the prime of life, with whitening hair—prematurely white, for the face and figure are quite young still—and stamped, so far as expression and aspect are concerned, by those social and humane interests which first carried him into Parliament. I have been long concerned with Evening Play Centres for school-children in Hoxton, one of the most congested quarters of our East End. And seven years ago I began to hear of the young and public-spirited doctor and man of science, who had made himself a name and place in Hoxton, who had won the confidence of the people crowded in its unlovely streets, had worked for the poor, and the sick, and the children, and had now beaten the Tory member, and was Hoxton's Liberal representative in the new Parliament elected in January 1910, to deal with the Lords, after the throwing out of Lloyd George's famous Budget. Once or twice since, I had come across him in matters concerned with education—cripple schools and the like—when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, immediately before the war. And now here was the doctor, the Hunterian Professor, the social worker, the friend of schools and school-children, transformed into the fighting Minister of a great fighting Department, itself the creation of the war, only second—if second—in its importance for the war, to the Admiralty and the War Office.
I was myself, for a fortnight of last year, the guest of the Ministry of Munitions, while Mr. Lloyd George was still its head, in some of the most important Munition areas; and I was then able to feel the current of hot energy, started by the first Minister, running—not of course without local obstacles and animosities—through an electrified England. That was in February 1916. Then, in August, came the astonishing speech of Mr. Montagu, on the development of the Munitions supply in one short year, as illustrated by the happenings of the Somme battlefield. And now, as successor to Mr. Montagu and Mr. Lloyd George, Dr. Addison sat in the Minister's chair, continuing the story.
What a story it is! Starting from the manufacture of guns, ammunition and explosives, and after pushing that to incredible figures, the necessities of its great task has led the Ministry to one forward step after another. Seeing that the supply of munitions depends on the supply of raw material, it is now regulating the whole mineral supply of this country, and much of that of the Allies; it is about to work qualities of iron ore that have never been worked before; it is deciding, over the length and breadth of the country, how much aluminium should be allowed to one firm, how much copper to another; it is producing steel for our Allies as well as for ourselves; it has taken over with time the whole Motor Transport of the war, and is now adding to it the Railway Transport of munitions here and abroad, and is dictating meanwhile to every engineering firm in the country which of its orders should come first, and which last. It is managing a whole gigantic industry with employes running into millions, half a million of them women, and managing it under wholly new conditions of humanity and forethought; it is housing and feeding and caring for innumerable thousands; transforming from day to day, as by a kind of by-work, the industrial mind and training of multitudes, and laying the foundations of a new, and surely happier England, after the War. And, finally, it is adjusting, with, on the whole, great success, the rival claims of the factories and the trenches, sending more and more men from the workshops to the fighting line, in proportion as the unskilled labour of the country—men and women, but especially women—is drawn, more and more widely, into the service of a dwindling amount of skilled labour, more and more "diluted."
* * * * *
But the light is failing and the shore is nearing. Life-belts are taken off, the destroyers have disappeared. We are on the quay, kindly welcomed by an officer from G.H.Q. who passes our bags rapidly through the Custom House, and carries us off to a neighbouring hotel for the night, it being too late for the long drive to G.H.Q. We are in France again!—and the great presence of the army is all about us. The quay crowded with soldiers, the port alive with ships, the grey-blue uniforms mingling with the khaki—after a year I see it again, and one's pulses quicken. The vast "effort of England" which last year had already reached so great a height, and has now, as all accounts testify, been so incredibly developed, is here once more in visible action, before me.
Next day, the motor arrives early, and with our courteous officer who has charge of us, in front, we are off, first, for one of the great camps I saw last year, and then for G.H.Q. itself. On the way, as we speed over the rolling down country beyond the town, my eyes are keen to catch some of the new signs of the time. Here is the first—a railway line in process of doubling—and large numbers of men, some of them German prisoners, working at it; typical both of the immense railway development all over the military zone, since last year, and of the extensive use now being made of prisoners' labour, in regions well behind the firing line. They lift their heads, as we pass, looking with curiosity at the two ladies in the military car. Their flat round caps give them an odd similarity. It is as if one saw scores of the same face, differentiated here and there by a beard. A docile hard-working crew, by all accounts, who give no trouble, and are managed largely by their N.C.O.'s. Are there some among them who saw the massacre at Dinant, the terrible things in Lorraine? Their placid, expressionless faces tell no tale.
But the miles have flown, and here already are the long lines of the camp. How pleasant to be greeted by some of the same officers! We go into the Headquarters Office, for a talk. "Grown? I should think we have!" says Colonel——. And, rapidly, he and one of his colleagues run through some of the additions and expansions. The Training Camp has been practically doubled, or, rather, another training camp has been added to the one that existed last year, and both are equipped with an increased number of special schools—an Artillery Training School, an Engineer Training School, a Lewis Gun School, a Gas School, with an actual gas chamber for the training of men in the use of their gas helmets,—and others, of which it is not possible to speak. "We have put through half a million of reinforcements since you were here last." And close upon two million rations were issued last month! The veterinary accommodation has been much enlarged, and two Convalescent Horse Depots have been added—(it is good indeed to see with what kindness and thought the Army treats its horses!). But the most novel addition to the camp has been a Fat Factory for the production of fat,—from which comes the glycerine used in explosives—out of all the food refuse of the camp. The fat produced by the system, here and in England, has already provided glycerine far millions of eighteen-pounder shells; the problem of camp refuse, always a desperate one, has been solved; and as a commercial venture the factory makes 250 per cent. profit.
Undeterred by what we hear of the smells! we go off to see it, and the enthusiastic manager explains the unsavoury processes by which the bones and refuse of all the vast camp are boiled down into a white fat, that looks almost eatable, but is meant, as a matter of fact, to feed not men but shells. Nor is that the only contribution to the fighting line which the factory makes. All the cotton waste of the hospitals, with their twenty thousand beds—the old dressings and bandages—come here, and after sterilisation and disinfection go to England for gun-cotton. Was there ever a grimmer cycle than this, by which that which feeds, and that which heals, becomes in the end that which kills! But let me try to forget that side of it, and remember, rather, as we leave the smells behind, that the calcined bones become artificial manure, and go back again into the tortured fields of France, while other bye-products of the factory help the peasants near to feed their pigs. And anything, however small, that helps the peasants of France in this war, comforts one's heart.
We climb up to the high ground of the camp for a general view before we go on to G.H.Q. and I see it, as I saw it last year, spread under the March sunshine, among the sand and the pines—a wonderful sight. "Everything has grown, you see, except the staff!" says the Colonel, smiling, as we shake hands. "But we rub along!"
Then we are in the motor again, and at last the new G.H.Q.—how different from that I saw last year!—rises before us. We make our way into the town, and presently the car stops for a minute before a building, and while our officer goes within, we retreat into a side street to wait. But my thoughts are busy. For that building, of which the side-front is still visible, is the brain of the British Army in France, and on the men who work there depend the fortunes of that distant line where our brothers and sons are meeting face to face the horrors and foulnesses of war. How many women whose hearts hang on the war, whose all is there, in daily and nightly jeopardy, read the words "British Headquarters" with an involuntary lift of soul, an invocation without words! Yet scarcely half a dozen Englishwomen in this war will ever see the actual spot. And here it is, under my eyes, the cold March sun shining fitfully on it, the sentry at the door, the khaki figures passing in and out. I picture to myself the rooms within, and the news arriving of General Gough's advance on the Ancre, of that German retreat as to which all Europe is speculating.
But we move on—to a quiet country house in a town garden—the Headquarters Mess of the Intelligence Department. Here I find, among our kind hosts, men already known to me from my visit of the year before, men whose primary business it is to watch the enemy, who know where every German regiment and German Commander are, who through the aerial photography of our airmen are now acquainted with every step of the German retreat, and have already the photographs of his second line. All the information gathered from prisoners, and from innumerable other sources, comes here; and the department has its eye besides on everything that happens within the zone of our Armies in France. For a woman to be received here is an exception—perhaps I may say an honour—of which I am rather tremulously aware. Can I make it worth while? But a little conversation with these earnest and able men shows plainly that they have considered the matter like any other incident in the day's work. England's Effort has been useful; therefore I am to be allowed again to see and write for myself; and therefore, what information can be given me as to the growth of our military power in France since last year will be given. It is not, of course, a question of war correspondence, which is not within a woman's powers. But it is a question of as much "seeing" as can be arranged for, combined with as much first-hand information as time and the censor allow. I begin to see my way.
The conversation at luncheon—the simplest of meals—and during a stroll afterwards, is thrilling indeed to us newcomers. "The coming summer's campaign must decide the issue of the war—though it may not see the end of it." "The issue of the war"—and the fate of Europe! "An inconclusive peace would be a victory for Germany." There is no doubt here as to the final issue; but there is a resolute refusal to fix dates, or prophesy details. "Man for man we are now the better army. Our strength is increasing month by month, while that of Germany is failing. Men and officers, who a year ago were still insufficiently trained, are now seasoned troops with nothing to learn from the Germans; and the troops recruited under the Military Service Act, now beginning to come out, are of surprisingly good quality." On such lines the talk runs, and it is over all too soon.
Then we are in the motor again, bound for an aerodrome forty or fifty miles away. We are late, and the last twenty-seven kilometres fly by in thirty-two minutes! It is a rolling country, and there are steep descents and sharp climbs, through the thickly-scattered and characteristic villages and small old towns of the Nord, villages crowded all of them with our men. Presently, with a start, we find ourselves on a road which saw us last spring—a year ago, to the day. The same blue distances, the same glimpses of old towns in the hollows, the same touches of snow on the heights. At last, in the cold sunset light, we draw up at our destination. The wide aerodrome stretches before us—great hangars coloured so as to escape the notice of a Boche overhead—with machines of all sizes, rising and landing—coming out of the hangars, or returning to them for the night. Two of the officers in charge meet us, and I walk round with them, looking at the various types—some for fighting, some for observation; and understanding—what I can! But the spirit of the men—that one can understand. "We are accumulating, concentrating now, for the summer offensive. Of course the Germans have been working hard too. They have lots of new and improved machines. But when the test comes we are confident that we shall down them again, as we did on the Somme. For us, the all-important thing is the fighting behind the enemy lines. Our object is to prevent the German machines from rising at all, to keep them down, while our airmen are reconnoitering along the fighting line. Awfully dangerous work! Lots don't come back. But what then? They will have done their job!"
The words were spoken so carelessly that for a few seconds I did not realise their meaning. But there was that in the expression of the man who spoke them which showed there was no lack of realisation there. How often I have recalled them, with a sore heart, in these recent weeks of heavy losses in the air-service—losses due, I have no doubt, to the special claims upon it of the German retreat.
The conversation dropped a little, till one of my companions, with a smile, pointed overhead. Three splendid biplanes were sailing above us, at a great height, bound south-wards. "Back from the line!" said the officer beside me, and we watched them till they dipped and disappeared in the sunset clouds. Then tea and pleasant talk. The young men insist that D. shall make tea. This visit of two ladies is a unique event. For the moment, as she makes tea in their sitting-room, which is now full of men, there is an illusion of home.
Then we are off, for another fifty miles. Darkness comes on, the roads are unfamiliar. At last an avenue and bright lights. We have reached the Visitors' Château, under the wing of G.H.Q.
No. 2
March 31st, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—My first letter you will perhaps remember took us to the Visitors' Château of G.H.Q. and left us alighting there, to be greeted by the same courteous host, Captain——, who presided last year over another Guest House far away. But we were not to sleep at the Château, which was already full of guests. Arrangements had been made for us at a cottage in the village near, belonging to the village schoolmistress; the motor took us there immediately, and after changing our travel-stained dresses, we went back to the Château for dinner. Many guests—all of them of course of the male sex, and much talk! Some of the guests—members of Parliament, and foreign correspondents—had been over the Somme battlefield that day, and gave alarmist accounts of the effects of the thaw upon the roads and the ground generally. Banished for a time by the frost, the mud had returned; and mud, on the front, becomes a kind of malignant force which affects the spirits of the soldiers.
The schoolmistress and her little maid sat up for us, and shepherded us kindly to bed. Never was there a more strangely built little house! The ceilings came down on our heads, the stairs were perpendicular. But there was a stove in each room, and the beds though hard, and the floor though bare, were scrupulously clean. In the early morning I woke up and looked out. There had been a white frost, and the sun was just rising in a clear sky. Its yellow light was shining on the whitewashed wall of the next cottage, on which a large pear-tree was trained. All round were frost-whitened plots of garden or meadow—préaux—with tall poplars in the hedges cutting the morning sky. Suddenly, I heard a continuous murmur in the room beneath me. It was the schoolmistress and her maid at prayer. And presently the house door opened and shut. It was Mademoiselle who had gone to early Mass. For the school was an école libre, and the little lady who taught it was a devout Catholic. The rich yet cold light, the frosty quiet of the village, the thin French trees against the sky, the ritual murmur in the room below—it was like a scene from a novel by René Bazin, and breathed the old, the traditional France.
We were to start early and motor far, but there was time before we started for a little talk with Mademoiselle. She was full of praise for our English soldiers, some of whom were billeted in the village. "They are very kind to our people, they often help the women, and they never complain." (Has the British Tommy in these parts really forgotten how to grouse?) "I had some of your men billeted here. I could only give them a room without beds, just the bare boards. 'You will find it hard,' I said. 'We will get a little straw,' said the sergeant. 'That will be all right.' Our men would have grumbled." (But I think this was Mademoiselle's politesse!) "And the children are devoted to your soldiers. I have a dear little girl in the school, nine years old. Sometimes from the window she sees a man in the street, a soldier who lodges with her mother. Then I cannot hold her. She is like a wild thing to be gone. 'Voilà mon camarade!—voilà mon camarade!' Out she goes, and is soon walking gravely beside him, hand in hand, looking up at him." "How do they understand each other?" "I don't know. But they have a language. Your sergeants often know more French than your officers, because they have to do the billeting and the talking to our people."
The morning was still bright when the motor arrived, but the frost had been keen, and the air on the uplands was biting. We speed first across a famous battlefield, where French and English bones lie mingled below the quiet grass, and then turn south-east. Nobody on the roads. The lines of poplar-trees fly past, the magpies flutter from the woods, and one might almost forget the war. Suddenly, a railway line, a steep descent and we are full in its midst again. On our left an encampment of Nissen huts—so called from their inventor, a Canadian officer—those new and ingenious devices for housing troops, or labour battalions, or coloured workers, at an astonishing saving both of time and material. In shape like the old-fashioned beehive, each hut can be put up by four or six men in a few hours. Everything is, of course, standardised, and the wood which lines their corrugated iron is put together in the simplest and quickest ways, ways easily suggested, no doubt, to the Canadian mind, familiar with "shacks" and lumber camps. We shall come across them everywhere along the front. But on this first occasion my attention is soon distracted from them, for as we turn a corner beyond the hut settlement, which I am told is that of a machine-gun detachment, there is an exclamation from D——.
Tanks! The officer in front points smiling to a field just ahead. There is one of them—the monster!—taking its morning exercise; practising up and down the high and almost perpendicular banks by which another huge field is divided. The motor slackens, and we watch the creature slowly attack a high bank, land complacently on the top, and then—an officer walking beside it to direct its movements—balance a moment on the edge of another bank equally high, a short distance away. There it is!—down!—not flopping or falling, but all in the way of business, gliding unperturbed. London is full of tanks, of course—on the films. But somehow to be watching a real one, under the French sky, not twenty miles from the line, is a different thing. We fall into an eager discussion with Captain F. in front, as to the part played by them in the Somme battle, and as to what the Germans may be preparing in reply to them. And while we talk, my eye is caught by something on the sky-line, just above the tank. It is a man and a plough—a plough that might have come out of the Odyssey—the oldest, simplest type. So are the ages interwoven; and one may safely guess that the plough—that very type!—will outlast many generations of tanks. But, for the moment, the tanks are in the limelight, and it is luck that we should have come upon them so soon, for one may motor many miles about the front without meeting with any signs of them.
Next, a fine main road and an old town, seething with all the stir of war. We come upon a crowded market-place, and two huge convoys passing each other in the narrow street beyond—one, an ammunition column, into which our motor humbly fits itself as best it can, by order of the officer in charge of the column, and the other, a long string of magnificent lorries belonging to the Flying Corps, which defiles past us on the left. The inhabitants of the town, old men, women and children, stand to watch the hubbub, with amused friendly faces. On we go, for a time, in the middle of the convoy. The great motor lorries filled with ammunition hem us in till the town is through, and a long hill is climbed. At the top of it we are allowed to draw out, and motor slowly past long lines of troops on the march; first, R.E.'s with their store waggons, large and small; then a cyclist detachment; a machine-gun detachment; field kitchens, a white goat lying lazily on the top of one of them; mules, heavily laden; and Lewis guns in little carts. Then infantry marching briskly in the keen air, while along other roads, visible to east and west, we see other columns converging. A division, apparently, on the march. The physique of the men, their alert and cheerful looks, strike me particularly. This pitiless war seems to have revealed to England herself the quality of her race. Though some credit must be given to the physical instructors of the Army!—who in the last twelve months especially have done a wonderful work.
At last we turn out of the main road, and the endless columns pass away into the distance. Again, a railway line in process of doubling; beyond, a village, which seems to be mainly occupied by an Army Medical detachment; then two large Casualty Clearing Stations, and a Divisional Dressing Station. Not many wounded here at present; the section of the line from which we are only some ten miles distant has been comparatively quiet of late. But what preparations everywhere! What signs of the coming storm! Hardly a minute passes as we speed along without its significant sight; horse-lines, Army Service depots bursting with stores,—a great dump of sandbags—another of ammunition.
And as I look out at the piles of shells, I think of the most recent figures furnished me by the Ministry of Munitions. Last year, when the Somme offensive began, and when I was writing England's Effort, the weekly output of eighteen-pounder shells was 17-1/2 times what it was during the first year of the war. It is now 28 times as much. Field howitzer ammunition has almost doubled since last July. That of medium guns and howitzers has more than doubled. That of the heaviest guns of all (over six-inch) is more than four times as great. By the growth of ammunition we may guess what has been the increase in guns, especially in those heavy guns we are now pushing forward after the retreating Germans, as fast as roads and railway lines can be made to carry them. The German Government, through one of its subordinate spokesmen, has lately admitted their inferiority in guns; their retreat, indeed, on the Somme before our pending attack, together with the state of their old lines, now we are in and over them, show plainly enough what they had to fear from the British guns and the abundance of British ammunition.
But what are these strange figures swarming beside the road—black tousled heads and bronze faces? Kaffir "boys," at work in some quarries, feeling the cold, no doubt, on this bright bitter day, in spite of their long coats. They are part of that large body of native labour, Chinese, Kaffir, Basuto, which is now helping our own men everywhere to push on and push up, as the new labour forces behind them release more and more of the fighting men for that dogged pursuit which is going on there—in that blue distance to our right!—where the German line swings stubbornly back, south-east, from the Vimy Ridge.
The motor stops. This is a Headquarters, and a staff officer comes out to greet us—a boy in looks, but a D.S.O. all the same! His small car precedes us as a guide, and we keep up with him as best we may. These are mining villages we are passing through, and on the horizon are some of those pyramidal slag-heaps—the Fosses—which have seen some of the fiercest fighting of the war. But we leave the villages behind, and are soon climbing into a wooden upland. Suddenly, a halt. A notice-board forbids the use of a stretch of road before us "from sun-rise to sunset." Evidently it is under German observation. We try to find another, parallel. But here, too, the same notice confronts us. We dash along it, however, and my pulses run a little quicker, as I realise, from the maps we carry, how near we are to the enemy lines which lie hidden in the haze, eastward; and from my own eyes, how exposed is the hillside. But we are safely through, and a little further we come to a wood—a charming wood, to all seeming, of small trees, which in a week or two will be full of spring leaf and flower. But we are no sooner in it, jolting up its main track, than we understand the grimness of what it holds. Spring and flowers have not much to say to it! For this wood and its neighbourhood—Ablain St. Nazaire, Carency, Neuville St. Vaast—have seen war at its cruellest; thousands of brave lives have been yielded here; some of the dead are still lying unburied in its furthest thickets, and men will go softly through it in the years to come. "Stranger, go and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their will:"—the immortal words are in my ears. But how many are the sacred spots in this land for which they speak!
We leave the motor and walk on through the wood to the bare upland beyond. The wood is still a wood of death, actual or potential. Our own batteries are all about us; so too are the remains of French batteries, from the days when the French still held this portion of the line. We watch the gunners among the trees and presently pass an encampment of their huts. Beyond, a high and grassy plateau—fringes of wood on either hand. But we must not go to the edge on our right so as to look down into the valley below. Through the thin leafless trees, however, we see plainly the ridges that stretch eastward, one behind the other, "suffused in sunny air." There are the towers of Mont St. Eloy—ours; the Bertonval Wood—ours; and the famous Vimy Ridge, blue in the middle distance, of which half is ours and half German. We are very near the line. Notre Dame de Lorette is not very far away, though too far for us to reach the actual spot, the famous bluff, round which the battle raged in 1915. And now the guns begin!—the first we have heard since we arrived. From our left—as it seemed—some distance away, came the short sharp reports of the trench mortars, but presently, as we walked on, guns just behind us and below us, began to boom over our heads, and we heard again the long-drawn scream or swish of the shells, rushing on their deadly path to search out the back of the enemy's lines in the haze yonder, and flinging confusion on his lines of communication, his supplies and reserves. He does not reply. He has indeed been strangely meek of late. The reason here cannot be that he is slipping away from our attack, as is the case farther south. The Vimy Ridge is firmly held; it is indeed the pivot of the retreat. Perhaps to-day he is economising. But, of course, at any moment he might reply. After a certain amount of hammering he must reply! And there are some quite fresh shell-holes along our path, some of them not many hours old. Altogether, it is with relief that as the firing grows hotter we turn back and pick up the motor in the wood again.
And yet one is loath to go! Never again shall I stand in such a scene—never again behold those haunted ridges, and this wood of death with the guns that hide in it! To have shared ever so little in such a bit of human experience is for a woman a thing of awe, if one has time to think of it. Not even groups of artillery men, chatting or completing their morning's toilet, amid the thin trees, can dull that sense in me. They are only "strafing" Fritz or making ready to "strafe" him; they have had an excellent midday meal in the huts yonder, and they whistle and sing as they go about their work, disappearing sometimes into mysterious regions out of sight. That is all there is in it for them. They are "doing their job," like the airmen, and if a German shell finds them in the wood, why, the German will have done his job, and they will bear no grudge. It is simple as that—for them. But to the onlooker, they are all figures in a great design—woven into the terrible tapestry of war, and charged with a meaning that we of this actual generation shall never more than dimly see or understand.
Again we rush along the exposed road and back into the mining region, taking a westward turn. A stately chateau, and near it a smaller house, where a General greets us. Lunch is over, for we are late, but it is hospitably brought back for us, and the General and I plunge into talk of the retreat, of what it means for the Germans, and what it will mean for us. After luncheon, we go into the next room to look at the General's big maps which show clearly how the salients run, the smaller and the larger, from which the Germans are falling back, followed closely by the troops of General Gough. News of the condition of the enemy's abandoned lines is coming in fast. "Let no one make any mistake. They have gone because they must—because of the power of our artillery, which never stops hammering them, whether on the line or behind the line, which interferes with all their communications and supplies, and makes life intolerable. At the same time, the retreat is being skilfully done, and will of course delay us. That was why they did it. We shall have to push up roads, railways, supplies; the bringing up of the heavy guns will take time, but less time than they think! Our men are in the pink of condition!"
On which again follows very high praise of the quality of the men now coming out under the Military Service Act. "Yet they are conscripts," says one of us, in some surprise, "and the rest were volunteers." "No doubt. But these are the men—many of them—who had to balance duties—who had wives and children to leave, and businesses which depended on them personally. Compulsion has cut the knot and eased their consciences. They'll make fine soldiers! But we want more—more!" And then follows talk on the wonderful developments of training—even since last year; and some amusing reminiscences of the early days of England's astounding effort, by which vast mobs of eager recruits without guns, uniforms, or teachers, have been turned into the magnificent armies now fighting in France.
The War Office has lately issued privately some extremely interesting notes on the growth and training of the New Armies, of which it is only now possible to make public use. From these it is clear that in the Great Experiment of the first two years of war all phases of intellect and capacity have played their part. The widely trained mind, taking large views as to the responsibility of the Army towards the nation delivered into its hands, so that not only should it be disciplined for war but made fitter for peace; and the practical inventive gifts of individuals who, in seeking to meet a special need, stumble on something universal, both forces have been constantly at work. Discipline and initiative have been the twin conquerors, and the ablest men in the Army, to use a homely phrase, have been out for both. Many a fresh, and valuable bit of training has been due to some individual officer struck with a new idea, and patiently working it out. The special "schools," which are now daily increasing the efficiency of the Army, if you ask how they arose, you will generally be able to trace them back to some eager young man starting a modest experiment in his spare time for the teaching of himself and some of his friends, and so developing it that the thing is finally recognised, enlarged, and made the parent of similar efforts elsewhere.
Let me describe one such "school"—to me a thrilling one, as I saw it on a clear March afternoon. A year ago no such thing existed. Now each of our Armies possesses one.
But this letter is already too long!
No. 3
Easter Eve, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—Since I finished my last letter to you, before the meeting of Congress, great days have come and gone.
America is with us!
At last, we English folk can say that to each other, without reserve or qualification, and into England's mood of ceaseless effort and anxiety there has come a sudden relaxation, a breath of something canning and sustaining. What your action may be—whether it will shorten the war, and how much, no one here yet knows. But when in some great strain a friend steps to your side, you don't begin with questions. He is there. Your cause, your effort, are his. Details will come. Discussion will come. But there is a breathing space first, in which feeling rests upon itself before it rushes out in action. Such a breathing space for England are these Easter days!
Meanwhile, the letters from the Front come in with their new note of joy. "You should see the American faces in the Army to-day!" writes one. "They bring a new light into this dismal spring." How many of them? Mayn't we now confess to ourselves and our Allies that there is already, the equivalent of an American division, fighting with the Allied Armies in France, who have used every honest device to get there? They have come in by every channel, and under every pretext—wavelets, forerunners of the tide. For now, you too have to improvise great armies, as we improvised ours in the first two years of war. And with you as with us, your unpreparedness stands as your warrant before history, that not from American minds and wills came the provocation to this war.
But your actual and realised co-operation sets me on lines of thought that distract me, for the moment, from the first plan of this letter. The special Musketry School with which I had meant to open it, must wait till its close. I find my mind full instead—in connection with the news from Washington—of those recently issued War Office pamphlets of which I spoke in my last letter; and I propose to run through their story. These pamphlets, issued not for publication but for the information of those concerned, are the first frank record of our national experience in connection with the war; and for all your wonderful American resource and inventiveness, your American energy and wealth, you will certainly, as prudent men, make full use of our experience in the coming months.
Last year, for England's Effort, I tried vainly to collect some of these very facts and figures, which the War Office was still jealously—'and no doubt quite rightly—withholding. Now at last they are available, told by "authority," and one can hardly doubt that each of these passing days will give them—for America a double significance. Surpass the story, if you can; we shall bear you no grudge! But up till now, it remains a chapter unique in the history of war. Many Americans, as your original letter to me pointed out, had still, last year, practically no conception of what we were doing and had done. The majority of our own people, indeed, were in much the same case. While the great story was still in the making, while the foundations were still being laid, it was impossible to correct all the annoying underestimates, all the ignorant or careless judgments, of people who took a point for the whole. The men at the heart of things could only set their teeth, keep silence and give no information that could help the enemy. The battle of the Somme, last July, was the first real testing of their work. The Hindenburg retreat, the successes in Mesopotamia, the marvellous spectacle of the Armies in France—and before this letter could be sent to Press, the glorious news from the Arras front!—are the present fruits of it.
Like you, we had, at the outbreak of war, some 500,000 men, all told, of whom not half were fully trained. None of us British folk will ever forget the Rally of the First Hundred Thousand! On the 8th of August, four days after the Declaration of War, Lord Kitchener asked for them. He got them in a fortnight. But the stream rushed on—in the fifth week of the war alone 250,000 men enlisted; 30,000 recruits—the yearly number enlisted before the war—joined in one day. Within six or seven weeks the half-million available at the beginning of the war had been more than doubled.
Then came a pause. The War Office, snowed under, not knowing where to turn for clothes, boots, huts, rifles, guns, ammunition, tried to check the stream by raising the recruits' standards. A mistake!—but soon recognised. In another month, under the influence of the victory on the Marne, and while the Germans were preparing the attacks on the British Line so miraculously beaten off in the first battle of Ypres, the momentary check had been lost in a fresh outburst of national energy. You will remember how the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee came into being, that first autumn?—how the Prime Minister took the lead, and the two great political parties of the country agreed to bring all their organisation, central or local, to bear on the supreme question of getting men for the Army. Tory and Radical toured the country together. The hottest opponents stood on the same platform. L'union sacrée—to use the French phrase, so vivid and so true, by which our great Ally has charmed her own discords to rest in defence of the country—became a reality here too, in spite of strikes, in spite of Ireland.
By July 1915—the end of the first year of war—more than 2,000,000 men had voluntarily enlisted. But the military chiefs knew well that it was but a half-way house. They knew, too, that it was not enough to get men and rush them out to the trenches as soon as any kind of training could be given them. The available men must be sorted out. Some, indeed, must be brought back from the fighting line for work as vital as the fighting itself.
So Registration came—the first real step towards organising the nation. 150,000 voluntary workers helped to register all men and women in the country, from eighteen to sixty-five, and on the results Lord Derby built his group system, which almost enabled us to do without compulsion. Between October and December 1915, another two million and a quarter men had "attested"—that is, had pledged themselves to come up for training when called on.
But, as every observer of this new England knows, we have here less than half the story. From a nation not invaded, protected, on the contrary, by its sea ramparts from the personal cruelties and ravages of war, to gather in between four and five million voluntary recruits was a great achievement. But to turn these recruits at the shortest possible notice, under the hammer-blows of a war, in which our enemies had every initial advantage, into armies equipped and trained according to modern standards, might well have seemed to those who undertook it an impossible task. And the task had to be accomplished, the riddle solved, before, in the face of the enemy, the incredible difficulties of it could possibly be admitted. The creators of the new armies worked, as far as they could, behind a screen. But now the screen is down, and we are allowed to see their difficulties in their true perspective—as they existed during the first months of the war.
In the first place—accommodation! At the opening of war we had barrack-room for 176,000 men. What to do with these capped, bare-headed, or straw-hatted multitudes who poured in at Lord Kitchener's call! They were temporarily housed—somehow—under every kind of shelter. But military huts for half a million men were immediately planned—then for nearly a million.
Timber—labour—lighting—water—drainage—roads—everything, had to be provided, and was provided. Billeting filled up the gaps, and large camps were built by private enterprise to be taken in time by the Government. Of course mistakes were made. Of course there were some dishonest contractors and some incompetent officials. But the breath, the winnowing blast of the national need was behind it all. By the end of the first year of war, the "problem of quartering the troops in the chief training centres had been solved."
In the next place, there were no clothes. A dozen manufacturers of khaki cloth existed before the war. They had to be pushed up as quickly as possible to 200. Which of us in the country districts does not remember the blue emergency suits, of which a co-operative society was able by a lucky stroke to provide 400,000 for the new recruits?—or the other motley coverings of the hosts that drilled in our fields and marched about our lanes? The War Office Notes, under my hand, speak of these months as the "tatterdemalion stage." For what clothes and boots there were must go to the men at the Front, and the men at home had just to take their chance.
Well! It took a year and five months—breathless months of strain and stress—while Germany was hammering East and West on the long-drawn lines of the Allies. But by then, January 1916, the Army was not only clothed, housed, and very largely armed, but we were manufacturing for our Allies.
As to the arms and equipment, look back at these facts. When the Expeditionary Force had taken its rifles abroad in August 1914, 150,000 rifles were left in the country, and many of them required to be resighted. The few Service rifles in each battalion were handed round "as the Three Fates handed round their one eye, in the story of Perseus"; old rifles, and inferior rifles "technically known as D.P.," were eagerly made use of. But after seven months' hard training with nothing better than these makeshifts, "men were apt to get depressed."
It was just the same with the Artillery. At the outbreak of war we had guns for eight divisions—say 140,000 men. And there was no plant wherewith to make and keep up more than that supply. Yet guns had to be sent as fast as they could be made to France, Egypt, Gallipoli. How were the gunners at home to be trained?
It was done, so to speak, with blood and tears. For seven months it was impossible for the gunner in training even to see, much less to work or fire the gun to which he was being trained. Zealous officers provided dummy wooden guns for their men. All kinds of devices were tried. And even when the guns themselves arrived, they came often without the indispensable accessories—range-finders, directors, and the like.
It was a time of hideous anxiety for both Government and War Office. For the military history of 1915 was largely a history of shortage of guns and ammunition—whether on the Western or Eastern fronts. All the same, by the end of 1915 the thing was in hand. The shells from the new factories were arriving in ever-increasing volume; and the guns were following.
In a chapter of England's Effort I have described the amazing development of some of the great armament works in order to meet this cry for guns, as I saw it in February 1916. The second stage of the war had then begun. The first was over, and we were steadily overtaking our colossal task. The Somme proved it abundantly. But the expansion still goes on; and what the nation owes to the directing brains and ceaseless energy of these nominally private but really national firms has never been sufficiently recognised. On my writing-desk is a letter received, not many days ago, from a world-famous firm whose works I saw last year: "Since your visit here in the early part of last year, there have been very large additions to the works." Buildings to accommodate new aeroplane and armament construction of different kinds are mentioned, and the letter continues: "We have also put up another gun-shop, 565 feet long, and 163 feet wide—in three extensions—of which the third is nearing completion. These additions are all to increase the output of guns. The value of that output is now 60 per cent, greater than it was in 1915. In the last twelve months, the output of shells has been one and a half times more than it was in the previous year." No wonder that the humane director who writes speaks with keen sympathy of the "long-continued strain" upon masters and men. But he adds—"When we all feel it, we think of our soldiers and sailors, doing their duty—unto death."
And then—to repeat—if the difficulties of equipment were huge, they were almost as nothing to the difficulties of training. The facts as the War Office has now revealed them (the latest of these most illuminating brochures is dated April 2nd, 1917) are almost incredible. It will be an interesting time when our War Office and yours come to compare notes!—"when Peace has calmed the world." For you are now facing the same grim task—how to find the shortest cuts to the making of an Army—which confronted us in 1914.
In the first place, what military trainers there were in the country had to be sent abroad with the first Expeditionary Force. Adjutants, N.C.O.'s, all the experienced pilots in the Flying Corps, nearly all the qualified instructors in physical training, the vast majority of all the seasoned men in every branch of the Service—down, as I have said, to the Army cooks—departed overseas. At the very last moment an officer or two were shed from every battalion of the Expeditionary Force to train those left behind. Even so, there was "hardly even a nucleus of experts left." And yet—officers for 500,000 men had to be found—within a month—from August 4th, 1914.
How was it done? The War Office answer makes fascinating reading. The small number of regular officers left behind—200 officers of the Indian Army—retired officers, "dug-outs"—all honour to them!—wounded officers from the Front; all were utilised. But the chief sources of supply, as we all know, were the Officers' Training Corps at the Universities and Public Schools which we owe to the divination, the patience, the hard work of Lord Haldane. Twenty thousand potential officers were supplied by the O.T.C's. What should we have done without them?
But even so, there was no time to train them in the practical business of war—and such a war! Yet their business was to train recruits, while they themselves were untrained. At first, those who were granted "temporary commissions" were given a month's training. Then even that became impossible. During the latter months of 1914 "there was practically no special training given to infantry subalterns, with temporary commissions." With 1915, the system of a month's training was revived—pitifully little, yet the best that could be done. But during the first five months of the war most of the infantry subalterns of the new armies "had to train themselves as best they could in the intervals of training their men."
One's pen falters over the words. Before the inward eye rises the phantom host of these boy-officers who sprang to England's aid in the first year of the war, and whose graves lie scattered in an endless series along the western front and on the heights of Gallipoli. Without counting the cost for a moment, they came to the call of the Great Mother, from near and far. "They trained themselves, while they were training their men." Not for them the plenty of guns and shells that now at least lessens the hideous sacrifice that war demands; not for them the many protective devices and safeguards that the war itself has developed. Their young bodies—their precious lives—paid the price. And in the Mother-heart of England they lie—gathered and secure—for ever.
* * * * *
But let me go a little further with the new War Office facts.
The year 1915 saw great and continuous advance. During that year, an average number of over a million troops were being trained in the United Kingdom, apart from the armies abroad. The First, Second, and Third Armies naturally came off much better than the Fourth and Fifth, who were yet being recruited all the time. What equipment, clothes and arms there were the first three armies got; the rest had to wait. But all the same, the units of these later armies were doing the best they could for themselves all the time; nobody stood still. And gradually—surely—order was evolved out of the original chaos. The Army Orders of the past had dropped out of sight with the beginning of the war. Everything had to be planned anew. The one governing factor was the "necessity of getting men to the front at the earliest possible moment." Six months' courses were laid down for all arms. It was very rare, however, that any course could be strictly carried out, and after the first three armies, the training of the rest seemed, for a time, to be all beginnings!—with the final stage farther and farther away. And always the same difficulty of guns, rifles, huts, and the rest.
But, like its own tanks, the War Office went steadily on, negotiating one obstacle after another. Special courses for special subjects began to be set up. Soon artillery officers had no longer to join their batteries at once on appointment; R.E. officers could be given a seven weeks' training at Chatham; little enough, "for a man supposed to know the use and repairs of telephones and telegraphs, or the way to build or destroy a bridge, or how to meet the countless other needs with which a sapper is called upon to deal!" Increasing attention was paid to staff training and staff courses. And insufficient as it all was, for months, the general results of this haphazard training, when the men actually got into the field—all short-comings and disappointments admitted—were nothing short of wonderful. Had the Germans forgotten that we are and always have been a fighting people? That fact, at any rate, was brought home to them by the unbroken spirit of the troops who held the line in France and Flanders in 1915 against all attempts to break through; and at Neuve Chapelle, or Loos, or a hundred other minor engagements, only wanted numbers and ammunition—above all ammunition!—to win them the full victory they had rightly earned.
Of this whole earlier stage, the junior subaltern was the leading figure. It was he—let me insist upon it anew—whose spirit made the new armies. If the tender figure of the "Lady of the Lamp" has become for many of us the chief symbol of the Crimean struggle, when Britain comes to embody in sculpture or in painting that which has touched her most deeply in this war, she will choose—surely—the figure of a boy of nineteen, laughing, eager, undaunted, as quick to die as to live, carrying in his young hands the "Luck" of England.
* * * * *
But with the end of 1915, the first stage, the elementary stage, of the new Armies came to an end. When I stood, in March 1916, on the Scherpenberg hill, looking out over the Salient, new conditions reigned. The Officer Cadet Corps had been formed; a lively and continuous intercourse between the realities of the front and the training at home had been set up; special schools in all subjects of military interest had been founded, often, as we have seen, by the zeal of individual officers, to be then gradually incorporated in the Army system. Men insufficiently trained in the early months had been given the opportunity—which they eagerly took—of beginning at the beginning again, correcting mistakes and incorporating all the latest knowledge. Even a lieutenant-colonel, before commanding a battalion, could go to school once more; and even for officers and men "in rest," there were, and are, endless opportunities of seeing and learning, which few wish to forgo.
And that brings me to what is now shaping itself—the final result. The year just passed, indeed—from March to March—has practically rounded our task—though the "learning" of the Army is never over!—and has seen the transformation—whether temporary or permanent, who yet can tell?—of the England of 1914, with its zealous mobs of untrained and "tatterdemalion" recruits, into a great military power,[This letter was finished just as the news of the Easter Monday Battle of Arras was coming in.] disposing of armies in no whit inferior to those of Germany, and bringing to bear upon the science of war—now that Germany has forced us to it—the best intelligence, and the best character, of the nation. The most insolent of the German military newspapers are already bitterly confessing it.
* * * * *
My summary—short and imperfect as it is—of this first detailed account of its work which the War Office has allowed to be made public—has carried me far afield.
The motor has been waiting long at the door of the hospitable headquarters which have entertained us! Let me return to it, to the great spectacle of the present—after this retrospect of the Past.
Again the crowded roads—the young and vigorous troops—the manifold sights illustrating branch after branch of the Army. I recall a draft, tired with marching, clambering with joy into some empty lorries, and sitting there peacefully content, with legs dangling and the ever blessed cigarette for company, then an aeroplane station—then a football field, with a violent game going on—a Casualty Clearing Station, almost a large hospital—another football match!—a battery of eighteen-pounders on the march, and beyond an old French market town crowded with lorries and men. In the midst of it D—— suddenly draws my attention to a succession of great nozzles passing us, with their teams and limbers. I have stood beside the forging and tempering of their brothers in the gun-shops of the north, have watched the testing and callipering of their shining throats. They are 6-inch naval guns on their way to the line—like everything else, part of the storm to come.
And in and out, among the lorries and the guns, stream the French folk, women, children, old men, alert, industrious, full of hope, with friendly looks for their Allies. Then the town passes, and we are out again in the open country, leaving the mining village behind. We are not very far at this point from that portion of the line which I saw last year under General X's guidance. But everything looks very quiet and rural, and when we emerged on the high ground of the school we had come to see, I might have imagined myself on a Surrey or Hertfordshire common. The officer in charge, a "mighty hunter" in civil life, showed us his work with a quiet but most contagious enthusiasm. The problem that he, and his colleagues engaged in similar work in other sections of the front, had to solve, was—how to beat the Germans at their own game of "sniping," which cost us so many lives in the first year and a half of war; in other words, how to train a certain number of men to an art of rifle-shooting, combining the instincts and devices of a "Pathfinder" with the subtleties of modern optical and mechanical science. "Don't think of this as meant primarily to kill," says the Chief of the School, as he walks beside me—"it is meant primarily to protect. We lost our best men—young and promising officers in particular—by the score before we learnt the tricks of the German 'sniper' and how to meet them." German "sniping," as our guide explains, is by no means all tricks. For the most part, it means just first-rate shooting, combined with the trained instinct and flair of the sportsman. Is there anything that England—and Scotland—should provide more abundantly? Still, there are tricks, and our men have learnt them.
Of the many surprises of the school I may not now speak. Above all, it is a school of observation. Nothing escapes the eye or the ear. Every point, for instance, connected with our two unfamiliar figures will have been elaborately noted by those men on the edge of the hill; the officer in charge will presently get a careful report on us.
"We teach our men the old great game of war—wit against wit—courage against courage—life against life. We try many men here, and reject a good few. But the men who have gone through our training here are valuable, both for attack and defence—above all, let me repeat it, they are valuable for protection."
And what is meant by this, I have since learnt in greater detail. Before these schools were started, every day saw a heavy toll—especially of officers' lives—taken by German snipers. Compare with this one of the latest records: that out of fifteen battalions there were only nine men killed by snipers in three months.
We leave the hill, half sliding down the frozen watercourse that leads to it, and are in the motor again, bound for an Army Headquarters.
No. 4
April 14th, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—As the news comes flashing in, these April days, and all the world holds its breath to hear the latest messages from Arras and the Vimy ridge, it is natural that in the memory of a woman who, six weeks ago, was a spectator—before the curtain rose—of the actual scene of such events, every incident and figure of that past experience, as she looks back upon it, should gain a peculiar and shining intensity.
The battle of the Vimy Ridge [April 8th] is clearly going to be the second (the first was the German retreat on the Somme) of those "decisive events" determining this year the upshot of the war, to which the Commander-in-Chief, with so strong and just a confidence, directed the eyes of this country some three months ago. When I was in the neighbourhood of the great battlefield—one may say it now!—the whole countryside was one vast preparation. The signs of the coming attack were everywhere—troops, guns, ammunition, food dumps, hospitals, air stations—every actor and every property in the vast and tragic play were on the spot, ready for the moment and the word.
Yet, except in the Headquarters and Staff Councils of the Army nobody knew when the moment and the word would come, and nobody spoke of them. The most careful and exact organisation for the great movement was going on. No visitor would hear anything of it. Only the nameless stir in the air, the faces of officers at Headquarters, the general alacrity, the endless work everywhere, prophesied the great things ahead. Perpetual, highly organised, scientific drudgery is three parts of war, it seems, as men now wage it. The Army, as I saw it, was at work—desperately at work!—but "dreaming on things to come."
One delightful hour of that March day stands out for me in particular. The strong, attractive presence of an Army Commander, whose name will be for ever linked with that of the battle of the Vimy ridge, surrounded by a group of distinguished officers; a long table, and a too brief stay; conversation that carries for me the thrill of the actual thing, close by, though it may not differ very much from wartalk at home: these are the chief impressions that remain. The General beside me, with that look in his kind eyes which seems to tell of nights shortened by hard work, says a few quietly confident things about the general situation, and then we discuss a problem which one of the party—not a soldier—starts.
Is it true or untrue that long habituation to the seeing or inflicting of pain and death, that the mere sights and sounds of the trenches tend with time to brutalise men, and will make them callous when they return to civil life? Do men grow hard and violent in this furnace after a while, and will the national character suffer thereby in the future? The General denies it strongly. "I see no signs of it. The kindness of the men to each other, to the wounded, whether British or German, to the French civilians, especially the women and children, is as marked as it ever was. It is astonishing the good behaviour of the men in these French towns; it is the rarest thing in the world to get a complaint."
I ask for some particulars of the way in which the British Army "runs" the French towns and villages in our zone. How is it done? "It is all summed up in three words," says an officer present, "M. le Maire!" What we should have done without the local functionaries assigned by the French system to every village and small town it is hard to say. They are generally excellent people; they have the confidence of their fellow townsmen, and know everything about them. Our authorities on taking over a town or village do all the preliminaries through M. le Maire, and all goes well.
The part played, indeed, by these local chiefs of the civil population throughout France during the war has been an honourable and arduous—in many cases a tragic—one. The murder, under the forms of a court-martial, of the Maire of Senlis and his five fellow hostages stands out among the innumerable German cruelties as one of peculiar horror. Everywhere in the occupied departments the Maire has been the surety for his fellows, and the Germans have handled them often as a cruel boy torments some bird or beast he has captured, for the pleasure of showing his power over it.
From the wife of the Maire of an important town in Lorraine I heard the story of how her husband had been carried off as a hostage for three weeks, while the Germans were in occupation. Meanwhile German officers were billeted in her charming old house. "They used to say to me every day with great politeness that they hoped my husband would not be shot. 'But why should he be shot, monsieur? He will do nothing to deserve it.' On which they would shrug their shoulders and say, 'Madame, c'est la guerre!' evidently wishing to see me terrified. But I never gave them that pleasure."
A long drive home, through the dark and silent country. Yet everywhere one feels the presence of the Army. We draw up to look at a sign-post at some cross roads by the light of one of the motor lamps. Instantly a couple of Tommies emerge from the darkness and give help. In passing through a village a gate suddenly opens and a group of horses comes out, led by two men in khaki; or from a Y.M.C.A. hut laughter and song float out into the night. And soon in these farms and cottages everybody will be asleep under the guard of the British Forces, while twenty miles away, in the darkness, the guns we saw in the morning are endlessly harassing and scourging the enemy lines, preparing for the day when the thoughts now maturing in the minds of the Army leaders will leap in flame to light.
* * * * *
To-day we are off for the Somme. I looked out anxiously with the dawn, and saw streaks of white mist lying over the village and the sun struggling through. But as we start on the road to Amiens, the mist gains the upper hand, and we begin to be afraid that we shall not get any of those wide views from the west of Albert over the Somme country which are possible in clear weather. Again the high upland, and this time three tanks on the road, but motionless, alack! the nozzles of their machine guns just visible on their great sides. Then a main road, if it can be called a road since the thaw has been at work upon it. Every mile or two, as our chauffeur explains, the pavé "is all burst up" from below, and we rock and lunge through holes and ruts that only an Army motor can stand. But German prisoners are thick on the worst bits, repairing as hard as they can. Was it perhaps on some of these men that certain of the recent letters that are always coming into G.H.Q. have been found? I will quote a few of those which have not yet seen the light.
Here are a batch of letters written in January of this year from Hamburg and its neighbourhood:
"It is indeed a miserable existence. How will it all end? There is absolutely nothing to be got here. Honey costs 6s. 6d. a pound, goose fat 18s. a pound. Lovely prices, aren't they? One cannot do much by way of heating, as there is no coal. We can just freeze and starve at home. Everybody is ill. All the infirmaries are overflowing. Small-pox has broken out. You are being shot at the front, and at home we are gradually perishing."
" … On the Kaiser's birthday, military bands played everywhere. When one passes and listens to this tomfoolery, and sees the emaciated and overworked men in war-time, swaying to the sounds of music, and enjoying it, one's very gall rises. Why music? Of course, if times were different, one could enjoy music. But to-day! It should be the aim of the higher authorities to put an end to this murder. In every sound of music the dead cry for revenge. I can assure you that it is very surprising that there has not been a single outbreak here, but it neither can nor will last much longer. How can a human being subsist on 1/4 lb. of potatoes a day? I should very much like the Emperor to try and live for a week on the fare we get. He would then say it is impossible…. I heard something this week quite unexpectedly, which although I had guessed it before, yet has depressed me still more. However, we will hope for the best."
"You write to say that you are worse off than a beast of burden…. I couldn't send you any cakes, as we had no more flour…. We have abundant bread tickets. From Thursday to Saturday I can still buy five loaves…. My health is bad; not my asthma, no, but my whole body is collapsing. We are all slowly perishing, and this is what it is all coming to."
" … The outlook here is also sad. One cannot get a bucket of coal. The stores and dealers have none. The schools are closing, as there is no coal. Soon everybody will be in the same plight. Neither coal nor vegetables can be bought. Holland is sending us nothing more, and we have none. We get 3-1/2 lb. of potatoes per person. In the next few days we shall only have swedes to eat, which must be dried."
* * * * *
A letter written from Hamburg in February, and others from Coblenz are tragic reading:
" … We shall soon have nothing more to eat. We earn no money, absolutely none; it is sad but true. Many people are dying here from inanition or under-feeding."
Or, take these from Neugersdorf, in Saxony:
"We cannot send you any butter, for we have none to eat ourselves. For three weeks we have not been able to get any potatoes. So we only have turnips to eat, and now there are no more to be had. We do not know what we can get for dinner this week, and if we settle to get our food at the Public Food-Kitchen we shall have to stand two hours for it."
"Here is February once more—one month nearer to peace. Otherwise all is the same. Turnips! Turnips! Very few potatoes, only a little bread, and no thought of butter or meat; on the other hand, any quantity of hunger. I understand your case is not much better on the Somme."
Or this from a man of the Ersatz Battalion, 19th F.A.R., Dresden:
"Since January 16th I have been called up and put into the Foot Artillery at Dresden. On the 16th we were first taken to the Quartermaster's Stores, where 2,000 of us had to stand waiting in the rain from 2.30 to 6.30…. On the 23rd I was transferred to the tennis ground. We are more than 100 men in one room. Nearly all of us have frozen limbs at present. The food, too, is bad; sometimes it cannot possibly be eaten. Our training also is very quick, for we are to go into the field in six weeks."
Or these from Itzehoe and Hanover:
"Could you get me some silk? It costs 8s. a metre here…. To-day, the 24th, all the shops were stormed for bread, and 1,000 loaves were stolen from the bakery. There were several other thousand in stock. In some shops the windows were smashed. In the grocers' shops the butter barrels were rolled into the street. There were soldiers in civilian dress. The Mayor wanted to hang them. There are no potatoes this week."
"To-day, the 27th, the bakers' shops in the —— Road were stormed….
This afternoon the butchers' shops are to be stormed."
"If only peace would come soon! We have been standing to for an alarm these last days, as the people here are storming all the bakers' shops. It is a semi-revolution. It cannot last much longer."
To such a pass have the Kaiser and the Junker party brought their countrymen! Here, no doubt, are some of the recipients of such letters among the peaceful working groups in shabby green-grey, scattered along the roads of France. As we pass, the German N.C.O. often looks up to salute the officer who is with us, and the general aspect of the men—at any rate of the younger men—is cheerfully phlegmatic. At least they are safe from the British guns, and at least they have enough to eat. As to this, let me quote, by way of contrast, a few passages from letters written by prisoners in a British camp to their people at home. One might feel a quick pleasure in the creature-comfort they express but for the burning memory of our own prisoners, and the way in which thousands of them have been cruelly ill-treated, tormented even, in Germany—worst of all, perhaps, by German women.
The extracts are taken from letters written mostly in December and
January last:
(a) " … Dear wife, don't fret about me, because the English treat us very well. Only our own officers (N.C.O.'s) treat us even worse than they do at home in barracks; but that we're accustomed to…."
(b) " … I'm now a prisoner in English hands, and I'm quite comfortable and content with my lot, for most of my comrades are dead. The English treat us well, and everything that is said to the contrary is not true. Our food is good. There are no meatless days, but we haven't any cigars…."
(c) Written from hospital, near Manchester: " … I've been a prisoner since October, 1916. I'm extremely comfortable here…. Considering the times, I really couldn't wish you all anything better than to be here too!"
(d) " … I am afraid I'm not in a position to send you very detailed letters about my life at present, but I can tell you that I am quite all right and comfortable, and that I wish every English prisoner were the same. Our new Commandant is very humane—strict, but just. You can tell everybody who thinks differently that I shall always be glad to prove that he is wrong…."
(e) " … I suppose you are all thinking that we are having a very bad time here as prisoners. It's true we have to do without a good many things, but that after all one must get accustomed to. The English are really good people, which I never would have believed before I was taken prisoner. They try all they can to make our lot easier for us, and you know there are a great many of us now. So don't be distressed for us…."
X is passed, a large and prosperous town, with mills in a hollow. We climb the hill beyond it, and are off on a long and gradual descent to Amiens. This Picard country presents everywhere the same general features of rolling downland, thriving villages, old churches, comfortable country houses, straight roads, and well-kept woods. The battlefields of the Somme were once a continuation of it! But on this March day the uplands are wind-swept and desolate; and chilly white mists curl about them, with occasional bursts of pale sun.
Out of the mist there emerges suddenly an anti-aircraft section; then a great Army Service dump; and presently we catch sight of a row of hangars and the following notice, "Beware of aeroplanes ascending and descending across roads." For a time the possibility of charging into a biplane gives zest to our progress, as we fly along the road which cuts the aerodrome; but, alack! there are none visible and we begin to drop towards Amiens.
Then, outside the town, sentinels stop us, French and British; our passes are examined; and, under their friendly looks—betraying a little surprise!—we drive on into the old streets. I was in Amiens two years before the war, between trains, that I might refresh a somewhat faded memory of the cathedral. But not such a crowded, such a busy Amiens as this! The streets are so full that we have to turn out of the main street, directed by a French military policeman, and find our way by a détour to the cathedral.
As we pass through Amiens arrangements are going on for the "taking over" of another large section of the French line, south of Albert; as far, it is rumoured, as Roye and Lagny. At last, with our new armies, we can relieve more of the French divisions, who have borne so gallantly and for so many months the burden of their long line. It is true that the bulk of the German forces are massed against the British lines, and that in some parts of the centre and the east, owing to the nature of the ground, they are but thinly strung along the French front, which accounts partly for the disproportion in the number of kilometres covered by each Ally. But, also, we had to make our Army; the French, God be thanked, had theirs ready, and gloriously have they stood the brunt, as the defenders of civilisation, till we could take our full share.
And now we, who began with 45 kilometres of the battle-line, have gradually become responsible for 185, so that "at last," says a French friend to me in Paris, "our men can have a rest, some of them for the first time! And, by Heaven, they've earned it!"
Yet, in this "taking over" there are many feelings concerned. For the French poilu and our Tommy it is mostly the occasion for as much fraternisation as their fragmentary knowledge of each other's speech allows; the Frenchman is proud to show his line, the Britisher is proud to take it over; there are laughter and eager good will; on the whole, it is a red-letter day. But sometimes there strikes in a note "too deep for tears." Here is a fragment from an account of a "taking over," written by an eye-witness:
Trains of a prodigious length are crawling up a French railway. One follows so closely upon another that the rear truck of the first is rarely out of sight of the engine-driver of the second. These trains are full of British soldiers. Most of them are going to the front for the first time. They are seated everywhere, on the trucks, on the roof—legs dangling over the edge—inside, and even over the buffers. Presently they arrive at their goal. The men clamber out on to the siding, collect their equipment and are ready for a march up country. A few children run alongside them, shouting, "Anglais!" "Anglais!" And some of them take the soldiers' hands and walk on with them until they are tired.
Now the trenches are reached, and the men break into single file. But the occasion is not the usual one of taking over a few trenches. We are relieving some sixty miles of French line. There is, however, no confusion. The right men are sent to the right places, and everything is done quietly. It is like a great tide sweeping in, and another sweeping out. Sixty miles of trenches are gradually changing their nationality.
The German, a few yards over the way, knows quite well what is happening. A few extra shells whizz by; a trench mortar or two splutter a welcome; but it makes little difference to the weary German who mans the trenches over against him. Only, the new men are fresh and untired, and the German has no Ally who can give him corresponding relief.
It has all been so quietly done! Yet it is really a great moment. The store of man power which Great Britain possesses is beginning to take practical effect. The French, who held the long lines at the beginning of war, who stood before Verdun and threw their legions on the road to Péronne, are now being freed for work elsewhere. They have "carried on" till Great Britain was ready, and now she is ready.
* * * * *
This was more than the beginning of a new tour of duty [says another witness]. I felt the need of some ceremony, and I think others felt the need of it too. There were little half-articulate attempts, in the darkness, of men trying to show what they felt—a whisper or two—in the queer jargon that is growing up between the two armies. An English sentry mounted upon the fire-step, and looked out into the darkness beside the Frenchman, and then, before the Frenchman stepped down, patted him on the shoulder, as though he would say: "These trenches—all right!—we'll look after them!"
Then I stumbled into a dug-out. A candle burnt there, and a French officer was taking up his things. He nodded and smiled. "I go," he said. "I am not sorry, and yet——" He shrugged his shoulders. I understood. One is never sorry to go, but these trenches—these bits of France, where Frenchmen had died—would no longer be guarded by Frenchmen. Then he waved his hand round the little dug-out. "We give a little more of France into your keeping." His gesture was extravagant and light, but his face was grave as he said it. He turned and went out. I followed. He walked along the communication trench after his men, and I along the line of my silent sentries. I spoke to one or two, and then stood on the fire-step, looking out into the night. I had the Frenchman's words in my head: "We give a little more of France into your keeping!" It was not these trenches only, where I stood, but all that lay out there in the darkness, which had been given into our keeping. Its dangers were ours now. There were villages away there in the heart of the night, still unknown to all but the experts at home, whose names—like Thiepval and Bazentin—would soon be English names, familiar to every man in Britain as the streets of his own town. All this France had entrusted to our care this night.
Such were the scenes that were quietly going on, not much noticed by the public at home during the weeks of February and March, and such were the thoughts in men's minds. How plainly one catches through the words of the last speaker an eager prescience of events to come!—the sweep of General Gough on Warlencourt and Bapaume—the French reoccupation of Péronne.
One word for the cathedral of Amiens before we leave the bustling streets of the old Picard capital. This is so far untouched and unharmed, though exposed, like everything else behind the front, to the bombs of German aeroplanes. The great west front has disappeared behind a mountain of sandbags; the side portals are protected in the same way, and inside, the superb carvings of the choir are buried out of sight. But at the back of the choir the famous weeping cherub sits weeping as before, peacefully querulous. There is something irritating in his placid and too artistic grief. Not so is "Rachel weeping for her children" in this war-ravaged country. Sterner images of Sorrow are wanted here—looking out through burning eyes for the Expiation to come.
* * * * *
Then we are off, bound for Albert, though first of all for the Headquarters of the particular Army which has this region in charge. The weather, alack! is still thick. It is under cover of such an atmosphere that the Germans have been stealing away, removing guns and stores wherever possible, and leaving rear-guards to delay our advance. But when the rear-guards amount to some 100,000 men, resistance is still formidable, not to be handled with anything but extreme prudence by those who have such vast interests in charge as the Generals of the Allies.
Our way takes us first through a small forest, where systematic felling and cutting are going on under British forestry experts. The work is being done by German prisoners, and we catch a glimpse through the trees of their camp of huts in a barbed-wire enclosure. Their guards sleep under canvas! … And now we are in the main street of a large picturesque village, approaching a château. A motor lorry comes towards us, driven at a smart pace, and filled with grey-green uniforms. Prisoners!—this time fresh from the field. We have already heard rumours on our way of successful fighting to the south.
The famous Army Commander himself, who had sent us a kind invitation to lunch with him, is unexpectedly engaged in conference with a group of French generals; but there is a welcome suggestion that on our way back from the Somme he will be free and able to see me. Meanwhile we go off to luncheon and much talk with some members of the Staff in a house on the village street. Everywhere I notice the same cheerful, one might even say radiant, confidence. No boasting in words, but a conviction that penetrates through all talk that the tide has turned, and that, however long it may take to come fully up, it is we whom it is floating surely on to that fortune which is no blind hazard, but the child of high faith and untiring labour. Of that labour the Somme battlefields we were now to see will always remain in my mind—in spite of ruin, in spite of desolation—as a kind of parable in action, never to be forgotten.
No. 5
April 26th, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—Amid the rushing events of these days—America rousing herself like an eagle "with eyes intentive to bedare the sun"; the steady and victorious advance along the whole front in France, which day by day is changing the whole aspect of the war; the Balfour Mission; the signs of deep distress in Germany—it is sometimes difficult to throw oneself back into the mood of even six weeks ago! History is coming so fast off the loom! And yet six weeks ago I stood at the pregnant beginnings of it all, when, though nature in the bitter frost and slush of early March showed no signs of spring, the winter lull was over, and everywhere on the British front men knew that great things were stirring.
Before I reached G.H.Q., Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had already reported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancre during February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied our efforts in the summer of 1916. That is to say, after three months of trench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed to have let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm and darkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme had moved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November. Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that during these three months strange things had been happening.
About the middle of November, after General Gough's brilliant strokes on the Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and Beaumont Hamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote—"For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme are over. Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of their countries here. They will not thereby achieve anything more." Yet when this was written the German Higher Command was already well aware that the battle of the Somme had been won by the Allies, and that it would be impossible for Germany to hold out on the same ground against another similar attack.
Three months, however, of an extraordinarily hard winter gave them a respite, and enabled them to veil the facts from their own people. The preparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights of January helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must have actually begun not many weeks after General Gough's last successes on the Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather, before Grandcourt and Bapaume. So that in the latter half of February, when General Gough again pushed forward, it was to feel the German line yielding before him; and by March 3rd, the day of my visit to the Somme, it was only a question of how far the Germans would go and what the retreat meant.
Meanwhile, in another section of the line our own plans were maturing, which were to bear fruit five weeks later in the brilliant capture of that Vimy ridge I had seen on March 2, filling the blue middle distance, from the bare upland of Notre Dame de Lorette. If on the Somme the anvil was to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle of Arras the hammer was to take its full revenge.
These things, however, were still hidden from all but the few, and in the first days of March the Germans had not yet begun to retire in front of the French line further south. The Somme advance was still the centre of things, and Bapaume had not yet fallen. As we drove on towards Albert we knew that we should be soon close behind our own guns, and within range of the enemy's.
No one who has seen it in war-time will ever forget the market-place of Albert—the colossal heaps of wreck that fill the centre of it; the new, pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco building of the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn and broken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdry ornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last, the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, in dumb protest to God and man. The gilded statue, which now hangs at right angles to the tower, has, after its original collapse under shell-fire, been fixed in this position by the French Engineers; and it is to be hoped that when the church comes to be rebuilt the figure will be left as it is. There is something extraordinarily significant and dramatic in its present attitude. Whatever artistic defects the statue may have are out of sight, and it seems as it hangs there, passionately hovering, above the once busy centre of a prosperous town, to be the very symbol and voice of France calling the world to witness.
A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along the Albert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims' way for generations to come.
"To other folk," writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his Battle of the Somme, "and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I suppose; but to us—La Boisselle and Ovillers—my hat!"
To walk about in those hells! I went along the "sunken road" all the way to Contalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! The new troops coming up now go barging across in the most light-hearted way. It means no more to them than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how we watered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play there now, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have a sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.
The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter—so far, at least, as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene itself—held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them. The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the air—mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in hour by hour.
"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing left but mud and dust.
Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some "hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see. Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the countryside.
Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course. "British!" says the officer in front—who was himself in the battle. Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our bearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the British and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-past seven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of our people, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victory prepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns; made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millions of workers—men and women—on the lathes and in the filling factories of these islands.
We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenches and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearly two years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these defences impregnable," says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the winter has made us at home—on paper—so familiar. "The numerous woods and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements—everything that the best brains of the German Army could devise for our destruction—had been lavished on the German lines. And behind the first line was a second—and behind the second line a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so vast a system. What remains of it—and of all the workings of the German mind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into the dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans flung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, and then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behind which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain, mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies might live.
"There were no stragglers, none!" Let us never forget that cry of exultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw the young untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappear into the hell beyond. And there in the packed graveyards that dot these slopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks in after days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by those who fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn ever in the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force.
"Life is but the pebble sunk,
Deeds the circle growing!"
And from the deeds done on this hillside, the suffering endured, the life given up, the victory won, by every kind and type of man within the British State—rich and poor, noble and simple, street-men from British towns, country-men from British villages, men from Canadian prairies, from Australian and New Zealand homesteads—one has a vision, as one looks on into the future, of the impulse given here spreading out through history, unquenched and imperishable. The fight is not over—the victory is not yet—but on the Somme no English or French heart can doubt the end.
The same thoughts follow one along the sunken road to Contalmaison. Here, first, is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped confusion of sandbags, of broken and overturned crosses, of graves tossed into a common ruin. And a little further are the ruins of Contalmaison, where the 3rd Division of the Prussian Guards was broken and 700 of them taken prisoners. Terrible are the memories of Contalmaison! Recall one letter only!—the letter written by a German soldier the day before the attack: "Nothing comes to us—no letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches—it is horrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven days since this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces." And from another letter: "Every one of us in these five days has become years older—we hardly know ourselves."
It was among these intricate remains of trenches and dug-outs, round the fragments of the old chateau, that such things happened. Here, and among those ghastly fragments of shattered woods that one sees to south and east—Mametz, Trônes, Delville, High Wood—human suffering and heroism, human daring and human terror, on one side and on the other, reached their height. For centuries after the battle of Marathon sounds of armed men and horses were heard by night; and to pry upon that sacred rendezvous of the souls of the slain was frowned on by the gods. Only the man who passed through innocently and ignorantly, not knowing where he was, could pass through safely. And here also, in days to come, those who visit these spots in mere curiosity, as though they were any ordinary sight, will visit them to their hurt.
* * * * *
So let the first thoughts run which are evolved by this brown and torn devastation. But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back, first, to the victory—to the results of all that hard and relentless fighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorable battlefield north and south of the Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners, between five and six hundred guns of different calibres, and more than a thousand machine guns, had fallen to the Allies in four months and a half. Many square miles of French territory had been recovered. Verdun—glorious Verdun—had been relieved. Italy and Russia had been helped by the concentration of the bulk of the German forces on the Western front. The enemy had lost at least half a million men; and the Allied loss, though great, had been substantially less. Our new armies had gloriously proved themselves, and the legend of German invincibility was gone.
So much for the first-fruits. The ultimate results are only now beginning to appear in the steady retreat of German forces, unable to stand another attack, on the same line, now that the protection of the winter pause is over. "How far are we from our guns?" I ask the officer beside me. And, as I speak, a flash to the north-east on the higher ground towards Pozières lights up the grey distance. My companion measures the hillside with his eyes. "About 1,000 yards." Their objective now is a temporary German line in front of Bapaume. But we shall be in Bapaume in a few days. And then?
Death—Victory—Work; these are the three leading impressions that rise and take symbolic shape amid these scenes. Let me turn now to the last. For anyone with the common share of heart and imagination, the first thought here must be of the dead—the next, of swarming life. For these slopes and roads and ruins are again alive with men. Thousands and thousands of our soldiers are here, many of them going up to or coming back from the line, while others are working—working—incessantly at all that is meant by "advance" and "consolidation."
The transformation of a line of battle into an efficient "back of the Army" requires, it seems, an amazing amount of human energy, contrivance, and endurance. And what we see now is, of course, a second or third stage. First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actual battlefield. For this the work of the men now at work here—R.E.'s and Labour battalions—is too skilled and too valuable. It is done by fatigues and burying parties from the battalions in occupation of each captured section. The dead are buried; the poor human fragments that remain are covered with chlorate of lime; equipments of all kinds, the litter of the battlefield, are brought back to the salvage dumps, there to be sorted and sent back to the bases for repairs.
Then—or simultaneously—begins the work of the Engineers and the Labour men. Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-holes filled up for the driving through of new roads and railways, and the provision of places where tents, huts, dumps, etc., are to stand. Roughly speaking, I see, as I look round me, that a great deal of this work is here already far advanced. There are hundreds of men, carts, and horses at work on the roads, and everywhere one sees the signs of new railway lines, either of the ordinary breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for the advanced carriage of food and ammunition. Here also is a great encampment of Nissen huts; there fresh preparations for a food or an ammunition dump.
With one pair of eyes one can only see a fraction of what is in truth going on. But the whole effect is one of vast and increasing industry, of an intensity of determined effort, which thrills the mind hardly less than the thought of the battle-line itself. "Yes, war is work," writes an officer who went through the Somme fighting, "much more than it is fighting. This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers find out here." Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will go cheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; and when the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder of the world.
On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of the Mametz wood upon our left. More graveyards, carefully tended; spaces of peace amid the universal movement. And always, on the southern horizon, those clear lines of British trenches, whence sprang on July 1st, 1916, the irresistible attack on Montauban and Mametz. Suddenly, over the desolate ground to the west, we see a man hovering in mid-air, descending on a parachute from a captive balloon that seems to have suffered mishap. The small wavering object comes slowly down; we cannot see the landing; but it is probably a safe one.
Then we are on the main Albert road again, and after some rapid miles I find myself kindly welcomed by one of the most famous leaders of the war. There, in a small room, which has surely seen work of the first importance to our victories on the Somme, a great General discusses the situation and the future with that same sober and reasoned confidence I have found everywhere among the representatives of our Higher Command. "Are we approaching victory? Yes; but it is too soon to use the great word itself. Everything is going well; but the enemy is still very strong. This year will decide it; but may not end it."
* * * * *
So far my recollections of March 3rd. But this is now April 26th, and all the time that I have been writing these recollections, thought has been leaping forward to the actual present—to the huge struggle now pending between Arras and Rheims—to the news that comes crowding in, day by day, of the American preparations in aid of the Allies—to all that is at stake for us and for you. Your eyes are now turned like ours to the battle-line in France. You triumph—and you suffer—with us!
No. 6
May 3rd, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—My last letter left me returning to our village lodgings under the wing of G.H.Q. after a memorable day on the Somme battle-fields. That night the talk at the Visitors' Château, during and after a very simple dinner in an old panelled room, was particularly interesting and animated. The morning's newspapers had just arrived from England, with the official communiques of the morning. We were pushing nearer and nearer to Bapaume; in the fighting of the preceding day we had taken another 128 prisoners; and the King had sent his congratulations to Sir Douglas Haig and the Army on the German withdrawal under "the steady and persistent pressure" of the British Army "from carefully prepared and strongly fortified positions—a fitting sequel to the fine achievements of my Army last year in the Battle of the Somme." There was also a report on the air-fighting and air-losses of February—to which I will return.
It was, of course, already obvious that the German retreat on the Somme was not—so far—going to yield us any very large captures of men or guns. Prisoners were indeed collected every day, but there were no "hauls" such as, little more than a month after this evening of March 3rd, were to mark the very different course of the Battle of Arras. Discussion turned upon the pace of the German retreat and the possible rate of our pursuit. "Don't forget," said an officer, "that they are moving over good ground, while the pursuit has to move over bad ground—roads with craters in them, ground so pitted with shell-holes that you can scarcely drive a peg between them, demolished bridges, villages that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The enemy has his guns with him; ours have to be pushed up over the bad ground. His machine-guns are always in picked and prepared positions; ours have to be improvised."
And also—"Don't forget the weather!" said another. Every misty day—and there were many in February—was very skilfully turned to account. Whenever the weather conditions made it impossible to use the eyes of our Air Service, men would say to each other on our side, "He'll go back a lot to-day!—somewhere or other." But in spite of secrecy and fog, how little respite we had given him! The enemy losses in casualties, prisoners, and stores during February were certainly considerable; not to speak of the major loss of all, that of the strongly fortified line on which two years of the most arduous and ingenious labour that even Germany can give had been lavished. "And almost everywhere," writes an eye-witness, "he was hustled and harried much more than is generally known." As you go eastward, for instance, across the evacuated ground you notice everywhere signs of increasing haste and flurry, such as the less complete felling of trees and telegraph posts. It was really a fine performance for our infantry and our cavalry patrols, necessarily unsupported by anything like our full artillery strength, to keep up the constant pressure they did on an enemy who enjoyed almost the full protection of his. It was dreadful country to live and fight in after the Germans had gone back over it, much worse than anything that troops have to face after any ordinary capture of an enemy line.
The fact is that old axioms are being everywhere revised in the light of this war. In former wars the extreme difficulty of a retreat in the face of the enemy was taken for granted. But this war—I am trying to summarise some first-hand opinion as it has reached me—has modified this point of view considerably.
We know now that for any serious attack on an enemy who has plenty of machine-guns and plenty of successive well-wired positions a great mass of heavy and other artillery is absolutely indispensable. And over ground deliberately wrecked and obstructed such artillery must take time to bring up. And yet—to repeat—how rapidly, how "persistently" all difficulties considered, to use the King's adjective, has the British Army pressed on the heels of the retreating enemy!
None of the officers with whom I talked believed that anything more could have been done by us than was done. "If it had been we who were retreating," writes one of them, "and the Germans who were pursuing, I do not believe they would have pushed us so hard or caused us as much loss, for all their pride in their staff work."
And it is, of course, evident from what has happened since I parted from my hosts at the Château, that we have now amply succeeded during the last few weeks in bringing the retreating enemy to bay. No more masked withdrawals, no more skilful evasions, for either Hindenburg or his armies! The victories of Easter week on and beyond the Vimy Ridge, and the renewed British attack of the last few days—I am writing on May 1st—together with the magnificent French advance towards Laon and to the east of Reims, have been so many fresh and crushing testimonies to the vitality and gathering force of the Allied armies.
What is to be the issue we wait to see. But at least, after the winter lull, it is once more joined; and with such an army as the War Office and the nation together, during these three years, have fashioned to his hand—so trained, so equipped, so fired with a common and inflexible spirit—Sir Douglas Haig and his lieutenants will not fail the hopes of Great Britain, of France—and of America!
At the beginning of March these last words could not have been added. There was an American professor not far from me at dinner, and we discussed the "blazing indiscretion" of Herr Zimmermann's Mexican letter. But he knew no more than I. Only I remember with pleasure the general tone of all the conversation about America that I either engaged in or listened to at Headquarters just a month before the historic meeting of Congress. It was one of intelligent sympathy with the difficulties in your way, coupled with a quiet confidence that the call of civilisation and humanity would very soon—and irrevocably—decide the attitude of America towards the war.
* * * * *
The evening at the Château passed only too quickly, and we were sad to say good-bye, though it left me still the prospect of further conversation with some members of the Intelligence Staff on my return journey from Paris and those points of the French line for which, thanks to the courtesy of the French Headquarters, I was now bound.
The last night under the little schoolmistress's quiet roof amid the deep stillness of the village was a wakeful one for me. The presence of the New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely living thing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as the amazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole end—the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of the strongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as a moral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of the preceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mighty instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.
How much I have heard of training since my arrival in France! It is not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper. Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr. Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.
But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to "do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the nation in its collected and corporate character" controlling the individual will in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals.
What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great Britain to-day—what we are about to witness in your own country—a nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea submitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes; accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain—death itself—rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school, resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed education is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than the youth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching of any strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical.
Training—"askêsis"—with either death, or the loss of all that makes honourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that is the present preoccupation of this nation in arms. Even the football games I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all part of this training. They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement. They are part of the system by which men are persuaded—not driven—to submit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even in their times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated that they end by demanding it.
As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery the terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with a shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horrible process of war has not brutalised the British soldier—you remember the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!—that he still remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the ideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that this relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace, and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things.
But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew Arnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire" during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of conscription," was told by his companion that "sooner than submit to conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life underground." An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by the way, as contrasted with the present state of things!—since it both shows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of "doing as it likes," when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings out its equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to be supreme over the individual interest and will.
But the stubbornness, the discipline, the sacrifice of the armies in the field are not all we want. The stubbornness of the nation at home, of the men and the women, is no less necessary to the great end. In these early days of March every week's news was bringing home to England the growing peril of the submarine attack. Would the married women, the elder women of the nation, rise to the demand for personal thought and saving, for training—in the matter of food—with the same eager goodwill as thousands of the younger women had shown in meeting the armies' demand for munitions? For the women heads of households have it largely in their hands.
The answer at the beginning of March was matter for anxiety. It is still matter for anxiety now—at the beginning of May.
Let us, however, return for a little to the Army. What would the marvellous organisation which England has produced in three years avail us, without the spirit in it,—the body, without the soul? All through these days I have been conscious, in the responsible men I have been meeting, of ideals of which no one talks, except when, on very rare occasions, it happens to be in the day's work like anything else to talk of ideals—but which are, in fact, omnipresent.
I find, for instance, among my War Office Notes, a short address given in the ordinary course of duty by an unnamed commandant to his officer-cadets. It appears here, in its natural place, just as part of the whole; revealing for a moment the thoughts which constantly underlie it.
"Believe me when I tell you that I have never found an officer who worked who did not come through. Only ill-health and death stand in your way. The former you can guard against in a great measure. The latter comes to us all, and for a soldier, a soldier's death is the finest of all. Fear of death does not exist for the man who has led a good and honest life. You must discipline your bodies and your minds—your bodies by keeping them healthy and strong, your minds by prayer and thought."
As to the relation between officers and men, that also is not talked about much, except in its more practical and workaday aspects—the interest taken by officers in the men's comfort and welfare, their readiness to share in the men's games and amusements, and so on. And no one pretends that the whole British Army is an army of "plaster saints," that every officer is the "little father" of his men, and all relations ideal.
But what becomes evident, as one penetrates a little nearer to the great organism, is a sense of passionate responsibility in all the finer minds of the Army towards their men, a readiness to make any sacrifice for them, a deep and abiding sense of their sufferings and dangers, of all that they are giving to their country. How this comes out again and again in the innumerable death-stories of British officers—those few words that commemorate them in the daily newspapers! And how evident is the profound response of the men to such a temper in their officers! There is not a day's action in the field—I am but quoting the eye-witnesses—that does not bring out such facts. Let a senior officer—an "old and tried soldier"—speak. He is describing a walk over a battlefield on the Ancre after one of our victories there last November:
"It is a curious thing to walk over enemy trenches that I have watched like a tiger for weeks and weeks. But what of the boys who took those trenches, with their eleven rows of barbed wire in front of them? I don't think I ever before to-day rated the British soldier at his proper value. His sufferings in this weather are indescribable. When he is not in the trenches his discomforts are enough to kill any ordinary mortal. When he is in the trenches it is a mixture between the North Pole and Hell. And yet when the moment comes he jumps up and charges at the impossible—and conquers it! … Some of the poor fellows who lay there as they fell looked to me absolutely noble, and I thought of their families who were aching for news of them and hoping against hope that they would not be left unburied in their misery.
"All the loving and tender thoughts that are lavished on them are not enough. There are no words to describe the large hearts of these men. God bless 'em! And what of the French on whose soil they lie? Can they ever forget the blood that is mingled with their own? I hope not. I don't think England has ever had as much cause to be proud as she has to-day."
Ah! such thoughts and feelings cut deep. They would be unbearable but for the saving salt of humour in which this whole great gathering of men, so to speak, moves suspended, as though in an atmosphere. It is everywhere. Coarse or refined, it is the universal protection, whether from the minor discomforts or the more frightful risks of war. Volumes could be filled, have already been filled, with it—volumes to which your American soldier when he gets to France in his thousands will add considerably—pages all his own! I take this touch in passing from a recent letter:
"A sergeant in my company [writes a young officer] was the other day buried by a shell. He was dug out with difficulty. As he lay, not seriously injured, but sputtering and choking, against the wall of the trench, his C.O. came by. 'Well, So-and-so, awfully sorry! Can I do anything for you?' 'Sir,' said the sergeant with dignity, still struggling out of the mud, 'I want a separate peace!'"
And here is another incident that has just come across me. Whether it is Humour or Pathos I do not know. In this scene they are pretty close together—the great Sisters!
A young flying officer, in a night attack, was hit by a shrapnel bullet from below. He thought it had struck his leg, but was so absorbed in dropping his bombs and bringing down his machine safely that, although he was aware of a feeling of faintness, he thought no more of it till he had landed in the aerodrome. Then it was discovered that his leg had been shot away, was literally hanging by a shred of skin, and how he had escaped bleeding to death nobody could quite understand. As it was, he had dropped his bombs, and he insisted on making his report in hospital.
He recovered from the subsequent operation, and in hospital, some weeks afterwards, his C.O. appeared, with the news of his recommendation for the D.S.O. The boy, for he was little more, listened with eyes of amused incredulity, opening wider and wider as the Colonel proceeded. When the communication was over, and the C.O., attributing the young man's silence to weakness or grateful emotion, had passed on, the nurse beside the bed saw the patient bury his head in the pillow with a queer sound of exasperation, and caught the words, "I call it perfectly childish!"
That an act so simple, so all in the bargain, should have earned the
D.S.O. seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!
* * * * *
With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting of our airmen behind the enemy lines.
"Many of them don't come back. What then? They will have done their job."
The report which reaches the château on our last evening illustrates this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February, 60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were "missing" or "brought down."
But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more startling report—that for April—lies before me. "There has not been a month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never reached such a tremendous figure," says the Times. The record number so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme fighting—322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German—269 of them brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147; the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.
It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service, realise at all the conditions of this fighting—its daring, its epic range, its constant development!
All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the treacheries of the very air itself.
In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges, pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his enemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with every gun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition, unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops of the machine.
But apart from active fighting, take such a common experience as what is called "a long reconnaissance." Pilot and observer receive their orders to reconnoitre "thoroughly" a certain area. It may be winter, and the cold at the height of many thousand feet may be formidable indeed. No matter. The thing is done, and, after hours in the freezing air, the machine makes for home; through a winter evening, perhaps, as we saw the two splendid biplanes, near the northern section of the line, sailing far above our heads into the sunset, that first day of our journey. The reconnaissance is over, and here is the first-hand testimony of one who has taken part in many, as to what it means in endurance and fatigue:
"Both pilot and observer are stiff with the cold. In winter it is often necessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilled parts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with the continual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyes are bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginable ache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, though sleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer must make his report and hand it in to the proper quarter."
So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting, though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air, squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, the fighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming more wonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"—I recall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid the noise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks before the battle of Arras—"when the great move begins we shall get the mastery again, as we did on the Somme."
Ask the gunners in the batteries of the April advance, as they work below the signalling planes; ask the infantry whom the gunners so marvellously protect, as to the truth of the prophecy!
"Our casualties are really light," writes an officer in reference to some of the hot fighting of the past month. Thanks, apparently, to the ever-growing precision of our artillery methods; which again depend on aeroplane and balloon information. So it is that the flying forms in the upper air become for the soldier below so many symbols of help and protection. He is restless when they are not there. And let us remember that aeroplanes were first used for artillery observation, not three years ago, in the battle of Aisne, after the victory of the Marne.
But the night in the quiet village wears away. To-morrow we shall be flying through the pleasant land of France, bound for Paris and Lorraine. For I am turning now to a new task. On our own line I have been trying to describe, for those who care to listen, the crowding impressions left on a woman-witness by the huge development in the last twelve months of the British military effort in France. But now, as I go forward into this beautiful country, which I have loved next to my own all my life, there are new purposes in my mind, and three memorable words in my ears:
"Reparation—Restitution—Guarantees!"
No. 7
May 10th, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—We are then, for a time, to put France, and not the British line, in the forefront of these later letters. For when I went out on this task, as I think you know, I had two objects in mind—intimately connected. The first was to carry on that general story of the British effort, which I began last year under your inspiration, down to the opening of this year's campaign. And the second was to try and make more people in this country, and more people in America, realise—as acutely and poignantly as I could—what it is we are really fighting for; what is the character of the enemy we are up against; what are the sufferings, outrages, and devastations which have been inflicted on France, in particular, by the wanton cruelty and ambition of Germany; for which she herself must be made to suffer and pay, if civilisation and freedom are to endure.
With this second intention, I was to have combined, by the courtesy of the French Headquarters, a visit to certain central portions of the French line, including Soissons, Reims, and Verdun. But by the time I reached France the great operations that have since marked the Soissons-Reims front were in active preparation; roads and motor-cars were absorbed by the movements of troops and stores; Reims and Verdun were under renewed bombardment; and visits to this section of the French line were entirely held up. The French authorities, understanding that I chiefly wished to see for myself some of the wrecked and ruined villages and towns dealt with in the French official reports, suggested, first Senlis and the battle-fields of the Ourcq, and then Nancy, the ruined villages of Lorraine, and that portion of their eastern frontier line where, simultaneously with the Battle of the Marne, General Castelnau directed from the plateau of Amance and the Grand Couronné that strong defence of Nancy which protected—and still protects—the French right, and has baulked all the German attempts to turn it.
Meanwhile, in the early days of March, the German retreat, south of the Somme and in front of the French line, was not yet verified; and the worst devastation of the war—the most wanton crime, perhaps, that Germany has so far committed—was not yet accomplished. I had left France before it was fully known, and could only realise, by hot sympathy from a distance, the passionate thrill of fury and wild grief which swept through France when the news began to come in from the evacuated districts. British correspondents with the advancing armies of the Allies have seen deeds of barbarism which British eyes and hearts will never forget, and have sent the news of them through the world. The destruction of Coucy and Ham, the ruin and plunder of the villages, the shameless loot everywhere, the hideous ill-treatment of the country folk, the deportation of boys and girls, the massacre of the fruit trees—these things have gone deep into the very soul of France, burning away—except in the minds of a few incorrigible fanatics—whatever foolish "pacificism" was there, and steeling the mind and will of the nation afresh to that victory which can alone bring expiation, punishment, and a peace worth the name. But, everywhere, the ruins with which northern, central, and eastern France are covered, whether they were caused by the ordinary processes of war or not, are equally part of the guilt of Germany. In the country which I saw last year on the Belgian border, from the great phantom of Ypres down to Festubert, the ravage is mainly the ravage of war. Incessant bombardment from the fighting lines has crumbled village after village into dust, or gashed the small historic towns and the stately country houses. There is no deliberate use of torch and petrol, as in the towns farther south and east. Ypres, however, was deliberately shelled into fragments day after day; and Arras is only a degree less carefully ruined. And whatever the military pretext may be, the root question remains—"Why are the Germans in France at all?" What brought them there but their own determination, in the words of the Secret Report of 1913 printed in the French Yellow book, to "strengthen and extend Deutschtum (Germanism) throughout the entire world"? Every injury that poor France in self-defence, or the Allies at her side, are forced to inflict on the villages and towns which express and are interwoven with the history and genius of the French, is really a German crime. There is no forgiveness for what Germany has done—none! She has tried to murder a people; and but for the splendid gifts of that people, she would have achieved her end.
Perhaps the tragedy of what is to be seen and heard at Senlis, on the battle-grounds of the Ourcq, and in the villages of Lorraine, was heightened for me by the beauty of the long drive south from the neighbourhood of G.H.Q.—some hundred and forty miles. It was a cold but clear March day. We had but parted from snow a little while, and we were soon to find it again. But on this day, austerely bright, the land of France unrolled before us its long succession of valley and upland, upland and valley. Here, no trace of the invader; generally speaking no signs of the armies; for our route lay, on an average, some forty miles behind the line. All was peace, solitude even; for the few women, old men, and boys on the land scarcely told in the landscape. But every mile was rich in the signs and suggestion of an old and most human civilisation—farms, villages, towns, the carefully tended woods, the fine roads running their straight unimpeded course over hill and dale, bearing witness to a State sense, of which we possess too little in this country.
We stopped several times on the journey—I remember a puncture, involving a couple of hours' delay, somewhere north of Beauvais—and found ourselves talking in small hot rooms with peasant families of all ages and stages, from the blind old grandmother, like a brooding Fate in the background, to the last toddling baby. How friendly they were, in their own self-respecting way!—the grave-faced elder women, the young wives, the children. The strength of the family in France seems to me still overwhelming—would we had more of it left in England! The prevailing effect was of women everywhere carrying on—making no parade of it, being indeed accustomed to work, and familiar with every detail of the land; having merely added the tasks of their husbands and sons to their own, and asking no praise for it. The dignity, the essential refinement and intelligence—for all their homely speech—of these solidly built, strong-faced women, in the central districts of France, is still what it was when George Sand drew her Berri peasants, nearly a hundred years ago.
Then darkness fell, and in the darkness we went through an old, old town where are the French General Headquarters. Sentries challenged us to right and left, and sent us forward again with friendly looks. The day had been very long, and presently, as we approached Paris, I fell asleep in my corner, only to be roused with a start by a glare of lights, and more sentries. The barrière of Paris!—shining out into the night.
Two days in Paris followed; every hour crowded with talk, and the vivid impressions of a moment when, from beyond Compiègne and Soissons—some sixty miles from the Boulevards—the French airmen flying over the German lines were now bringing back news every morning and night of fresh withdrawals, fresh villages burning, as the sullen enemy relaxed his hold.
On the third day, a most courteous and able official of the French Foreign Office took us in charge, and we set out for Senlis on a morning chill and wintry indeed, but giving little sign of the storm it held in leash.
To reach Senlis one must cross the military enceinte of Paris. Many visitors from Paris and other parts of France, from England, or from America, have seen by now the wreck of its principal street, and have talked with the Abbé Dourlent, the "Archiprêtre" of the cathedral, whose story often told has lost but little of its first vigour and simplicity, to judge at least by its effect on two of his latest visitors.
We took the great northern road out of Paris, which passes scenes memorable in the war of 1870. On both sides of us, at frequent intervals, across the flat country, were long lines of trenches, and belts of barbed wire, most of them additions to the defences of Paris since the Battle of the Marne. It is well to make assurance doubly sure! But although, as we entered the Forest of Chantilly, the German line was no more than some thirty-odd miles away, and since the Battle of the Aisne, two and a half years ago, it has run, practically, as it still ran in the early days of this last March, the notion of any fresh attack on Paris seemed the merest dream. It was indeed a striking testimony to the power of the modern defensive—this absolute security in which Paris and its neighbourhood has lived and moved all that time, with—up to a few weeks ago—the German batteries no farther off than the suburbs of Soissons. How good to remember, as one writes, all that has happened since I was in Senlis!—and the increased distance that now divides the German hosts from the great prize on which they had set their hearts.
How fiercely they had set their hearts on it, the old Curé of Senlis, who is the chief depository of the story of the town, was to make us feel anew.
One enters Senlis from Paris by the main street, the Rue de la République, which the Germans deliberately and ruthlessly burnt on September 2nd and 3rd, 1914. We moved slowly along it through the blackened ruins of houses large and small, systematically fired by the German pétroleurs, in revenge for a supposed attack by civilians upon the entering German troops. Les civils ont tiré—it is the universal excuse for these deeds of wanton barbarism, and for the hideous cruelties to men, women, and children that have attended them—beginning with that incident which first revealed to a startled world the true character of the men directing the German Army—the burning and sack of Louvain. It is to be hoped that renewed and careful investigation will be made—(much preliminary inquiry has already of course taken place)—after the war into all these cases. My own impression from what I have heard, seen, and read—for what it may be worth—is that the plea is almost invariably false; but that the state of panic and excitement into which the German temperament falls, with extraordinary readiness, under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troops traversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for an honest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers, without excusing at all the deeds to which it led. Of this abnormal excitability, the old Curé of Senlis gave one or two instances which struck me.
We came across him by chance in the cathedral—the beautiful cathedral I have heard Walter Pater describe, in my young Oxford days, as one of the loveliest and gracefullest things in French Gothic. Fortunately, though the slender belfry and the roof were repeatedly struck by shrapnel in the short bombardment of the town, no serious damage was done. We wandered round the church alone, delighting our eyes with the warm golden white of the stone, the height of the grooved arches, the flaming fragments of old glass, when we saw the figure of an old priest come slowly down the aisle, his arms folded. He looked at us rather dreamily and passed. Our guide, Monsieur P., followed and spoke to him. "Monsieur, you are the Abbé Dourlent?"
"I am, sir. What can I do for you?"