NOW IT CAN BE TOLD
by Philip Gibbs
CONTENTS
[ PART ONE. OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS ]
[ PART TWO. THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE ]
[ PART THREE. THE NATURE OF A BATTLE ]
[ PART FOUR. A WINTER OF DISCONTENT ]
[ PART FIVE. THE HEART OF A CITY ]
[ PART SIX. PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME ]
[ PART SEVEN. THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON ]
[ PART EIGHT. FOR WHAT MEN DIED ]
PREFACE
In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen again—surely—if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on all the fronts where conditions were the same.
What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, nor deny anything in my daily narratives of events on the western front as they are now published in book form. They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly, as a truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in France and Belgium during the years of war, broadly pictured out as far as I could see and know. My duty, then, was that of a chronicler, not arguing why things should have happened so nor giving reasons why they should not happen so, but describing faithfully many of the things I saw, and narrating the facts as I found them, as far as the censorship would allow. After early, hostile days it allowed nearly all but criticism, protest, and of the figures of loss.
The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war and of all war—not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather as the truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out of their experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however painful, to add something to the world's knowledge out of which men of good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one people and another, some new code of international morality, preventing or at least postponing another massacre of youth like that five years' sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness.
PART ONE. OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS
I
When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and a glorious adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out from London to report the proceedings, and I was one of them.
We went in civilian clothes without military passports—the War Office was not giving any—with bags of money which might be necessary for the hire of motor-cars, hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in the antechambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan War, and others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior staff-officers who knew that “K” hated these men and thought the press ought to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into false hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them and were told to buy horses and sleeping-bags and be ready to start at a moment's notice for the front.
The moment's notice was postponed for months....
The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of “seeing something,” without authority, and made wild, desperate efforts to break through the barrier that had been put up against them by French and British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were arrested, put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, rearrested, and expelled from France. That was after fantastic adventures in which they saw what war meant in civilized countries where vast populations were made fugitives of fear, where millions of women and children and old people became wanderers along the roads in a tide of human misery, with the red flame of war behind them and following them, and where the first battalions of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so confident of victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did not know), came back maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, swamping over many cities and thousands of villages and many fields. Those young writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of heroic pageantry.
“Had a good time?” asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly waiting for an answer.
“A good time!”... God!... Did people think it was amusing to be an onlooker of world-tragedy?... One of them remembered a lady of France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the battle that was now being fought round their own town. She was brave—pointed out the line of the German advance on the map—and it was in a troop-train crowded with French soldiers—and then burst into wild weeping, clasping the hand of an English writing-man so that her nails dug into his flesh. I remember her still.
“Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!” said the boy of eight.
Through Amiens at night had come a French army in retreat. There were dead and wounded on their wagons. Cuirassiers stumbled as they led their tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in the darkness, stared at their men retreating like this through their city, and knew that the enemy was close behind.
“Nous sommes perdus!” whispered a woman, and gave a wailing cry.
People were fighting their way into railway trucks at every station for hundreds of miles across northern France. Women were beseeching a place for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on journeys of nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and hunger. An old woman died, and her corpse blocked up the lavatory. At night they slept on the pavements in cities invaded by fugitives.
At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of France, there were columns of ambulances bringing in an endless tide of wounded. They were laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-yards, five hundred at a time. Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood. Some of their bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with a hard snuffle. A foul smell came from them.
At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with disinfecting fluid after getting through with one day's wounded. The French doctor in charge had received a telegram from the director of medical services: “Make ready for forty thousand wounded.” It was during the first battle of the Marne.
“It is impossible!” said the French doctor....
Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened themselves against the walls and said, “God in heaven!” Two hundred and fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats, sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in their breasts. It was cold at night and there were only a few canal-boats and fishermen's cottages, and in them were crowds of fugitives. The odor of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, and sicken in remembrance....
Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many other towns from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. In Dixmude young boys of France—fusiliers marins—lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall, falling to bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting for death amid the dead bodies of his men—one so young, so handsome, lying there on his back, with a waxen face, staring steadily at the sky through the broken roof....
At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the esplanade, and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of a red-brick villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a town that had been built for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the world. British monitors lying close into shore were answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by Ostend. From one monitor came a group of figures with white masks of cotton-wool tipped with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with the dead body of an officer tied up in a sack....
“O Jesu!... O maman!... O ma pauvre p'tite femme!... O Jesu! O Jesu!”
From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or parched in the burning sun before the battle of the Marne these cries went up to the blue sky of France in August of '14. They were the cries of youth's agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the victory that saved France and us. The German dead had been gathered into heaps like autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising from them....
That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw our little Regular Army, the “Old Contemptibles,” on their way back, with the German hordes following close. Sir John French had his headquarters for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish soldiers, stragglers from units still keeping some kind of order, were coming in, bronzed, dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied round with rags, with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty as dogs, crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been retreating and retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty bridges of France. Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied out the diary of their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men. “Wait,” they said. “In a few days we shall give them a hard knock. They will never get Paris. Jamais de la vie!”...
In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken bottles... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and where French and British soldiers—stragglers all—drank together, and sang above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans.
And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of that first six months of war—as afterward—came back the tide of wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals crowded with blind and dying and moaning men....
“Had an interesting time?” asked a man I wanted to kill because of his smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons. As an onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because they could not understand. All these things I had seen in the first nine months I put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that some might know; but it was only a few who understood....
II
In 1915 the War Office at last moved in the matter of war correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against them, was being broken down a little by the pressure of public opinion (mentioned from time to time by members of the government), which demanded more news of their men in the field than was given by bald communiqués from General Headquarters and by an “eye-witness” who, as one paper had the audacity to say, wrote nothing but “eye-wash.” Even the enormous, impregnable stupidity of our High Command on all matters of psychology was penetrated by a vague notion that a few “writing fellows” might be sent out with permission to follow the armies in the field, under the strictest censorship, in order to silence the popular clamor for more news. Dimly and nervously they apprehended that in order to stimulate the recruiting of the New Army now being called to the colors by vulgar appeals to sentiment and passion, it might be well to “write up” the glorious side of war as it could be seen at the base and in the organization of transport, without, of course, any allusion to dead or dying men, to the ghastly failures of distinguished generals, or to the filth and horror of the battlefields. They could not understand, nor did they ever understand (these soldiers of the old school) that a nation which was sending all its sons to the field of honor desired with a deep and poignant craving to know how those boys of theirs were living and how they were dying, and what suffering was theirs, and what chances they had against their enemy, and how it was going with the war which was absorbing all the energy and wealth of the people at home.
“Why don't they trust their leaders?” asked the army chiefs. “Why don't they leave it to us?”
“We do trust you—with some misgivings,” thought the people, “and we do leave it to you—though you seem to be making a mess of things—but we want to know what we have a right to know, and that is the life and progress of this war in which our men are engaged. We want to know more about their heroism, so that it shall be remembered by their people and known by the world; about their agony, so that we may share it in our hearts; and about the way of their death, so that our grief may be softened by the thought of their courage. We will not stand for this anonymous war; and you are wasting time by keeping it secret, because the imagination of those who have not joined cannot be fired by cold lines which say, 'There is nothing to report on the western front.'”
In March of 1915 I went out with the first body of accredited war correspondents, and we saw some of the bad places where our men lived and died, and the traffic to the lines, and the mechanism of war in fixed positions as were then established after the battle of the Marne and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an experimental visit. It was not until June of that year, after an adventure on the French front in the Champagne, that I received full credentials as a war correspondent with the British armies on the western front, and joined four other men who had been selected for this service, and began that long innings as an authorized onlooker of war which ended, after long and dreadful years, with the Army of Occupation beyond the Rhine.
III
In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by courtesy a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General Headquarters at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time to time, according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was very peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women worked while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied us by the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick ride over Cassel Hill to the edge of the Ypres salient and the farthest point where any car could go without being seen by a watchful enemy and blown to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we walked, up sinister roads, or along communication trenches, to the fire-step in the front line, or into places like “Plug Street” wood and Kemmel village, and the ruins of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle—the training-schools of British armies—where always birds of death were on the wing, screaming with high and rising notes before coming to earth with the cough that killed... After hours in those hiding-places where boys of the New Army were learning the lessons of war in dugouts and ditches under the range of German guns, back again to the little white chateau at Tatinghem, with a sweet scent of flowers from the fields, and nightingales singing in the woods and a bell tinkling for Benediction in the old church tower beyond our gate.
“To-morrow,” said the colonel—our first chief—before driving in for a late visit to G. H. Q., “we will go to Armentieres and see how the 'Kitchener' boys are shaping in the line up there. It ought to be interesting.”
The colonel was profoundly interested in the technic of war, in its organization of supplies and transport, and methods of command. He was a Regular of the Indian Army, a soldier by blood and caste and training, and the noblest type of the old school of Imperial officer, with obedience to command as a religious instinct; of stainless honor, I think, in small things as well as great, with a deep love of England, and a belief and pride in her Imperial destiny to govern many peoples for their own good, and with the narrowness of such belief. His imagination was limited to the boundaries of his professional interests, though now and then his humanity made him realize in a perplexed way greater issues at stake in this war than the challenge to British Empiry.
One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield, with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in chalky ditches below their breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a colleague of mine and said in a startled way:
“This must never happen again! Never!”
It will never happen again for him, as for many others. He was too tall for the trenches, and one day a German sniper saw the red glint of his hat-band—he was on the staff of the 11th Corps—and thought, “a gay bird”! So he fell; and in our mess, when the news came, we were sad at his going, and one of our orderlies, who had been his body-servant, wept as he waited on us.
Late at night the colonel—that first chief of ours—used to come home from G. H. Q., as all men called General Headquarters with a sense of mystery, power, and inexplicable industry accomplishing—what?—in those initials. He came back with a cheery shout of, “Fine weather to-morrow!” or, “A starry night and all's well!” looking fine and soldierly as the glare of his headlights shone on his tall figure with red tabs and a colored armlet. But that cheeriness covered secret worries. Night after night, in those early weeks of our service, he sat in his little office, talking earnestly with the press officers—our censors. They seemed to be arguing, debating, protesting, about secret influences and hostilities surrounding us and them. I could only guess what it was all about. It all seemed to make no difference to me when I sat down before pieces of blank paper to get down some kind of picture, some kind of impression, of a long day in place where I had been scared awhile because death was on the prowl in a noisy way and I had seen it pounce on human bodies. I knew that tomorrow I was going to another little peep-show of war, where I should hear the same noises. That talk downstairs, that worry about some mystery at G. H. Q. would make no difference to the life or death of men, nor get rid of that coldness which came to me when men were being killed nearby. Why all that argument?
It seemed that G. H. Q.—mysterious people in a mysterious place—were drawing up rules for war correspondence and censorship; altering rules made the day before, formulating new rules for to-morrow, establishing precedents, writing minutes, initialing reports with, “Passed to you,” or, “I agree,” written on the margin. The censors who lived with us and traveled with us and were our friends, and read what we wrote before the ink was dry, had to examine our screeds with microscopic eyes and with infinite remembrance of the thousand and one rules. Was it safe to mention the weather? Would that give any information to the enemy? Was it permissible to describe the smell of chloride-of-lime in the trenches, or would that discourage recruiting? That description of the traffic on the roads of war, with transport wagons, gun-limbers, lorries, mules—how did that conflict with Rule No. 17a (or whatever it was) prohibiting all mention of movements of troops?
One of the censors working late at night, with lines of worry on his forehead and little puckers about his eyes, turned to me with a queer laugh, one night in the early days. He was an Indian Civil Servant, and therefore, by every rule, a gentleman and a charming fellow.
“You don't know what I am risking in passing your despatch! It's too good to spoil, but G. H. Q. will probably find that it conveys accurate information to the enemy about the offensive in 1925. I shall get the sack—and oh, the difference to me!”
It appeared that G. H. Q. was nervous of us. They suggested that our private letters should be tested for writing in invisible ink between the lines. They were afraid that, either deliberately for some journalistic advantage, or in sheer ignorance as “outsiders,” we might hand information to the enemy about important secrets. Belonging to the old caste of army mind, they believed that war was the special prerogative of professional soldiers, of which politicians and people should have no knowledge. Therefore as civilians in khaki we were hardly better than spies.
The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in the moonlight, after a day up the line, where young men were living and dying in dirty ditches. I could see that he was worried, even angry.
“Those people!” he said.
“What people?”
“G. H. Q.”
“Oh, Lord!” I groaned. “Again?” and looked across the fields of corn to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that day—or yesterday was it?—kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer... How sweet was the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star twinkled above the low flashes of gun-fire away there in the salient.
“They want us to waste your time,” said the officer. “Those were the very words used by the Chief of Intelligence—in writing which I have kept. 'Waste their time!'... I'll be damned if I consider my work is to waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good fools see that this is not a professional adventure, like their other little wars; that the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to know what its men are doing? They have a right to know.”
IV
Just at first—though not for long—there was a touch of hostility against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their quarters, wondered why we should come “spying around,” trying to “see things.” I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy clouds in a blue sky. There was a long straight road leading to the village of Vermelles, with a crisscross of communication trenches on one side, and, on the other, fields where corn and grass grew rankly in abandoned fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though this were Arcady in days of peace. It was not. The red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or so away, were sharply defined, as through stereoscopic lenses, in the quiver of sunlight, and had the sinister look of a death-haunted place. It was where the French had fought their way through gardens, walls, and houses in murderous battle, before leaving it for British troops to hold. Across it now came the whine of shells, and I saw that shrapnel bullets were kicking up the dust of a thousand yards down the straight road, following a small body of brown men whose tramp of feet raised another cloud of dust, like smoke. They were the only representatives of human life—besides ourselves—in this loneliness, though many men must have been in hiding somewhere. Then heavy “crumps” burst in the fields where the sheep were browsing, across the way we had to go to the brigade headquarters.
“How about it?” asked the captain with me. “I don't like crossing that field, in spite of the buttercups and daisies and the little frisky lambs.”
“I hate the idea of it,” I said.
Then we looked down the road at the little body of brown men. They were nearer now, and I could see the face of the officer leading them—a boy subaltern, rather pale though the sun was hot. He halted and saluted my companion.
“The enemy seems to have sighted our dust, sir. His shrapnel is following up pretty closely. Would you advise me to put my men under cover, or carry on?”
The captain hesitated. This was rather outside his sphere of influence. But the boyishness of the other officer asked for help.
“My advice is to put your men into that ditch and keep them there until the strafe is over.” Some shrapnel bullets whipped the sun-baked road as he spoke.
“Very good, sir.”
The men sat in the ditch, with their packs against the bank, and wiped the sweat off their faces. They looked tired and dispirited, but not alarmed.
In the fields behind them—our way—the 4.2's (four—point-twos) were busy plugging holes in the grass and flowers, rather deep holes, from which white smoke-clouds rose after explosive noises.
“With a little careful strategy we might get through,” said the captain. “There's a general waiting for us, and I have noticed that generals are impatient fellows. Let's try our luck.”
We walked across the wild flowers, past the sheep, who only raised their heads in meek surprise when shells came with a shrill, intensifying snarl and burrowed up the earth about them. I noticed how loudly and sweetly the larks were singing up in the blue. Several horses lay dead, newly killed, with blood oozing about them, and their entrails smoking. We made a half-loop around them and then struck straight for the chateau which was the brigade headquarters. Neither of us spoke now. We were thoughtful, calculating the chance of getting to that red-brick house between the shells. It was just dependent on the coincidence of time and place.
Three men jumped up from a ditch below a brown wall round the chateau garden and ran hard for the gateway. A shell had pitched quite close to them. One man laughed as though at a grotesque joke, and fell as he reached the courtyard. Smoke was rising from the outhouses, and there was a clatter of tiles and timbers, after an explosive crash.
“It rather looks,” said my companion, “as though the Germans knew there is a party on in that charming house.”
It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never good to go back before reaching one's objective. That was bad for the discipline of the courage that is just beyond fear.
Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the chateau, and as we went in through the gateway a sergeant made a quick jump for a barn as a shell burst somewhere close. As visitors we hesitated between two ways into the chateau, and chose the easier; and it was then that I became dimly aware of hostility against me on the part of a number of officers in the front hall. The brigade staff was there, grouped under the banisters. I wondered why, and guessed (rightly, as I found) that the center of the house might have a better chance of escape than the rooms on either side, in case of direct hits from those things falling outside.
It was the brigade major who asked our business. He was a tall, handsome young man of something over thirty, with the arrogance of a Christ Church blood.
“Oh, he has come out to see something in Vermelles? A pleasant place for sightseeing! Meanwhile the Hun is ranging on this house, so he may see more than he wants.”
He turned on his heel and rejoined his group. They all stared in my direction as though at a curious animal. A very young gentleman—the general's A. D. C.—made a funny remark at my expense and the others laughed. Then they ignored me, and I was glad, and made a little study in the psychology of men awaiting a close call of death. I was perfectly conscious myself that in a moment or two some of us, perhaps all of us, might be in a pulp of mangled flesh beneath the ruins of a red-brick villa—the shells were crashing among the outhouses and in the courtyard, and the enemy was making good shooting—and the idea did not please me at all. At the back of my brain was Fear, and there was a cold sweat in the palms of my hands; but I was master of myself, and I remember having a sense of satisfaction because I had answered the brigade major in a level voice, with a touch of his own arrogance. I saw that these officers were afraid; that they, too, had Fear at the back of the brain, and that their conversation and laughter were the camouflage of the soul. The face of the young A. D. C. was flushed and he laughed too much at his own jokes, and his laughter was just a tone too shrill. An officer came into the hall, carrying two Mills bombs—new toys in those days—and the others fell back from him, and one said:
“For Christ's sake don't bring them here—in the middle of a bombardment!”
“Where's the general?” asked the newcomer.
“Down in the cellar with the other brigadier. They don't ask us down to tea, I notice.”
Those last words caused all the officers to laugh—almost excessively. But their laughter ended sharply, and they listened intently as there was a heavy crash outside.
Another officer came up the steps and made a rapid entry into the hall.
“I understand there is to be a conference of battalion commanders,” he said, with a queer catch in his breath. “In view of this—er—bombardment, I had better come in later, perhaps?”
“You had better wait,” said the brigade major, rather grimly.
“Oh, certainly.”
A sergeant-major was pacing up and down the passage by the back door. He was calm and stolid. I liked the look of him and found something comforting in his presence, so that I went to have a few words with him.
“How long is this likely to last, Sergeant-major”
“There's no saying, sir. They may be searching for the chateau to pass the time, so to speak, or they may go on till they get it. I'm sorry they caught those gunners. Nice lads, both of them.”
He did not seem to be worrying about his own chance.
Then suddenly there was silence. The German guns had switched off. I heard the larks singing through the open doorway, and all the little sounds of a summer day. The group of officers in the hall started chatting more quietly. There was no more need of finding jokes and laughter. They had been reprieved, and could be serious.
“We'd better get forward to Vermelles,” said my companion.
As we walked away from the chateau, the brigade major passed us on his horse. He leaned over his saddle toward me and said, “Good day to you, and I hope you'll like Vermelles.”
The words were civil, but there was an underlying meaning in them.
“I hope to do so, sir.”
We walked down the long straight road toward the ruins of Vermelles with a young soldier-guide who on the outskirts of the village remarked in a casual way:
“No one is allowed along this road in daylight, as a rule. It's under hobservation of the henemy.”
“Then why the devil did you come this way?” asked my companion.
“I thought you might prefer the short cut, sir.”
We explored the ruins of Vermelles, where many young Frenchmen had fallen in fighting through the walls and gardens. One could see the track of their strife, in trampled bushes and broken walls. Bits of red rag—the red pantaloons of the first French soldiers—were still fastened to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches, water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs littered the ditches which had been dug as trenches across streets of burned-out houses.
V
A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front of the chateau of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still standing, and told us the story of its capture.
“It was a wild scrap. I was told all about it by a French sergeant who was in it. They were under the cover of that wall over there, about a hundred yards away, and fixing up a charge of high explosives to knock a breach in the wall. The chateau was a machine-gun fortress, with the Germans on the top floor, the ground floor, and in the basement, protected by sand-bags, through which they fired. A German officer made a bad mistake. He opened the front door and came out with some of his machine-gunners from the ground floor to hold a trench across the square in front of the house. Instantly a French lieutenant called to his men. They climbed over the wall and made a dash for the chateau, bayoneting the Germans who tried to stop them. Then they swarmed into the chateau—a platoon of them with the lieutenant. They were in the drawing-room, quite an elegant place, you know, with the usual gilt furniture and long mirrors. In one corner was a pedestal, with a statue of Venus standing on it. Rather charming, I expect. A few Germans were killed in the room, easily. But upstairs there was a mob who fired down through the ceiling when they found what had happened. The French soldiers prodded the ceiling with their bayonets, and all the plaster broke, falling on them. A German, fat and heavy, fell half-way through the rafters, and a bayonet was poked into him as he stuck there. The whole ceiling gave way, and the Germans upstairs came downstairs, in a heap. They fought like wolves—wild beasts—with fear and rage. French and Germans clawed at one another's throats, grabbed hold of noses, rolled over each other. The French sergeant told me he had his teeth into a German's neck. The man was all over him, pinning his arms, trying to choke him. It was the French lieutenant who did most damage. He fired his last shot and smashed a German's face with his empty revolver. Then he caught hold of the marble Venus by the legs and swung it above his head, in the old Berserker style, and laid out Germans like ninepins... The fellows in the basement surrendered.”
VI
The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin, and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had their battery nearby. We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through undergrowth to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and wire frames with immortelles remained as relics of that garden where the people of Vermelles had laid their dead to rest. New dead had followed old dead. I stumbled over something soft, like a ball of clay, and saw that it was the head of a faceless man, in a battered kepi. From a ditch close by came a sickly stench of half-buried flesh.
“The whole place is a pest-house,” said the gunner.
Another voice spoke from some hiding-place.
“Salvo!”
The earth shook and there was a flash of red flame, and a shock of noise which hurt one's ear-drums.
“That's my battery,” said the gunner officer. “It's the very devil when one doesn't expect it.”
I was introduced to the gentleman who had said “Salvo!” He was the gunner-major, and a charming fellow, recently from civil life. All the battery was made up of New Army men learning their job, and learning it very well, I should say. There was no arrogance about them.
“It's sporting of you to come along to a spot like this,” said one of them. “I wouldn't unless I had to. Of course you'll take tea in our mess?”
I was glad to take tea—in a little house at the end of the ruined high-street of Vermelles which had by some miracle escaped destruction, though a shell had pierced through the brick wall of the parlor and had failed to burst. It was there still, firmly wedged, like a huge nail. The tea was good, in tin mugs. Better still was the company of the gunner officers. They told me how often they were “scared stiff.” They had been very frightened an hour before I came, when the German gunners had ranged up and down the street, smashing up ruined houses into greater ruin.
“They're so methodical!” said one of the officers.
“Wonderful shooting!” said another.
“I will say they're topping gunners,” said the major. “But we're learning; my men are very keen. Put in a good word for the new artillery. It would buck them up no end.”
We went back before sunset, down the long straight road, and past the chateau which we had visited in the afternoon. It looked very peaceful there among the trees.
It is curious that I remember the details of that day so vividly, as though they happened yesterday. On hundreds of other days I had adventures like that, which I remember more dimly.
“That brigade major was a trifle haughty, don't you think?” said my companion. “And the others didn't seem very friendly. Not like those gunner boys.”
“We called at an awkward time. They were rather fussed.”
“One expects good manners. Especially from Regulars who pride themselves on being different in that way from the New Army.”
“It's the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier. The Regular crowd think the war belongs to them... But I liked their pluck. They're arrogant to Death himself when he comes knocking at the door.”
VII
It was not long before we broke down the prejudice against us among the fighting units. The new armies were our friends from the first, and liked us to visit them in their trenches and their dugouts, their camps and their billets. Every young officer was keen to show us his particular “peep-show” or to tell us his latest “stunt.” We made many friends among them, and it was our grief that as the war went on so many of them disappeared from their battalions, and old faces were replaced by new faces, and those again by others when they had become familiar. Again and again, after battle, twenty-two officers in a battalion mess were reduced to two or three, and the gaps were filled up from the reserve depots. I was afraid to ask, “Where is So-and-so?” because I knew that the best answer would be, “A Blighty wound,” and the worst was more likely.
It was the duration of all the drama of death that seared one's soul as an onlooker; the frightful sum of sacrifice that we were recording day by day. There were times when it became intolerable and agonizing, and when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace by negotiation, by compromise, that the river of blood might cease to flow. The men looked so splendid as they marched up to the lines, singing, whistling, with an easy swing. They looked so different when thousands came down again, to field dressing-stations—the walking wounded and the stretcher cases, the blind and the gassed—as we saw them on the mornings of battle, month after month, year after year.
Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether “soft,” though we did not go “over the top” or live in the dirty ditches with them. We had to travel prodigiously to cover the ground between one division and another along a hundred miles of front, with long walks often at the journey's end and a wet way back. Sometimes we were soaked to the skin on the journey home. Often we were so cold and numbed in those long wild drives up desolate roads that our limbs lost consciousness and the wind cut into us like knives. We were working against time, always against time, and another tire-burst would mean that no despatch could be written of a great battle on the British front, or only a short record written in the wildest haste when there was so much to tell, so much to describe, such unforgetable pictures in one's brain of another day's impressions in the fields and on the roads.
There were five English correspondents and, two years later, two Americans. On mornings of big battle we divided up the line of front and drew lots for the particular section which each man would cover. Then before the dawn, or in the murk of winter mornings, or the first glimmer of a summer day, our cars would pull out and we would go off separately to the part of the line allotted to us by the number drawn, to see the preliminary bombardment, to walk over newly captured ground, to get into the backwash of prisoners and walking wounded, amid batteries firing a new barrage, guns moving forward on days of good advance, artillery transport bringing up new stores of ammunition, troops in support marching to repel a counter-attack or follow through the new objectives, ambulances threading their way back through the traffic, with loads of prostrate men, mules, gunhorses, lorries churning up the mud in Flanders.
So we gained a personal view of all this activity of strife, and from many men in its whirlpool details of their own adventure and of general progress or disaster on one sector of the battle-front. Then in divisional headquarters we saw the reports of the battle as they came in by telephone, or aircraft, or pigeon-post, from half-hour to half-hour, or ten minutes by ten minutes. Three divisions widely separated provided all the work one war correspondent could do on one day of action, and later news on a broader scale, could be obtained from corps headquarters farther back. Tired, hungry, nerve-racked, splashed to the eyes in mud, or covered in a mask of dust, we started for the journey back to our own quarters, which we shifted from time to time in order to get as near as we could to the latest battle-front without getting beyond reach of the telegraph instruments—by relays of despatch-riders—at “Signals,” G. H. Q., which remained immovably fixed in the rear.
There was a rendezvous in one of our rooms, and each man outlined the historical narrative of the day upon the front he had covered, reserving for himself his own adventures, impressions, and emotions.
Time slipped away, and time was short, while the despatch-riders waited for our unwritten despatches, and censors who had been our fellow-travelers washed themselves cleaner and kept an eye on the clock.
Time was short while the world waited for our tales of tragedy or victory... and tempers were frayed, and nerves on edge, among five men who hated one another, sometimes, with a murderous hatred (though, otherwise, good comrades) and desired one another's death by slow torture or poison-gas when they fumbled over notes, written in a jolting car, or on a battlefield walk, and went into past history in order to explain present happenings, or became tangled in the numbers of battalions and divisions.
Percival Phillips turned pink-and-white under the hideous strain of nervous control, with an hour and a half for two columns in The Morning Post. A little pulse throbbed in his forehead. His lips were tightly pressed. His oaths and his anguish were in his soul, but unuttered. Beach Thomas, the most amiable of men, the Peter Pan who went a bird-nesting on battlefields, a lover of beauty and games and old poems and Greek and Latin tags, and all joy in life—what had he to do with war?—looked bored with an infinite boredom, irritable with a scornful impatience of unnecessary detail, gazed through his gold-rimmed spectacles with an air of extreme detachment (when Percy Robinson rebuilt the map with dabs and dashes on a blank sheet of paper), and said, “I've got more than I can write, and The Daily Mail goes early to press.”
“Thanks very much... It's very kind of you.”
We gathered up our note-books and were punctiliously polite. (Afterward we were the best of friends.) Thomas was first out of the room, with short, quick little steps in spite of his long legs. His door banged. Phillips was first at his typewriter, working it like a machine-gun, in short, furious spasms of word-fire. I sat down to my typewriter—a new instrument of torture to me—and coaxed its evil genius with conciliatory prayers.
“For dear God's sake,” I said, “don't go twisting that blasted ribbon of yours to-day. I must write this despatch, and I've just an hour when I want five.”
Sometimes that Corona was a mechanism of singular sweetness, and I blessed it with a benediction. But often there was a devil in it which mocked at me. After the first sentence or two it twisted the ribbon; at the end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry snake, writhing and coiling hideously.
I shouted for Mackenzie, the American, a master of these things.
He came in and saw my blanched face, my sweat of anguish, my crise de nerfs. I could see by his eyes that he understood my stress and had pity on me.
“That's all right,” he said. “A little patience—”
By a touch or two he exorcised the devil, laughed, and said: “Go easy. You've just about reached breaking—point.”
I wrote, as we all wrote, fast and furiously, to get down something of enormous history, word-pictures of things seen, heroic anecdotes, the underlying meaning of this new slaughter. There was never time to think out a sentence or a phrase, to touch up a clumsy paragraph, to go back on a false start, to annihilate a vulgar adjective, to put a touch of style into one's narrative. One wrote instinctively, blindly, feverishly... And downstairs were the censors, sending up messages by orderlies to say “half-time,” or “ten minutes more,” and cutting out sometimes the things one wanted most to say, modifying a direct statement of fact into a vague surmise, taking away the honor due to the heroic men who had fought and died to-day... Who would be a war correspondent, or a censor?
So it happened day by day, for five months at a stretch, when big battles were in progress. It was not an easy life. There were times when I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I could hardly rouse myself to a new day's effort. There were times when I was faint and sick and weak; and my colleagues were like me. But we struggled on to tell the daily history of the war and the public cursed us because we did not tell more, or sneered at us because they thought we were “spoon-fed” by G. H. Q.—who never gave us any news and who were far from our way of life, except when they thwarted us, by petty restrictions and foolish rules.
VIII
The Commander-in-Chief—Sir John French—received us when we were first attached to the British armies in the field—a lifetime ago, as it seems to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the chateau near St.-Omer, which he used as his own headquarters, with his A. D. C.'s in attendance, though the main general headquarters were in the town. Our first colonel gathered us like a shepherd with his flock, counting us twice over before we passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew afterward to be Sir Philip Sassoon, received us and chatted pleasantly in a French salon with folding-doors which shut off an inner room. There were a few portraits of ladies and gentlemen of France in the days before the Revolution, like those belonging to that old aristocracy which still existed, in poverty and pride, in other chateaus in this French Flanders. There was a bouquet of flowers on the table, giving a sweet scent to the room, and sunlight streamed through the shutters... I thought for a moment of the men living in ditches in the salient, under harassing fire by day and night. Their actions and their encounters with death were being arranged, without their knowledge, in this sunny little chateau....
The folding-doors opened and Sir John French came in. He wore top-boots and spurs, and after saying, “Good day, gentlemen,” stood with his legs apart, a stocky, soldierly figure, with a square head and heavy jaw. I wondered whether there were any light of genius in him—any inspiration, any force which would break the awful strength of the enemy against us, any cunning in modern warfare.
He coughed a little, and made us a speech. I forget his words, but remember the gist of them. He was pleased to welcome us within his army, and trusted to our honor and loyalty. He made an allusion to the power of the press, and promised us facilities for seeing and writing, within the bounds of censorship. I noticed that he pronounced St.-Omer, St.-Omar, as though Omar Khayyam had been canonized. He said, “Good day, gentlemen,” again, and coughed huskily again to clear his throat, and then went back through the folding-doors.
I saw him later, during the battle of Loos, after its ghastly failure. He was riding a white horse in the villages of Heuchin and Houdain, through which lightly wounded Scots of the 1st and 15th Divisions were making their way back. He leaned over his saddle, questioning the men and thanking them for their gallantry. I thought he looked grayer and older than when he had addressed us.
“Who mun that old geezer be, Jock?” asked a Highlander when he had passed.
“I dinna ken,” said the other Scot. “An' I dinna care.”
“It's the Commander-in-Chief,” I said. “Sir John French.”
“Eh?” said the younger man, of the 8th Gordons. He did not seem thrilled by the knowledge I had given him, but turned his head and stared after the figure on the white horse. Then he said: “Well, he's made a mess o' the battle. We could've held Hill 70 against all the di'els o' hell if there had bin supports behind us.”
“Ay,” said his comrade, “an' there's few o' the laddies'll come back fra Cite St.-Auguste.”
IX
It was another commander-in-chief who received us some months after the battle of Loos, in a chateau near Montreuil, to which G. H. Q. had then removed. Our only knowledge of Sir Douglas Haig before that day was of a hostile influence against us in the First Army, which he commanded. He had drawn a line through his area beyond which we might not pass. He did not desire our presence among his troops nor in his neighborhood. That line had been broken by the protests of our commandant, and now as Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig had realized dimly that he might be helped by our services.
It was in another French salon that we waited for the man who controlled the British armies in the field—those armies which we now knew in some intimacy, whom we had seen in the front-line trenches and rest-camps and billets, hearing their point of view, knowing their suffering and their patience, and their impatience—and their deadly hatred of G. H. Q.
He was very handsome as he sat behind a Louis XIV table, with General Charteris—his Chief of Intelligence, who was our chief, too—behind him at one side, for prompting and advice. He received us with fine courtesy and said:
“Pray be seated, gentlemen.”
There had been many troubles over censorship, of which he knew but vaguely through General Charteris, who looked upon us as his special “cross.” We had fought hard for liberty in mentioning units, to give the honor to the troops, and for other concessions which would free our pens.
The Commander-in-Chief was sympathetic, but his sympathy was expressed in words which revealed a complete misunderstanding of our purpose and of our work, and was indeed no less than an insult, unconscious but very hurtful.
“I think I understand fairly well what you gentlemen want,” he said. “You want to get hold of little stories of heroism, and so forth, and to write them up in a bright way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the kitchen, and the Man in the Street.” The quiet passion with which those words were resented by us, the quick repudiation of this slur upon our purpose by a charming man perfectly ignorant at that time of the new psychology of nations in a war which was no longer a professional adventure, surprised him. We took occasion to point out to him that the British Empire, which had sent its men into this war, yearned to know what they were doing and how they were doing, and that their patience and loyalty depended upon closer knowledge of what was happening than was told them in the communiques issued by the Commander-in-Chief himself. We urged him to let us mention more frequently the names of the troops engaged—especially English troops—for the sake of the soldiers themselves, who were discouraged by this lack of recognition, and for the sake of the people behind them... It was to the pressure of the war correspondents, very largely, that the troops owed the mention and world-wide honor which came to them, more generously, in the later phases of the war.
The Commander-in-Chief made a note of our grievances, turning now and again to General Charteris, who was extremely nervous at our frankness of speech, and telling him to relax the rules of censorship as far as possible. That was done, and in later stages of the war I personally had no great complaint against the censorship, and wrote all that was possible to write of the actions day by day, though I had to leave out something of the underlying horror of them all, in spite of my continual emphasis, by temperament and by conviction, on the tragedy of all this sacrifice of youth. The only alternative to what we wrote would have been a passionate denunciation of all this ghastly slaughter and violent attacks on British generalship. Even now I do not think that would have been justified. As Bernard Shaw told me, “while the war lasts one must put one's own soul under censorship.”
After many bloody battles had been fought we were received again by the Commander-in-Chief, and this time his cordiality was not marred by any slighting touch.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have played the game like men!”
When victory came at last—at last!—after the years of slaughter, it was the little band of war correspondents on the British front, our foreign comrades included, whom the Field-Marshal addressed on his first visit to the Rhine. We stood on the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, watched by groups of Germans peering through the escort of Lancers. It was a dank and foul day, but to us beautiful, because this was the end of the long journey—four-and—a-half years long, which had been filled with slaughter all the way, so that we were tired of its backwash of agony, which had overwhelmed our souls—mine, certainly. The Commander-in-Chief read out a speech to us, thanking us for our services, which, he said, had helped him to victory, because we had heartened the troops and the people by our work. It was a recognition by the leader of our armies that, as chroniclers of war, we had been a spiritual force behind his arms. It was a reward for many mournful days, for much agony of spirit, for hours of danger—some of us had walked often in the ways of death—and for exhausting labors which we did so that the world might know what British soldiers had been doing and suffering.
X
I came to know General Headquarters more closely when it removed, for fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once within sight of the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below its hill, but now looking across a wide vista of richly cultivated fields where many hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came to G. H. Q. from journeys over the wild desert of the battlefields, where men lived in ditches and “pill-boxes,” muddy, miserable in all things but spirit, as to a place where the pageantry of war still maintained its old and dead tradition. It was like one of those pageants which used to be played in England before the war—picturesque, romantic, utterly unreal. It was as though men were playing at war here, while others sixty miles away were fighting and dying, in mud and gas-waves and explosive barrages.
An “open sesame,” by means of a special pass, was needed to enter this City of Beautiful Nonsense. Below the gateway, up the steep hillside, sentries stood at a white post across the road, which lifted up on pulleys when the pass had been examined by a military policeman in a red cap. Then the sentries slapped their hands on their rifles to the occupants of any motor-car, sure that more staff-officers were going in to perform those duties which no private soldier could attempt to understand, believing they belonged to such mysteries as those of God. Through the narrow streets walked elderly generals, middle-aged colonels and majors, youthful subalterns all wearing red hat-bands, red tabs, and the blue-and-red armlet of G. H. Q., so that color went with them on their way.
Often one saw the Commander-in-Chief starting for an afternoon ride, a fine figure, nobly mounted, with two A. D. C.'s and an escort of Lancers. A pretty sight, with fluttering pennons on all their lances, and horses groomed to the last hair. It was prettier than the real thing up in the salient or beyond the Somme, where dead bodies lay in upheaved earth among ruins and slaughtered trees. War at Montreuil was quite a pleasant occupation for elderly generals who liked their little stroll after lunch, and for young Regular officers, released from the painful necessity of dying for their country, who were glad to get a game of tennis, down below the walls there, after strenuous office-work in which they had written “Passed to you” on many “minutes,” or had drawn the most comical caricatures of their immediate chief, and of his immediate chief, on blotting-pads and writing-blocks.
It seemed, at a mere glance, that all these military inhabitants of G. H. Q. were great and glorious soldiers. Some of the youngest of them had a row of decorations from Montenegro, Serbia, Italy, Rumania, and other states, as recognition of gallant service in translating German letters (found in dugouts by the fighting-men), or arranging for visits of political personages to the back areas of war, or initialing requisitions for pink, blue, green, and yellow forms, which in due course would find their way to battalion adjutants for immediate filling-up in the middle of an action. The oldest of them, those white-haired, bronze-faced, gray-eyed generals in the administrative side of war, had started their third row of ribbons well before the end of the Somme battles, and had flower-borders on their breasts by the time the massacres had been accomplished in the fields of Flanders. I know an officer who was awarded the D. S. O. because he had hindered the work of war correspondents with the zeal of a hedge-sparrow in search of worms, and another who was the best-decorated man in the army because he had presided over a visitors' chateau and entertained Royalties, Members of Parliament, Mrs. Humphry Ward, miners, Japanese, Russian revolutionaries, Portuguese ministers, Harry Lauder, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, clergymen, Montenegrins, and the Editor of John Bull, at the government's expense—and I am bound to say he deserved them all, being a man of infinite tact, many languages, and a devastating sense of humor. There was always a Charlie Chaplin film between moving pictures of the battles of the Somme. He brought the actualities of war to the visitors' chateau by sentry-boxes outside the door, a toy “tank” in the front garden, and a collection of war trophies in the hall. He spoke to High Personages with less deference than he showed to miners from Durham and Wales, and was master of them always, ordering them sternly to bed at ten o'clock (when he sat down to bridge with his junior officers), and with strict military discipline insisting upon their inspection of the bakeries at Boulogne, and boot-mending factories at Calais, as part of the glory of war which they had come out for to see.
So it was that there were brilliant colors in the streets of Montreuil, and at every doorway a sentry slapped his hand to his rifle, with smart and untiring iteration, as the “brains” of the army, under “brass hats” and red bands, went hither and thither in the town, looking stern, as soldiers of grave responsibility, answering salutes absent—mindedly, staring haughtily at young battalion officers who passed through Montreuil and looked meekly for a chance of a lorry-ride to Boulogne, on seven days' leave from the lines.
The smart society of G. H. Q. was best seen at the Officers' Club in Montreuil, at dinner-time. It was as much like musical comedy as any stage setting of war at the Gaiety. A band played ragtime and light music while the warriors fed, and all these generals and staff officers, with their decorations and arm-bands and polished buttons and crossed swords, were waited upon by little W. A. A. C.'s with the G. H. Q. colors tied up in bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under their short skirts and fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts of light-hearted laughter! Such whisperings of secrets and intrigues and scandals in high places! Such careless—hearted courage when British soldiers were being blown to bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and shell-shocked in places that were far—so very far—from G. H. Q.!
XI
There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our quarters—women's voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came into the mess—we were at breakfast—and explained the meaning of the clamor, which by some intuition and a quick ear for French he had gathered from all this confusion of tongues.
“There's a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has been attacking a girl. The villagers want an officer to arrest him.”
The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. “Tell three orderlies to follow me.”
We went into the roadway, and twenty women crowded round us with a story of attempted violence against an innocent girl. The man had been drinking last night at the estaminet up there. Then he had followed the girl, trying to make love to her. She had barricaded herself in the room, when he tried to climb through the window.
“If you don't come out I'll get in and kill you,” he said, according to the women.
But she had kept him out, though he prowled round all night. Now he was hiding in an outhouse. The brute! The pig!
When we went up the road the man was standing in the center of it, with a sullen look.
“What's the trouble?” he asked. “It looks as if all France were out to grab me.”
He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning his chance of escape. There was no chance.
The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched back between the orderlies, with an old soldier of the Contemptibles behind him.
Later in the day he was lined up for identification by the girl, among a crowd of other men.
The girl looked down the line, and we watched her curiously—a slim creature with dark hair neatly coiled.
She stretched out her right hand with a pointing finger.
“Le voila!... c'est l'homme.”
There was no mistake about it, and the man looked sheepishly at her, not denying. He was sent off under escort to the military prison in St. Omer for court-martial.
“What's the punishment—if guilty?” I asked.
“Death,” said the colonel, resuming his egg.
He was a fine-looking fellow, the prisoner. He had answered the call for king and country without delay. In the estaminet, after coming down from the salient for a machine-gun course, he had drunk more beer than was good for him, and the face of a pretty girl had bewitched him, stirring up desire. He wanted to kiss her lips... There were no women in the Ypres salient. Nothing pretty or soft. It was hell up there, and this girl was a pretty witch, bringing back thoughts of the other side—for life, womanhood, love, caresses which were good for the souls and bodies of men. It was a starved life up there in the salient... Why shouldn't she give him her lips? Wasn't he fighting for France? Wasn't he a tall and proper lad? Curse the girl for being so sulky to an English soldier!... And now, if those other women, those old hags, were to swear against him things he had never said, things he had never done, unless drink had made him forget—by God! supposing drink had made him forget? He would be shot against a white wall. Shot dead, disgracefully, shamefully, by his own comrades! O Christ! and the little mother in a Sussex cottage!...
XII
Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion headquarters for the officer I had gone to see. He was attending a court martial. Presently he came into the wooden hut, with a flushed face.
“Sorry I had to keep you,” he said. “Tomorrow there will be one swine less in the world.”
“A death sentence?”
He nodded.
“A damned coward. Said he didn't mind rifle-fire, but couldn't stand shells. Admitted he left his post. He doesn't mind rifle-fire!... Well, tomorrow morning.”
The officer laughed grimly, and then listened for a second.
There were some heavy crumps falling over Kemmel Hill, rather close, it seemed, to our wooden hut.
“Damn those German gunners” said the officer. “Why can't they give us a little peace?”
He turned to his papers, but several times while I talked with him he jerked his head up and listened to a heavy crash.
On the way back I saw a man on foot, walking in front of a mounted man, past the old hill of the Scherpenberg, toward the village of Locre. There was something in the way he walked, in his attitude—the head hunched forward a little, and his arms behind his back—which made me turn to look at him. He was manacled, and tied by a rope to the mounted man. I caught one glimpse of his face, and then turned away, cold and sick. There was doom written on his face, and in his eyes a captured look. He was walking to his wall.
XIII
There were other men who could not stand shell-fire. It filled them with an animal terror and took all will-power out of them. One young officer was like that man who “did not mind rifle-fire.” He, by some strange freak of psychology, was brave under machine-gun fire. He had done several gallant things, and was bright and cheerful in the trenches until the enemy barraged them with high explosive. Then he was seen wandering back to the support trenches in a dazed way. It happened three times, and he was sentenced to death. Before going out at dawn to face the firing-squad he was calm. There was a lighted candle on the table, and he sorted out his personal belongings and made small packages of them as keepsakes for his family and friends. His hand did not tremble. When his time came he put out the candle, between thumb and finger, raised his hand, and said, “Right O!”
Another man, shot for cowardice in face of the enemy, was sullen and silent to one who hoped to comfort him in the last hour. The chaplain asked him whether he had any message for his relatives. He said, “I have no relatives.” He was asked whether he would like to say any prayers, and he said, “I don't believe in them.” The chaplain talked to him, but could get no answer—and time was creeping on. There were two guards in the room, sitting motionless, with loaded rifles between their knees. Outside it was silent in the courtyard, except for little noises of the night and the wind. The chaplain suffered, and was torn with pity for that sullen man whose life was almost at an end. He took out his hymn—book and said: “I will sing to you. It will pass the time.” He sang a hymn, and once or twice his voice broke a little, but he steadied it. Then the man said, “I will sing with you.” He knew all the hymns, words and music. It was an unusual, astonishing knowledge, and he went on singing, hymn after hymn, with the chaplain by his side. It was the chaplain who tired first. His voice cracked and his throat became parched. Sweat broke out on his forehead, because of the nervous strain. But the man who was going to die sang on in a clear, hard voice. A faint glimmer of coming dawn lightened the cottage window. There were not many minutes more. The two guards shifted their feet. “Now,” said the man, “we'll sing 'God Save the King.'” The two guards rose and stood at attention, and the chaplain sang the national anthem with the man who was to be shot for cowardice. Then the tramp of the firing-party came across the cobblestones in the courtyard. It was dawn.
XIV
Shell-shock was the worst thing to see. There were generals who said: “There is no such thing as shell-shock. It is cowardice. I would court-martial in every case.” Doctors said: “It is difficult to draw the line between shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well as mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues by concussion, or actual physical damage to the brain; sometimes it is a shock of horror unbalancing the mind, but that is more rare. It is not generally the slight, nervous men who suffer worst from shell-shock. It is often the stolid fellow, one of those we describe as being utterly without nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him. He has no resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man, the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand self-control in a 'nervy' man. That helps him in war; whereas the yokel, or the sergeant—major type, is splendid until the shock comes. Then he may crack. But there is no law. Imagination—apprehension—are the devil, too, and they go with 'nerves.'”
It was a sergeant-major whom I saw stricken badly with shell-shock in Aveluy Wood near Thiepval. He was convulsed with a dreadful rigor like a man in epilepsy, and clawed at his mouth, moaning horribly, with livid terror in his eyes. He had to be strapped to a stretcher before he could be carried away. He had been a tall and splendid man, this poor, terror-stricken lunatic.
Nearer to Thiepval, during the fighting there, other men were brought down with shell-shock. I remember one of them now, though I saw many others. He was a Wiltshire lad, very young, with an apple-cheeked face and blue-gray eyes. He stood outside a dugout, shaking in every limb, in a palsied way. His steel hat was at the back of his head and his mouth slobbered, and two comrades could not hold him still.
These badly shell-shocked boys clawed their mouths ceaselessly. It was a common, dreadful action. Others sat in the field hospitals in a state of coma, dazed, as though deaf, and actually dumb. I hated to see them, turned my eyes away from them, and yet wished that they might be seen by bloody-minded men and women who, far behind the lines, still spoke of war lightly, as a kind of sport, or heroic game, which brave boys liked or ought to like, and said, “We'll fight on to the last man rather than accept anything less than absolute victory,” and when victory came said: “We stopped too soon. We ought to have gone on for another three months.” It was for fighting-men to say those things, because they knew the things they suffered and risked. That word “we” was not to be used by gentlemen in government offices scared of air raids, nor by women dancing in scanty frocks at war-bazaars for the “poor dear wounded,” nor even by generals at G. H. Q., enjoying the thrill of war without its dirt and danger.
Seeing these shell-shock cases month after month, during years of fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and were callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting the boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers whose articles on war were always “cheery”; the bishops and clergy who praised God as the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies, and had never said a word before the war to make it less inevitable; the schoolmasters who gloried in the lengthening “Roll of Honor” and said, “We're doing very well,” when more boys died; the pretty woman-faces ogling in the picture-papers, as “well—known war-workers”; the munition-workers who were getting good wages out of the war; the working-women who were buying gramophones and furs while their men were in the stinking trenches; the dreadful, callous, cheerful spirit of England at war.
Often I was unfair, bitter, unbalanced, wrong. The spirit of England, taking it broad and large—with dreadful exceptions—was wonderful in its courage and patience, and ached with sympathy for its fighting sons, and was stricken with the tragedy of all this slaughter. There were many tears in English homes; many sad and lonely women. But, as an onlooker, I could not be just or fair, and hated the non-combatants who did not reveal its wound in their souls, but were placid in their belief that we should win, and pleased with themselves because of their easy optimism. So easy for those who did not see!
XV
As war correspondents we were supposed to have honorary rank as captains, by custom and tradition—but it amounted to nothing, here or there. We were civilians in khaki, with green bands round our right arms, and uncertain status. It was better so, because we were in the peculiar and privileged position of being able to speak to Tommies and sergeants as human beings, to be on terms of comradeship with junior subalterns and battalion commanders, and to sit at the right hand of generals without embarrassment to them or to ourselves.
Physically, many of our generals were curiously alike. They were men turned fifty, with square jaws, tanned, ruddy faces, searching and rather stern gray eyes, closely cropped hair growing white, with a little white mustache, neatly trimmed, on the upper lip.
Mentally they had similar qualities. They had unfailing physical courage—though courage is not put to the test much in modern generalship, which, above the rank of brigadier, works far from the actual line of battle, unless it “slips” in the wrong direction. They were stern disciplinarians, and tested the quality of troops by their smartness in saluting and on parade, which did not account for the fighting merit of the Australians. Most of them were conservative by political tradition and hereditary instinct, and conservative also in military ideas and methods. They distrusted the “brilliant” fellow, and were inclined to think him unsafe; and they were not quick to allow young men to gain high command at the expense of their gray hair and experience. They were industrious, able, conscientious men, never sparing themselves long hours of work for a life of ease, and because they were willing to sacrifice their own lives, if need be, for their country's sake, they demanded equal willingness of sacrifice from every officer and man under their authority, having no mercy whatever for the slacker or the weakling.
Among them there was not one whose personality had that mysterious but essential quality of great generalship—inspiring large bodies of men with exalted enthusiasm, devotion, and faith. It did not matter to the men whether an army commander, a corps commander, or a divisional commander stood in the roadside to watch them march past on their way to battle or on their way back. They saw one of these sturdy men in his brass hat, with his ruddy face and white mustache, but no thrill passed down their ranks, no hoarse cheers broke from them because he was there, as when Wellington sat on his white horse in the Peninsular War, or as when Napoleon saluted his Old Guard, or even as when Lord Roberts, “Our Bob,” came perched like a little old falcon on his big charger.
Nine men out of ten in the ranks did not even know the name of their army general or of the corps commander. It meant nothing to them. They did not face death with more passionate courage to win the approval of a military idol. That was due partly to the conditions of modern warfare, which make it difficult for generals of high rank to get into direct personal touch with their troops, and to the masses of men engaged. But those difficulties could have been overcome by a general of impressive personality, able to stir the imaginations of men by words of fire spoken at the right time, by deep, human sympathy, and by the luck of victory seized by daring adventure against great odds.
No such man appeared on the western front until Foch obtained the supreme command. On the British front there was no general with the gift of speech—a gift too much despised by our British men of action—or with a character and prestige which could raise him to the highest rank in popular imagination. During the retreat from Mona, Sir John French had a touch of that personal power—his presence meant something to the men because of his reputation in South Africa; but afterward, when trench warfare began, and the daily routine of slaughter under German gun-fire, when our artillery was weak, and when our infantry was ordered to attack fixed positions of terrible strength without adequate support, and not a dog's chance of luck against such odds, the prestige of the Commander-in-Chief faded from men's minds and he lost place in their admiration. It was washed out in blood and mud.
Sir Douglas Haig, who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, near the coast, had the affection and loyalty of the staff—officers. A man of remarkably good looks, with fine, delicate features, strengthened by the firm line of his jaw, and of singular sweetness, courtesy, and simplicity in his manner toward all who approached him, he had qualities which might have raised him to the supreme height of personal influence among his armies but for lack of the magic touch and the tragic condition of his command.
He was intensely shy and reserved, shrinking from publicity and holding himself aloof from the human side of war. He was constitutionally unable to make a dramatic gesture before a multitude, or to say easy, stirring things to officers and men whom he reviewed. His shyness and reserve prevented him also from knowing as much as he ought to have known about the opinions of officers and men, and getting direct information from them. He held the supreme command of the British armies on the western front when, in the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders, of Picardy and Artois, there was not much chance for daring strategy, but only for hammer-strokes by the flesh and blood of men against fortress positions—the German trench systems, twenty-five miles deep in tunneled earthworks and machine-gun dugouts—when the immensity of casualties among British troops was out of all proportion to their gains of ground, so that our men's spirits revolted against these massacres of their youth and they were embittered against the generalship and staff-work which directed these sacrificial actions.
This sense of bitterness became intense, to the point of fury, so that a young staff officer, in his red tabs, with a jaunty manner, was like a red rag to a bull among battalion officers and men, and they desired his death exceedingly, exalting his little personality, dressed in a well-cut tunic and fawn-colored riding-breeches and highly polished top-boots, into the supreme folly of “the Staff” which made men attack impossible positions, send down conflicting orders, issued a litter of documents—called by an ugly name—containing impracticable instructions, to the torment of the adjutants and to the scorn of the troops. This hatred of the Staff was stoked high by the fires of passion and despair. Some of it was unjust, and even the jaunty young staff-officer—a G. S. O. 3, with red tabs and polished boots—was often not quite such a fool as he looked, but a fellow who had proved his pluck in the early days of the war and was now doing his duty—about equal to the work of a boy clerk—with real industry and an exaggerated sense of its importance.
Personally I can pay high tribute to some of our staff—officers at divisional, corps, and army headquarters, because of their industry, efficiency, and devotion to duty. And during the progress of battle I have seen them, hundreds of times, working desperately for long hours without much rest or sleep, so that the fighting-men should get their food and munitions, so that the artillery should support their actions, and the troops in reserve move up to their relief at the proper time and place.
Owing largely to new army brains the administrative side of our war became efficient in its method and organization, and the armies were worked like clockwork machines. The transport was good beyond all words of praise, and there was one thing which seldom failed to reach poor old Tommy Atkins, unless he was cut off by shell-fire, and that was his food. The motor-supply columns and ammunition-dumps were organized to the last item. Our map department was magnificent, and the admiration of the French. Our Intelligence branch became valuable (apart from a frequent insanity of optimism) and was sometimes uncanny in the accuracy of its information about the enemy's disposition and plans. So that the Staff was not altogether hopeless in its effect, as the young battalion officers, with sharp tongues and a sense of injustice in their hearts, made out, with pardonable blasphemy, in their dugouts.
Nevertheless the system was bad and British generalship made many mistakes, some of them, no doubt, unavoidable, because it is human to err, and some of them due to sheer, simple, impregnable stupidity.
In the early days the outstanding fault of our generals was their desire to gain ground which was utterly worthless when gained. They organized small attacks against strong positions, dreadfully costly to take, and after the desperate valor of men had seized a few yards of mangled earth, found that they had made another small salient, jutting out from their front in a V-shaped wedge, so that it was a death-trap for the men who had to hold it. This was done again and again, and I remember one distinguished officer saying, with bitter irony, remembering how many of his men had died, “Our generals must have their little V's at any price, to justify themselves at G. H. Q.”
In the battles of the Somme they attacked isolated objectives on narrow fronts, so that the enemy swept our men with fire by artillery concentrated from all points, instead of having to disperse his fire during a general attack on a wide front. In the days of trench warfare, when the enemy artillery was much stronger than ours, and when his infantry strength was enormously greater, our generals insisted upon the British troops maintaining an “aggressive” attitude, with the result that they were shot to pieces, instead of adopting, like the French, a quiet and waiting attitude until the time came for a sharp and terrible blow. The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertubert, and Loos, in 1915, cost us thousands of dead and gave us no gain of any account; and both generalship and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who know anything of those battles, ghastly.
After all, our generals had to learn their lesson, like the private soldier, and the young battalion officer, in conditions of warfare which had never been seen before—and it was bad for the private soldier and the young battalion officer, who died so they might learn. As time went on staff-work improved, and British generalship was less rash in optimism and less rigid in ideas.
XVI
General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents—he had been something of the kind himself in earlier days—and we were welcomed at his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought during the war, and I think now, that he had more intellect and “quality” than many of our other generals. A tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of movement and gesture, not “stocky” or rigid, but nervous and restless, he gave one a sense of power and intensity of purpose. There was a kind of slow-burning fire in him—a hatred of the enemy which was not weakened in him by any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to me, against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he may have felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions upon his liberty of command. A bitter irony was often in his laughter when discussing politicians at home, and the wider strategy of war apart from that on his own front. He was intolerant of stupidity, which he found widespread, and there was no tenderness or emotion in his attitude toward life. The officers and men under his command accused him of ruthlessness. But they admitted that he took more personal risk than he need have done as a divisional general, and was constantly in the trenches examining his line. They also acknowledged that he was generous in his praise of their good service, though merciless if he found fault with them. He held himself aloof—too much, I am sure—from his battalion officers, and had an extreme haughtiness of bearing which was partly due to reserve and that shyness which is in many Englishmen and a few Scots.
In the old salient warfare he often demanded service in the way of raids and the holding of death-traps, and the execution of minor attacks which caused many casualties, and filled men with rage and horror at what they believed to be unnecessary waste of life—their life, and their comrades'—that did not make for popularity in the ranks of the battalion messes. Privately, in his own mess, he was gracious to visitors, and revealed not only a wide range of knowledge outside as well as inside his profession, but a curious, unexpected sympathy for ideas, not belonging as a rule to generals of the old caste. I liked him, though I was always conscious of that flame and steel in his nature which made his psychology a world away from mine. He was hit hard—in what I think was the softest spot in his heart—by the death of one of his A. D. C.'s—young Congreve, who was the beau ideal of knighthood, wonderfully handsome, elegant even when covered from head to foot in wet mud (as I saw him one day), fearless, or at least scornful of danger, to the verge of recklessness. General Haldane had marked him out as the most promising young soldier in the whole army. A bit of shell, a senseless bit of steel, spoiled that promise—as it spoiled the promise of a million boys—and the general was saddened more than by the death of other gallant officers.
I have one memory of General Haldane which shows him in a different light. It was during the great German offensive in the north, when Arras was hard beset and the enemy had come back over Monchy Hill and was shelling villages on the western side of Arras, which until then had been undamaged. It was in one of these villages—near Avesnes-le-Compte—to which the general had come back with his corps headquarters, established there for many months in earlier days, so that the peasants and their children knew him well by sight and had talked with him, because he liked to speak French with them. When I went to see him one day during that bad time in April of '18, he was surrounded by a group of children who were asking anxiously whether Arras would be taken. He drew a map for them in the dust of the roadway, and showed them where the enemy was attacking and the general strategy. He spoke simply and gravely, as though to a group of staff-officers, and the children followed his diagram in the dust and understood him perfectly.
“They will not take Arras if I can help it,” he said. “You will be all right here.”
XVII
Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general in the days of Sir John French, and I dined at his mess once or twice, and he came to ours on return visits. The son of Macready, the actor, he had a subtlety of mind not common among British generals, to whom “subtlety” in any form is repulsive. His sense of humor was developed upon lines of irony and he had a sly twinkle in his eyes before telling one of his innumerable anecdotes. They were good stories, and I remember one of them, which had to do with the retreat from Mons. It was not, to tell the truth, that “orderly” retreat which is described in second-hand accounts. There were times when it was a wild stampede from the tightening loop of a German advance, with lorries and motor-cycles and transport wagons going helter-skelter among civilian refugees and mixed battalions and stragglers from every unit walking, footsore, in small groups. Even General Headquarters was flurried at times, far in advance of this procession backward. One night Sir Neville Macready, with the judge advocate and an officer named Colonel Childs (a hot-headed fellow!), took up their quarters in a French chateau somewhere, I think, in the neighborhood of Creil. The Commander-in-Chief was in another chateau some distance away. Other branches of G. H. Q. were billeted in private houses, widely scattered about a straggling village.
Colonel Childs was writing opposite the adjutant-general, who was working silently. Presently Childs looked up, listened, and said:
“It's rather quiet, sir, outside.”
“So much the better,” growled General Macready. “Get on with your job.”
A quarter of an hour passed. No rumble of traffic passed by the windows. No gun-wagons were jolting over French pave.
Colonel Childs looked up again and listened.
“It's damned quiet outside, sir.”
“Well, don't go making a noise,” said the general, “Can't you see I'm busy?”
“I think I'll just take a turn round,” said Colonel Childs.
He felt uneasy. Something in the silence of the village scared him. He went out into the roadway and walked toward Sir John French's quarters. There was no challenge from a sentry. The British Expeditionary Force seemed to be sleeping. They needed sleep—poor beggars!—but the Germans did not let them take much.
Colonel Childs went into the Commander-in-Chief's chateau and found a soldier in the front hall, licking out a jam-pot.
“Where's the Commander-in-Chief?” asked the officer.
“Gone hours ago, sir,” said the soldier. “I was left behind for lack of transport. From what I hear the Germans ought to be here by now. I rather fancy I heard some shots pretty close awhile ago.”
Colonel Childs walked back to his own quarters quickly. He made no apology for interrupting the work of the adjutant-general.
“General, the whole box of tricks has gone. We've been left behind. Forgotten!”
“The dirty dogs!” said General Macready.
There was not much time for packing up, and only one motor-car, and only one rifle. The general said he would look after the rifle, but Colonel Childs said if that were so he would rather stay behind and take his chance of being captured. It would be safer for him. So the adjutant-general, the judge advocate, the deputy assistant judge advocate (Colonel Childs), and an orderly or two packed into the car and set out to find G.H.Q. Before they found it they had to run the gantlet of Germans, and were sniped all the way through a wood, and took flying shots at moving figures. Then, miles away, they found G.H.Q.
“And weren't they sorry to see me again!” said General Macready, who told me the tale. “They thought they had lost me forever.”
The day's casualty list was brought into the adjutant—general one evening when I was dining in his mess. The orderly put it down by the side of his plate, and he interrupted a funny story to glance down the columns of names.
“Du Maurier has been killed... I'm sorry.”
He put down the paper beside his plate again and continued his story, and we all laughed heartily at the end of the anecdote. It was the only way, and the soldier's way. There was no hugging of grief when our best friend fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's life, and then, “Carry on!”
XVIII
Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme, I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there and elsewhere. One of my first meetings with him was extraordinarily embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While he was organizing his army, which was to be called, with unconscious irony, “The Army of Pursuit”—the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a pursuit—he desired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the war correspondents were then quartered. As we were paying for it and liked it, we put up an opposition which was most annoying to his A.D.C.'s, especially to one young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty manners, and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who had looked over our rooms without troubling to knock at the doors, and then said, “This will suit us down to the ground.” On my way back from the salient one evening I walked up the drive in the flickering light of summer eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of whom I thought I recognized as an old friend.
“Hullo!” I said, cheerily. “You here again?”
Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry Rawlinson. He must have been surprised, but dug me in the ribs in a genial way, and said, “Hullo, young feller!”
He made no further attempt to “pinch” our quarters, but my familiar method of address could not have produced that result.
His headquarters at Querrieux were in another old chateau on the Amiens-Albert road, surrounded by pleasant fields through which a stream wound its way. Everywhere the sign-boards were red, and a military policeman, authorized to secure obedience to the rules thereon, slowed down every motor-car on its way through the village, as though Sir Henry Rawlinson lay sick of a fever, so anxious were his gestures and his expression of “Hush! do be careful!”
The army commander seemed to me to have a roguish eye. He seemed to be thinking to himself, “This war is a rare old joke!” He spoke habitually of the enemy as “the old Hun” or “old Fritz,” in an affectionate, contemptuous way, as a fellow who was trying his best but getting the worst of it every time. Before the battles of the Somme I had a talk with him among his maps, and found that I had been to many places in his line which he did not seem to know. He could not find there very quickly on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that this was “camouflage,” in case I might tell “old Fritz” that such places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening optimism. He had always got the enemy “nearly beat,” and he arranged attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking another blow which would lead this time to stupendous results. In the early days, in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and he was a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of decision and a quick intelligence in open warfare. His trouble on the Somme was that the enemy did not permit open warfare, but made a siege of it, with defensive lines all the way back to Bapaume, and every hillock a machine-gun fortress and every wood a death-trap. We were always preparing for a “break-through” for cavalry pursuit, and the cavalry were always being massed behind the lines and then turned back again, after futile waiting, encumbering the roads. “The bloodbath of the Somme,” as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks through the woods of death—Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette and Martinpuich—I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux, scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle. It is their job to be cheerful, to harden their hearts against the casualty lists, to keep out of the danger-zone unless their presence is strictly necessary. But it is inevitable that the men who risk death daily, the fighting-men who carry out the plans of the High Command and see no sense in them, should be savage in their irony when they pass a peaceful house where their doom is being planned, and green-eyed when they see an army general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young A.D.C. slashing the flowers with his cane and telling the latest joke from London to his laughing chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of us—I, for one—adopted the point of view of the men who were to die, finding some reason in their hatred of the staffs, though they were doing their job with a sense of duty, and with as much intelligence as God had given them. Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson was one of our best generals, as may be seen by the ribbons on his breast, and in the last phase commanded a real “Army of Pursuit,” which had the enemy on the run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that last phase of open warfare that Rawlinson showed his qualities of generalship and once again that driving purpose which was his in the Somme battles, but achieved only by prodigious cost of life.
XIX
Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very little except by hearsay. He went by the name of “The Bull,” because of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that followed the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis of the Scarpe did not reveal high generalship. There were many young officers—and some divisional generals who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without sufficient forethought, and the stream of casualties which poured back, day by day, with tales of tragic happenings did not inspire one with a sense of some high purpose behind it all, or some presiding genius.
General Byng, “Bungo Byng,” as he was called by his troops, won the admiration of the Canadian Corps which he commanded, and afterward, in the Cambrai advance of November, '17, he showed daring of conception and gained the first striking surprise in the war by novel methods of attack—spoiled by the quick come-back of the enemy under Von Marwitz and our withdrawal from Bourlon Wood, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and other places, after desperate fighting.
His chief of staff, Gen. Louis Vaughan, was a charming, gentle-mannered man, with a scientific outlook on the problems of war, and so kind in his expression and character that it seemed impossible that he could devise methods of killing Germans in a wholesale way. He was like an Oxford professor of history discoursing on the Marlborough wars, though when I saw him many times outside the Third Army headquarters, in a railway carriage, somewhere near Villers Carbonnel on the Somme battlefields, he was explaining his preparations and strategy for actions to be fought next day which would be of bloody consequence to our men and the enemy.
General Birdwood, commanding the Australian Corps, and afterward the Fifth Army in succession to General Gough, was always known as “Birdie” by high and low, and this dapper man, so neat, so bright, so brisk, had a human touch with him which won him the affection of all his troops.
Gen. Hunter Weston, of the 8th Corps, was another man of character in high command. He spoke of himself in the House of Commons one day as “a plain, blunt soldier,” and the army roared with laughter from end to end. There was nothing plain or blunt about him. He was a man of airy imagination and a wide range of knowledge, and theories on life and war which he put forward with dramatic eloquence.
It was of Gen. Hunter Weston that the story was told about the drunken soldier put onto a stretcher and covered with a blanket, to get him out of the way when the army commander made a visit to the lines.
“What's this?” said the general.
“Casualty, sir,” said the quaking platoon commander.
“Not bad, I hope?”
“Dead, sir,” said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk.
The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic way, “The army commander salutes the honored dead!”
And the drunken private put his head from under the blanket and asked, “What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?”
That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, but it went through the army affixed to the name of Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit him.
The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the Somme, when many of our divisions were cut to pieces in the attempt to break the German line at Gommecourt. It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the success on the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter Weston was not degomme, as the French would say, and continued to air his theories on life and warfare until the day of Victory, when once again we had “muddled through,” not by great generalship, but by the courage of common men.
Among the divisional generals with whom I came in contact—I met most of them at one time or another—were General Hull of the 56th (London) Division, General Hickey of the 16th (Irish) Division, General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th (Ulster) Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Bantams) Division, afterward of the 33d.
General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, straight-thinking man, and I should say an able general. “Ruthless,” his men said, but this was a war of ruthlessness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times, because he had to order his men to do things which he knew were folly. I remember sitting on the window-sill of his bedroom, in an old house of Arras, while he gave me an account of “the battle in the dark,” in which the Londoners and other English troops lost their direction and found themselves at dawn with the enemy behind them. General Hull made no secret of the tragedy or the stupidity... On another day I met him somewhere on the other side of Peronne, before March 21st, when he was commanding the 16th (Irish) Division in the absence of General Hickey, who was ill. He talked a good deal about the belief in a great German offensive, and gave many reasons for thinking it was all “bluff.” A few days later the enemy had rolled over his lines... Out of thirteen generals I met at that time, there were only three who believed that the enemy would make his great assault in a final effort to gain decisive victory, though our Intelligence had amassed innumerable proofs and were utterly convinced of the approaching menace.
“They will never risk it!” said General Gorringe of the 47th (London) Division. “Our lines are too strong. We should mow them down.”
I was standing with him on a wagon, watching the sports of the London men. We could see the German lines, south of St.-Quentin, very quiet over there, without any sign of coming trouble. A few days later the place where we were standing was under waves of German storm-troops.
I liked the love of General Hickey for his Irish division. An Irishman himself, with a touch of the old Irish soldier as drawn by Charles Lever, gay-hearted, proud of his boys, he was always pleased to see me because he knew I had a warm spot in my heart for the Irish troops. He had a good story to tell every time, and passed me on to “the boys” to get at the heart of them. It was long before he lost hope of keeping the division together, though it was hard to get recruits and losses were high at Guillemont and Ginchy. For the first time he lost heart and was very sad when the division was cut to pieces in a Flanders battle. It lost 2,000 men and 162 officers before the battle began—they were shelled to death in the trenches—and 2,000 men and 170 officers more during the progress of the battle. It was murderous and ghastly.
General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, afterward commanding the 4th Corps, had the respect of his troops, though they called him “Uncle” because of his shock of white hair. The Highland division, under his command, fought many battles and gained great honor, even from the enemy, who feared them and called the kilted men “the ladies from hell.” It was to them the Germans sent their message in a small balloon during the retreat from the Somme: “Poor old 51st. Still sticking it! Cheery-oh!”
“Uncle” Harper invited me to lunch in his mess, and was ironical with war correspondents, and censors, and the British public, and new theories of training, and many things in which he saw no sense. There was a smoldering passion in him which glowed in his dark eyes.
He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire for a time.
“No man in this war,” he said, with a sweeping assertion, “has ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first.” And, broadly speaking, I think he was right, in spite of the Director of Training, who was extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority.
XX
I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely limited in their range of ideas and qualities of character.
“One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with generals,” said a friend of mine, after lunching with an army commander.
That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or wishy-washy sentiment.
What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the system which put the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the old school of war, unable, by reason of their age and traditions, to get away from rigid methods and to become elastic in face of new conditions.
Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its system of training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from specimens produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the Regular Army, so that they took the lion's share of staff appointments, thus keeping out brilliant young men of the new armies, whose brain-power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of the Sandhurst standard. Here and there, where the unprofessional soldier obtained a chance of high command or staff authority, he proved the value of the business mind applied to war, and this was seen very clearly—blindingly—in the able generalship of the Australian Corps, in which most of the commanders, like Generals Hobbs, Monash, and others, were men in civil life before the war. The same thing was observed in the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the corps commander, having been an estate agent, and many of his high officers having had no military training of any scientific importance before they handled their own men in France and Flanders.
XXI
As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short legs. He puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well organized by the Second Army headquarters, compared with the abominable mismanagement of other troops, the contrast being visible to every battalion officer and even to the private soldier. How much share of this was due to Sir Herbert Plumer it is impossible for me to tell, though it is fair to give him credit for soundness of judgment in general ideas and in the choice of men.
He had for his chief of staff Sir John Harington, and beyond all doubt this general was the organizing brain of to Second Army, though with punctilious chivalry he gave, always, the credit of all his work to the army commander. A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with extreme simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he impressed me as a brain of the highest temper and quality in staff-work. His memory for detail was like a card-index system, yet his mind was not clogged with detail, but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad sweep of the problem which confronted him. There was something fascinating as well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating the weight and effect of gun-fire, the strength of the enemy's defenses and man-power, the psychology of German generalship and of German units, the pressure which could be put on British troops before the breaking-point of courage, the relative or cumulative effects of poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the disposition of German guns and the probability of their movement in this direction or that, the amount of their wastage under our counter-battery work, the advantages of attacks in depth—one body of troops “leap-frogging,” another in an advance to further objectives—the time-table of transport, the supply of food and water and ammunition, the comfort of troops before action, and a thousand other factors of success.
Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and of the eve of it, Sir John Harington sent for the war correspondents and devoted an hour or more to a detailed explanation of his plans. He put down all his cards on the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither minimizing nor exaggerating the difficulties and dangers of the attack, pointing out the tactical obstacles which must be overcome before any chance of success, and exposing the general strategy in the simplest and clearest speech.
I used to study him at those times, and marveled at him. After intense and prolonged work at all this detail involving the lives of thousands of men, he was highly wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain at full tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. He was a chemist explaining the factors of a great experiment of which the result was still uncertain. He could only hope for certain results after careful analysis and synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He laughed sometimes at surprises he had caused the enemy, or was likely to cause them—surprises which would lead to a massacre of their men. He warmed to the glory of the courage of the troops who were carrying out his plans.
“It depends on these fellows,” he would say. “I am setting them a difficult job. If they can do it, as I hope and believe, it will be a fine achievement. They have been very much tried, poor fellows, but their spirit is still high, as I know from their commanding officers.”
One of his ambitions was to break down the prejudice between the fighting units and the Staff. “We want them to know that we are all working together, for the same purpose and with the same zeal. They cannot do without us, as we cannot do without them, and I want them to feel that the work done here is to help them to do theirs more easily, with lighter losses, in better physical conditions, with organization behind them at every stage.”
Many times the Second Army would not order an attack or decide the time of it before consulting the divisional generals and brigadiers, and obtaining their consensus of opinion. The officers and men in the Second Army did actually come to acknowledge the value of the staff-work behind them, and felt a confidence in its devotion to their interests which was rare on the western front.
At the end of one of his expositions Sir John Harington would rise and gather up his maps and papers, and say:
“Well, there you are, gentlemen. You know as much as I do about the plans for to-morrow's battle. At the end of the day you will be able to see the result of all our work and tell me things I do not know.”
Those conferences took place in the Second Army headquarters on Cassel Hill, in a big building which was a casino before the war, with a far-reaching view across Flanders, so that one could see in the distance the whole sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country below Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Hazebrouck in the foreground. Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the clammy touch of fog on the window-panes stealing through the cracks and creeping into the room. The meteorologist of the Second Army was often a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained on nights when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting in their trenches to attack in a murky dawn!... We said good night to General Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama of human life and death which we had heard in advance in that glass house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood before many hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my soul when I stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in pitch darkness, over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to break one's neck, with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far away, watery lights in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps afire, and the noise of artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks. We were starting early to see the opening of the battle and its backwash. There would be more streams of bloody, muddy men, more crowds of miserable prisoners, more dead bodies lying in the muck of captured ground, more shells plunging into the wet earth and throwing up columns of smoke and mud, more dead horses, disemboweled, and another victory at fearful cost, over one of the Flanders ridges.
Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long was this to go on—this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left in the world that could settle the argument by other means than this? When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take, and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that we could go on gaining ground at such a price? Was it to be extermination on both sides? The end of civilization itself? General Harington had said: “The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty of reserves on hand and he is fighting hard. It won't be a walk-over to-morrow.”
As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I went to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the darkness, my window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-flashes, and said, “O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help us to the end.” Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early start before the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the duckboards... Or Montague—white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we came to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells. I hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men had greater cause, though it was for their sake that I suffered most, as an observer of their drama of death... As observers we saw most of the grisly game.
PART TWO. THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE
EARLY DAYS WITH THE NEW ARMY
I
By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The “Old Contemptibles” were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still “carried on” as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into those same fields, to the same fate. The only survivors were Regular officers taken out of the fighting-lines to form the staffs of new divisions and to train the army of volunteers now being raised at home, and men who were recovering from wounds or serving behind the lines: those, and non-commissioned officers who were the best schoolmasters of the new boys, the best friends and guides of the new officers, stubborn in their courage, hard and ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed according to their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the shambles. It was in March of 1915 that a lieutenant-colonel in the trenches said to me: “I am one out of 150 Regular officers still serving with their battalions. That is to say, there are 150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of 1,500.”
That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride in a long history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England and France by its own death. Those boys of ours whom I had seen in the first August of the war, landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a festival, toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them and loading them with fruit and flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit and training. As riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a sudden check by forces they had despised. They held their fire until the German ranks were within eight hundred yards of them, and then mowed them down as though by machine-gun fire—before we had machine-guns, except as rare specimens, here and there. Our horse artillery was beyond any doubt the best in the world at that time. Even before peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took “the King's shilling” and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British soldier universal fame as a terrible warrior. There will never be a Regular Army like that. Modern warfare has opened the arena to the multitude. They may no longer sit in the Coliseum watching the paid gladiators. If there be war they must take their share of its sacrifice. They must be victims as well as victors. They must pay for the luxury of conquest, hatred, and revenge by their own bodies, and for their safety against aggression by national service.
After the first quick phases of the war this need of national soldiers to replace the professional forces became clear to the military leaders. The Territorials who had been raised for home defense were sent out to fill up the gaps, and their elementary training was shown to be good enough, as a beginning, in the fighting-lines. The courage of those Territorial divisions who came out first to France was quickly proved, and soon put to the supreme test, in which they did not fail. From the beginning to the end these men, who had made a game of soldiering in days of peace, yet a serious game to which they had devoted much of their spare time after working-hours, were splendid beyond all words of praise, and from the beginning to the end the Territorial officers—men of good standing in their counties, men of brain and business training—were handicapped by lack of promotion and treated with contempt by the High Command, who gave preference always to the Regular officers in every staff appointment.
This was natural and inevitable in armies controlled by the old Regular school of service and tradition. As a close corporation in command of the machine, it was not within their nature or philosophy to make way for the new type. The Staff College was jealous of its own. Sandhurst and Woolwich were still the only schools of soldiering recognized as giving the right “tone” to officers and gentlemen fit for high appointment. The cavalry, above all, held the power of supreme command in a war of machines and chemistry and national psychology....
I should hate to attack the Regular officer. His caste belonged to the best of our blood. He was the heir to fine old traditions of courage and leadership in battle. He was a gentleman whose touch of arrogance was subject to a rigid code of honor which made him look to the comfort of his men first, to the health of his horse second, to his own physical needs last. He had the stern sense of justice of a Roman Centurian, and his men knew that though he would not spare them punishment if guilty, he would give them always a fair hearing, with a point in their favor, if possible. It was in their code to take the greatest risk in time of danger, to be scornful of death in the face of their men whatever secret fear they had, and to be proud and jealous of the honor of the regiment. In action men found them good to follow—better than some of the young officers of the New Army, who had not the same traditional pride nor the same instinct for command nor the same consideration for their men, though more easy-going and human in sympathy.
So I salute in spirit those battalion officers of the Old Army who fulfilled their heritage until it was overwhelmed by new forces, and I find extenuating circumstances even in remembrance of the high stupidities, the narrow imagination, the deep, impregnable, intolerant ignorance of Staff College men who with their red tape and their general orders were the inquisitors and torturers of the new armies. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. They were molded in an old system, and could not change their cliche.
II
The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers, who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish imagination of the masses, so that every wall in London and great cities, every fence in rural places, was placarded with picture-posters.
... “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”... “What will your best girl say if you're not in khaki?”
Those were vulgar appeals which, no doubt, stirred many simple souls, and so were good enough. It would have been better to let the people know more of the truth of what was happening in France and Flanders—the truth of tragedy, instead of carefully camouflaged communiques, hiding the losses, ignoring the deeds of famous regiments, veiling all the drama of that early fighting by a deliberate screen of mystery, though all was known to the enemy. It was fear of their own people, not of the enemy, which guided the rules of censorship then and later.
For some little time the British people did not understand what was happening. How could they know? It appeared that all was going well. Then why worry? Soon there would be the joy-bells of peace, and the boys would come marching home again, as in earlier wars. It was only very slowly—because of the conspiracy of silence—that there crept into the consciousness of our people the dim realization of a desperate struggle ahead, in which all their young manhood would be needed to save France and Belgium, and—dear God!—England herself. It was as that thought touched one mind and another that the recruiting offices were crowded with young men. Some of them offered their bodies because of the promise of a great adventure—and life had been rather dull in office and factory and on the farm. Something stirred in their blood—an old call to youth. Some instinct of a primitive, savage kind, for open-air life, fighting, killing, the comradeship of hunters, violent emotions, the chance of death, surged up into the brains of quiet boys, clerks, mechanics, miners, factory hands. It was the call of the wild—the hark-back of the mind to the old barbarities of the world's dawn, which is in the embryo of modern man. The shock of anger at frightful tales from Belgium—little children with their hands cut off (no evidence for that one); women foully outraged; civilians shot in cold blood—sent many men at a quick pace to the recruiting agents. Others were sent there by the taunt of a girl, or the sneer of a comrade in khaki, or the straight, steady look in the eyes of a father who said, “What about it, Dick?... The old country is up against it.” It was that last thought which worked in the brain of England's manhood. That was his real call, which whispered to men at the plow—quiet, ruminating lads, the peasant type, the yeoman—and excited undergraduates in their rooms at Oxford and Cambridge, and the masters of public schools, and all manner of young men, and some, as I know, old in years but young in heart. “The old country is in danger!” The shadow of a menace was creeping over some little patch of England—or of Scotland.
“I's best be going,” said the village boy.
“'Dulce et decorum est—'” said the undergraduate.
“I hate the idea, but it's got to be done,” said the city—bred man.
So they disappeared from their familiar haunts—more and more of them as the months passed. They were put into training-camps, “pigged” it on dirty straw in dirty barns, were ill-fed and ill-equipped, and trained by hard—mouthed sergeants—tyrants and bullies in a good cause—until they became automata at the word of command, lost their souls, as it seemed, in that grinding-machine of military training, and cursed their fate. Only comradeship helped them—not always jolly, if they happened to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul-mouthed slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if they were in their own crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable lads. Eleven months' training! Were they ever going to the front? The war would be over before they landed in France... Then, at last, they came.
III
It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from the secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gone from them, but who could not get a word of their doings in France.
I saw the first of the “Kitchener men,” as we called them then. The tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road of France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings, and I poked my head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching forward to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts the imagination of our people will strive to conjure up the vision of those boys who, in the year of 1915, went out to Flanders, not as conscript soldiers, but as volunteers, for the old country's sake, to take their risks and “do their bit” in the world's bloodiest war. I saw those fellows day by day, touched hands with them, went into the trenches with them, heard their first tales, and strolled into their billets when they had shaken down for a night or two within sound of the guns. History will envy me that, this living touch with the men who, beyond any doubt, did in their simple way act and suffer things before the war ended which revealed new wonders of human courage and endurance. Some people envied me then—those people at home to whom those boys belonged, and who in country towns and villages and suburban houses would have given their hearts to get one look at them there in Flanders and to see the way of their life... How were they living? How did they like it? How were they sleeping? What did the Regulars think of the New Army?
“Oh, a very cheerful lot,” said a sergeant-major of the old Regular type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed at the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres, which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take it into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already killed a lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.)
“Not a bit of trouble with them,” said the sergeant-major, “and all as keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, `I'm going.' They're glad to be out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten months we've been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were willing enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, though some more famous... Till we get our chance, you know.”
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn, where a party of his men were resting.
“You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I'll bet on that.”
The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me think of hayfields in southern England.
They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, “Any one here from Burpham?”
One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair, and said, “Yes.”
I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he had cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue eyes.
“P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham,” he said in a kind of whisper, so that the other men should not hear.
The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages. They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair, freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad to be out in France. Anything was better than training at home.
“I like Germans more'n sergeant-majors,” said one young yokel, and the others shouted with laughter at his jest.
“Perhaps you haven't met the German sergeants,” I said.
“I've met our'n,” said the Sussex boy. “A man's a fool to be a soldier. Eh, lads?”
They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers.
“Not that we're skeered,” said one of them. “We'll be glad when the fighting begins.”
“Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don't forget the shells last night.”
There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of the South Saxons were full of spirit. In their yokel way they were disguising their real thoughts—their fear of being afraid, their hatred of the thought of death—very close to them now—and their sense of strangeness in this scene on the edge of Armentieres, a world away from their old life.
The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a bronzed man with a grizzled mustache and light-blue eyes, with a fine tenderness in his smile.
“These boys of mine are all right,” he said. “They're dear fellows, and ready for anything. Of course, it was anxious work at first, but my N. C. O.'s are a first-class lot, and we're ready for business.”
He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the business eleven months ago. It had not been easy, among all those scattered villages of the southern county. He had gone hunting among the farms and cottages for likely young fellows. They were of good class, and he had picked the lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. They came from a good stock—the yeoman breed. One could not ask for better stuff. The officers were men of old county families, and they knew their men. That was a great thing. So far they had been very lucky with regard to casualties, though it was unfortunate that a company commander, a fine fellow who had been a schoolmaster and a parson, should have been picked off by a sniper on his first day out.
The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though nothing very fierce as yet. They were led on in easy stages to the danger-zone. It was not fair to plunge them straight away into the bad places. But the test of steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the reserve trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there was a bit of digging to do in the open.
“Quiet there, boys,” said the sergeant-major. “And no larks.”
It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a light drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's trenches were about a thousand yards away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.
“And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!” said the heir to a seaside lodging-house.
“Thirsty work, this grave-digging job,” said a lad who used to skate on rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.
“Can't see much in those shells,” said a young man who once sold ladies' blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. “How those newspaper chaps do try to frighten us!”
He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.
“What's that? Wasps?”
A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise. Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a beast.
“What's that, Sergeant?”
“Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of it... Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!”
The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.
“Get up, Charlie,” said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared voice, “Oh, Sergeant!”
“That's all right,” said the sergeant-major. “We're getting off very lightly. New remember what I've been telling you... Stretcher this way.”
They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New Army.
“Like old soldiers, sir,” said the sergeant-major, when he stood chatting with the colonel after breakfast.
It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all—which made the Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of red-brick walls.
“Funny business!” said one of the boys.
“Regular Drury Lane melodrama,” said another.
“Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch,” was another comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.
They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when this beastliness is being done.
“Not a single casualty,” said one of the officers when the storm of shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks. “Anything wrong with our luck?”
Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone. No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their billets, where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march.
“I woke up pretty quick,” said one of them, “and thought the house had fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down for breakfast now,' she said. But a shell is better—as a knocker-up. I didn't stop to dress.”
Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of his escape.
“K.'s men” had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not appeal humorously to sensitive men.
“Any room for us there?” asked one of these bronzed fellows as he marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.
“Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German trenches,” was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned at their own wit.
IV
I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to “The Empire” left them stone—cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall, when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not because they hated Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood) like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G. H. Q. “What's patriotism?” asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down in the roots of their hearts, and, as with a boy who came from the village where I lived for a time, the name of some such place held all the meaning of life to many of them. The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws. The smell of the fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees, the heritage that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched them with the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought.
The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he had watered his mother's plants... London! Good old London!... His heart ached for it sometimes when, as sentry, he stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No Man's Land.
One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the building, and listened. The men were singing “Auld Lang Syne” to the accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts, and the old tune—so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the war zone—sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army sang “God Save the King.” I heard it sung a thousand times or more on royal festivals and tours, but listening to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders, where a number of “K.'s men” lay on the straw a night or two away from the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they had to take their turn, I heard it with more emotion than ever before. In that anthem, chanted by these boys in the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where his men lay sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen outside that barn and hear those words:
Send him victorious, Happy and glorious.
As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag that meant to them some old village on the Sussex Downs, where a mother and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old London, where the 'buses went clanging down the Strand.
As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s men, standing sentry outside the camp.
“Who goes there?”
It was a cockney voice.
“Friends.”
“Pass, friends. All's well.”
Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hell-fires and killed in great numbers, which made all things different in the philosophy of modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the music of an epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to the future race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. Yet it was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham Rye, who said, like a voice of Fate, “All's well.”
V
When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could not “answer back.” In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open fire. We called this monster “grandma,” and there was a little group of generals on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the effect of the first shell. Its target was on the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by our generals and by God. Preliminary to the attack our field-guns opened fire with shrapnel, which scattered over the German trenches—their formidable earthworks with deep, shell-proof dugouts—like the glitter of confetti, and had no more effect than that before the infantry made a rush for the enemy's line and were mown down by machine-gun fire—the Germans were very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak—in the usual way of those early days. The first shell fired by our monster howitzer was heralded by a low reverberation, as of thunder, from the field below us. Then, several seconds later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a tall, black column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze clawed at it and tore it to tatters.
“Some shell!” said an officer. “Now we ought to win the war—I don't think!”
Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two)—“aunty,” as we called it.
Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, and gradually our gun-power grew and grew, until we could “answer back,” and give more than came to us; but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the racket, as the Old Army had done, being strafed by harassing fire, having their trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, and their bodies broken, at all times and in all places within range of German guns.
Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had observation of our position. From the Westhook Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge his observers watched every movement of our men round Ypres, and along the main road to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of them were visible. From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and Messines they could see for miles across our territory, not only the trenches, but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind them and the roads through the villages. They looked straight into Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched among its ruins and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch village and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from Fleet Street who was cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of white dust which would tell them when men were marching by—more cannon fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with shells to spare ranged upon separate farm-houses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They shelled the roads down which our transport wagons went at night, and the communication trenches to which our men moved up to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail against their 5.9's, which in those early days we could only answer by a few pip-squeaks. They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres.
All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places, searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls. They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, “It's quite cozy, after all!”
And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street clubs, in the same tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor—while they listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be to-day or to-morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking, that bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and tear them to bits and make a mess of things.
There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was cruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink into the squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk—silk pajamas—and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew out the back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language, and then lit another gold—tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast. His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old traditions of service to an officer of the Guards, and he provided excellent little meals, done to a turn, until something else happened, and he was buried alive within a few yards of his master... Whenever I went to the canal-bank, and I went there many times (when still and always hungry high velocities came searching for a chance meal), I thought of my friend in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had lived there in the worst days, and some of whom had died there. They hated that canal-bank and dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and there was the laughter of men who hid the fear in their hearts and were “game” until some bit of steel plugged them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to tatters.
VI
Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer, after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places. The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage.
I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in '15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I also learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward, not enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in civil life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground beneath them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette.
We were sitting in the garden of the general's headquarters, having a picnic meal before going into the trenches. In spite of the wasps, which attacked the sandwiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of war. No shell same crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well within range of the enemy's guns), and the loudest noise was the drop of an over-ripe apple in the orchard. Later on a shrill whistle signaled a hostile airplane overhead, but it passed without throwing a bomb.
“You will have a moist time in some of the trenches,” said the general (whose boots were finely polished). “The rain has made them rather damp... But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We're expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It's an interesting place.”
The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I uttered a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly mine under me. It makes such a mess of a man.
A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: “The sound of picks has been heard close to our sap-head. The enemy will probably explode their mine in a few hours.”
“That's the place I was telling you about,” said the general. “It's well worth a visit... But you must make up your mind to get your feet wet.”
As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed to my shoulders, I was ready to brave the perils of wet feet with any man.
It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that in London—which seemed a long way off—people were going about under umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their pretty ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of peace.) But in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something different, and hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our soldiers, who cursed the rain—as in the old days, “they swore terribly in Flanders”—did not tuck their clothes up above their ankles. They took off their trousers.
There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those hefty men coming back through the communication trenches with the tails of their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were plastered with a yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they trudged on grimly through two feet of water, and the boots which they wore without socks squelched at every step with a loud, sucking noise—“like a German drinking soup,” said an officer who preceded me.
“Why grouse?” he said, presently. “It's better than Brighton!”
It was a queer experience, this paddling through the long communication trenches, which wound in and out like the Hampton Court maze toward the front line, and the mine craters which made a salient to our right, by a place called the “Tambour.” Shells came whining overhead and somewhere behind us iron doors were slamming in the sky, with metallic bangs, as though opening and shutting in a tempest. The sharp crack of rifle-shots showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and once I stood in a deep pool, with the water up to my knees, listening to what sounded like the tap-tap-tap of invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil.
It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his elegant legs.
“Clever fellows!” said the officer, as two of us climbed on to the fire-stand of the trench in order to avoid a specially deep water-hole, and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were only two hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was loud at the corner of the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of despond.
“And I hope they can swim!” said an ironical voice from a dugout, as the officers passed. They were lying in wet mud in those square burrows, the men who had been working all night under their platoon commanders, and were now sleeping and resting in their trench dwellings. As I paddled on I glanced at those men lying on straw which gave out a moist smell, mixed with the pungent vapors of chloride of lime. They were not interested in the German guns, which were giving their daily dose of “hate” to the village of Becourt-Becordel. The noise did not interrupt their heavy, slumbrous breathing. Some of those who were awake were reading novelettes, forgetting war in the eternal plot of cheap romance. Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their knees tucked up, staring gloomily to the opposite wall of the trench in day-dreams of some places betwixt Aberdeen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them, and said, “How are you getting on?” He answered, “I'm not getting on... I don't see the fun of this.”
“Can you keep dry?”
“Dry?... I'm soaked to the skin.”
“What's it like here?”
“It's hell... The devils blow up mines to make things worse.”
Another boy spoke.
“Don't you mind what he says, sir. He's always a gloomy bastard. Doesn't believe in his luck.”
There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts—a woman's face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers.
A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops who were once in this section of trenches. It was an altar built into the side of the trench, where mass was said each morning by a soldier—priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and above the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of which I read the words Notre Dame des Tranchees (“Our Lady of the Trenches”). A tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of those who worshiped here:
“This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do not touch the fragile statue in trench-clay.”
“Our Lady of the Trenches!” It was the first time I had heard of this new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches of death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of mankind whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do.
From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young soldier was playing the mandolin to two comrades. “All the latest ragtime,” said one of them with a grin.
So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the parapets at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a village in which the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through which we waded was alive with a multitude of swimming frogs. Red slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them.
“Rats are the worst plague,” said a colonel, coming out of the battalion headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table. “There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and they're audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night writhes with them... I don't mind the mice so much. One of them comes to dinner on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar who is very pally with me.”
We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in the churned-up soil... The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and I wondered whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a foreknowledge of death in his eyes.
One of the officers had spoken to me privately.
“I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it's the mining business that wears one's nerve to shreds. One never knows.”
I hated to leave him there to his agony... The colonel himself was all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing the glint of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver ricocheted from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for having fired.
The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the water-logged trenches, the shell-fire which broke down the parapets and buried men in wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers waiting for English heads, and then the mines—oh, a cheery little school of courage for the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war for the devil and General Squeers!
VII
The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts.
I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the war that I think I could find my way about it blindfold, even now. I saw it first in March of 1915, before the battle when the Germans first used poison-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French and British soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of masonry. On that first visit I found it scarred by shell—fire, and its great Cloth Hall was roofless and licked out by the flame of burning timbers, but most of the buildings were still standing and the shops were busy with customers in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small booths served by the women and girls who sold picture post-cards and Flemish lace and fancy cakes and soap to British soldiers sauntering about without a thought of what might happen here in this city, so close to the enemy's lines, so close to his guns. I had tea in a bun-shop, crowded with young officers, who were served by two Flemish girls, buxom, smiling, glad of all the English money they were making.
A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first sign of his work was when a mass of French soldiers and colored troops, and English, Irish, Scottish, and Canadian soldiers came staggering through the Lille and Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell upon them. They were gasping for breath, vomiting, falling into unconsciousness, and, as they lay, their lungs were struggling desperately against some stifling thing. A whitish cloud crept up to the gates of Ypres, with a sweet smell of violets, and women and girls smelled it and then gasped and lurched as they ran and fell. It was after that when shells came in hurricane flights over Ypres, smashing the houses and setting them on fire, until they toppled and fell inside themselves. Hundreds of civilians hid in their cellars, and many were buried there. Others crawled into a big drain-pipe—there were wounded women and children among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them—and they stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their buttresses and towers.
When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were raked into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never a day for years in which Ypres was not shelled.
The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and passed through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish Chateau... For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men and women could move freely without hiding from the pursuit of death; and even there, from time to time, there were shells from long-range guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons, taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-horses with huge fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers of Flemish churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont Neir, whose sails have turned through centuries of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as I write—that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of the roads and fields where the traffic of war went up, month after month, year after year.
That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was strangely quiet, I remember. There was “nothing doing,” as our men used to say. The German gunners seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a charming day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of war under every old hedge.
“What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?” asked one of my companions. There were three of us.
It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the village which then—they were early days!—looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine above its gray thatch and red-tiled roofs.
Suddenly one of us said, “Good God!”
An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the sky and the hamlet into which we were just going was blotted out by black smoke, which came up from its center as though its market-place had opened up and vomited out infernal vapors.
“A big shell that!” said one man, a tall, lean-limbed officer, who later in the war was sniper-in-chief of the British army. Something enraged him at the sight of that shelled village.
“Damn them!” he said. “Damn the war! Damn all dirty dogs who smash up life!”
Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there had been a minute or so between us and Dickebusch. (In Dickebusch my young cobbler friend from Fleet Street was crouching low, expecting death.) The peace of the day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the way to Ypres. The German gunners had wakened up again. They always did. They were getting busy, those house-wreckers. The long rush of shells tore great holes through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet in the ditch, we ate the luncheon we had carried in our pockets.
“A silly idea!” said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad look in his eyes. He was Norman-Irish, and a man of letters, and a crack shot, and all the boys he knew were being killed.
“What's silly?” I asked, wondering what particular foolishness he was thinking of, in a world of folly.
“Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one's mouth, just because some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has no personal acquaintance.”
“Damn silly,” I said.
“That's all there is to it in modern warfare,” said the lanky man. “It's not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength against your enemy's, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics and chemistry. What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when guns kill at fifteen miles?”
Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised tricks to make him show his head, and shot each head that showed.
The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again. It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past the red-brick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls, past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring, as our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres. The enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in the morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again... I remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient splendor, with broken traces of peoples who once had lived here in security. I looked up at the blue sky above those white ruins, and had an idea that death hovered there like a hawk ready to pounce. Even as one of us (not I) spoke the thought, the signal came. It was a humming drone high up in the sky.
“Look out!” said the lanky man. “Germans!”
It was certain that two birds hovering over the Grande Place were hostile things, because suddenly white puffballs burst all round them, as the shrapnel of our own guns scattered about them. But they flew round steadily in a half-circle until they were poised above our heads.
It was time to seek cover, which was not easy to find just there, where masses of stonework were piled high. At any moment things might drop. I ducked my head behind a curtain of bricks as I heard a shrill “coo-ee!” from a shell. It burst close with a scatter, and a tin cup was flung against a bit of wall close to where the lanky man sat in a shell-hole. He picked it up and said, “Queer!” and then smelled it, and said “Queer!” again. It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some poisonous liquid from a German chemist's shop. Other bombs were dropping round as the two hostile airmen circled overhead, untouched still by the following shell-bursts. Then they passed toward their own lines, and my friend in the shell-hole called to me and said, “Let's be going.”
It was time to go.
When we reached the edge of the town our guns away back started shelling, and we knew the Germans would answer. So we sat in a field nearby to watch the bombardment. The air moved with the rushing waves which tracked the carry of each shell from our batteries, and over Ypres came the high singsong of the enemies' answering voice.
As the dusk fell there was a movement out from Vlamertinghe, a movement of transport wagons and marching men. They were going up in the darkness through Ypres—rations and reliefs. They were the New Army men of the West Riding.
“Carry on there,” said a young officer at the head of his company. Something in his eyes startled me. Was it fear, or an act of sacrifice? I wondered if he would be killed that night. Men were killed most nights on the way through Ypres, sometimes a few and sometimes many. One shell killed thirty one night, and their bodies lay strewn, headless and limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place. Transport wagons galloped their way through, between bursts of shell-fire, hoping to dodge them, and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the litter of their wheels and shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and the raw flesh of the dead horses that had not dodged them. Many men were buried alive in Ypres, under masses of masonry when they had been sleeping in cellars, and were wakened by the avalanche above them. Comrades tried to dig them out, to pull away great stones, to get down to those vaults below from which voices were calling; and while they worked other shells came and laid dead bodies above the stones which had entombed their living comrades. That happened, not once or twice, but many times in Ypres.
There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had had eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with walls of sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very long at a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic according to the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' book as a hobby, until it was buried under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful soul, in spite of the menace of death always about him.
VIII
My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had the idea.
“It would be a great adventure,” he said, as we stood listening to the gun-fire over there.
“It would be damn silly,” said a staff officer. “Only a stern sense of duty would make me do it.”
It was Gullett who was the brave man.
We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living soul.
Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves. There was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry and twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had been once a fair city.
For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers of the sinking sun and the first stars that glimmered in a pale sky, the frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us.
The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from end to end by a thunderbolt. A recent shell had torn out a slice so that the top of the tower was supported only upon broken buttresses, and the great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. The Cloth Hall was but a skeleton in stone, with immense gaunt ribs about the dead carcass of its former majesty. Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's was a stark ruin, which gleamed white through the darkening twilight.
We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried life.
It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron lamp-posts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and plants still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed by the daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been all wrecked.
The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms, and in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we stumbled over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes. The silence was broken now by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I jumped sideways with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be the signal for our batteries, and shell after shell went rushing through the night, with that long, menacing hiss which ends in a dull blast.
The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells followed each other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, echoed back by the ruins of Ypres in hollow, reverberating thunder-strokes. The enemy was answering back, not very fiercely yet, and from the center of the town, in or about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses or of huge blocks of stone splitting into fragments.
We groped along, scared with the sense of death around us. The first flares of the night were being lighted by both sides above their trenches on each side of the salient. The balls of light rose into the velvety darkness and a moment later suffused the sky with a white glare which faded away tremulously after half a minute.
Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields between Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance. The whole shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We could see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We stared across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge crater, and those trenches which were battered to pieces but not abandoned in the first battle of Ypres and the second battle.
That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British soldiers—there were years to follow when many more would lie there—and as between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on this ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our loneliness here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and made me see unnatural things.
No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures approaching him through a clump of trees. His words rang out like pistol-shots.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
“Friends!” we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a shaking bayonet.
“Come close to be recognized!” he said, and his voice was harsh.
We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sentries sometimes shot too soon.
“Who are you?” he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we explained he laughed gruffly. “I never saw two strangers pass this way before!”
He was an old soldier, “back to the army again,” with Kitchener's men. He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa—“Little wars compared to this,” as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more “luminous” than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness, except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another battalion at Hooge, who were hard pressed. “They went along under a lot of shrapnel and had many casualties.”
He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful way, with phrases of almost biblical beauty in their simple truth, and the soul of the man, the spirit of the whole army in which he was a private soldier, was revealed when he flashed out a sentence with his one note of fire, “But the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!”
We wandered away again into the darkness, with the din of the bombardment all about us. There was not a square yard of ground unplowed by shells and we did not nourish any false illusions as to finding a safe spot for a bivouac.
There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where a man might say “No shells will fall here.” But one place we found where there seemed some reasonable odds of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we might curl up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not be “crumped” before the dawn. There were several of these shelters there, but, peering into them by the light of a match, I shuddered at the idea of lying in one of them. They had been long out of use and there was a foul look about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to rot there. They were inhabited already by half-wild cats—the abandoned cats of Ypres, which hunted mice through the ruins of their old houses—and they spat at me and glared with green-eyed fear as I thrust a match into their lairs.
There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on which we put our cake and Cointreau, and here, through half a night, my friend and I sat watching and listening to that weird scene upon which the old moon looked down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked over all the problems of life and death and the meaning of man's heritage.
Another sentry challenged us—all his nerves jangled at our apparition. He was a young fellow, one of “Kitchener's crowd,” and told us frankly that he had the “jimjams” in this solitude of Ypres and “saw Germans” every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us—“for company.
It was becoming chilly. The dew made our clothes damp. Cake and sweet liquor were poor provisions for the night, and the thought of hot tea was infinitely seductive. Perhaps somewhere one might find a few soldiers round a kettle in some friendly dugout. We groped our way along, holding our breath at times as a shell came sweeping overhead or burst with a sputter of steel against the ramparts. It was profoundly dark, so that only the glowworms glittered like jewels on black velvet. The moon had gone down, and inside Ypres the light of the distant flares only glimmered faintly above the broken walls. In a tunnel of darkness voices were speaking and some one was whistling softly, and a gleam of red light made a bar across the grass. We walked toward a group of black figures, suddenly silent at our approach—obviously startled.
“Who's there?” said a voice.
We were just in time for tea—a stroke of luck—with a company of boys (all Kitchener lads from the Civil Service) who were spending the night here. They had made a fire behind a screen to give them a little comfort and frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense of humor, cynical and blasphemous, but even through their jokes there was a yearning for the end of a business which was too close to death.
I remember the gist of their conversation, which was partly devised for my benefit. One boy declared that he was sick of the whole business.
“I should like to cancel my contract,” he remarked.
“Yes, send in your resignation, old lad,” said another, with ironical laughter.
“They'd consider it, wouldn't they? P'raps offer a rise in wages—I don't think!”
Another boy said, “I am a citizen of no mean Empire, but what the hell is the Empire going to do for me when the next shell blows off both my bleeding legs?”
This remark was also received by a gust of subdued laughter, silenced for a moment by a roar and upheaval of masonry somewhere by the ruins of the Cloth Hall.
“Soldiers are prisoners,” said a boy without any trace of humor. “You're lagged, and you can't escape. A 'blighty' is the best luck you can hope for.”
“I don't want to kill Germans,” said a fellow with a superior accent. “I've no personal quarrel against them; and, anyhow, I don't like butcher's work.”
“Christian service, that's what the padre calls it. I wonder if Christ would have stuck a bayonet into a German stomach—a German with his hands up. That's what we're asked to do.”
“Oh, Christianity is out of business, my child. Why mention it? This is war, and we're back to the primitive state—B.C. All the same, I say my little prayers when I'm in a blue funk.
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child.”
This last remark was the prize joke of the evening, received with much hilarity, not too loud, for fear of drawing fire—though really no Germans could have heard any laughter in Ypres.
Nearby, their officer was spending the night. We called on him, and found him sitting alone in a dugout furnished by odd bits from the wrecked houses, with waxen flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and an old cottage clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a Devonshire lad, with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his loneliness, with a roof over his head which would be no proof against a fair-sized shell.
He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him. He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his green armchair.
The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a little while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as the first faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire burst out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new spasms of ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing them, had an attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.
The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated fireworks after a night of orgy.
In a distant field a cock crew.
The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed again nakedly. Then the guns ceased for a while, and there was quietude in the trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways, went two tired figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swiftness to escape the early morning “hate” which was sure to come as soon as a clock in Vlamertinghe still working in a ruined tower chimed the hour of six.
I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and pack-mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about, and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and their flashes were red through the Flanders mist. Always this capital of the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about.
“Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert.”
So said the traffic man at the crossroads.
As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened the strap of one's gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one's soul icily.
IX
The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for young Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a time there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with excellent stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one of our generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which broke up their conference. Afterward there was no chateau, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags and burrowed in the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.
I remember one young Irish officer who came down to bur quarters on a brief respite from commanding the garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome fellow, like young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a profound melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile.
“Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you?” he asked.
He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a strong, fetid smell came from him.
“Hooge,” he said, in a thoughtful way, “is not a health resort.”
He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a leper. He told one or two stories about the things that happened at Hooge, and I wondered if hell could be so bad. After a short stay he went back again, and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before saying good-by he touched some flowers on the mess-table, and for a moment or two listened to birds twittering in the trees.
“Thanks very much,” he said. “I've enjoyed this visit a good deal.. . Good-by.”
He went back through Ypres on the way to Hooge, and the mine-crater where his Irish soldiers were lying in slime, in which vermin crawled.
Sometimes it was the enemy who mined under our position, blowing a few men to bits and scattering the sand-bags. Sometimes it was our men who upheaved the earth beyond them by mine charges and rushed the new crater.
It was in July of '15 that the devils of Hooge became merry and bright with increased activity. The Germans had taken possession of one of the mine-craters which formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin road, with trenches running down to it on either side, so that it was like the spear-head of their position. They had fortified it with sand-bags and crammed it with machine—guns which could sweep the ground on three sides, so making a direct attack by infantry a suicidal enterprise. Our trenches immediately faced this stronghold from the other side of a road at right angles with the Menin road, and our men—the New Army boys—were shelled day and night, so that many of them were torn to pieces, and others buried alive, and others sent mad by shell-shock. (They were learning their lessons in the school of courage.) It was decided by a conference of generals, not at Hooge, to clear out this hornets' nest, and the job was given to the sappers, who mined under the roadway toward the redoubt, while our heavy artillery shelled the enemy's position all around the neighborhood.
On July 22d the mine was exploded, while our men crouched low, horribly afraid after hours of suspense. The earth was rent asunder by a gust of flame, and vomited up a tumult of soil and stones and human limbs and bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell upon them.
“I thought I had been blown to bits,” one of them told me. “I was a quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, 'Christ!... Christ!'”
When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the enemy's redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had been a crisscross of trenches and sand-bag shelters for their machine-guns and a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater, hollowed deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps which had blocked up the enemy's trenches on either side of the position, so that they could not rush into the cavern and take possession. It was our men who “rushed” the crater and lay there panting in its smoking soil.
Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt, and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the mine-explosion and by the loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept up a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in bursts of gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and wounded many men. Our line at Hooge at that time was held by the King's Royal Rifles of the 14th Division, young fellows, not far advanced in the training-school of war. They held on under the gunning of their positions, and each man among them wondered whether it was the shell screeching overhead or the next which would smash him into pulp like those bodies lying nearby in dugouts and upheaved earthworks.
On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of silence after a heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of the K. R. R. raised their heads above broken parapets and crawled out of shell-holes and looked about. There were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men were wailing. The unwounded, startled by the silence, became aware of some moisture falling on them; thick, oily drops of liquid.
“What in hell's name—?” said a subaltern.
One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something like paraffin.
Coming across from the German trenches were men hunched up under some heavy weights. They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-pipes. Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken ground where the King's Royal Rifles lay.
Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making them living torches, and in a second or two cinders.
It was a new horror of war—the Flammenwerfer.
Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay.
The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They moved up at once to support their comrades and make a counter-attack. The ground they had to cover was swept by machine-guns, and many fell, but the others attacked again and again, regardless of their losses, and won back part of the lost ground, leaving only a depth of five hundred yards in the enemy's hands.
So the position remained until the morning of August 9th, when a new attack was begun by the Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Midland troops of the 6th Division, who had been long in the salient and had proved the quality of northern “grit” in the foul places and the foul weather of that region.
It was late on the night of August 8th that these battalions took up their position, ready for the assault. These men, who came mostly from mines and workshops, were hard and steady and did not show any outward sign of nervousness, though they knew well enough that before the light of another day came their numbers would have passed through the lottery of this game of death. Each man's life depended on no more than a fluke of luck by the throw of those dice which explode as they fall. They knew what their job was. It was to cross five hundred yards of open ground to capture and to hold a certain part of the German position near the Chateau of Hooge.
They were at the apex of the triangle which made a German salient after the ground was lost, on July 30th. On the left side of the triangle was Zouave Wood, and Sanctuary Wood ran up the right side to a strong fort held by the enemy and crammed with machine-guns and every kind of bomb. The base of the upturned triangle was made by the Menin road, to the north, beyond which lay the crater, the chateau, and the stables.
The way that lay between the regiment and their goal was not an easy one to pass. It was cut and crosscut by our old trenches, now held by the enemy, who had made tangles of barbed wire in front of their parapets, and had placed machine-guns at various points. The ground was littered with dead bodies belonging to the battle of July 30th, and pock-marked by deep shell-holes. To cross five hundred yards of such ground in the storm of the enemy's fire would be an ordeal greater than that of rushing from one trench to another. It would have to be done in regular attack formation, and with the best of luck would be a grim and costly progress.
The night was pitch dark. The men drawn up could only see one another as shadows blacker than the night. They were very quiet; each man was fighting down his fear in his soul, trying to get a grip on nerves hideously strained by the rack of this suspense. The words, “Steady, lads.” were spoken down the ranks by young lieutenants and sergeants. The sounds of men whispering, a cough here and there, a word of command, the clink of bayonets, the cracking of twigs under heavy boots, the shuffle of troops getting into line, would not carry with any loudness to German ears.
The men deployed before dawn broke, waiting for the preliminary bombardment which would smash a way for them. The officers struck matches now and then to glance at their wrist-watches, set very carefully to those of the gunners. Then our artillery burst forth with an enormous violence of shell-fire, so that the night was shattered with the tumult of it. Guns of every caliber mingled their explosions, and the long screech of the shells rushed through the air as though thousands of engines were chasing one another madly through a vast junction in that black vault.
The men listened and waited. As soon as the guns lengthened their fuses the infantry advance would begin. Their nerves were getting jangled. It was just the torture of human animals. There was an indrawing of breath when suddenly the enemy began to fire rockets, sending up flares which made white waves of light. If they were seen! There would be a shambles.
But the smoke of all the bursting shells rolled up in a thick veil, hiding those mining lads who stared toward the illuminations above the black vapors and at the flashes which seemed to stab great rents in the pall of smoke. “It was a jumpy moment,” said the colonel of the Durhams, and the moment lengthened into minutes.
Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the second which had been given for the assault to begin, and instantly, to the tick, the guns lifted and made a curtain of fire round the Chateau of Hooge, beyond the Menin road, six hundred yards away.
“Time!”
The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden clatter from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men girdled with hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and made their first rush forward. The ground had been churned up by our shells, and the trenches had been battered into shapelessness, strewn with broken wire and heaps of loose stones and fragments of steel.
It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them, and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.
Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a slaughter-house.
The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now, and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing quickly from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting hoarsely, and hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, and scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling down again, until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom of this pit of hell.
While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the dugouts already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge beyond and with a final rush, almost winded and spent, reached the extreme limit of their line of assault and achieved the task which had been set them. They were mad now, not human in their senses. They saw red through bloodshot eyes. They were beasts of prey—these decent Yorkshire lads.
Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans were bayoneted, until not a single enemy lived on this ground, and the light of day on that 9th of August revealed a bloody and terrible scene, not decent for words to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which had been a panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for mercy, with that dreadful screech of terror from German boys who saw the white gleam of steel at their stomachs before they were spitted. Not many of those Durham and Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. The few who do must have thrust it out of their vision, unless at night it haunts them.
The assaulting battalion had lost many men during the assault, but their main ordeal came after the first advance, when the German guns belched out a large quantity of heavy shells from the direction of Hill 60. They raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield the position they had gained. But they would not go back or crawl away from their dead.
All through the day the bombardment continued, answered from our side by fourteen hours of concentrated fire, which I watched from our battery positions. In spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies through the “crumped” trenches, the men held on and consolidated their positions. One of the most astounding feats was done by the sappers, who put up barbed wire beyond the line under a devilish cannonade.
A telephone operator had had his apparatus smashed by a shell early in the action, and worked his way back to get another. He succeeded in reaching the advanced line again, but another shell knocked out his second instrument. It was then only possible to keep in touch with the battalion headquarters by means of messengers, and again and again officers and men made their way across the zone of fire or died in the attempt. Messages reached the colonel of the regiment that part of his front trenches had been blown away.
From other parts of the line reports came in that the enemy was preparing a counter-attack. For several hours now the colonel of the Durhams could not get into touch with his companies, isolated and hidden beneath the smoke of the shell-bursts. Flag-wagging and heliographing were out of the question. He could not tell even if a single man remained alive out there beneath all those shells. No word came from them now to let him know if the enemy were counter-attacking.
Early in the afternoon he decided to go out and make his own reconnaissance. The bombardment was still relentless, and it was only possible to go part of the way in an old communication trench. The ground about was littered with the dead, still being blown about by high explosives.
The soul of the colonel was heavy then with doubt and with the knowledge that most of the dead here were his own. When he told me this adventure his only comment was the soldier's phrase, “It was not what might be called a 'healthy' place.” He could see no sign of a counter-attack, but, straining through the smoke-clouds, his eyes could detect no sign of life where his men had been holding the captured lines. Were they all dead out there?
On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion would be relieved, and managed to send this order to a part of it. It was sent through by various routes, but some men who carried it came back with the news that it was still impossible to get into touch with the companies holding the advanced positions above the Menin road.
In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. Several of them had been blown as far as ten yards by the air-pressure of exploding shells and had been buried in the scatter of earth.
“When at last my men came back—those of them who had received the order,” said the colonel, “I knew the price of their achievement—its cost in officers and men.” He spoke as a man resentful of that bloody sacrifice.
There were other men still alive and still holding on. With some of them were four young officers, who clung to their ground all through the next night, before being relieved. They were without a drop of water and suffered the extreme miseries of the battlefield.
There was no distinction in courage between those four men, but the greater share of suffering was borne by one. Early in the day he had had his jaw broken by a piece of shell, but still led his men. Later in the day he was wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his command, and he was still leading the survivors of his company when he came back on the morning of Tuesday, August 10th.
Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, “Send us more bombs.” It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after thirty hours under shell-fire, that the survivors came away from their rubbish heap in the lines of death.
So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men, touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through such hours without having on their faces more traces of their hell, though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague.
X
Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets.
A friend of mine—an ironical fellow—nudged me, and said, “Sunday-school for young Christians!” and made a hideous face, very comical.
It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and “O. C. Bayonets”—Col. Ronald Campbell—was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier—boys. They made sudden jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then kicked the sack.
“That's what I like to see,” said an officer. “There's a fine fighting-spirit in that lad. He'll kill plenty of Germans before he's done.”
Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes bulge out of their heads, fired them with blood-lust, stoked up hatred of Germans—all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a sense of latent power and passion in him. He told funny stories—one, famous in the army, called “Where's 'Arry?”
It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, “Where's 'Arry?... 'Arry 'asn't 'ad a go yet.”
'Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher's work, but he was called up and given his man to kill. And after that 'Arry was like a man-eating tiger in his desire for German blood.
He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. “You may meet a German who says, 'Mercy! I have ten children.'... Kill him! He might have ten more.”
At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see every form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of death—machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later on, tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth of the British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived longest were experts in divers branches of technical education.
Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet instruction and devoted his genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a bayonet) to the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of psychology. When men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken, he set to work to build up their vitality again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets—the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, and to rear chicks, and tend flowers, and grow vegetables. Love, and not hate, was now his gospel. All his training was done by games, simple games arousing intelligence, leading up to elaborate games demanding skill of hand and eye. He challenged the whole army system of discipline imposed by authority by a new system of self-discipline based upon interest and instinct. His results were startling, and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, shell-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter in their eyes.
“It's a pity,” he said, “they have to go off again and be shot to pieces. I cure them only to be killed—but that's not my fault. It's the fault of war.”
It was Colonel Campbell who discovered “Willie Woodbine,” the fighting parson and soldier's poet, who was the leading member of a traveling troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two. They fought one another with science (as old professionals) and challenged any man in the crowd. Then one of them played the violin and drew the soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after another fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and war, and the weakness of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those fellows in his hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new revelation, gave them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches again.
XI
Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as far back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and farmstead, villa, and chateau was inhabited by men in khaki, who made themselves at home and established friendly relations with civilians there unless they were too flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper, or too filthy in their habits. Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another.
For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of that British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world of ghosts carved their names on wooden beams, and on the whitewashed walls scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John Johnson was a bastard; or that a certain battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser Bill would die on the gallows, illustrating those remarks with portraits and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but vivid and significant.
The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which he made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his officers' mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, “Ou est le blooming couteau?” or “Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s'il vous plait, madame.” It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that “Les pommes de terre frites are absolument all right if only madame will tenir ses cheveux on.” In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have passed them on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered kilts pumped up the water from old wells, and whistled “I Know a Lassie” to the girl who brought the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while Sandy played a “wee bit” on the pipes to the peasant—folk who gathered at the gate. Such good relations existed between the cottagers and their temporary guests that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversation was of dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and hell), the old lady who had given him her best bedroom at the beginning of the war flung her arms about him and greeted him like a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with his undeveloped mustache on his upper lip, her demonstrations were embarrassing.
It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the primitive earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn about, came back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden with buttercups, and were not too uncomfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns.
There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our officers were billeted in French chateaux. There was a splendor of surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life of that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in prehistoric times. I knew scores of such places, and went through gilded gates emblazoned with noble coats of arms belonging to the days of the Sun King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to generals and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up to old mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by noble parks and ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of harvests had been stored. From one of the archways here one might see in the mind's eye Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist, or even Henri de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all their plumes alight in the sun as they mounted their horses for a morning's boar-hunt.
It was surprising at first when a young British officer came out and said, “Toppin' morning,” or, “Any news from the Dardanelles?” There was something incongruous about this habitation of French chiteaux by British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of it made me laugh in early days of first impressions, when I went through the rooms of one of those old historic houses, well within range of the German guns with a brigade major. It was the Chateau de Henencourt, near Albert.
“This is the general's bedroom,” said the brigade major, opening a door which led off a gallery, in which many beautiful women of France and many great nobles of the old regime looked down from their gilt frames.
The general had a nice bed to sleep in. In such a bed Mme. du Barry might have stretched her arms and yawned, or the beautiful Duchesse de Mazarin might have held her morning levee. A British general, with his bronzed face and bristly mustache, would look a little strange under that blue-silk canopy, with rosy cherubs dancing overhead on the flowered ceiling. His top-boots and spurs stood next to a Louis Quinze toilet-table. His leather belts and field-glasses lay on the polished boards beneath the tapestry on which Venus wooed Adonis and Diana went a-hunting. In other rooms no less elegantly rose-tinted or darkly paneled other officers had made a litter of their bags, haversacks, rubber baths, trench—boots, and puttees. At night the staff sat down to dinner in a salon where the portraits of a great family of France, in silks and satins and Pompadour wigs, looked down upon their khaki. The owner of the chateau, in whose veins flowed the blood of those old aristocrats, was away with his regiment, in which he held the rank of corporal. His wife, the Comtesse de Henencourt, managed the estate, from which all the men-servants except the veterans had been mobilized. In her own chateau she kept one room for herself, and every morning came in from the dairies, where she had been working with her maids, to say, with her very gracious smile, to the invaders of her house: “Bon jour, messieurs! Ca va bien?”
She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. Poor chateaux of France! German shells came to knock down their painted turrets, to smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride.
Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust and twisted iron.
I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years after my first visit there. The enemy's line had come closer to it and it was a target for their guns. Our guns—heavy and light—were firing from the back yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had already broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and torn away great chunks of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in the petit salon. His hand trembled as he greeted me.
“I'm not fond of this place,” he said. “The whole damn thing will come down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars.”
We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the vault. A shell came over the chateau and burst in the outhouses.
“They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago,” said the colonel. “Made a mess of some heavy gunners.”
There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it was not so sinister a place as farther on, where a brother of mine sat in a hole directing his battery... The Countess of Henencourt had gone. She went away with her dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads.
XII
One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy but a little undergrowth—and the queerest part of it all was the sense of safety, the ridiculously false security with which one could wander about the village and up the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that one's movements were being watched by German eyes and that the whole place could be blown off the face of the earth... but for the convenient fact that the Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond the footpath, were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own guns.
That sounded like a fairy-tale to men who, in other places, could not go over the parapet of the first-line trenches, or even put their heads up for a single second, without risking instant death.
I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the British infantry surrounding them—it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood—the lieutenant insisted upon leading the way to the top of the hill.
He made a slight detour to point out a German shell which had fallen there without exploding, and made laughing comments upon the harmless, futile character of those poor Germans in front of us. They did their best to kill us, but oh, so feebly!
Yet when I took a pace toward the shell he called out, sharply, “Ne touchez pas!” I would rather have touched a sleeping tiger than that conical piece of metal with its unexploded possibilities, but bent low to see the inscriptions on it, scratched by French gunners with wore recklessness of death. Mort aux Boches was scrawled upon it between the men's initials.
Then we came to the hill-crest and to the last of our trenches, and, standing there, looked down upon the villages of Vaux and Curlu, separated by a piece of marshy water. In the farthest village were the Germans, and in the nearest, just below us down the steep cliff, our own men. Between the two there was a narrow causeway across the marsh and a strip of woods half a rifle-shot in length.
Behind, in a sweeping semicircle round their village and ours, were the German trenches and the German guns. I looked into the streets of both villages as clearly as one may see into Clovelly village from the crest of the hill. In Vaux-sur-Somme a few British soldiers were strolling about. One was sitting on the window-sill of a cottage, kicking up his heels.
In the German village of Curlu the roadways were concealed by the perspective of the houses, with their gables and chimney-stacks, so that I could not see any passers—by. But at the top of the road, going out of the village and standing outside the last house on the road, was a solitary figure—a German sentry.
The French lieutenant pointed to a thin mast away from the village on the hillside.
“Do you see that? That is their flagstaff. They hoist their flag for victories. It wagged a good deal during the recent Russian fighting. But lately they have not had the cheek to put it up.”
This interpreter—the Baron de Rosen—laughed very heartily at that naked pole on the hill.
Then I left him and joined our own men, and went down a steep hill into Vaux, well outside our line of trenches, and thrust forward as an outpost in the marsh. German eyes could see me as I walked. At any moment those little houses about me might have been smashed into rubbish heaps. But no shells came to disturb the waterfowl among the reeds around.
And so it was that the life in this place was utterly abnormal, and while the guns were silent except for long—range fire, an old-fashioned mode of war—what the adjutant of this little outpost called a “gentlemanly warfare,” prevailed. Officers and men slept within a few hundred yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas at night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous excursion, such as Sir Walter Manny would have liked, between thirty or forty men on one side against somewhat the same number on the other.
Our men used to steal out along the causeway which crossed the marsh—a pathway about four feet wide, broadening out in the middle, so that a little redoubt or blockhouse was established there, then across a narrow drawbridge, then along the path again until they came to the thicket which screened the German village of Curlu.
It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were creeping forward from the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in party-colored clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly contact was made.
Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles, the zip-zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility. It was a sharp encounter one night when the Loyal North Lancashires held the village of Vaux, and our men brought back many German helmets and other trophies as proofs of victory. Then to bed in the village, and a good night's rest, as when English knights fought the French, not far from these fields, as chronicled in the pages of that early war correspondent, Sir John Froissart.
All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out into the wood, where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon two men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood, motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through the brushwood. If I had followed the path on which they stood for just a little way I should have walked into the German village. But, on the other hand, I should not have walked back again....
When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our own trenches again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit to that grim little outpost in the marsh. If all the war had been like this it would have been more endurable for men who had no need to hide in holes in the earth, nor crouch for three months below ground, until an hour or two of massacre below a storm of high explosives. In the village on the marsh men fought at least against other men, and not against invisible powers which belched forth death.
It was part of the French system of “keeping quiet” until the turn of big offensives; a good system, to my mind, if not carried too far. At Frise, next door to Vaux, in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a little too far, with relaxed vigilance.
It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through the reeds and enter the French line and exchange souvenirs with the sentries.
“Souvenir!” said one of them one day. “Bullet—you know—cartouche. Comprenny?”
A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, sat up with a grin and said, “Mais oui, mon vieux,” and felt in his pouch for a cartridge, and then in his pockets, and then in the magazine of the rifle between his knees.
“Fini!” he said. “Tout fini, mon p'tit camarade.”
The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that little village in the loop of the Somme, and “pinched” every man of the French garrison. There was the devil to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of the French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees.
Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in the zone of war, when the battles of the Somme began, and were blown off the map.
XIII
At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentieres—a most “unhealthy” place in later years of war—a bathing establishment was organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though they had brought a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they had done that. To any interested visitor, understanding the nobility of their work, they exhibited a curious relic. It was the Holy Shirt of Nieppe, which should be treasured as a memorial in our War Museum—an object-lesson of what the great war meant to clean-living men. It was not a saint's shirt, but had been worn by a British officer in the trenches, and was like tens of thousands of other shirts worn by our officers and men in the first winters of the war, neither better nor worse, but a fair average specimen. It had been framed in a glass case, and revealed, on its linen, the corpses of thousands of lice. That vermin swarmed upon the bodies of all our boys who went into the trenches and tortured them. After three days they were lousy from head to foot. After three weeks they were walking menageries. To English boys from clean homes, to young officers who had been brought up in the religion of the morning tub, this was one of the worst horrors of war. They were disgusted with themselves. Their own bodies were revolting to them. Scores of times I have seen battalions of men just out of battle stripping themselves and hunting in their shirts for the foul beast. They had a technical name for this hunter's job. They called it “chatting.” They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the water—brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men in Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and there, as at Nieppe, officers with human sympathy organized a system by which battalions of men could wash their bodies.
The place in Nieppe had been a jute-factory, and there were big tubs in the sheds, and nearby was the water of the Lys. Boilers were set going to heat the water. A battalion's shirts were put into an oven and the lice were baked and killed. It was a splendid thing to see scores of boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a bit of soap for each. They gave little grunts and shouts of joyous satisfaction. The cleansing water, the liquid heat, made their flesh tingle with exquisite delight, sensuous and spiritual. They were like children. They splashed one another, with gurgles of laughter. They put their heads under water and came up puffing and blowing like grampuses. Something broke in one's heart to see them, those splendid boys whose bodies might soon be torn to tatters by chunks of steel. One of them remembered a bit of Latin he had sung at Stonyhurst: “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.” (“Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be cleansed; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.”)
On the other side of the lines the Germans were suffering in the same way, lousy also, and they, too, were organizing bath-houses. After their first retreat I saw a queer name on a wooden shed: Entlausunganstalt. I puzzled over it a moment, and then understood. It was a new word created out of the dirt of modern war—“Delousing station.”
XIV
It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death was not the only reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far ridge, and left the world in darkness.
On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it. The red ball just showed above the far line of single trees which were black as charcoal on the edge of a long, straight road two miles away, and from its furnace there were flung a million feathers of flame against the silk-blue canopy of the evening sky. The burning colors died out in a few minutes, and the fields darkened, and all the corn-shocks paled until they became quite white, like rows of tents, under the harvest moon. Another night had come in this year of war.
Up Ypres way the guns were busy, and at regular intervals the earth trembled, and the air vibrated with dull, thunderous shocks.
“The moon's face looks full of irony to-night,” said the man by my side. “It seems to say, `What fools those creatures are down there, spoiling their harvest-time with such a mess of blood!'”
The stars were very bright in some of those Flemish nights. I saw the Milky Way clearly tracked across the dark desert. The Pleiades and Orion's belt were like diamonds on black velvet. But among all these worlds of light other stars, unknown to astronomers, appeared and disappeared. On the road back from a French town one night I looked Arras way, and saw what seemed a bursting planet. It fell with a scatter of burning pieces. Then suddenly the thick cloth of the night was rent with stabs of light, as though flashing swords were hacking it, and a moment later a finger of white fire was traced along the black edge of the far-off woods, so that the whole sky was brightened for a moment and then was blotted out by a deeper darkness... Arras was being shelled again, as I saw it many times in those long years of war.
The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was rather horrible. Their strange, intense quietude, when the guns were not at work, made them dead, as the very spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One night, as on many others, I walked through one of them with a friend. Every house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam came through any crack. No footstep, save our own, told of life. The darkness was almost palpable. It seemed to press against one's eyeballs like a velvet mask. My nerves were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny silence and invisibility that I started violently at the sound of a quiet voice speaking three inches from my ear.
“Halte! Qui va la?”
It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the wall of a house in such a gulf of blackness that not even his bayonet was revealed by a glint.
Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world was there, close to the lines of the bronzed cornfields splashed with the scarlet of poppies, and the pale yellow of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away and away, without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met the sky.
I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across to a slope of rising ground where there was no ripening wheat, and where the grass itself came to a sudden halt, as though afraid of something. I knew the reason of this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for miles each way. Those were the parapets of German trenches, and in the ditches below them were earth-men, armed with deadly weapons, staring out across the beauty of France and wondering, perhaps, why they should be there to mar it, and watching me, a little black dot in their range of vision, with an idle thought as to whether it were worth their while to let a bullet loose and end my walk. They could have done so easily, but did not bother. No shot or shell came to break through the hum of bees or to crash through the sigh of the wind, which was bending all the ears of corn to listen to the murmurous insect-life in these fields of France.
Close to me was a group of peasants—a study for a painter like Millet. One of them shouted out to me, “Voilà les Boches!” waving his arm to left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them.
A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice munched an apple, like Audrey in “As You Like It,” and between her bites told me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that she had been nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came bursting all round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to great holes in the field), and described the coming of the Germans into her village over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about the whereabouts of French soldiers and had given one of those fat Germans a blow on the face when he had tried to make love to her in her father's barn. Her mother had been raped.
In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within shell-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of them was driving the reaping—machine and looked like a gunner on his limber, with his kepi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of his comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the edge of the wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased their work to drink out of a leather wine-bottle which had been replenished from a hand-cart. It was a pretty scene if one could forget the grim purpose which had put those harvesters in uniform.
The same thought was in the mind of a British officer.
“A beautiful country, this,” he said. “It's a pity to cut it up with trenches and barbed wire.”
Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two away from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no mercy for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men's souls, not shirking the next ordeal.
It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of '15, that one found one's way to many of the trenches that marked the boundary-lines of the year's harvesting, and in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the shells of our batteries, answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn howls of murder across the heads of peasant women who were gleaning, with bent backs.
In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under showers of shrapnel, but the long avenues between the trenches were cool and pleasant in the heat of the day. It was one of the elementary schools where many of our soldiers learned the A B C of actual warfare after their training in camps behind the lines. Here one might sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but for the fact that country wenches were not allowed in the dugouts and trenches, where I found our soldiers killing flies in the intervals between pot-shots at German periscopes.
The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pursuit of killing time and life (with luck), and sniping was hot on both sides, so that the wood resounded with sharp reports as though hard filbert nuts were being cracked by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men was hit by a sniper, and his body was carried off for burial as I went toward the first line of trenches, hoping that my shadow would not fall across a German periscope. The sight of that dead body passing chilled one a little. There were many graves in the bosky arbors—eighteen under one mound—but some of those who had fallen six months before still lay where the gleaners could not reach them.
I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel bullets and a litter of limbs.
XV
For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls. By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of entertainment among men dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and encouraged “variety” shows, organized by young officers who had been amateur actors before the war, who searched around for likely talent. There was plenty of it in the New Army, including professional “funny men,” trick cyclists, conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the summer of '15 most of the divisions had their dramatic entertainments: “The Follies,” “The Bow Bells,” “The Jocks,” “The Pip-Squeaks,” “The Whizz-Bangs,” “The Diamonds,” “The Brass Hats,” “The Verey Lights,” and many others with fancy names.
I remember going to one of the first of them in the village of Acheux, a few miles from the German lines. It was held in an old sugar-factory, and I shall long remember the impressions of the place, with seven or eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, broken, barn-like building, where strange bits of machinery looked through the darkness, and where through gashes in the walls stars twinkled.
There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent in one's nostrils, and when the curtain went up on a well—fitted stage and “The Follies” began their performance, the squalor of the place did not matter. What mattered was the enormous whimsicality of the Bombardier at the piano, and the outrageous comicality of a tousle-haired soldier with a red nose, who described how he had run away from Mons “with the rest of you,” and the light—heartedness of a performance which could have gone straight to a London music-hall and brought down the house with jokes and songs made up in dugouts and front—line trenches.
At first the audience sat silent, with glazed eyes. It was difficult to get a laugh out of them. The mud of the trenches was still on them. They stank of the trenches, and the stench was in their souls. Presently they began to brighten up. Life came back into their eyes. They laughed!... Later, from this audience of soldiers there were yells of laughter, though the effect of shells arriving at unexpected moments, in untoward circumstances, was a favorite theme of the jesters. Many of the men were going into the trenches that night again, and there would be no fun in the noise of the shells, but they went more gaily and with stronger hearts, I am sure, because of the laughter which had roared through the old sugar—factory.
A night or two later I went to another concert and heard the same gaiety of men who had been through a year of war. It was in an open field, under a velvety sky studded with innumerable stars. Nearly a thousand soldiers trooped through the gates and massed before the little canvas theater. In front a small crowd of Flemish children squatted on the grass, not understanding a word of the jokes, but laughing in shrill delight at the antics of soldier-Pierrots. The corner-man was a funny fellow, and his by-play with a stout Flemish woman round the flap of the canvas screen, to whom he made amorous advances while his comrades were singing sentimental ballads, was truly comic. The hit of the evening was when an Australian behind the stage gave an unexpected imitation of a laughing-jackass.
There was something indescribably weird and wild and grotesque in that prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural mirth. An Australian by my side said: “Well done! Exactly right!” and the Flemish children shrieked with joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. Old, old songs belonging to the early Victorian age were given by the soldiers, who had great emotion and broke down sometimes in the middle of a verse. There were funny men dressed in the Widow Twankey style, or in burlesque uniforms, who were greeted with yells of laughter by their comrades. An Australian giant played some clever card tricks, and another Australian recited Kipling's “Gunga Din” with splendid fire. And between every “turn” the soldiers in the field roared out a chorus:
“Jolly good song, Jolly well sung. If you can think of a better you're welcome to try. But don't forget the singer is dry; Give the poor beggar some beer!”
A touring company of mouth-organ musicians was having a great success in the war zone. But, apart from all those organized methods of mirth, there was a funny man in every billet who played the part of court jester, and clowned it whatever the state of the weather or the risks of war. The British soldier would have his game of “house” or “crown and anchor” even on the edge of the shell-storm, and his little bit of sport wherever there was room to stretch his legs. It was a jesting army (though some of its jokes were very grim), and those who saw, as I did, the daily tragedy of war, never ceasing, always adding to the sum of human suffering, were not likely to discourage that sense of humor.
A successful concert with mouth-organs, combs, and tissue-paper and penny whistles was given by the Guards in the front-line trenches near Loos. They played old English melodies, harmonized with great emotion and technical skill. It attracted an unexpected audience. The Germans crowded into their front line—not far away—and applauded each number. Presently, in good English, a German voice shouted across:
“Play 'Annie Laurie' and I will sing it.”
The Guards played “Annie Laurie,” and a German officer stood up on the parapet—the evening sun was red behind him—and sang the old song admirably, with great tenderness. There was applause on both sides.
“Let's have another concert to-morrow!” shouted the Germans.
But there was a different kind of concert next day, and the music was played by trench-mortars, Mills bombs, rifle-grenades, and other instruments of death in possession of the Guards. There were cries of agony and terror from the German trenches, and young officers of the Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud laughter.
XVI
It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.
It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.
Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.
So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures of a fairy-tale.
So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o' nights into No Man's Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy's barbed wire, until presently, after an hour's waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle—three notches one night—to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.
In one section of trenches the men made a habit of betting upon those who would be wounded first. It had all the uncertainty of the roulette-table... One day, when the German gunners were putting over a special dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to inquire about a “new chum,” who had come up with the drafts.
“Is Private Smith all right?” he asked.
“Yes, Sergeant, he's all right,” answered the men crouching in the dark hole.
“Private Smith isn't wounded yet?” asked the, sergeant again, five minutes later.
“No, Sergeant.”
Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well-being.
“That sergeant seems a very kind man,” said the boy. “Seems to love me like a father!”
A yell of laughter answered him.
“You poor, bleeding fool!” said one of his comrades. “He's drawn you in a lottery! Stood to win if you'd been hit.”
In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches.
“Bit of Bill,” said the leading man, putting in a leg.
“Another bit of Bill,” he said, unearthing a hand.
“Bill's ugly mug,” he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found.
As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.
How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: “Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!”
“Not so much of your 'Mercy, Kamerad,'” said the cockney. “'And us over your bloody ticker!”
It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment.
One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the war.
“Where's your prisoner?” asked an Intelligence officer waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest corporal.
“I lost him on the way, sir,” said the corporal.
“Lost him?”
The corporal was embarrassed.
“Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I'd been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies at 'ome, sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago and he'd never see her again. When he started cryin' I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter.”
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice—eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men's souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.
“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, “it doesn't do to take this war seriously.”
And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:
“That there Grand Fleet of ours don't seem to be very active, sir. It's a pity it don't come down these blinkin' trenches and do a bit of work!”
“Having a clean-up, my man?” said a brigadier to a soldier trying to wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug.
“Yes, sir,” said the man, “and I wish I was a blasted canary.”
One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it lasted. The colonel (who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a telephone message to his dugout telling him that two politicians were about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking him to show them something interesting.
“Interesting?” said the colonel. “Do they think this war is a peep-show for politicians? Do they want me to arrange a massacre to make a London holiday?” Then his voice changed and he laughed. “Show them something interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do that.”
He did. When the two M. P.'s arrived, apparently at the front-line trenches, they were informed by the colonel that, much to his regret, for their sake, the enemy was just attacking, and that his men were defending their position desperately.
“We hope for the best,” he said, “and I think there is just a chance that you will escape with your lives if you stay here quite quietly.”
“Great God!” said one of the M. P.'s, and the other was silent, but pale.
Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle—grenades and throwing bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, “We won't go home till morning,” in a most heroic way... The battle lasted twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced to his visitors:
“The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to fear.”
One of the M. P.'s was thrilled with excitement. “The valor of your men was marvelous,” he said. “What impressed me most was the cheerfulness of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came down on the stretchers.”
The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing. “Funny devils!” he said. “They are so glad to be going home.”
The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle—not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward.
XVII
On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer (visited from time to time by monstrous nightbirds who dropped high-explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns there, but generally some hundreds of young officers and men from many different battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the direction of General Baker-Carr, who was the master machine-gunner of the British army (at a time when we were very weak in those weapons compared with the enemy's strength) and a cheery, vital man.
“This war has produced two great dugouts,” said Lord Kitchener on a visit to the convent. “Me and Baker-Carr.”
It was the boys who interested me more than the machines. (I was never much interested in the machinery of war.) They came down from the trenches to this school with a sense of escape from prison, and for the ten days of their course they were like “freshers” at Oxford and made the most of their minutes, organizing concerts and other entertainments in the evenings after their initiation into the mysteries of Vickers and Lewis. I was invited to dinner there one night, and sat between two young cavalry officers on long benches crowded with subalterns of many regiments. It was a merry meal and a good one—to this day I remember a potato pie, gloriously baked, and afterward, as it was the last night of the course, all the officers went wild and indulged in a “rag” of the public-school kind. They straddled across the benches and barged at each other in single tourneys and jousts, riding their hobby-horses with violent rearings and plungings and bruising one another without grievous hurt and with yells of laughter. Glasses broke, crockery crashed upon the polished boards. One boy danced the Highland fling on the tables, others were waltzing down the corridors. There was a Rugby scrum in the refectory, and hunting-men cried the “View halloo!” and shouted “Yoicks! yoicks!” ... General Baker-Carr was a human soul, and kept to his own room that night and let discipline go hang....
When the battles of the Somme began it was those young officers who led their machine-gun sections into the woods of death—Belville Wood, Mametz Wood, High Wood, and the others. It was they who afterward held the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still alive on March 21, 1918, when they were surrounded by a sea of Germans and fought until the last, in isolated redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin. Two of them are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that night, and who escaped many close calls of death before the armistice. Of the others who charged one another with wooden benches, their laughter ringing out, some were blown to bits, and some were buried alive, and some were blinded and gassed, and some went “missing” for evermore.
XVIII
In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the will-power, the moral code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was bad enough in the trenches, where men looked across the parapet to the same corner of hell day by day, to the same dead bodies rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater, to the same old sand-bags in the enemy's line, to the blasted tree sliced by shell-fire, the upturned railway—truck of which only the metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the sky-line, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In “quiet” sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number of casualties day by day, by casual shell-fire or snipers' bullets, and that became part of the boredom. “What casualties?” asked the adjutant in his dugout.
“Two killed, three wounded, sir.”
“Very well... You can go.”
A salute in the doorway of the dugout, a groan from the adjutant lighting another cigarette, leaning with his elbow on the deal table, staring at the guttering of the candle by his side, at the pile of forms in front of him, at the glint of light on the steel helmet hanging by its strap on a nail near the shelf where he kept his safety-razor, flash—lamp, love-letters (in an old cigar-box), soap, whisky—bottle (almost empty now), and an unread novel.
“Hell!... What a life!”
But there was always work to do, and odd incidents, and frights, and responsibilities.
It was worse—this boredom—for men behind the lines; in lorry columns which went from rail-head to dump every damned morning, and back again by the middle of the morning, and then nothing else to do for all the day, in a cramped little billet with a sulky woman in the kitchen, and squealing children in the yard, and a stench of manure through the small window. A dull life for an actor who had toured in England and America (like one I met dazed and stupefied by years of boredom—paying too much for safety), or for a barrister who had many briefs before the war and now found his memory going, though a young man, because of the narrow limits of his life between one Flemish village and another, which was the length of his lorry column and of his adventure of war. Nothing ever happened to break the monotony—not even shell-fire. So it was also in small towns like Hesdin, St.-Pol, Bruay, Lillers—a hundred others where officers stayed for years in charge of motor-repair shops, ordnance-stores, labor battalions, administration offices, claim commissions, graves' registration, agriculture for soldiers, all kinds of jobs connected with that life of war, but not exciting.
Not exciting. So frightful in boredom that men were tempted to take to drink, to look around for unattached women, to gamble at cards with any poor devil like themselves. Those were most bored who were most virtuous. For them, with an ideal in their souls, there was no possibility of relief (for virtue is not its own reward), unless they were mystics, as some became, who found God good company and needed no other help. They had rare luck, those fellows with an astounding faith which rose above the irony and the brutality of that business being done in the trenches, but there were few of them.
Even with hours of leisure, men who had been “bookish” could not read. That was a common phenomenon. I could read hardly at all, for years, and thousands were like me. The most “exciting” novel was dull stuff up against that world convulsion. What did the romance of love mean, the little tortures of one man's heart, or one woman's, troubled in their mating, when thousands of men were being killed and vast populations were in agony? History—Greek or Roman or medieval—what was the use of reading that old stuff, now that world history was being made with a rush? Poetry—poor poets with their love of beauty! What did beauty matter, now that it lay dead in the soul of the world, under the filth of battlefields, and the dirt of hate and cruelty, and the law of the apelike man? No—we could not read; but talked and talked about the old philosophy of life, and the structure of society, and Democracy and Liberty and Patriotism and Internationalism, and Brotherhood of Men, and God, and Christian ethics; and then talked no more, because all words were futile, and just brooded and brooded, after searching the daily paper (two days old) for any kind of hope and light, not finding either.
XIX
At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came out to France with the cheerful shout of “Now we sha'n't be long!” before they fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons to the Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. The New Army boys who followed them were desperate to get out to “the great adventure.” They cursed the length of their training in English camps. “We sha'n't get out till it's too late!” they said. Too late, O God! Even when they had had their first spell in the trenches and came up against German strength they kept a queer faith, for a time, that “something” would happen to bring peace as quickly as war had come. Peace was always coming three months ahead. Generals and staff-officers, as well as sergeants and privates, had that strong optimism, not based on any kind of reason; but gradually it died out, and in its place came the awful conviction which settled upon the hearts of the fighting-men, that this war would go on forever, that it was their doom always to live in ditches and dugouts, and that their only way of escape was by a “Blighty” wound or by death.
A chaplain I knew used to try to cheer up despondent boys by pretending to have special knowledge of inside politics.
“I have it on good authority,” he said, “that peace is near at hand. There have been negotiations in Paris—”
Or:
“I don't mind telling you lads that if you get through the next scrap you will have peace before you know where you are.”
They were not believing, now. He had played that game too often.
“Old stuff, padre!” they said.
That particular crowd did not get through the next scrap. But the padre's authority was good. They had peace long before the armistice.
It was worst of all for boys of sensitive minds who were lucky enough to get a “cushie” wound, and so went on and on, or who were patched up again quickly after one, two, or three wounds, and came back again. It was a boy like that who revealed his bitterness to me one day as we stood together in the salient.
“It's the length of the war,” he said, “which does one down. At first it seemed like a big adventure, and the excitement of it, horrible though it was, kept one going. Even the first time I went over the top wasn't so bad as I thought it would be. I was dazed and drunk with all sorts of emotions, including fear, that were worse before going over. I had what we call `the needle.' They all have it. Afterward one didn't know what one was doing—even the killing part of the business—until one reached the objective and lay down and had time to think and to count the dead about... Now the excitement has gone out of it, and the war looks as though it would go on forever. At first we all searched the papers for some hope that the end was near. We don't do that now. We know that whenever the war ends, this year or next, this little crowd will be mostly wiped out. Bound to be. And why are we going to die? That's what all of us want to know. What's it all about? Oh yes, I know the usual answers: 'In defense of liberty,' 'To save the Empire.' But we've all lost our liberty. We're slaves under shell-fire. And as for the Empire—I don't give a curse for it. I'm thinking only of my little home at Streatham Hill. The horrible Hun? I've no quarrel with the poor blighters over there by Hooge. They are in the same bloody mess as we are. They hate it just as much. We're all under a spell together, which some devils have put on us. I wonder if there's a God anywhere.”
This sense of being under a black spell I found expressed by other men, and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: “This war was not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell.” This belief was due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which gun-fire is at so long a range that shell-fire has the quality of natural and elemental powers of death—like thunderbolts—and men killed twenty miles behind the lines while walking over sunny fields or in busy villages had no thought of a human enemy desiring their individual death.
God and Christianity raised perplexities in the minds of simple lads desiring life and not death. They could not reconcile the Christian precepts of the chaplain with the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles of the battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the fields of France and Flanders seemed to them—to many of them, I know—a certain proof that God did not exist, or if He did exist was not, as they were told, a God of Love, but a monster glad of the agonies of men. That at least was the thought expressed to me by some London lads who argued the matter with me one day, and that was the thought which our army chaplains had to meet from men who would not be put off by conventional words. It was not good enough to tell them that the Germans were guilty of all this crime and that unless the Germans were beaten the world would lose its liberty and life. “Yes, we know all that,” they said, “but why did God allow the Germans, or the statesmen who arranged the world by force, or the clergy who christened British warships? And how is it that both sides pray to the same God for victory? There must be something wrong somewhere.”
It was not often men talked like that, except to some chaplain who was a human, comradely soul, some Catholic “padre” who devoted himself fearlessly to their bodily and spiritual needs, risking his life with them, or to some Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa under shell-fire, with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, of “Keep your hearts up, my lads, and your heads down.”
Most of the men became fatalists, with odd superstitions in the place of faith. “It's no good worrying,” they said.
“If your name is written on a German shell you can't escape it, and if it isn't written, nothing can touch you.”
Officers as well as men had this fatalistic belief and superstitions which amused them and helped them. “Have the Huns found you out yet?” I asked some gunner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill. “Not yet,” said one of them, and then they all left the table at which we were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them ardently. They were touching wood.
“Take this with you,” said an Irish officer on a night I went to Ypres. “It will help you as it has helped me. It's my lucky charm.” He gave me a little bit of coal which he carried in his tunic, and he was so earnest about it that I took it without a smile and felt the safer for it.
Once in a while the men went home on seven days' leave, or four, and then came back again, gloomily, with a curious kind of hatred of England because the people there seemed so callous to their suffering, so utterly without understanding, so “damned cheerful.” They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men who said, “If I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause.” They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England—to make the people know what war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all.
From a week-end at home I stood among a number of soldiers who were going back to the front, after one of those leaves. The boat warped away from the pier, the M. T. O. and a small group of officers, detectives, and Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and the “revenants” on deck stared back at the cliffs of England across a widening strip of sea.
“Back to the bloody old trenches,” said a voice, and the words ended with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards, whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said, “Do be careful, Desmond, for my sake!” Afterward he had sat in the corner of his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A few days later he was blown to bits by a bomb—an accident of war.)
A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, “You know who I am, don't you, sir?”
I hadn't the least idea who he was—this little ginger—haired soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the claret-colored ribbon of the V. C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his name, and said the papers had “done him proud,” and that they had made a lot of him at home—presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor's addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes, though one couldn't tell it by the look of him.
“Now I'm going back to the trenches,” he said, gloomily. “Same old business and one of the crowd again.” He was suffering from the reaction of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff-officers, chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and army nurses were more interested in an airship, a silver fish with shining gills and a humming song in its stomach.
France... and the beginning of what the little V. C. had called “the same old business.” There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way down the Strand.
Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which goes down to the deck of the hospital-ship, on which an officer was ticking off each wounded body after a glance at the label tied to the man's tunic. Several young officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers and one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down upon him. The same old business and the same old pluck.
I motored down the long, straight roads of France eastward, toward that network of lines which are the end of all journeys after a few days' leave, home and back again. The same old sights and sounds and smells which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck to live through the war, will haunt them for the rest of life, and speak of Flanders.
The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week or two before, there had been fields of high, bronzed corn there were now long stretches of stubbled ground waiting for the plow. The wheat-sheaves had been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were motionless because no breath of air stirred on this September afternoon. The smell of Flemish villages—a mingled odor of sun-baked thatch and bakeries and manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors stored up through the centuries—was overborne by a new and more pungent aroma which crept over the fields with the evening haze.
It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there be another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine.
Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were keen, to mind its menace—those soldiers who came marching down the road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would “grouse” at the duration of the war and swear that he was “fed up” with it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The hammering of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the shell-shock cases.
But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out of tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back to the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who once belonged to a civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way, because it was the very best thing to do.
One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the “feel” of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's way down country lanes—“The Veritable Cuckoo” and “The Lost Corner” and “The Flower of the Fields”—and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh!
So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in the market-place of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we last passed this way.
London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed a year ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer surprise that, after all, this business of war was something more real than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came back to them and became the normal instead of the abnormal. They were back again to the settled state of war, as boys go back to public schools after the wrench from home, and find that the holiday is only the incident and school the more enduring experience.
There were no new impressions, only the repetition of old impressions. So I found when I heard the guns again and watched the shells bursting about Ypres and over Kemmel Ridge and Messines church tower.
Two German airplanes passed overhead, and the hum of their engines was loud in my ears as I lay in the grass. Our shrapnel burst about them, but did not touch their wings. All around there was the slamming of great guns, and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a shell-hole, thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of all this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled me for miles. No amount of meditation would screw a new meaning out of it all. It was just the commonplace of life out here.
The routine of it went on. The officer who came back from home stepped into his old place, and after the first greeting of, “Hullo, old man! Had a good time?” found his old job waiting for him. So there was a new brigadier-general? Quick promotion, by Jove!
Four men had got knocked out that morning at D4, and it was rotten bad luck that the sergeant-major should have been among them. A real good fellow. However, there's that court martial for this afternoon, and, by the by, when is that timber coming up? Can't build the new dugout if there's no decent wood to be got by stealing or otherwise. You heard how the men got strafed in their billets the other day? Dirty work!
The man who had come back went into the trenches and had a word or two with the N.C.O.'s. Then he went into his own dugout. The mice had been getting at his papers. Oh yes, that's where he left his pipe! It was lying under the trestle-table, just where he dropped it before going on leave. The clay walls were a bit wet after the rains. He stood with a chilled feeling in this little hole of his, staring at every familiar thing in it.
Tacked to the wall was the portrait of a woman. He said good-by to her at Victoria Station. How long ago? Surely more than seven hours, or seven years... Outside there were the old noises. The guns were at it again. That was a trench-mortar. The enemy's eight-inch howitzers were plugging away. What a beastly row that machine-gun was making! Playing on the same old spot. Why couldn't they leave it alone, the asses?... Anyhow, there was no doubt about it—he had come back again. Back to the trenches and the same old business.
There was a mine to be blown up that night and it would make a pretty mess in the enemy's lines. The colonel was very cheerful about it, and explained that a good deal of sapping had been done. “We've got the bulge on 'em,” he said, referring to the enemy's failures in this class of work. In the mess all the officers were carrying on as usual, making the same old jokes.
The man who had come back got back also the spirit of the thing with astonishing rapidity. That other life of his, away there in old London, was shut up in the cupboard of his heart.
So it went on and on until the torture of its boredom was broken by the crash of big battles, and the New Armies, which had been learning lessons in the School of Courage, went forward to the great test, and passed, with honor.
PART THREE. THE NATURE OF A BATTLE
I
In September of 1915 the Commander-in-Chief and his staff were busy with preparations for a battle, in conjunction with the French, which had ambitious objects. These have never been stated because they were not gained (and it was the habit of our High Command to conceal its objectives and minimize their importance if their hopes were unfulfilled), but beyond doubt the purpose of the battle was to gain possession of Lens and its coal-fields, and by striking through Hulluch and Haisnes to menace the German occupation of Lille. On the British front the key of the enemy's position was Hill 70, to the north of Lens, beyond the village of Loos, and the capture of that village and that hill was the first essential of success.
The assault on these positions was to be made by two New Army divisions of the 4th Corps: the 47th (London) Division, and the 15th (Scottish) Division. They were to be supported by the 11th Corps, consisting of the Guards and two new and untried divisions, the 21st and the 24th. The Cavalry Corps (less the 3d Cavalry Division under General Fanshawe) was in reserve far back at St.-Pol and Pernes; and the Indian Cavalry Corps under General Remington was at Doullens; “to be in readiness,” wrote Sir John French, “to co-operate with the French cavalry in exploiting any success which might be attained by the French and British forces.”... Oh, wonderful optimism! In that Black Country of France, scattered with mining villages in which every house was a machine-gun fort, with slag heaps and pit-heads which were formidable redoubts, with trenches and barbed wire and brick-stacks, and quarries, organized for defense in siege-warfare, cavalry might as well have ridden through hell with hope of “exploiting” success... “Plans for effective co-operation were fully arranged between the cavalry commanders of both armies,” wrote our Commander-in-Chief in his despatch. I can imagine those gallant old gentlemen devising their plans, with grave courtesy, over large maps, and A. D. C.'s clicking heels in attendance, and an air of immense wisdom and most cheerful assurance governing the proceedings in the salon of a French chateau. .. The 3d Cavalry Division, less one brigade, was assigned to the First Army as a reserve, and moved into the area of the 4th Corps on the 2lst and 22d of September.
II
The movements of troops and the preparations for big events revealed to every British soldier in France the “secret” of the coming battle. Casualty clearing-stations were ordered to make ready for big numbers of wounded. That was always one of the first signs of approaching massacre. Vast quantities of shells were being brought up to the rail-heads and stacked in the “dumps.” They were the first-fruit of the speeding up of munition-factories at home after the public outcry against shell shortage and the lack of high explosives. Well, at last the guns would not be starved. There was enough high-explosive force available to blast the German trenches off the map. So it seemed to our innocence—though years afterward we knew that no bombardment would destroy all earthworks such as Germans made, and that always machine-guns would slash our infantry advancing over the chaos of mangled ground.
Behind our lines in France, in scores of villages where our men were quartered, there was a sense of impending fate. Soldiers of the New Army knew that in a little while the lessons they had learned in the School of Courage would be put to a more frightful test than that of holding trenches in stationary warfare. Their boredom, the intolerable monotony of that routine life, would be broken by more sensational drama, and some of them were glad of that, and said: “Let's get on with it. Anything rather than that deadly stagnation.” And others, who guessed they were chosen for the coming battle, and had a clear vision of what kind of things would happen (they knew something about the losses at Neuve Chapelle and Festubert), became more thoughtful than usual, deeply introspective, wondering how many days of life they had left to them.
Life was good out of the line in that September of '15. The land of France was full of beauty, with bronzed corn-stooks in the fields, and scarlet poppies in the grass, and a golden sunlight on old barns and on little white churches and in orchards heavy with fruit. It was good to go into the garden of a French chateau and pluck a rose and smell its sweetness, and think back to England, where other roses were blooming. England!... And in a few days—who could say?—perhaps eternal sleep somewhere near Lens.
Some officers of the Guards came into the garden of the little house where I lived at that time with other onlookers. It was an untidy garden, with a stretch of grass-plot too rough to be called a lawn, but with pleasant shade under the trees, and a potager with raspberries and currants on the bushes, and flower-beds where red and white roses dropped their petals.
Two officers of the Scots Guards, inseparable friends, came to gossip with us, and read the papers, and drink a little whisky in the evenings, and pick the raspberries. They were not professional soldiers. One of them had been a stock-broker, the other “something in the city.” They disliked the army system with an undisguised hatred and contempt. They hated war with a ferocity which was only a little “camouflaged” by the irony and the brutality of their anecdotes of war's little comedies. They took a grim delight in the humor of corpses, lice, bayonet—work, and the sniping of fair-haired German boys. They laughed, almost excessively, at these attributes of warfare, and one of them used to remark, after some such anecdote, “And once I was a little gentleman!”
He was a gentleman still, with a love of nature in his heart—I saw him touch the petals of living roses with a caress in his finger-tips—and with a spiritual revolt against the beastliness of this new job of his, although he was a strong, hard fellow, without weakness of sentiment. His close comrade was of more delicate fiber, a gentle soul, not made for soldiering at all, but rather for domestic life, with children about him, and books. As the evenings passed in this French village, drawing him closer to Loos by the flight of time, I saw the trouble in his eyes which he tried to hide by smiling and by courteous conversation. He was being drawn closer to Loos and farther away from the wife who knew nothing of what that name meant to her and to him.
Other officers of the Guards came into the garden—Grenadiers. There were two young brothers of an old family who had always sent their sons to war. They looked absurdly young when they took off their tunics and played a game of cricket, with a club for a bat, and a tennis-ball. They were just schoolboys, but with the gravity of men who knew that life is short. I watched their young athletic figures, so clean-limbed, so full of grace, as they threw the ball, and had a vision of them lying mangled.
An Indian prince came into the garden. It was “Ranjitsinji,” who had carried his bat to many a pavilion where English men and women had clapped their hands to him, on glorious days when there was sunlight on English lawns. He took the club and stood at the wicket and was bowled third ball by a man who had only played cricket after ye manner of Stratford-atte-Bow. But then he found himself, handled the club like a sword, watched the ball with a falcon's eye, played with it. He was on the staff of the Indian Cavalry Corps, which was “to co-operate in exploiting any success.”
“To-morrow we move,” said one of the Scots Guards officers. The colonel of the battalion came to dinner at our mess, sitting down to a white tablecloth for the last time in his life. They played a game of cards, and went away earlier than usual.
Two of them lingered after the colonel had gone. They drank more whisky.
“We must be going,” they said, but did not go.
The delicate-looking man could not hide the trouble in his eyes.
“I sha'n't be killed this time,” he said to a friend of mine. “I shall be badly wounded.”
The hard man, who loved flowers, drank his fourth glass of whisky.
“It's going to be damned uncomfortable,” he said. “I wish the filthy thing were over. Our generals will probably arrange some glorious little massacres. I know 'em!... Well, good night, all.”
They went out into the darkness of the village lane. Battalions were already on the move, in the night. Their steady tramp of feet beat on the hard road. Their dark figures looked like an army of ghosts. Sparks were spluttering out of the funnels of army cookers. A British soldier in full field kit was kissing a woman in the shadow-world of an estaminet. I passed close to them, almost touching them before I was aware of their presence.
“Bonne chance!” said the woman. “Quand to reviens—”
“One more kiss, lassie,” said the man.
“Mans comme to es gourmand, toi!”
He kissed her savagely, hungrily. Then he lurched off the sidewalk and formed up with other men in the darkness.
The Scots Guards moved next morning. I stood by the side of the colonel, who was in a gruff mood.
“It looks like rain,” he said, sniffing the air. “It will probably rain like hell when the battle begins.”
I think he was killed somewhere by Fosse 8. The two comrades in the Scots Guards were badly wounded. One of the young brothers was killed and the other maimed. I found their names in the casualty lists which filled columns of The Times for a long time after Loos.
III
The town of Bethune was the capital of our army in the Black Country of the French coal-fields. It was not much shelled in those days, though afterward—years afterward—it was badly damaged by long-range guns, so that its people fled, at last, after living so long on the edge of war.
Its people were friendly to our men, and did not raise their prices exorbitantly. There were good shops in the town—“as good as Paris,” said soldiers who had never been to Paris, but found these plate-glass windows dazzling, after trench life, and loved to see the “mamzelles” behind the counters and walking out smartly, with little high-heeled shoes. There were tea-shops, crowded always with officers on their way to the line or just out of it, and they liked to speak French with the girls who served them. Those girls saw the hunger in those men's eyes, who watched every movement they made, who tried to touch their hands and their frocks in passing. They knew they were desired, as daughters of Eve, by boys who were starved of love. They took that as part of their business, distributing cakes and buns without favor, with laughter in their eyes, and a merry word or two. Now and then, when they had leisure, they retired to inner rooms, divided by curtains from the shop, and sat on the knees of young British officers, while others played ragtime or sentimental ballads on untuned pianos. There was champagne as well as tea to be had in these bun—shops, but the A. P. M. was down on disorder or riotous gaiety, and there were no orgies. “Pas d'orgies,” said the young ladies severely when things were getting a little too lively. They had to think of their business.
Down side-streets here and there were houses where other women lived, not so severe in their point of view. Their business, indeed, did not permit of severity, and they catered for the hunger of men exiled year after year from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. They gave the base counterfeit of love in return for a few francs, and there were long lines of men—English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers—who waited their turn to get that vile imitation of life's romance from women who were bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price than a few francs for the Circe's cup of pleasure, which changed them into swine for a while, until the spell passed, and would have blasted their souls if God were not understanding of human weakness and of war. They paid in their bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of ours who loved life and beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth and shell-fire, and were trained to kill, and knew that death was hunting for them and had all the odds of luck. Their children and their children's children will pay also for the sins of their fathers, by rickety limbs and water—on-the-brain, and madness, and tuberculosis, and other evils which are the wages of sin, which flourished most rankly behind the fields of war.
The inhabitants of Bethune—the shopkeepers, and brave little families of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines, and harlots—came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and watched the British army pouring through—battalions of Londoners and Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by hard-mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances, empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after day.
“Bonne chance!” cried the women, waving hands and handkerchiefs.
“Les pauvres enfants!” said the old women, wiping their eyes on dirty aprons. “We know how it is. They will be shot to pieces. It is always like that, in this sacred war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those dirty Boches! Those sacred bandits!”
“They are going to give the Boches a hard knock,” said grizzled men, who remembered in their boyhood another war. “The English army is ready. How splendid they are, those boys! And ours are on the right of them. This time—!”
“Mother of God, hark at the guns!”
At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and listened to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and Noeux-les-Mines, and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where the French guns were at work. There were loud, earth—shaking rumblings, and now and then enormous concussions. In the night sky lights rose in long, spreading bars of ruddy luminance, in single flashes, in sudden torches of scarlet flame rising to the clouds and touching them with rosy feathers.
“'Cre nom de Dieu!” said French peasants, on the edge of all that, in villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Houdain, Grenay, Bruay, and Pernes. “The caldron is boiling up... There will be a fine pot-au-feu.”
They wondered if their own sons would be in the broth. Some of them knew, and crossed themselves by wayside shrines for the sake of their sons' souls, or in their estaminets cursed the Germans with the same old curses for having brought all this woe into the world.
IV
In those villages—Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others—on the edge of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and villages, getting a fine edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing, and having their morale heightened by addresses from brigadiers and divisional commanders on the glorious privilege which was about to be theirs of leading the assault, and on the joys as well as the duty of killing Germans.
In one battalion of Scots—the 10th Gordons, who were afterward the 8/10th—there were conferences of company commanders and whispered consultations of subalterns. They were “Kitchener” men, from Edinburgh and Aberdeen and other towns in the North. I came to know them all after this battle, and gave them fancy names in my despatches: the Georgian gentleman, as handsome as Beau Brummell, and a gallant soldier, who was several times wounded, but came back to command his old battalion, and then was wounded again nigh unto death, but came back again; and Honest John, slow of speech, with a twinkle in his eyes, careless of shell splinters flying around his bullet head, hard and tough and cunning in war; and little Ginger, with his whimsical face and freckles, and love of pretty girls and all children, until he was killed in Flanders; and the Permanent Temporary Lieutenant who fell on the Somme; and the Giant who had a splinter through his brain beyond Arras; and many other Highland gentlemen, and one English padre who went with them always to the trenches, until a shell took his head off at the crossroads.
It was the first big attack of the 15th Division. They were determined to go fast and go far. Their pride of race was stronger than the strain on their nerves. Many of them, I am certain, had no sense of fear, no apprehension of death or wounds. Excitement, the comradeship of courage, the rivalry of battalions, lifted them above anxiety before the battle began, though here and there men like Ginger, of more delicate fiber, of imagination as well as courage, must have stared in great moments at the grisly specter toward whom they would soon be walking.
In other villages were battalions of the 47th London Division. They, too, were to be in the first line of attack, on the right of the Scots. They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London. They were a different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel—nerved, with more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more instinctive revolt against the butchery that was to come. But they, too, had been “doped” for morale, their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be London's day out. They were to fight for the glory of the old town... the old town where they had lived in little suburban houses with flower-gardens, where they had gone up by the early morning trains to city offices and government offices and warehouses and shops, in days before they ever guessed they would go a-soldiering, and crouch in shell-holes under high explosives, and thrust sharp steel into German bowels. But they would do their best. They would go through with it. They would keep their sense of humor and make cockney jokes at death. They would show the stuff of London pride.
“Domine, dirige nos!”
I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in tea-shops with them when they were playing dominoes, before the war, as though that were the most important game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-dress ball in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter Raleigh and I was Richard Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers of life—chroniclers of passing history. I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my friend went into the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way of life became a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and afterward sat in shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that death would find him, as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with one man whom afterward I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near Arras, on an afternoon when a shell had killed three of his men bathing in a tank, and other shells made a mess of blood and flesh in his wagon-lines. We both wore steel hats, and he was the first to recognize a face from the world of peace. After his greeting he swore frightful oaths, cursing the war and the Staff. His nerves were all jangled. There was another officer in the 47th London Division whom I had known as a boy. He was only nineteen when he enlisted, not twenty when he had fought through several battles. He and hundreds like him had been playing at red Indians in Kensington Gardens a few years before an August in 1914... The 47th London Division, going forward to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose souls had been shaped by all the influences of environment, habit, and tradition in which I had been born and bred. Their cradle had been rocked to the murmurous roar of London traffic. Their first adventures had been on London Commons. The lights along the Embankment, the excitement of the streets, the faces of London crowds, royal pageantry—marriages, crownings, burials—on the way to Westminster, the little dramas of London life, had been woven into the fiber of their thoughts, and it was the spirit of London which went with them wherever they walked in France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to the things they saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves on the way to Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of courage.
V
I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from many points of view. It was a hideous territory, this Black Country between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number of high black cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were called Fosses. Around those black mounds there was great slaughter, as at Fosse 8 and Fosse 10 and Puits 14bis, and the Double Crassier near Loos, because they gave observation and were important to capture or hold. Near them were the pit-heads, with winding-gear in elevated towers of steel which were smashed and twisted by gun-fire; and in Loos itself were two of those towers joined by steel girders and gantries, called the “Tower Bridge” by men of London. Rows of red cottages where the French miners had lived were called corons, and where they were grouped into large units they were called cites, like the Cite St.-Auguste, the Cite St.-Pierre, and the Cite St.-Laurent, beyond Hill 70, on the outskirts of Lens. All those places were abandoned now by black-grimed men who had fled down mine-shafts and galleries with their women and children, and had come up on our side of the lines at Noeux-les-Mines or Bruay or Bully-Grenay, where they still lived close to the war. Shells pierced the roof of the church in that squalid village of Noeux—les-Mines and smashed some of the cottages and killed some of the people now and then. Later in the war, when aircraft dropped bombs at night, a new peril over—shadowed them with terror, and they lived in their cellars after dusk, and sometimes were buried there. But they would not retreat farther back—not many of them—and on days of battle I saw groups of French miners and dirty-bloused girls excited by the passage of our troops and by the walking wounded who came stumbling back, and by stretcher cases unloaded from ambulances to the floors of their dirty cottages. High velocities fell in some of the streets, shrapnel-shells whined overhead and burst like thunderclaps. Young hooligans of France slouched around with their hands in their pockets, talking to our men in a queer lingua franca, grimacing at those noises if they did not come too near. I saw lightly wounded girls among them, with bandaged heads and hands, but they did not think that a reason for escape. With smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers in steel hats and clasped their arms or leaned against their shoulders. They had known many of those men before. They were their sweethearts. In those foul little mining towns the British troops had liked their billets, because of the girls there. London boys and Scots “kept company” with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes, and taught them a base patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on their cheeks when the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of death. They were kind-hearted little sluts with astounding courage.
“Aren't you afraid of this place?” I asked one of them in Bully-Grenay when it was “unhealthy” there. “You might be killed here any minute.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Je m'en fiche de la mort!” (“I don't care a damn about death.”)
I had the same answer from other girls in other places.
That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos—those mining towns behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from a place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had his trenches and earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life aboveground, in which many men were hidden.
Storms of gun-fire broke loose from our batteries a week before the battle. It was our first demonstration of those stores of high-explosive shells which had been made by the speeding up of munition-work in England, and of a gun-power which had been growing steadily since the coming out of the New Army. The weather was heavy with mist and a drizzle of rain. Banks of smoke made a pall over all the arena of war, and it was stabbed and torn by the incessant flash of bursting shells. I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable veil which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be seen, no slaughter, no heroic episode—only through rifts in the smoke the blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins. German trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the tombs of living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones—all that was certain but invisible.
“Very boring,” said an officer by my side. “Not a damn thing to be seen.”
“Our men ought to have a walk-over,” said an optimist. “Any living German must be a gibbering idiot with shell-shock.”
“I expect they're playing cards in their dugouts,” said the officer who was bored. “Even high explosives don't go down very deep.”
“It's stupendous, all the same. By God! hark at that! It seems more than human. It's like some convulsion of nature.”
“There's no adventure in modern war,” said the bored man. “It's a dirty scientific business. I'd kill all chemists and explosive experts.”
“Our men will have adventure enough when they go over the top at dawn. Hell must be a game compared with that.”
The guns went on pounding away, day after day, laboring, pummeling, hammering, like Thor with his thunderbolts. It was the preparation for battle. No men were out of the trenches yet, though some were being killed there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and outside the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of Vermelles, and away up at Cambrin and Givenchy. The German guns were answering back intermittently, but holding most of their fire until human flesh came out into the open. The battle began at dawn on September 25th.
VI
In order to distract the enemy's attention and hold his troops away from the main battle-front, “subsidiary attacks” were made upon the German lines as far north as Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypres, and southward to La Bassee Canal at Givenchy, by the troops of the Second and Third Armies. This object, wrote Sir John French, in his despatch, “was most effectively achieved.” It was achieved by the bloody sacrifice of many brave battalions in the 3d and 14th Divisions (Yorkshire, Royal Scots, King's Royal Rifles, and others), and by the Meerut Division of the Indian Corps, who set out to attack terrible lines without sufficient artillery support, and without reserves behind them, and without any chance of holding the ground they might capture. It was part of the system of war. They were the pawns of “strategy,” serving a high purpose in a way that seemed to them without reason. Not for them was the glory of a victorious assault. Their job was to “demonstrate” by exposing their bodies to devouring fire, and by attacking earthworks which they were not expected to hold. Here and there men of ours, after their rush over No Man's Land under a deadly sweep of machine-gun fire, flung themselves into the enemy's trenches, bayoneting the Germans and capturing the greater part of their first line. There they lay panting among wounded and dead, and after that shoveled up earth and burrowed to get cover from the shelling which was soon to fall on them. Quickly the enemy discovered their whereabouts and laid down a barrage fire which, with deadly accuracy, plowed up their old front line and tossed it about on the pitchforks of bursting shells. Our men's bodies were mangled in that earth. High explosives plunged into the midst of little groups crouching in holes and caverns of the ground, and scattered their limbs. Living, unwounded men lay under those screaming shells with the panting hearts of toads under the beat of flails. Wounded men crawled back over No Man's Land, and some were blown to bits as they crawled, and others got back. Before nightfall, in the dark, a general retirement was ordered to our original line in that northern sector, owing to the increasing casualties under the relentless work of the German guns. Like ants on the move, thousands of men rose from the upheaved earth, and with their stomachs close to it, crouching, came back, dragging their wounded. The dead were left.
“On the front of the Third Army,” wrote Sir John French, “subsidiary operations of a similar nature were successfully carried out.”
From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mothers' sons they had been a bloody shambles without any gain. The point of view depends on the angle of vision.
VII
Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the field—no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood—and from the officers who survived. It is a story full of the psychology of battle, with many strange incidents which happened to men when their spirit was uplifted by that mingling of exultation and fear which is heroism, and with queer episodes almost verging on comedy in the midst of death and agony, at the end of a day of victory, most ghastly failure.
The three attacking divisions from left to right on the line opposite the villages of Hulluch and Loos were the 1st, the 15th (Scottish), and the 47th (London). Higher up, opposite Hulluch and Haisnes, the 9th (Scottish) Division and the 7th Division were in front of the Hohenzollern redoubt (chalky earthworks thrust out beyond the German front-line trenches, on rising ground) and some chalk-quarries.
The men of those divisions were lined up during the night in the communication trenches, which had been dug by the sappers and laid with miles of telephone wire. They were silent, except for the chink of shovels and side arms, the shuffle of men's feet, their hard breathing, and occasional words of command. At five-thirty, when the guns in all our batteries were firing at full blast, with a constant scream of shells over the heads of the waiting men, and when the first faint light of day stole into the sky, there was a slight rain falling, and the wind blew lightly from the southwest.
In the front-line trenches a number of men were busy with some long, narrow cylinders, which had been carried up a day before. They were arranging them in the mud of the parapets with their nozles facing the enemy lines.
“That's the stuff to give them!”
“What is it?”
“Poison-gas. Worse than they used at Ypres.”
“Christ!... supposing we have to walk through it?”
“We shall walk behind it. The wind will carry it down the throat of the Fritzes. We shall find 'em dead.”
So men I met had talked of that new weapon which most of them hated.
It was at five-thirty when the men busy with the cylinders turned on little taps. There was a faint hissing noise, the escape of gas from many pipes. A heavy, whitish cloud came out of the cylinders and traveled aboveground as it was lifted and carried forward by the breeze.
“How's the gas working?” asked a Scottish officer.
“Going fine!” said an English officer. But he looked anxious, and wetted a finger and held it up, to get the direction of the wind.
Some of the communication trenches were crowded with the Black Watch of the 1st Division, hard, bronzed fellows, with the red heckle in their bonnets. (It was before the time of steel hats.) They were leaning up against the walls of the trenches, waiting. They were strung round with spades, bombs, and sacks.
“A queer kind o' stink!” said one of them, sniffing.
Some of the men began coughing. Others were rubbing their eyes, as though they smarted.
The poison-gas... The wind had carried it half way across No Man's Land, then a swirl changed its course, and flicked it down a gully, and swept it right round to the Black Watch in the narrow trenches. Some German shell-fire was coming, too. In one small bunch eight men fell in a mush of blood and raw flesh. But the gas was worse. There was a movement in the trenches, the huddling together of frightened men who had been very brave. They were coughing, spitting, gasping. Some of them fell limp against their fellows, with pallid cheeks which blackened. Others tied handkerchiefs about their mouths and noses, but choked inside those bandages, and dropped to earth with a clatter of shovels. Officers and men were cursing and groaning. An hour later, when the whistles blew, there were gaps in the line of the 1st Division which went over the top. In the trenches lay gassed men. In No Man's Land others fell, swept by machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives. The 1st Division was “checked.”...
“We caught it badly,” said some of them I met later in the day, bandaged and bloody, and plastered in wet chalk, while gassed men lay on stretchers about them, unconscious, with laboring lungs.
VIII
Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) Division climbed over their parapets at six-thirty, and saw the open ground before them, and the dusky, paling sky above them, and broken wire in front of the enemy's churned-up trenches; and through the smoke, faintly, and far away, three and a half miles away, the ghostly outline of the “Tower Bridge” of Loos, which was their goal. For an hour there were steady tides of men all streaming slowly up those narrow communication ways, cut through the chalk to get into the light also, where death was in ambush for many of them somewhere in the shadows of that dawn.
By seven-forty the two assaulting brigades of the 15th Division had left the trenches and were in the open. Shriller than the scream of shells above them was the skirl of pipes, going with them. The Pipe Major of the 8th Gordons was badly wounded, but refused to be touched until the other men were tended. He was a giant, too big for a stretcher, and had to be carried back on a tarpaulin. At the dressing-station his leg was amputated, but he died after two operations, and the Gordons mourned him.
While the Highlanders went forward with their pipes, two brigades of the Londoners, on their right, were advancing in the direction of the long, double slag heap, southwest of Loos, called the Double Crassier. Some of them were blowing mouth-organs, playing the music-hall song of “Hullo, hullo, it's a different girl again!” and the “Robert E. Lee,” until one after another a musician fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel burst over them, and here and there shells plowed up the earth where they were trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French still stayed in their trenches—their own attack was postponed until midday—and they cheered the London men, as they went forward, with cries of, “Vivent les Angdais!” “A mort—les Boches!” It was they who saw one man kicking a football in advance of the others.
“He is mad!” they said. “The poor boy is a lunatic!”
“He is not mad,” said a French officer who had lived in England. “It is a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the British sport.”
It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he held it for fourteen hundred yards—the best-kicked goal in history.
Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man's Land. But they were not missed then by those who went on in waves—rather, like molecules, separating, collecting, splitting up into smaller groups, bunching together again, on the way to the first line of German trenches. A glint of bayonets made a quickset hedge along the line of churned-up earth which had been the Germans' front—line trench. Our guns had cut the wire or torn gaps into it. Through the broken strands went the Londoners on the right, the Scots on the left, shouting hoarsely now. They saw red. They were hunters of human flesh. They swarmed down into the first long ditch, trampling over dead bodies, falling over them, clawing the earth and scrambling up the parados, all broken and crumbled, then on again to another ditch. Boys dropped with bullets in their brains, throats, and bodies. German machine-guns were at work at close range.
“Give'em hell!” said an officer of the Londoners—a boy of nineteen. There were a lot of living Germans in the second ditch, and in holes about. Some of them stood still, as though turned to clay, until they fell with half the length of a bayonet through their stomachs. Others shrieked and ran a little way before they died. Others sat behind hillocks of earth, spraying our men with machine-gun bullets until bombs were hurled on them and they were scattered into lumps of flesh.
Three lines of trench were taken, and the Londoners and the Scots went forward again in a spate toward Loos. All the way from our old lines men were streaming up, with shells bursting among them or near them.
On the way to Loos a company of Scots came face to face with a tall German. He was stone-dead, with a bullet in his brain, his face all blackened with the grime of battle; but he stood erect in the path, wedged somehow in a bit of trench. The Scots stared at this figure, and their line parted and swept each side of him, as though some obscene specter barred the way. Rank after rank streamed up, and then a big tide of men poured through the German trench systems and rushed forward. Three—quarters of a mile more to Loos. Some of them were panting, out of breath, speechless. Others talked to the men about them in stray sentences. Most of them were silent, staring ahead of them and licking their lips with swollen tongues. They were parched with thirst, some of them told me. Many stopped to drink the last drop out of their water-bottles. As one man drank he spun round and fell with a thud on his face. Machine-gun bullets were whipping up the earth. From Loos came a loud and constant rattle of machine-guns. Machine-guns were firing out of the broken windows of the houses and from the top of the “Tower Bridge,” those steel girders which rose three hundred feet high from the center of the village, and from slit trenches across the narrow streets. There were one hundred machine-guns in the cemetery to the southwest of the town, pouring out lead upon the Londoners who had to pass that place.
Scots and London men were mixed up, and mingled in crowds which encircled Loos, and forced their way into the village; but roughly still, and in the mass, they were Scots who assaulted Loos itself, and London men who went south of it to the chalk-pits and the Double Crassier.
It was eight o'clock in the morning when the first crowds reached the village, and for nearly two hours afterward there was street-fighting.
It was the fighting of men in the open, armed with bayonets, rifles, and bombs, against men invisible and in hiding, with machine-guns. Small groups of Scots, like packs of wolves, prowled around the houses, where the lower rooms and cellars were crammed with Germans, trapped and terrified, but still defending themselves. In some of the houses they would not surrender, afraid of certain death, anyhow, and kept the Scots at bay awhile until those kilted men flung themselves in and killed their enemy to the last man. Outside those red-brick houses lay dead and wounded Scots. Inside there were the curses and screams of a bloody vengeance. In other houses the machine-gun garrisons ceased fire and put white rags through the broken windows, and surrendered like sheep. So it was in one house entered by a little kilted signaler, who shot down three men who tried to kill him. Thirty others held their hands up and said, in a chorus of fear, “Kamerad! Kamerad!”
A company of the 8th Gordons were among the first into Loos, led by some of those Highland officers I have mentioned on another page. It was “Honest John” who led one crowd of them, and he claims now, with a laugh, that he gained his Military Cross for saving the lives of two hundred Germans. “I ought to have got the Royal Humane Society's medal,” he said. Those Germans—Poles, really, from Silesia—came swarming out of a house with their hands up. But the Gordons had tasted blood. They were hungry for it. They were panting and shouting, with red bayonets, behind their officer.
That young man thought deeply and quickly. If there were “no quarter” it might be ugly for the Gordons later in the day, and the day was young, and Loos was still untaken.
He stood facing his own men, ordered them sternly to keep steady. These men were to be taken prisoners and sent back under escort. He had his revolver handy, and, anyhow, the men knew him. They obeyed, grumbling sullenly.
There was the noise of fire in other parts of the village, and the tap-tap-tap of machine-guns from many cellars. Bombing-parties of Scots silenced those machine-gunners at last by going to the head of the stairways and flinging down their hand-grenades. The cellars of Loos were full of dead.
In one of them, hours after the fighting had ceased among the ruins of the village, and the line of fire was forward of Hill 70, a living man still hid and carried on his work. The colonel of one of our forward battalions came into Loos with his signalers and runners, and established his headquarters in a house almost untouched by shell-fire. At the time there was very little shelling, as the artillery officers on either side were afraid of killing their own men, and the house seemed fairly safe for the purpose of a temporary signal-station.
But the colonel noticed that shortly after his arrival heavy shells began to fall very close and the Germans obviously were aiming directly for this building. He ordered the cellars to be searched, and three Germans were found. It was only after he had been in the house for forty minutes that in a deeper cellar, which had not been seen before, the discovery was made of a German officer who was telephoning to his own batteries and directing their fire. Suspecting that the colonel and his companions were important officers directing general operations, he had caused the shells to fall upon the house knowing that a lucky shot would mean his own death as well as theirs.
As our searchers came into the cellar, he rose and stood there, waiting, with a cold dignity, for the fate which he knew would come to him, as it did. He was a very brave man.
Another German officer remained hiding in the church, which was so heavily mined that it would have blown half the village into dust and ashes if he had touched off the charges. He was fumbling at the job when our men found and killed him.
In the southern outskirts of Loos, and in the cemetery, the Londoners had a bloody fight among the tombstones, where nests of German machine-guns had been built into the vaults. New corpses, still bleeding, lay among old dead torn from their coffins by shell-fire. Londoners and Siiesian Germans lay together across one another's bodies. The London men routed out most of the machine-gunners and bayoneted some and took prisoners of others. They were not so fierce as the Scots, but in those hours forgot the flower-gardens in Streatham and Tooting Bec and the manners of suburban drawing rooms.. . It is strange that one German machine-gun, served by four men, remained hidden behind a gravestone all through that day, and Saturday, and Sunday, and sniped stray men of ours until routed at last by moppers-up of the Guards brigade.
As the Londoners came down the slope to the southern edge of Loos village, through a thick haze of smoke from shell-fire and burning houses, they were astounded to meet a crowd of civilians, mostly women and children, who came streaming across the open in panic-stricken groups. Some of them fell under machine-gun fire snapping from the houses or under shrapnel bursting overhead. The women were haggard and gaunt, with wild eyes and wild hair, like witches. They held their children in tight claws until they were near our soldiers, when they all set up a shrill crying and wailing. The children were dazed with terror. Other civilians crawled up from their cellars in Loos, spattered with German blood, and wandered about among soldiers of many British battalions who crowded amid the scarred and shattered houses, and among the wounded men who came staggering through the streets, where army doctors were giving first aid in the roadway, while shells were bursting overhead and all the roar of the battle filled the air for miles around with infernal tumult.
Isolated Germans still kept sniping from secret places, and some of them fired at a dressing-station in the market-place, until a French girl, afterward decorated for valor—she was called the Lady of Loos by Londoners and Scots—borrowed a revolver and shot two of them dead in a neighboring house. Then she came back to the soup she was making for wounded men.
Some of the German prisoners were impressed as stretcher-bearers, and one, “Jock,” had compelled four Germans to carry him in, while he lay talking to them in broadest Scots, grinning despite his blood and wounds.
A London lieutenant called out to a stretcher-bearer helping to carry down a German officer, and was astounded to be greeted by the wounded man.
“Hullo, Leslie!... I knew we should meet one day.”
Looking at the man's face, the Londoner saw it was his own cousin... There was all the drama of war in that dirty village of Loos, which reeked with the smell of death then, and years later, when I went walking through it on another day of war, after another battle on Hill 70, beyond.
IX
While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of men, wounded, dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, women, doctors, Highlanders and Lowlanders “fey” with the intoxication of blood, London soldiers with tattered uniforms and muddy rifles and stained bayonets, mixed brigades were moving forward to new objectives. The orders of the Scottish troops, which I saw, were to go “all out,” and to press on as far as they could, with the absolute assurance that all the ground they gained would be held behind them by supporting troops; and having that promise, they trudged on to Hill 70. The Londoners had been ordered to make a defensive flank on the right of the Scots by capturing the chalk-pit south of Loos and digging in. They did this after savage fighting in the pit, where they bayoneted many Germans, though raked by machine-gun bullets from a neighboring copse, which was a fringe of gashed and tattered trees. But some of the London boys were mixed up with the advancing Scots and went on with them, and a battalion of Scots Fusiliers who had been in the supporting brigade of the 15th Division, which was intended to follow the advance, joined the first assault, either through eagerness or a wrong order, and, unknown to their brigadier, were among the leaders in the bloody struggle in Loos, and labored on to Hill 70, where Camerons, Gordons, Black Watch, Seaforths, Argyll, and Sutherland men and Londoners were now up the slopes, stabbing stray Germans who were trying to retreat to a redoubt on the reverse side of the hill.
For a time there was a kind of Bank Holiday crowd on Hill 70. The German gunners, knowing that the redoubt on the crest was still held by their men, dared not fire; and many German batteries were on the move, out of Lens and from their secret lairs in the country thereabouts, in a state of panic. On our right the French were fighting desperately at Souchez and Neuville St.-Vaast and up the lower slopes of Vimy, suffering horrible casualties and failing to gain the heights in spite of the reckless valor of their men, but alarming the German staffs, who for a time had lost touch with the situation—their telephones had been destroyed by gun-fire—and were filled with gloomy apprehensions. So Hill 70 was quiet, except for spasms of machine-gun fire from the redoubt on the German side of the slope and the bombing of German dugouts, or the bayoneting of single men routed out from holes in the earth.
One of our men came face to face with four Germans, two of whom were armed with rifles and two with bombs. They were standing in the wreckage of a trench, pallid, and with the fear of death in their eyes. The rifles clattered to the earth, the bombs fell at their feet, and their hands went up when the young Scot appeared before them with his bayonet down. He was alone, and they could have killed him, but surrendered, and were glad of the life he granted them. As more men came up the slope there were greetings between comrades, of:
“Hullo, Jock!”
“Is that you, Alf?”
They were rummaging about for souvenirs in half-destroyed dugouts where dead bodies lay. They were “swapping” souvenirs—taken from prisoners—silver watches, tobacco-boxes, revolvers, compasses. Many of them put on German field-caps, like schoolboys with paper caps from Christmas crackers, shouting with laughter because of their German look. They thought the battle was won. After the first wild rush the shell-fire, the killing, the sight of dead comrades, the smell of blood, the nightmare of that hour after dawn, they were beginning to get normal again, to be conscious of themselves, to rejoice in their luck at having got so far with whole skins. It had been a fine victory. The enemy was nowhere. He had “mizzled off.”
Some of the Scots, with the hunter's instinct still strong, decided to go on still farther to a new objective. They straggled away in batches to one of the suburbs of Lens—the Cite St.-Auguste. Very few of them came back with the tale of their comrades' slaughter by sudden bursts of machine-gun fire which cut off all chance of retreat....
The quietude of Hill 70 was broken by the beginning of a new bombardment from German guns.
“Dig in,” said the officers. “We must hold on at all costs until the supports come up.”
Where were the supporting troops which had been promised? There was no sign of them coming forward from Loos. The Scots were strangely isolated on the slopes of Hill 70. At night the sky above them was lit up by the red glow of fires in Lens, and at twelve-thirty that night, under that ruddy sky, dark figures moved on the east of the hill and a storm of machine-gun bullets swept down on the Highlanders and Lowlanders, who crouched low in the mangled earth. It was a counter-attack by masses of men crawling up to the crest from the reverse side and trying to get the Scots out of the slopes below. But the men of the 15th Division answered by volleys of rifle-fire, machine-gun fire, and bombs. They held on in spite of dead and wounded men thinning out their fighting strength. At five-thirty in the morning there was another strong counter-attack, repulsed also, but at another price of life in those holes and ditches on the hillside.
Scottish officers stared anxiously back toward their old lines. Where were the supports? Why did they get no help? Why were they left clinging like this to an isolated hill? The German artillery had reorganized. They were barraging the ground about Loos fiercely and continuously. They were covering a great stretch of country up to Hulluch, and north of it, with intense harassing fire. Later on that Saturday morning the 15th Division received orders to attack and capture the German earthwork redoubt on the crest of the hill. A brigade of the 21st Division was nominally in support of them, but only small groups of that brigade appeared on the scene, a few white-faced officers, savage with anger, almost mad with some despair in them, with batches of English lads who looked famished with hunger, weak after long marching, demoralized by some tragedy that had happened to them. They were Scots who did most of the work in trying to capture the redoubt, the same Scots who had fought through Loos. They tried to reach the crest. Again and again they crawled forward and up, but the blasts of machine-gun fire mowed them down, and many young Scots lay motionless on those chalky slopes, with their kilts riddled with bullets. Others, hit in the head, or arms, or legs, writhed like snakes back to the cover of broken trenches.
“Where are the supports?” asked the Scottish officers. “In God's name, where are the troops who were to follow on? Why did we do all this bloody fighting to be hung up in the air like this?”
The answer to their question has not been given in any official despatch. It is answered by the tragedy of the 21st and 24th Divisions, who will never forget the misery of that day, though not many are now alive who suffered it. Their part of the battle I will tell later.
X
To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of September 25th—of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly “Jocks,” and they were in exalted spirits because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and out of it—alive. They came straggling back through the villages behind the lines to the casualty clearing—stations and ambulance-trains. Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown, brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood. Some of them were wounded in the legs and hobbled with their arms about their comrades' necks. Their kilts were torn and plastered with chalky mud. Nearly all of them had some “souvenir” of the fighting—German watches, caps, cartridges. They carried themselves with a warrior look, so hard, so lean, so clear-eyed, these young Scots of the Black Watch and Camerons and Gordons. They told tales of their own adventure in broad Scots, hard to understand, and laughed grimly at the killing they had done, though here and there a lad among them had a look of bad remembrance in his eyes, and older men spoke gravely of the scenes on the battlefield and called it “hellish.” But their pride was high. They had done what they had been asked to do. The 15th Division had proved its quality. Their old battalions, famous in history, had gained new honor.
Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long ambulance-train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They crowded the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged heads and arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The spirit of victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, drugged them. And now they were going home for a spell. Home to bonny Scotland, with a wound that would take some time to heal.
There were other wounded men from whom no laughter came, nor any sound. They were carried to the train on stretchers, laid down awhile on the wooden platforms, covered with blankets up to their chins—unless they uncovered themselves with convulsive movements. I saw one young Londoner so smashed about the face that only his eyes were uncovered between layers of bandages, and they were glazed with the first film of death. Another had his jaw blown clean away, so the doctor told me, and the upper half of his face was livid and discolored by explosive gases. A splendid boy of the Black Watch was but a living trunk. Both his arms and both his legs were shattered. If he lived after butcher's work of surgery he would be one of those who go about in boxes on wheels, from whom men turn their eyes away, sick with a sense of horror. There were blind boys led to the train by wounded comrades, groping, very quiet, thinking of a life of darkness ahead of them—forever in the darkness which shut in their souls. For days and weeks that followed there was always a procession of ambulances on the way to the dirty little town of Lillers, and going along the roads I used to look back at them and see the soles of muddy boots upturned below brown blankets. It was more human wreckage coming down from the salient of Loos, from the chalkpits of Hulluch and the tumbled earth of the Hohenzollern redoubt, which had been partly gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a square brick building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time a casualty clearing-station, the “bad” cases were unloaded; men with chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without noses, and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without faces...
XI
To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning, when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours.
There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment, a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with fixed bayonets. They were the men who had surrendered from deep dugouts in the trenches between us and Loos and from the cellars of Loos itself. They had seen many of their comrades bayoneted. Some of them had shrieked for mercy. Others had not shrieked, having no power of sound in their throats, but had shrunk back at the sight of glinting bayonets, with an animal fear of death. Now, all that was a nightmare memory, and they were out of it all until the war should end, next year, the year after, the year after that—who could tell?
They had been soaked to the skin in the night and their gray uniforms were still soddened. Many of them were sleeping, in huddled, grotesque postures, like dead men, some lying on their stomachs, face downward. Others were awake, sitting hunched up, with drooping heads and a beaten, exhausted look. Others paced up and down, up and down, like caged animals, as they were, famished and parched, until we could distribute the rations. Many of them were dying, and a German ambulanceman went among them, injecting them with morphine to ease the agony which made them writhe and groan. Two men held their stomachs, moaning and whimpering with a pain that gnawed their bowels, caused by cold and damp. They cried out to me, asking for a doctor. A friend of mine carried a water jar to some of the wounded and held it to their lips. One of them refused. He was a tall, evil-looking fellow, with a bloody rag round his head—a typical “Hun,” I thought. But he pointed to a comrade who lay gasping beside him and said, in German, “He needs it first.” This man had never heard of Sir Philip Sidney, who at Zutphen, when thirsty and near death, said, “His need is greater than mine,” but he had the same chivalry in his soul.
The officer in charge of their escort could not speak German and had no means of explaining to the prisoners that they were to take their turn to get rations and water at a dump nearby. It was a war correspondent, young Valentine Williams, afterward a very gallant officer in the Irish Guards who gave the orders in fluent and incisive German. He began with a hoarse shout of “Achtung!” and that old word of command had an electrical effect on many of the men. Even those who had seemed asleep staggered to their feet and stood at attention. The habit of discipline was part of their very life, and men almost dead strove to obey.
The non-commissioned officers formed parties to draw and distribute the rations, and then those prisoners clutched at hunks of bread and ate in a famished way, like starved beasts. Some of them had been four days hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, and intense hunger gave them a kind of vitality when food appeared. The sight of that mass of men reduced to such depths of human misery was horrible. One had no hate in one's heart for them then.
“Poor devils!” said an officer with me. “Poor beasts! Here we see the `glory' of war! the `romance' of war!”
I spoke to some of them in bad German, and understood their answer.
“It is better here than on the battlefield,” said one of them. “We are glad to be prisoners.”
One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing ceaselessly.
“I pity our poor people there,” he said.
One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the battle, which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more than what happens within a yard or two.
“The English caught us by surprise when the attack came at last,” he said. “The bombardment had been going on for days, and we could not guess when the attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering how long it would be before a shell came through the roof and blow us to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. Wounded men crawled into the dugout, and some of them died down there. We sat looking at their bodies in the doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a lull came. A friend of mine was there, dead, and I stepped on his stomach to get upstairs. The first thing I saw was a crowd of your soldiers streaming past our trenches. We were surrounded on three sides, and our position was hopeless. Some of our men started firing, but it was only asking for death. Your men killed them with bayonets. I went back into my dugout and waited. Presently there was an explosion in the doorway and part of the dugout fell in. One of the men with me had his head blown off, and his blood spurted on me. I was dazed, but through the fumes I saw an English soldier in a petticoat standing at the doorway, making ready to throw another bomb.
“I shouted to him in English:
“'Don't kill us! We surrender!'
“He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his bomb. Then he said:
“'Come out, you swine.'
“So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your Highlanders, with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued with them in words I could not understand-a dialect-and we were told to go along a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another group of prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!”
He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had just come from great horrors.
Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German. Some of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were true Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.
A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked cigarettes apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our officers.
“Did you get any of our gas this morning?” I asked them, and one of them laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“I smelled it a little. It was rather nice... The English always imitate the German war-methods, but without much success.”
They grinned and imitated my way of saying “Guten Tag” when I left them. It took a year or more to tame the arrogance of the German officer. At the end of the Somme battles he changed his manner when captured, and was very polite.
In another place—a prison in St.-Omer—I had a conversation with two other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians—one a stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just escaped, and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with clear-cut features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of our mines had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him. The fat man by his side—his captain—had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth.
They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the younger man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for another winter campaign and—that seemed to me at the time a fine touch of audacity—for two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of '16, after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after that the winter of '17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me, the more I thought of them, idiotic and almost insane. Why, the world itself could not suffer two more years of war. It would end before then in general anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all fronts. Humanity of every nation would revolt against such prolonged slaughter... It was I who was mad, in the foolish faith that the war would end before another year had passed, because I thought that would be the limit of endurance of such mutual massacre.
In a room next to those two officers—a week before this battle, the captain had been rowing with his wife on the lake at Potsdam—was another prisoner, who wept and wept. He had escaped to our lines before the battle to save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken and thought he had lost his soul. What stabbed his conscience most was the thought that his wife and children would lose their allowances because of his treachery. He stared at us with wild, red eyes.
“Ach, mein armes Weib! Meine Kinder!... Ach, Gott in Himmel!”
He had no pride, no dignity, no courage.
This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his hands against the wall and laid his head on his arm and wept.
XII
During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from slag heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and flurry of gun-fire and the smoke of shells mixing with wet mist, and the backwash of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and wagons, and supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge of a volcano I sat among the slag heaps with gunner observers, who were listening at telephones dumped down in the fields and connected with artillery brigades and field batteries.
“The Guards are fighting round Fosse 8,” said one of these observers.
Through the mist I could see Fosse 8, a flat-topped hill of coal-dust. Little glinting lights were playing about it, like confetti shining in the sun. That was German shrapnel. Eruptions of red flame and black earth vomited out of the hill. That was German high explosive. For a time on Monday, September 27th, it was the storm-center of battle.
“What's that?” asked an artillery staff-officer, with his ear to the field telephone. “What's that?... Hullo!... Are you there?... The Guards have been kicked off Fosse 8... Oh, hell!”
From all parts of the field of battle such whispers came to listening men and were passed on to headquarters, where other men listened. This brigade was doing pretty well. That was hard pressed. The Germans were counter-attacking heavily. Their barrage was strong and our casualties heavy. “Oh, hell!” said other men. From behind the mist came the news of life and death, revealing things which no onlooker could see.
I went closer to see—into the center of the arc of battle, up by the Loos redoubt, where the German dead and ours still lay in heaps. John Buchan was my companion on that walk, and together we stood staring over the edge of a trench to where, grim and gaunt against the gray sky, loomed the high, steel columns of the “Tower Bridge,” the mining-works which I had seen before the battle as an inaccessible landmark in the German lines. Now they were within our lines in the center of Loos, and no longer “leering” at us, as an officer once told me they used to do when he led his men into communication trenches under their observation.
Behind us now was the turmoil of war—thousands and scores of thousands of men moving in steady columns forward and backward in the queer, tangled way which during a great battle seems to have no purpose or meaning, except to the directing brains on the Headquarters Staff, and, sometimes in history, none to them.
Vast convoys of transports choked the roads, with teams of mules harnessed to wagons and gun-limbers, with trains of motor ambulances packed with wounded men, with infantry brigades plodding through the slush and slime, with divisional cavalry halted in the villages, and great bivouacs in the boggy fields.
The men, Londoners, and Scots, and Guards, and Yorkshires, and Leinsters, passed and repassed in dense masses, in small battalions, in scattered groups. One could tell them from those who were filling their places by the white chalk which covered them from head to foot, and sometimes by the blood which had splashed them.
Regiments which had lost many of their comrades and had fought in attack and counter-attack through those days and nights went very silently, and no man cheered them. Legions of tall lads, who a few months before marched smart and trim down English lanes, trudged toward the fighting-lines under the burden of their heavy packs, with all their smartness befouled by the business of war, but wonderful and pitiful to see because of the look of courage and the gravity in their eyes as they went up to dreadful places. Farther away within the zone of the enemy's fire the traffic ceased, and I came into the desolate lands of death, where there is but little movement, and the only noise is that of guns. I passed by ruined villages and towns.
To the left was Vermelles (two months before death nearly caught me there), and I stared at those broken houses and roofless farms and fallen churches which used to make one's soul shiver even when they stood clear in the daylight.
To the right, a few hundred yards away, was Masingarbe, from which many of our troops marched out to begin the great attack. Farther back were the great slag heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, and all around other black hills of this mining country which rise out of the flat plain. It was a long walk through narrow trenches toward that Loos redoubt where at last I stood. There was the smell of death in those narrow, winding ways. One boy, whom death had taken almost at the entrance-way, knelt on the fire-step, with his head bent and his forehead against the wet clay, as though in prayer. Farther on other bodies of London boys and Scots lay huddled up.
We were in the center of a wide field of fire, with the enemy's batteries on one side and ours on the other in sweeping semicircles. The shells of all these batteries went crying through the air with high, whining sighs, which ended in the cough of death. The roar of the guns was incessant and very close. The enemy was sweeping a road to my right, and his shells went overhead with a continual rush, passing our shells, which answered back. The whole sky was filled with these thunderbolts. Many of them were “Jack Johnsons,” which raised a volume of black smoke where they fell. I wondered how it would feel to be caught by one of them, whether one would have any consciousness before being scattered. Fear, which had walked with me part of the way, left me for a time. I had a strange sense of exhilaration, an intoxicated interest in this foul scene and the activity of that shell-fire.
Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama of the battleground. It was but an ugly, naked plain, rising up to Hulluch and Haisnes on the north, falling down to Loos on the east, from where we stood, and rising again to Hill 70 (now in German hands again), still farther east and a little south.
The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the skyline, and Fosse 8 was a black wart between them. The “Tower Bridge,” close by in the town of Loos, was the one high landmark which broke the monotony of this desolation.
No men moved about this ground. Yet thousands of men were hidden about us in the ditches, waiting for another counter-attack behind storms of fire. The only moving things were the shells which vomited up earth and smoke and steel as they burst in all directions over the whole zone. We were shelling Hulluch and Haisnes and Fosse 8 with an intense, concentrated fire, and the enemy was retaliating by scattering shells over the town of Loos and our new line between Hill 70 and the chalk-pit, and the whole length of our line from north to south.
Only two men moved about above the trenches. They were two London boys carrying a gas-cylinder, and whistling as though it were a health resort under the autumn sun... It was not a health resort. It stank of death, from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush of flesh and bones lying around the Loos redoubt and all the ground in this neighborhood, and for a long distance north.
Through the streets of Bethune streamed a tide of war: the transport of divisions, gun-teams with their limber ambulance convoys, ammunition wagons, infantry moving up to the front, despatch riders, staff-officers, signalers, and a great host of men and mules and motor-cars. The rain lashed down upon the crowds; waterproofs and burberries and the tarpaulin covers of forage-carts streamed with water, and the bronzed faces of the soldiers were dripping wet. Mud splashed them to the thighs. Fountains of mud spurted up from the wheels of gun-carriages. The chill of winter made Highlanders as well as Indians—those poor, brave, wretched Indians who had been flung into the holding attack on the canal at La Bassee, and mown down in the inevitable way by shrapnel and machine-gun bullets—shiver in the wind.
Yet, in spite of rain and great death, there was a spirit of exultation among many fighting-men. At last there was a break in the months of stationary warfare. We were up and out of the trenches. The first proofs of victory were visible there in a long line of German guns captured at Loos, guarded on each side by British soldiers with fixed bayonets. Men moving up did not know the general failure that had swamped a partial success. They stared at the guns and said, “By God—we've got 'em going this time!”
A group of French civilians gathered round them, excited at the sight. Artillery officers examined their broken breech-blocks and their inscriptions:
“Pro Gloria et Patria.”