NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

by Philip Gibbs


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.”

“Ultima ratio regis.”

The irony of the words made some of the onlookers laugh. A French
interpreter spoke to some English officers with a thrill of joy in his
voice. Had they heard the last news from Champagne? The French had broken
through the enemy’s line. The Germans were in full retreat.. . It was
utterly untrue, because after the desperate valor of heroic youth and
horrible casualties, the French attack had broken down. But the spirit of
hope came down the cold wind and went with the men whom I saw marching to
the fields of fate in the slanting rain, as the darkness and the mist came
to end another day of battle.

Outside the headquarters of a British army corps stood another line of
captured field-guns and several machine-guns, of which one had a strange
history of adventure. It was a Russian machine-gun, taken by the Germans
on the eastern front and retaken by us on the western front.

In General Rawlinson’s headquarters I saw a queer piece of booty. It was a
big bronze bell used by the Germans in their trenches to signal a British
gas-attack.

General Rawlinson was taking tea in his chateau when I called on him, and
was having an animated argument with Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards, as
to the disposal of the captured artillery and other trophies. Lord Cavan
claimed some for his own, with some violence of speech. But General
Rawlinson was bright and breezy as usual. Our losses were not worrying
him. As a great general he did not allow losses to worry him. He ate his
tea with a hearty appetite, and chaffed his staff-officers. They were
anticipating the real German counter-attack—a big affair. Away up
the line there would be more dead piled up, more filth and stench of human
slaughter, but the smell of it would not reach back to headquarters.


XIII

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 1915, and issued by
the War Office on November 1st of that year, the Commander-in-Chief stated
that: “In view of the great length of line along which the British troops
were operating it was necessary to keep a strong reserve in my own hand.
The 11th Corps, consisting of the Guards, the 21st and the 24th Divisions,
were detailed for this purpose. This reserve was the more necessary owing
to the fact that the Tenth French Army had to postpone its attack until
one o’clock in the day; and further, that the corps operating on the
French left had to be directed in a more or less southeasterly direction,
involving, in case of our success, a considerable gap in our line. To
insure, however, the speedy and effective support of the 1st and 4th Corps
in the case of their success, the 21st and 24th Divisions passed the night
of the 24th and 25th on the line Beuvry (to the east of
Bethune)-Noeux-les-Mines. The Guards Division was in the neighborhood of
Lillers on the same night.”

By that statement, and by the facts that happened in accordance with it,
the whole scheme of attack in the battle of Loos will stand challenged in
history. Lord French admits in that despatch that he held his reserves “in
his own hand,” and later he states that it was not until nine-thirty on
the morning of battle that “I placed the 21st and 24th Divisions at the
disposal of the General Officer commanding First Army.” He still held the
Guards. He makes, as a defense of the decision to hold back the reserves,
the extraordinary statement that there “would be a considerable gap in our
line in case of our success.” That is to say, he was actually envisaging a
gap in the line if the attack succeeded according to his expectations, and
risking the most frightful catastrophe that may befall any army in an
assault upon a powerful enemy, provided with enormous reserves, as the
Germans were at that time, and as our Commander-in-Chief ought to have
known.

But apart from that the whole time-table of the battle was, as it now
appears, fatally wrong. To move divisions along narrow roads requires an
immense amount of time, even if the roads are clear, and those roads
toward Loos were crowded with the transport and gun-limbers of the
assaulting troops. To move them in daylight to the trenches meant
inevitable loss of life and almost certain demoralization under the
enemy’s gun-fire.

“Between 11 A.M. and 12 noon the central brigade of these divisions filed
past me at Bethune and Noeux-les-Mines, respectively,” wrote Sir John
French. It was not possible for them to reach our old trenches until 4
P.M. It was Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, the Chief of Staff, who revealed
that fact to me afterward in an official explanation, and it was confirmed
by battalion officers of the 24th Division whom I met.

That time-table led to disaster. By eight o’clock in the morning there
were Scots on Hill 70. They had been told to go “all out,” with the
promise that the ground they gained would be consolidated by following
troops. Yet no supports were due to arrive until 4 P.M. at our original
line of attack—still away back from Hill 70—by which time the
enemy had recovered from his first surprise, had reorganized his guns, and
was moving up his own supports. Tragedy befell the Scots on Hill 70 and in
the Cite St.-Auguste, as I have told. Worse tragedy happened to the 21st
and 24th Divisions. They became hopelessly checked and tangled in the
traffic of the roads, and in their heavy kit were exhausted long before
they reached the battlefield. They drank the water out of their bottles,
and then were parched. They ate their iron rations, and then were hungry.
Some of their transport moved too far forward in daylight, was seen by
German observers, ranged on by German guns, and blown to bits on the road.
The cookers were destroyed, and with them that night’s food. None of the
officers had been told that they were expected to attack on that day. All
they anticipated was the duty of holding the old support trenches. In
actual fact they arrived when the enemy was preparing a heavy
counter-attack and flinging over storms of shell-fire. The officers had no
maps and no orders. They were utterly bewildered with the situation, and
had no knowledge as to the where-abouts of the enemy or their own
objectives. Their men met heavy fire for the first time when their
physical and moral condition was weakened by the long march, the lack of
food and water, and the unexpected terror ahead of them. They crowded into
broken trenches, where shells burst over them and into them. Young
officers acting on their own initiative tried to lead their men forward,
and isolated parties went forward, but uncertainly, not knowing the ground
nor their purpose. Shrapnel lashed them, and high-explosive shells plowed
up the earth about them and with them. Dusk came, and then darkness. Some
officers were cursing, and some wept, fearing dishonor. The men were
huddled together like sheep without shepherds when wolves are about, and
saw by the bewilderment of the officers that they were without leadership.
It is that which makes for demoralization, and these men, who afterward in
the battle of the Somme in the following year fought with magnificent
valor, were on that day at Loos demoralized in a tragic and complete way.
Those who had gone forward came back to the crowded trenches and added to
the panic and the rage and the anguish. Men smashed their rifles in a kind
of madness. Boys were cursing and weeping at the same time. They were too
hopelessly disordered and dismayed by the lack of guidance and by the
shock to their sense of discipline to be of much use in that battle. Some
bodies of them in both these unhappy divisions arrived in front of Hill 70
at the very time when the enemy launched his first counter-attack, and
were driven back in disorder… Some days later I saw the 21st Division
marching back behind the lines. Rain slashed them. They walked with bent
heads. The young officers were blanched and had a beaten look. The sight
of those dejected men was tragic and pitiful.


XIV

Meanwhile, at 6 P.M. on the evening of the first day of battle, the Guards
arrived at Noeux-les-Mines. As I saw them march up, splendid in their
height and strength and glory of youth, I looked out for the officers I
knew, yet hoped I should not see them—that man who had given a
farewell touch to the flowers in the garden of our billet, that other one
who knew he would be wounded, those two young brothers who had played
cricket on a sunny afternoon. I did not see them, but saw only columns of
men, staring grimly ahead of them, with strange, unspeakable thoughts
behind their masklike faces.

It was not until the morning of the 26th that the Commander-in-Chief
“placed them at the disposal of the General Officer commanding First
Army,” and it was on the afternoon of Monday, the 27th, that they were
ordered to attack.

By that time we had lost Fosse 8, one brigade of the 9th Scottish Division
having been flung back to its own trenches after desperate fighting, at
frightful cost, after the capture of the Hohenzollern redoubt by the 26th
Brigade of that division. To the north of them the 7th Division was also
suffering horrible losses after the capture of the quarries, near Hulluch,
and the village of Haisnes, which afterward was lost. The commanding
officers of both divisions, General Capper of the 7th, and General
Thesiger of the 9th, were killed as they reconnoitered the ground, and
wounded men were pouring down to the casualty clearing stations if they
had the luck to get so far. Some of them had not that luck, but lay for
nearly two days before they were rescued by the stretcher-bearers from
Quality Street and Philosophe.

It was bad all along the line. The whole plan had gone astray from the
beginning. With an optimism which was splendid in fighting-men and costly
in the High Command, our men had attacked positions of enormous strength—held
by an enemy in the full height of his power—without sufficient
troops in reserve to follow up and support the initial attack, to
consolidate the ground, and resist inevitable counter-attacks. What
reserves the Commander-in-Chief had he held “in his own hand” too long and
too far back.

The Guards went in when the enemy was reorganized to meet them. The 28th
Division, afterward in support, was too late to be a decisive factor.

I do not blame Lord French. I have no right to blame him, as I am not a
soldier nor a military expert. He did his best, with the highest motives.
The blunders he made were due to ignorance of modern battles. Many other
generals made many other blunders, and our men paid with their lives. Our
High Command had to learn by mistakes, by ghastly mistakes, repeated
often, until they became visible to the military mind and were paid for
again by the slaughter of British youth. One does not blame. A
writing-man, who was an observer and recorder, like myself, does not sit
in judgment. He has no right to judge. He merely cries out, “O God!… O
God!” in remembrance of all that agony and that waste of splendid boys who
loved life, and died.

On Sunday, as I have told, the situation was full of danger. The Scots of
the 15th Division, weakened by many losses and exhausted by their long
fatigue, had been forced to abandon the important position of Puits 14—a
mine-shaft half a mile north of Hill 70, linked up in defense with the
enemy’s redoubt on the northeast side of Hill 70. The Germans had been
given time to bring up their reserves, to reorganize their broken lines,
and to get their batteries into action again.

There was a consultation of anxious brigadiers in Loos when no man could
find safe shelter owing to the heavy shelling which now ravaged among the
houses. Rations were running short, and rain fell through the roofless
ruins, and officers and men shivered in wet clothes. Dead bodies blown
into bits, headless trunks, pools of blood, made a ghastly mess in the
roadways and the houses. Badly wounded men were dragged down into the
cellars, and lay there in the filth of Friday’s fighting. The headquarters
of one of the London brigades had put up in a roofless barn, but were
shelled out, and settled down on some heaps of brick in the open. It was
as cold as death in the night, and no fire could be lighted, and iron
rations were the only food, until two chaplains, “R. C.” and Church of
England (no difference of dogma then), came up as volunteers in a perilous
adventure, with bottles of hot soup in mackintoshes. They brought a touch
of human warmth to the brigade staff, made those hours of the night more
endurable, but the men farther forward had no such luck. They were
famishing and soaked, in a cold hell where shells tossed up the earth
about them and spattered them with the blood and flesh of their comrades.

On Monday morning the situation was still more critical, all along the
line, and the Guards were ordered up to attack Hill 70, to which only a
few Scots were clinging on the near slopes. The 6th Cavalry Brigade
dismounted—no more dreams of exploiting success and galloping round
Lens—were sent into Loos with orders to hold the village at all
cost, with the men of the 15th Division, who had been left there.

The Londoners were still holding on to the chalk-pit south of Loos, under
murderous fire.

It was a bad position for the troops sent into action at that stage. The
result of the battle on September 25th had been to create a salient thrust
like a wedge into the German position and enfiladed by their guns. The
sides of the salient ran sharply back—from Hulluch in the north,
past the chalk-quarries to Givenchy, and in the south from the lower
slopes of Hill 70 past the Double Crassier to Grenay. The orders given to
the Guards were to straighten out this salient on the north by capturing
the whole of Hill 70, Puits 14, to the north of it, and the chalk-pit
still farther north.

It was the 2d Brigade of Guards, including Grenadiers, Welsh and Scots
Guards, which was to lead the assault, while the 1st Brigade on the left
maintained a holding position and the 3d Brigade was in support,
immediately behind.

As soon as the Guards started to attack they were met by a heavy storm of
gas-shells. This checked them for a time, as smoke-helmets—the old
fashioned things of flannel which were afterward changed for the masks
with nozzles—had to be served out, and already men were choking and
gasping in the poisonous fumes. Among them was the colonel of the
Grenadiers, whose command was taken over by the major. Soon the men
advanced again, looking like devils, as, in artillery formation (small
separate groups), they groped their way through the poisoned clouds.
Shrapnel and high explosives burst over them and among them, and many men
fell as they came within close range of the enemy’s positions running from
Hill 70 northward to the chalk-pit.

The Irish Guards, supported by the Coldstreamers, advanced down the valley
beyond Loos and gained the lower edge of Bois Hugo, near the chalk-pit,
while the Scots Guards assaulted Puits 14 and the building in its group of
houses known as the Keep. Another body of Guards, including Grenadiers and
Welsh, attacked at the same time the lower slopes of Hill 70.

Puits 14 itself was won by a party of Scots Guards, led by an officer
named Captain Cuthbert, which engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, routing
out the enemy from the houses. Some companies of the Grenadiers came to
the support of their comrades in the Scots Guards, but suffered heavy
losses themselves. A platoon under a young lieutenant named Ayres Ritchie
reached the Puits, and, storming their way into the Keep, knocked out a
machine-gun, mounted on the second floor, by a desperate bombing attack.
The officer held on in a most dauntless way to the position, until almost
every man was either killed or wounded, unable to receive support, owing
to the enfilade fire of the German machine-guns.

Night had now come on, the sky lightened by the bursting of shells and
flares, and terrible in its tumult of battle. Some of the Coldstreamers
had gained possession of the chalk-pit, which they were organizing into a
strong defensive position, and various companies of the Guards divisions,
after heroic assaults upon Hill 70, where they were shattered by the fire
which met them on the crest from the enemy’s redoubt on the northeast
side, had dug themselves into the lower slopes.

There was a strange visitor that day at the headquarters of the Guards
division, where Lord Cavan was directing operations. A young officer came
in and said, quite calmly: “Sir, I have to report that my battalion has
been cut to pieces. We have been utterly destroyed.”

Lord Cavan questioned him, and then sent for another officer. “Look after
that young man,” he said, quietly. “He is mad. It is a case of
shell-shock.”

Reports came through of a mysterious officer going the round of the
batteries, saying that the Germans had broken through and that they had
better retire. Two batteries did actually move away.

Another unknown officer called out, “Retire! Retire!” until he was shot
through the head. “German spies!” said some of our officers and men, but
the Intelligence branch said, “Not spies… madmen… poor devils!”

Before the dawn came the Coldstreamers made another desperate attempt to
attack and hold Puits 14, but the position was too deadly even for their
height of valor, and although some men pushed on into this raging fire,
the survivors had to fall back to the woods, where they strengthened their
defensive works.

On the following day the position was the same, the sufferings of our men
being still further increased by heavy shelling from 8-inch howitzers.
Colonel Egerton of the Coldstream Guards and his adjutant were killed in
the chalk-pit.

It was now seen by the headquarters staff of the Guards Division that
Puits 14 was untenable, owing to its enfilading by heavy artillery, and
the order was given for a retirement to the chalk-pit, which was a place
of sanctuary owing to the wonderful work done throughout the night to
strengthen its natural defensive features by sand—bags and barbed
wire, in spite of machine-guns which raked it from the neighboring woods.

The retirement was done as though the men were on parade, slowly, and in
perfect order, across the field of fire, each man bearing himself, so
their officers told me, as though at the Trooping of the Colors, until now
one and then another fell in a huddled heap. It was an astonishing tribute
to the strength of tradition among troops. To safeguard the honor of a
famous name these men showed such dignity in the presence of death that
even the enemy must have been moved to admiration.

But they had failed, after suffering heavy losses, and the
Commander-in-Chief had to call upon the French for help, realizing that
without strong assistance the salient made by that battle of Loos would be
a death-trap. The French Tenth Army had failed, too, at Vimy, thus failing
to give the British troops protection on their right flank.

“On representing this to General Joffre,” wrote Sir John French, “he was
kind enough to ask the commander of the northern group of French armies to
render us assistance. General Foch met those demands in the same friendly
spirit which he has always displayed throughout the course of the whole
campaign, and expressed his readiness to give me all the support he could.
On the morning of the 28th we discussed the situation, and the general
agreed to send the 9th French Corps to take over the ground occupied by
us, extending from the French left up to and including that portion of
Hill 70 which we were holding, and also the village of Loos. This relief
was commenced on September 30th, and completed on the two following
nights.”

So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter—attack
delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north to
the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight
battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous
bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st Division in the
neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards holding the
Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had
been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the living
were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved up into chunks of flesh in
the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans had their own shambles, more
frightful, we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in front of
our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed back and waves of living men
were broken by the fire of our field-guns, rifles, and machine-guns. Sir
John French’s staff estimated the number of German dead as from eight to
nine thousand. It was impossible to make any accurate sum in that
arithmetic of slaughter, and always the enemy’s losses were exaggerated
because of the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made corpses in
that Debit and Credit of war’s bookkeeping.

What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille, nor
even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody slopes
where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged salient
enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on one slag
heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they could, a few
yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the Hohenzollern redoubt
which became another Hooge where English youth was blown up by mines,
buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living death in lousy caves dug
into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient, narrower than that of Ypres,
more dismal, and as deadly, among the pit-heads and the black dust hills
and the broken mine-shafts of that foul country beyond Loos.

The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly
failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it spoke in
whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things which were
dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-men, asking of
God as well as of mortals why the courage of the soldiers they led should
be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter, laughing with despairing mirth
at the optimism of their leaders, who had been lured on by a strange,
false, terrible belief in German weakness, and looking ahead at unending
vistas of such massacre as this which would lead only to other salients,
after desperate and futile endeavor.


PART FOUR. A WINTER OF DISCONTENT


I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled
hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men—ours and the
enemy’s. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies of
British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their brown
lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to go on
forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each
side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17 the winter
was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had cut all our
divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world by the immense
martyrdom of boys—British, French, and German—on the western
front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of their
Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the
long-drawn fury of attack and counter-attack, and from the intensity of
gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on our
side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had weakened
and were nearly spent.

But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No
mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing a
vision of the war’s end.

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground we
had gained—the new horror of that new salient—had sapped into
the confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of
German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no
good some of those old gentlemen saying, “We’ve got ’em beat!” when from
Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under
ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made
by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without
much plan or purpose, was only “asking for trouble” from German
counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas,
flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess
of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling
up the lists of death.

“It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men,” said the generals. “We must
maintain an aggressive policy.”

They searched their trench maps for good spots where another “small
operation” might be organized. There was a competition among the corps and
divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine explosions,
trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.

“My corps,” one old general told me over a cup of tea in his headquarters
mess, “beats the record for raids.” His casualties also beat the record,
and many of his officers and men called him, just bluntly and simply, “Our
old murderer.” They disliked the necessity of dying so that he might add
one more raid to his heroic competition with the corps commander of the
sector on the left. When they waited for the explosion of a mine which
afterward they had to “rush” in a race with the German bombing-parties,
some of them saw no sense in the proceeding, but only the likelihood of
having legs and arms torn off by German stick-bombs or shells. “What’s the
good of it?” they asked, and could find no answer except the satisfaction
of an old man listening to the distant roar of the new tumult by which he
had “raised hell” again.


II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled
down—knee-deep where the trenches were worst—for the winter
campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the
Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces
of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing
sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down
the slimy parapets.

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept out of the
ground, so that rifles were clammy to the touch and a blanket of moisture
settled on every stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be seen through
the veil of vapor to the enemy’s lines, where he stayed invisible.

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the battlefields were in
that quagmire state. An advancing wave of men would have been clogged in
the mud after the first jump over the slimy sand-bags, and to advance
artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done on either side
but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and minings which had
no object except “to keep up the spirit of the men.” There was always work
to do in the trenches—draining them, strengthening their parapets,
making their walls, tiling or boarding their floorways, timbering the
dugouts, and after it was done another rainstorm or snowstorm undid most
of it, and the parapets slid down, the water poured in, and spaces were
opened for German machine-gun fire, and there was less head cover against
shrapnel bullets which mixed with the raindrops, and high explosives which
smashed through the mud. The working parties had a bad time and a wet one,
in spite of waders and gum boots which were served out to lucky ones. Some
of them wore a new kind of hat, seen for the first time, and greeted with
guffaws—the “tin” hat which later became the headgear of all
fighting-men. It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds, and
every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in
which there was “Nothing to report.”

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their
dugouts. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they
drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their “bully,” and endured it
all with the philosophy of “grin and bear it!” and laughter, as I heard
them laughing in those places between explosive curses.

On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were more miserable, not
because their plight was worse, but because I think they lacked the
English sense of humor. In some places they had the advantage of our men
in better trenches, with better drains and dugouts—due to an
industry with which ours could never compete. Here and there, as in the
ground to the north of Hooge, they were in a worse state, with such rivers
in their trenches that they went to enormous trouble to drain the
Bellewarde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season. Those
field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to their
line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together—only
a few yards apart—our men could hear their boots squelching in the
mud with sucking, gurgling noises.

“They’re drinking soup again!” said our humorists.

There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of their
common misery.

“How deep is it with you?” shouted a German soldier.

His voice came from behind a pile of sand-bags which divided the enemy and
ourselves in a communication trench between the main lines.

“Up to our blooming knees,” said an English corporal, who was trying to
keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.

“So?… You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it.”

It was so bad in parts of the line during November storms that whole
sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze. It was the
frost as well as the rain which caused this ruin, making the earthworks
sink under their weight of sand-bags. German and English soldiers were
exposed to one another like ants upturned from their nests by a minor
landslide. They ignored one another. They pretended that the other fellows
were not there. They had not been properly introduced. In another place,
reckless because of their discomfort, the Germans crawled upon their slimy
parapets and sat on top to dry their legs, and shouted: “Don’t shoot!
Don’t shoot!”

Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets drying their legs,
and grinning at the gray ants yonder, until these incidents were reported
back to G. H. Q.—where good fires were burning under dry roofs—and
stringent orders came against “fraternization.” Every German who showed
himself was to be shot. Of course any Englishman who showed himself—owing
to a parapet falling in—would be shot, too. It was six of one and
half a dozen of the other, as always, in this trench warfare, but the
dignity of G. H. Q. would not be outraged by the thought of such indecent
spectacles as British and Germans refusing to kill each other on sight.
Some of the men obeyed orders, and when a German sat up and said, “Don’t
shoot!” plugged him through the head. Others were extremely
short-sighted… Now and again Germans crawled over to our trenches and
asked meekly to be taken prisoner. I met a few of these men and spoke with
them.

“There is no sense in this war,” said one of them. “It is misery on both
sides. There is no use in it.”

That thought of war’s futility inspired an episode which was narrated
throughout the army in that winter of ’15, and led to curious
conversations in dugouts and billets. Above a German front-line trench
appeared a plank on which, in big letters, was scrawled these words

“The English are fools.”

“Not such bloody fools as all that!” said a sergeant, and in a few minutes
the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire.

Another plank appeared, with other words:

“The French are fools.”

Loyalty to our allies caused the destruction of that board.

A third plank was put up:

“We’re all fools. Let’s all go home.”

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some laughter,
and men repeating it said: “There’s a deal of truth in those words. Why
should this go on? What’s it all about? Let the old men who made this war
come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The fighting-men have no
real quarrel with one another. We all want to go home to our wives and our
work.”

But neither side was prepared to “go home” first. Each side was in a trap—a
devil’s trap from which there was no escape. Loyalty to their own side,
discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of old
tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste which ruled them,
all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by pastors, newspapers,
generals, staff-officers, old men at home, exalted women, female furies, a
deep and simple love for England and Germany, pride of manhood, fear of
cowardice—a thousand complexities of thought and sentiment prevented
men, on both sides, from breaking the net of fate in which they were
entangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing massacre, by a
rising from the trenches with a shout of, “We’re all fools!… Let’s all
go home!”

In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, too. As an army
and a nation they went on to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and their doom.
But many German soldiers were converted to that gospel of “We’re all
fools!” and would not fight again with any spirit, as we found at times,
after August 8th, in the last year of war.


III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about
lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to torture
soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Many men standing
in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of
feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to
swell, and then to go “dead,” and then suddenly to burn as though touched
by red-hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores of men could not walk
back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be carried pick-a-back by
their comrades, to the field dressing stations. So I saw hundreds of them,
and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The medical officers cut off
their boots and their puttees, and the socks that had become part of their
skins, exposing blackened and rotting feet. They put oil on them, and
wrapped them round with cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with
the name of that new disease—“trench-foot.” Those medical officers
looked serious as the number of cases increased.

“This is getting beyond a joke,” they said. “It is pulling down the
battalion strength worse than wounds.”

Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and cursed the new
affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned
carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate
malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted wounds
by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out of the
trenches.

There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were being
carried pick-a-back to the ambulance-trains at Remy siding, near
Poperinghe, with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton-wool.
The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burning fagots for
conscience’ sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West Riding) Division
there were over four hundred cases in that winter of ’15. Other battalions
in the Ypres salient suffered as much.

It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was taken up to the
trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, two or three times a day, that the
malady of trench-foot was reduced, and at last almost eliminated.

The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and
would not be beaten by it.

A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly wounded as he stood
thigh-high in water. A bomb or a trench-mortar smashed one of his legs
into a pulp of bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down to
the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed to the neck in mud,
with his instruments held high. The operation was done in the water, red
with the blood of the wounded man, who was then brought down, less a leg,
to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a man about to die… But
that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked with the priest who came to
anoint him, and wrote a letter to his wife.

“I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me,” he began. He
mentioned that he had had an “accident” which had taken one of his legs
away. “But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg,” he wrote,
and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed marveled at him,
though day after day they saw great courage; such courage as that of
another man who was brought in mortally wounded and lay next to a comrade
on the operating table.

“Stick it, lad!” he said, “stick it!” and turned his head a little to look
at his friend.

Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by
duck-boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and
tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom
their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud
which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort
anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.


IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish
Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under concentrated
gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the Guards who followed
them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to part of a communication
trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks) nicknamed “Big Willie,”
near another trench called “Little Willie.” Our enemies forced their way
back into some of their old trenches in this outpost beyond their main
lines, and in spite of the chaos produced by our shell-fire built up new
parapets and sand-bag barricades, flung out barbed wire, and dug
themselves into this graveyard where their dead and ours were strewn.

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession of
the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the spell of a
high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was partly ours and
stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and upheaved
chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any beauty in
the spot, or any value in it—so close to the German lines that one
could not cough for fear of losing one’s head. It seemed to me a place not
to gain and not to hold. If I had been a general (appalling thought!) I
should have said: “Let the enemy have that little hell of his. Let men
live there among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and the stench of
rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, and for him will be an
abomination, dreaded by his men.”

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should
have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to
“bite it off,” that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line. It
was an operation that would be good to report in the official communique.
Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our men after their
dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and their losses
forgotten.

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was given on
October 13th, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of Nottingham,
and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of Leicester, North
Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters, on the night of
the 12th.

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire upon
the redoubt, followed at 1 P.M. by volumes of smoke and gas. The chief
features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a group of
colliers’ houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag heap known as
the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called Fosse 8, and on the
left another group of cottages, and another black hillock farther to the
right of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of the Hohenzollern
redoubt which our troops were to attack.

It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery fire had
been, it failed to destroy the enemy’s barbed wire and front trenches
sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still working their
machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire lifted, and the
gas-clouds rolled away.

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and the
beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our heavy guns.
It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners living round the
pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up iron ladders and coal
heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle of war which had become a
monotonous and familiar thing in their lives, because the intensity of our
gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-clouds, and a certain strange, whitish
vapor which was wafted from our lines toward the enemy stirred their
imagination, dulled by the daily din of guns, to a sense of something
beyond the usual flight of shells in their part of the war zone.

“The English are attacking again!” was the message which brought out these
men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of the
slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the brightness
of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was the same scene
that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt in the September
battle—a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with the whitish
earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then falling again
so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was visible, with its
steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line. To the left the ruins
of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of smoke, and beyond a huddle of
broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the
Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible through
drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the golden
light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village churches, red
roofs shattered by shell-fire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before
the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines against
the gray-blue of the sky.

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were
massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the battle
by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed as though
our shells came from every field and village for miles back, behind the
lines.

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of their
explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of innumerable
mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one incessant roar
rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound. The whole line of battle
was in a grayish murk, which obscured all landmarks, so that even the
Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from
the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy
texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our infantry
attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of cloud, a
thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then curled forward
to the enemy’s lines.

“That’s our gas!” said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group of
observers—English and French officers.

“And the wind is dead right for it,” said another voice. “The Germans will
get a taste of it this time!”

Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath as
though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a little.
They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind its
curtain—men caught in those fumes, the terror-stricken flight before
its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy trapped in their dugouts.
Imagination leaped out, through invisibility, to the realization of the
things that were happening beyond.

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human
element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across a
stretch of flat ground beyond some of those zigzag lines of trenches
little black things were scurrying forward. They were not bunched together
in close groups, but scattered. Some of them seemed to hesitate, and then
to fall and lie where they fell, others hurrying on until they disappeared
in the drifting clouds.

It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by the bombers. The
Germans were firing tempests of shells. Some of them were curiously
colored, of a pinkish hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of vivid green.
They were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the chemistry of
death was poured out on both sides—and through it went the men of
the Midland Division.

The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of Staffordshire men,
who advanced in four lines toward the Big Willie trench which formed the
southeast side of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading companies, who
were first over our own parapets, made a quick rush, half blinded by the
smoke and the gaseous vapors which filled the air, and were at once
received by a deadly fire from many machine-guns. It swept their ranks,
and men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little parties flung out in
extended order.

Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and as they fell cheered
their men on, while others ran forward shouting, followed by numbers which
dwindled at every yard, so that only a few reached the Big Willie trench
in the first assault.

A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the
trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at the
German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again they
kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the communication
trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of them to bits as
bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass. Other Germans followed,
flinging their own stick-bombs.

The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man was wounded and
many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still flinging
grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each
motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel pomegranates
which burst with the noise of a high-explosive shell.

The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade made in the Big
Willie trench by some of their men behind. Behind them again was another
barrier, in case the first should be rushed.

It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Germans were swarming up
Big Willie with strong bombing-parties, and would soon blast a way through
unless they were thrust beyond the range of hand-grenades. It was a young
lieutenant named Hawker, with some South Staffordshire men, who went
forward to meet this attack and kept the enemy back until four o’clock in
the afternoon, when only a few living men stood among the dead and they
had to fall back to the second barrier.

Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the trenches, and in
the darkness the wounded men were carried back to the rear, while those
who had escaped worked hard to strengthen their defenses by sand-bags and
earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life lay in fierce industry.

Early next morning an attempt was made by other battalions to come to the
relief of those who held on behind those barriers in Big Willie trench.
They were Nottingham men—Robin Hoods and other Sherwood lads—and
they came across the open ground in two directions, attacking the west as
well as the east ends of the German communication trenches which formed
the face of the Hohenzollern redoubt.

They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their advance was met by
intense fire from artillery and machine-guns, so that many were blown to
bits or mangled or maimed, and none could reach their comrades in Big
Willie trench.

While one brigade of the Midland men had been fighting like this on the
right, another brigade had been engaged on the left. It contained
Sherwood, Leicester, and Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October
13th, went forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor. Advancing
in four lines, the leading companies were successful in reaching the
Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed through the barbed wire, part of which was
uncut, and reached the Fosse trench which forms the north base of the
salient.

Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely and the two
remaining lines were heavily shelled by German artillery. It was an hour
in which the courage of those men was agonized. They were exposed on naked
ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with gas and smoke; all
the abomination of battle—he moaning of the wounded, the last cries
of the dying, the death-crawl of stricken beings holding their broken
limbs and their entrails—was around them, and in front a hidden
enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a better position.

The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were sustained
in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through the old
yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those who had not
fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past these poor, bloody,
moaning men, to the German trenches behind the redoubt.

At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their bombers
were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun to a point
within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed till dark, and
then were forced to fall back.

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up the
Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here ghastly
fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three hundred
yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering numbers of
German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other Midland lads
went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades until they fell or
until few comrades were left to support them as they stood among their
dead and dying.

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength in
their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet the
business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into the
deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white
illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a
tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in the
Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull
explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed that
night.

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of
Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with
comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but
determined to hold the ground they had won.

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out
desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by other
Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers was found in
the way that won him his V.C.

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men
eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they could
not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or more clear
before them, and any man who flung himself forward was the target of a
hand-grenade.

From front and from flank German bombs came whizzing, falling short
sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore down lumps of trench, and
sometimes falling very close—close enough to kill.

Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the barrier still
intact by bombing and bombing.

When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he wondered how long the
barrier would last, and gave orders for another to be built behind him, so
that when the rush came it would be stopped behind him—and over him.

Men worked at that barricade, piling up sand-bags, and as it was built
that young lieutenant knew that his own retreat was being cut off and that
he was being coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were with him—I
never learned their names—and they were hardly enough to hand up
bombs as quickly as he wished to throw them.

Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting for a pounce. Though
wounded so that he felt faint and giddy, he called out for more bombs.
“More!” he said, “More!” and his hand was like a machine reaching out and
throwing.

Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was hauled over the barricade
which he had ordered to be built behind him, closing up his way of escape.

All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th Division held on to
their ground, and some of the Sherwoods made a new attack, clearing the
enemy out of the east portion of the redoubt.

It was lucky that it coincided with a counter-attack made by the enemy at
a different point, because it relieved the pressure there. Bombing duels
continued hour after hour, and human nature could hardly have endured so
long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of men.

So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on the night of October
15th the enemy attacked along the whole line of redoubts, and the Midland
men, who were just about to leave the trenches, found themselves engaged
in a new action. They had to fight again before they could go, and they
fought like demons or demigods for their right of way and home, and bombed
the enemy back to his holes in the ground.

So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Midland men of England,
whose division, years later, helped to break the Hindenburg line along the
great canal south of St.-Quentin.

What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless the generals who
planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony. It
demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the best
they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great courage, before
they died or fell, and it left some living men, and others who relieved
them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so close to the enemy that
one could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers.

And through the winter of ’15, and the years that followed, the
Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as
deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood, and
Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted themselves
lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls stank of new and
ancient death.

* * *

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were the
men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and
spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester
and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant
London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they relieved
the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to Givenchy, and
in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern. It was there the
English battalions learned the worst things of war and showed the quality
of English courage.

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in
spirit, stronger than the flesh.

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an enemy
trench, but his own bombing—party was cut off, owing to heavy
casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter
went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee and
he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle—the miracle of
human courage—he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench,
mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk—but made his
way along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were
hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing with
his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and directed
him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and worked his way
forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a violent
counter-attack.

Men fell rapidly under the enemy’s bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only one
leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were
beginning to have the wind-up, as they say, issued orders, controlled the
fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was repulsed
after two hours’ fighting, and only then did Cotter allow his wounds to be
bandaged. From the dug—out where he lay while the bombardment still
continued he called out cheery words to the men, until he was carried
down, fourteen hours later. He received the V. C., but died of his wounds.

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward, round
these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes of
shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a time
and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts of
supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were dead
or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis gun,
helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by German
bombers until it jammed.

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his,
flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until
reinforcements reached him.

Another officer of the Buff’s—by name Smeltzer—withdrew his
platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way
back slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of
his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of
nothing except that “when the Boches began shelling I got into a dugout,
and when they stopped I came out again.”

There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English
way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of
the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way
to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade.
He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with
them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded,
this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they had a
lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by
the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare—one V. C.,
sixteen D. S. C.’s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military
Medals—were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen
thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time,
made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern took the
highest toll of life and limbs.


V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward,
when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company
of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of
mine raised his hand and said, “Listen!”

Through the open door came the music of a mouth—organ, and it was
playing an old tune:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ,
our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine, rising
now and then into a savage violence which rattled the window-panes, and
beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of
distant guns.

“Christmas Eve!” said an officer. “Nineteen hundred and fifteen years
ago… and now—this!”

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was
followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in
Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the
meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and contrasted
it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few words of
perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades had gone
since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the courage of
laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the little
tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its feast-day,
in places where Death had been busy—and where the spirit of evil lay
in ambush!

So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of the enemy’s
guns. Already six hundred civilians—mostly women and children—had
been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting together through
broken window-panes, and children were staring into little shops (only a
few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken walls) where Christmas
toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier’s boots—a French Hop o’ My Thumb
in the giant’s boots—was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and
inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying
some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the
benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers
read their legends and laughed at them: “My heart is to you.” “Good luck.”
“To the success!” “Remind France.”

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked up
sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was spending
it.

“The people at home will be glad of ’em,” he said. “I s’pose one can’t
forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain’t the same thing out here.”

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and
found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their
batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed, fountains of
spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars lurching in
the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side-slipping in a wild way
through boggy tracks, supply—columns churning up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come that
way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white
beard must have lifted his red gown high—waist-high—when he
waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and he
would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in sludge,
now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water,
as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags to save a
headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth,
would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open spaces,
where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those
sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of
slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy’s lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a
hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery
of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I felt)
in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, “It’s best to
get a move on here,” and, “This road is swept by machine—gun fire,”
and, “I don’t like this corner; it’s quite unhealthy.”

But that absurd idea—of Santa Claus in the trenches—came into
my head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a
whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the
glint of his red cloak.

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small
group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.

“Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?” asked a lad, grinning
down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.

“Likely, ain’t it?” said the other boy. “Father Christmas would be a
bloody fool to come out here… They’d be full of water in the morning.”

“You’ll get some presents,” I said. “They haven’t forgotten you at home.”

At that word “home” the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes
for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was
a girlish-looking fellow—perhaps that was why his comrades were
chaffing him—and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn
back to some village in Yorkshire.

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas with
contemptuous irony.

“A happy Christmas!” said one of them, with a laugh. “Plenty of crackers
about this year! Tom Smith ain’t in it.”

“And I hope we’re going to give the Boches some Christmas presents,” said
another. “They deserve it, I don’t think!”

“No truce this year?” I asked.

“A truce?… We’re not going to allow any monkey—tricks on the
parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We’ve got to
get on with the war. That’s my motto.”

Other men said: “We wouldn’t mind a holiday. We’re fed up to the neck with
all this muck.”

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol I
heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both sides,
and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle on the
keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into a bit of
trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel shells were
bursting, and behind the lines our “heavies” were busily at work firing at
long range.

“On earth peace, good-will toward men.”

The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that long
line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines, and the
riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells which came
clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of great guns.

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and the
dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by the
splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.


VI

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year, and
the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept fields,
so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and there was
no peace on earth.

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of war.
I heard the New-Year’s chorus when I went to see the last of the year
across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence. It went
into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories, to thunderous
salvos, carrying death with them. The “heavies” were indulging in a
special strafe this New—Year’s eve. As I went down a road near the
lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash of gun upon gun.
The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and the roar of all this
artillery stupefied one’s sense of sound. All about me in the village of
Annequin, through which I walked, there was no other sound, no noise of
human life. There were no New-Year’s eve rejoicings among those rows of
miners’ cottages on the edge of the battlefield. Half those little
red-brick houses were blown to pieces, and when here and there through a
cracked window-pane I saw a woman’s white face peering out upon me as I
passed I felt as though I had seen a ghost-face in some black pit of hell.

For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always under
the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there passed all
belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the field of
battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of Loos stood
grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain and the mist
loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor
bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hulluch were
jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New—Year’s eve, I saw no
sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the broad
desolation and listened to the enormous clangor of great guns.

* * *

Coming back that day through Bethune I met some very human life. It was a
big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to see what
“Tommy” was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and saw a good
deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that sector and the naval
men did their little bit by the side of the lads in khaki, who liked this
visit. They discovered the bomb store and opened such a Brock’s benefit
that the enemy must have been shocked with surprise. One young marine was
bomb-slinging for four hours, and grinned at the prodigious memory as
though he had had the time of his life. Another confessed to me that he
preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off all night until the dawn.
There was no sleep in the dugouts, and every hour was a long thrill.

“I don’t mind saying,” said a petty officer who had fought in several
naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, “that I had a fair
fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. ‘I suppose I’ve got to look
through a periscope,’ I said. ‘Not you,’ said the sergeant. ‘At night you
puts your head over the parapet.’ So over the parapet I put my head, and
presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle began to
shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I fixed bayonet
and prepared for an attack… But I’m blessed if it wasn’t a swarm of
rats!”

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some
of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young
fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.

“Come up and have a look, Jack,” he said to one of the bluejackets.

“Not in these trousers, old mate!” said that young man.

“All as cool as cucumbers,” said a petty officer, “and take the
discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It’s marvelous.
Good luck to them in the new year!”

* * *

Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed to
die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that New-Year’s
day.

They were the heroes of Loos—or some of them—Camerons and
Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King’s Own
Scottish Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and
away to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their
battalions have been filled up with new drafts—of the same type as
themselves and of the same grit—but that day no ghost of grief, no
dark shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round
a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in
those days of the September battle.

There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from
Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship which
burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the platform above
the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came in, and this hall in
France was filled with the wild strains of it.

“And they’re grand, the pipes,” said one of the Camerons. “When I’ve been
sae tired on the march I could have laid doon an’ dee’d the touch o’ the
pipes has fair lifted me up agen.”

The piper made way for a Kiltie at the piano, and for Highlanders, who
sang old songs full of melancholy, which seemed to make the hearts of his
comrades grow glad as when they helped him with “The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks
of Loch Lomond.” But the roof nearly flew off the hall to “The March of
the Cameron Men,” and the walls were greatly strained when the regimental
marching song broke at every verse into wild Highland shouts and the
war-cry which was heard at Loos of “Camerons, forward!” “Forward,
Camerons!”

“An Englishman is good,” said one of the Camerons, leaning over the table
to me, “and an Irishman is good, but a Scot is the best of all.” Then he
struck the palm of one hand with the fist of another. “But the London
men,” he said, with a fine, joyous laugh at some good memory, “are as good
as any fighting-men in France. My word, ye should have seen ’em on
September 25th. And the London Irish were just lions!”

Out in the rain-slashed street I met the colonel of a battalion of Argylls
and Sutherlands, with several of his officers; a tall, thin officer with a
long stride, who was killed when another year had passed. He beckoned to
me and said: “I’m going the rounds of the billets to wish the men good
luck in the new year. It’s a strain on the constitution, as I have to
drink their health each time!”

He bore the strain gallantly, and there was something noble and chivalrous
in the way he spoke to all his men, gathered together in various rooms in
old Flemish houses, round plum-pudding from home or feasts provided by the
army cooks. To each group of men he made the same kind of speech, thanking
them from his heart for all their courage.

“You were thanked by three generals,” he said, “after your attack at Loos,
and you upheld the old reputation of the regiment. I’m proud of you. And
afterward, in November, when you had the devil of a time in the trenches,
you stuck it splendidly and came out with high spirits. I wish you all a
happy new year, and whatever the future may bring I know I can count on
you.”

In every billet there were three cheers for the colonel, and another three
for the staff captain, and though the colonel protested that he was afraid
of spending a night in the guard-room (there were shouts of laughter at
this), he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the custom of the
day.

“Toodle-oo, old bird!” said a kilted cockney, halfway up a ladder, on
which he swayed perilously, being very drunk; but the colonel did not hear
this familiar way of address.

In many billets and in many halls the feast of New Year’s day was kept in
good comradeship by men who had faced death together, and who in the year
that was coming fought in many battles and fell on many fields.


VII

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for a
long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never knew what
they might do next. When they were most quiet they were most dangerous.
They used cunning as well as courage, and went out on red-Indian
adventures over No Man’s Land for fierce and scientific slaughter.

I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when a big party of
them—all volunteers—went out one night with intent to get
through the barbed wire outside a strong German position, to do a lot of
killing there. They had trained for the job and thought out every detail
of this hunting expedition. They blacked their faces so that they would
not show white in the enemy’s flares. They fastened flash-lamps to their
bayonets so that they might see their victims. They wore rubber gloves to
save their hands from being torn on the barbs of the wire.

Stealthily they crawled over No Man’s Land, crouching in shell-holes every
time a rocket rose and made a glimmer of light. They took their time at
the wire, muffling the snap of it by bits of cloth. Reliefs crawled up
with more gloves, and even with tins of hot cocoa. Then through the gap
into the German trenches, and there were screams of German soldiers,
terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes, and black faces above
them, and bayonets already red with blood. It was butcher’s work, quick
and skilful, like red-Indian scalping. Thirty Germans were killed before
the Canadians went back, with only two casualties… The Germans were
horrified by this sudden slaughter. They dared not come out on patrol
work. Canadian scouts crawled down to them and insulted them, ingeniously,
vilely, but could get no answer. Later they trained their machine—guns
on German working-parties and swept crossroads on which supplies came up,
and the Canadian sniper, in one shell-hole or another, lay for hours in
sulky patience, and at last got his man… They had to pay for all this,
at Maple Copse, in June of ’15, as I shall tell. But it was a vendetta
which did not end until the war ended, and the Canadians fought the
Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skilful patience which at last
brought them to Mons on the day before armistice.

I saw a good deal of the Canadians from first to last, and on many days of
battle saw the tough, hard fighting spirit of these men. Their generals
believed in common sense applied to war, and not in high mysteries and
secret rites which cannot be known outside the circle of initiation. I was
impressed by General Currie, whom I met for the first time in that winter
of 1915-16, and wrote at the time that I saw in him “a leader of men who
in open warfare might win great victories by doing the common-sense thing
rapidly and decisively, to the surprise of an enemy working by elaborate
science. He would, I think, astound them by the simplicity of his smashing
stroke.” Those words of mine were fulfilled—on the day when the
Canadians helped to break the Drocourt-Queant line, and when they captured
Cambrai, with English troops on their right, who shared their success.
General Currie, who became the Canadian Corps Commander, did not spare his
men. He led them forward whatever the cost, but there was something great
and terrible in his simplicity and sureness of judgment, and this real—estate
agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was undoubtedly a man of
strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and tradition which
swathed round so many of our own leaders.

He cut clean to the heart of things, ruthlessly, like a surgeon, and as I
watched that man, immense in bulk, with a heavy, thoughtful face and stern
eyes that softened a little when he smiled, I thought of him as Oliver
Cromwell. He was severe as a disciplinarian, and not beloved by many men.
But his staff-officers, who stood in awe of him, knew that he demanded
truth and honesty, and that his brain moved quickly to sure decisions and
saw big problems broadly and with understanding. He had good men with him—mostly
amateurs—but with hard business heads and the same hatred of red
tape and niggling ways which belonged to their chief. So the Canadian
Corps became a powerful engine on our side when it had learned many
lessons in blood and tragedy. They organized their publicity side in the
same masterful way, and were determined that what Canada did the world
should know—and damn all censorship. They bought up English artists,
photographers, and writing—men to record their exploits. With Lord
Beaverbrook in England they engineered Canadian propaganda with immense
energy, and Canada believed her men made up the British army and did all
the fighting. I do not blame them, and only wish that the English soldier
should have been given his share of the honors that belonged to him—the
lion’s share.


VIII

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. It became part of
the routine of war, that quick killing in the night, for English and
Scottish and Irish and Welsh troops, and some had luck with it, and some
men liked it, and to others it was a horror which they had to do, and
always it was a fluky, nervy job, when any accident might lead to tragedy.

I remember one such raid by the 12th West Yorks in January of ’15, which
was typical of many others, before raids developed into minor battles,
with all the guns at work.

There were four lieutenants who drew up the plan and called for
volunteers, and it was one of these who went out first and alone to
reconnoiter the ground and to find the best way through the German barbed
wire. He just slipped out over the parapet and disappeared into the
darkness. When he came back he had a wound in the wrist—it was just
the bad luck of a chance bullet—but brought in valuable knowledge.
He had found a gap in the enemy’s wire which would give an open door to
the party of visitors. He had also tested the wire farther along, and
thought it could be cut without much bother.

“Good enough!” was the verdict, and a detachment started out for No Man’s
Land, divided into two parties.

The enemy trenches were about one hundred yards away, which seems a mile
in the darkness and the loneliness of the dead ground. At regular
intervals the German rockets flared up so that the hedges and wire and
parapets along their line were cut out ink-black against the white
illumination, and the two patrols of Yorkshiremen who had been crawling
forward stopped and crouched lower and felt themselves revealed, and then
when darkness hid them again went on.

The party on the left were now close to the German wire and under the
shelter of a hedge. They felt their way along until the two subalterns who
were leading came to the gap which had been reported by the first
explorer. They listened intently and heard the German sentry stamping his
feet and pacing up and down. Presently he began to whistle softly, utterly
unconscious of the men so close to him—so close now that any
stumble, any clatter of arms, any word spoken, would betray them.

The two lieutenants had their revolvers ready and crept forward to the
parapet. The men had to act according to instinct now, for no order could
be given, and one of them found his instinct led him to clamber right into
the German trench a few yards away from the sentry, but on the other side
of the traverse. He had not been there long, holding his breath and
crouching like a wolf, before footsteps came toward him and he saw the
glint of a cigarette.

It was a German officer going his round. The Yorkshire boy sprang on to
the parapet again, and lay across it with his head toward our lines and
his legs dangling in the German trench. The German officer’s cloak brushed
his heels, but the boy twisted round a little and stared at him as he
passed. But he passed, and presently the sentry began to whistle again,
some old German tune which cheered him in his loneliness. He knew nothing
of the eyes watching him through the darkness nor of his nearness to
death.

It was the first lieutenant who tried to shoot him. But the revolver was
muddy and would not fire. Perhaps a click disturbed the sentry. Anyhow,
the moment had come for quick work. It was the sergeant who sprang upon
him, down from the parapet with one pounce. A frightful shriek, with the
shrill agony of a boy’s voice, wailed through the silence. The sergeant
had his hand about the German boy’s throat and tried to strangle him and
to stop another dreadful cry.

The second officer made haste. He thrust his revolver close to the
struggling sentry and shot him dead, through the neck, just as he was
falling limp from a blow on the head given by the butt-end of the weapon
which had failed to fire. The bullet did its work, though it passed
through the sergeant’s hand, which had still held the man by the throat.
The alarm had been raised and German soldiers were running to the rescue.

“Quick!” said one of the officers.

There was a wild scramble over the parapet, a drop into the wet ditch, and
a race for home over No Man’s Land, which was white under the German
flares and noisy with the waspish note of bullets.

The other party were longer away and had greater trouble to find a way
through, but they, too, got home, with one officer badly wounded, and
wonderful luck to escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from “the jumps”
for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their own barbed wire,
as though the English were out there again. And at the sound of those
bombs the West Yorks laughed all along their trenches.


IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those battlefields
of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many nationalities and
races and breeds of men belonging to that British family of ours which
sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there were all the ways of
speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all the creeds and local
customs and songs of old tradition which belong to the mixture of our
blood wherever it is found about the world.

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years of war
over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and Lowlanders
with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches the German
soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained harmony that it was
as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into the firing-line. The
Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no officer received his
command unless he spoke it as fluently as running water by Aberystwyth,
and even orders were given in this tongue until a few Saxons, discovered
in the ranks, failed to form fours and know their left hand from their
right in Welsh.

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the peasants in
these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old Saxon words which
puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought the northern
bur with them and the grit of the northern spirit. And Ireland, though she
would not have conscription, sent some of the bravest of her boys out
there, and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons the old
fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly again, and the blood
of her race has been poured out upon these tragic fields.

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with Irish
boys at the beginning of ’16 that I found it hard not to believe that a
part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In one old
outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows lay cuddled
up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave out a sweet,
sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the loft, to
which they climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs.

I went up the ladder after them—it was very shaky in the middle—and,
putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark
figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs. One
boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny whistle very
softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the straws.

“The craytures are that bold,” said a boy from County Cork, “that when we
first came in they sat up smilin’ and sang ‘God Save Ireland.’ Bedad, and
it’s the truth I’m after tellin’ ye.”

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the
shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and
soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at
making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a few
bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no Protestant
with a grudge against the Pope.

There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the Dublins and the
Munsters were up in the firing-line at the Hohenzollern. The shelling was
so violent that it was difficult to get up the supplies, and some of the
boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was the only complaint
which one of them made when I asked him what he thought of his first
experience under fire.

“It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I’d been after thinking, if
only my appetite had not been bigger than my belt, at all.”

The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who had just come out from
the old country to join their comrades in the firing-line. When the
Germans put over a number of shells, smashing the trenches and wounding
men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted to get over the
parapet and make a dash for the enemy. “’Twould taych him a lesson,” they
told their officers, who had some trouble in restraining them.

These newcomers had to take part in the digging which goes on behind the
lines at night—out in the open, without the shelter of a trench. It
was nervous work, especially when the German flares went up, silhouetting
their figures on the sky-line, and when one of the enemy’s machine-guns
began to chatter. But the Irish boys found the heart for a jest, and one
of them, resting on his spade a moment, stared over to the enemy’s lines
and said, “May the old devil take the spalpeen who works that typewriter!”

It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had come fresh to the
trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of war
until then. But they came out proudly—“with their tails up,” said
one of their officers—after their baptism of fire.

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn on
the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors—who were myself and
another—the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came
striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under
their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around them
and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their breath
for “the good old Irish tune” demanded by the captain.

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish yesterdays,
and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the yearning of
them.

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that’s going round? The shamrock
is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.

She’s the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; They’re hanging
men and women there for wearing of the green.

Then the pipers played the “March of O’Neill,” a wild old air as shrill
and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish battle-cries
against Elizabeth’s pikemen and Cromwell’s Ironsides.

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the old
people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that Flemish
barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the boys who were
out there fighting.

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of an
Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself, with
all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which came crying
from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could carry across
the sea.

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy, a
poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and torn, and
caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger along. But they
pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when they passed their
brigadier, who called out words of praise to them.

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them, after
a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps round
German redoubts, up there in the swamps.


X

Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a glint of
sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good
flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to fall, and
then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of Flanders were
white.

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all the
pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our soldiers
were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from Santa
Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy ridges on the
red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the rubbish heaps in Flemish
farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where British soldiers
made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely country which led to the
trenches, every furrow in the fields was a thin white ridge, and the
trees, which were just showing a shimmer of green, stood ink-black against
the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak down each tall trunk on
the side nearest to the wind. The old windmills of Flanders which looked
down upon the battlefields had been touched by the softly falling flakes,
so that each rib of their sails and each rung of their ladders and each
plank of their ancient timbers was outlined like a frosty cobweb.

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through the blizzard with
ermine mantles over their mackintosh capes, and mounted men with their
heads bent to the storm were like white knights riding through a white
wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun—limbers drawn
up by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals,
were all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed
in the great quietude.

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the piled
sand-bags and snow-men of sentries standing in the shelter of the
traverses. The tarpaulin roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts were so
changed by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places of fairy
folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a Christmas hiding-place,
and not of soldiers stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers and
keeping their rifles dry.

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty even to No Man’s
Land, making a lace-work pattern of barbed wire, and lying very softly
over the tumbled ground of mine-fields, so that all the ugliness of
destruction and death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes
fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them tenderly. It was as
though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold their wings above
the obscene things of war.

For a little while the snow brought something like peace. The guns were
quieter, for artillery observation was impossible. There could be no
sniping, for the scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches. The
airplanes which went up in the morning came down quickly to the powdered
fields and took shelter in their sheds. A great hush was over the war
zone, but there was something grim, suggestive of tragic drama, in this
silent countryside, so white even in the darkness, where millions of men
were waiting to kill one another.

Behind the lines the joke of the snow was seen by soldiers, who were quick
to see a chance of fun. Men who had been hurling bombs in the Ypres
salient bombarded one another with hand-grenades, which burst noiselessly
except for the shouts of laughter that signaled a good hit.

French soldiers were at the same game in one village I passed, where the
snow-fight was fast and furious, and some of our officers led an attack
upon old comrades with the craft of trappers and an expert knowledge of
enfilade fire. The white peace did not last long. The ermine mantle on the
battlefield was stained by scarlet patches as soon as men could see to
fight again.


XI

For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the
Chateau of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the line,
were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motor-cars could
move through that snow which drifted across the roads. We sat indoors
talking—high treason sometimes—pondering over the problem of a
war from which there seemed no way out, becoming irritable with one
another’s company, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics of
war, the purpose of man, the gospel of Christ, the guilt of Germany, and
the dishonesty of British politicians. Futile, foolish arguments, while
men were being killed in great numbers, as daily routine, without result!

Officers of a division billeted nearby came in to dine with us, some of
them generals with elaborate theories on war and a passionate hatred of
Germany, seeing no other evil in the world; some of them brigadiers with
tales of appalling brutality (which caused great laughter), some of them
battalion officers with the point of view of those who said, “Morituri te
saluant!”

There was one whose conversation I remember (having taken notes of it
before I turned in that night). It was a remarkable conversation, summing
up many things of the same kind which I had heard in stray sentences by
other officers, and month by month, years afterward, heard again, spoken
with passion. This officer who had come out to France in 1914 and had been
fighting ever since by a luck which had spared his life when so many of
his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak with passion. He spoke
with a bitter, mocking irony. He said that G.H.Q. was a close corporation
in the hands of the military clique who had muddled through the South
African War, and were now going to muddle through a worse one. They were,
he said, intrenched behind impregnable barricades of old, moss-eaten
traditions, red tape, and caste privilege. They were, of course, patriots
who believed that the Empire depended upon their system. They had no doubt
of their inherent right to conduct the war, which was “their war,” without
interference or criticism or publicity. They spent many hours of the days
and nights in writing letters to one another, and those who wrote most
letters received most decorations, and felt, with a patriotic fire within
their breasts, that they were getting on with the war.

Within their close corporation there were rivalries, intrigues, perjuries,
and treacheries like those of a medieval court. Each general and
staff-officer had his followers and his sycophants, who jostled for one
another’s jobs, fawned on the great man, flattered his vanity, and made
him believe in his omniscience. Among the General Staff there were various
grades—G.S.O. I, G.S.O. II, G.S.O. III, and those in the lower
grades fought for a higher grade with every kind of artfulness, and
diplomacy and back-stair influence. They worked late into the night. That
is to say, they went back to their offices after dining at mess—“so
frightfully busy, you know, old man!”—and kept their lights burning,
and smoked more cigarettes, and rang one another up on the telephone with
futile questions, and invented new ways of preventing something from being
down somewhere. The war to them was a far-off thing essential to their way
of life, as miners in the coal-fields are essential to statesmen in
Downing Street, especially in cold weather. But it did not touch their
souls or their bodies. They did not see its agony, or imagine it, or worry
about it. They were always cheerful, breezy, bright with optimism. They
made a little work go a long way. They were haughty and arrogant with
subordinate officers, or at the best affable and condescending, and to
superior officers they said, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “Quite so, sir,” to
any statement, however absurd in its ignorance and dogmatism. If a
major-general said, “Wagner was a mountebank in music,” G.S.O. III, who
had once studied at Munich, said, “Yes, sir,” or, “You think so, sir? Of
course you’re right.”

If a lieutenant-colonel said, “Browning was not a poet,” a staff captain,
who had read Browning at Cambridge with passionate admiration, said: “I
quite agree with you, sir. And who do you think was a poet, sir?”

It was the army system. The opinion of a superior officer was correct,
always. It did not admit of contradiction. It was not to be criticized.
Its ignorance was wisdom.

G. H. Q. lived, said our guest, in a world of its own, rose-colored,
remote from the ugly things of war. They had heard of the trenches, yes,
but as the West End hears of the East End—a nasty place where common
people lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society folk go
slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell burst, having braved
the lice and the dirt.

“The trenches are the slums,” said our guest. “We are the Great Unwashed.
We are the Mud-larks.”

There was a trench in the salient called J. 3. It was away out in advance
of our lines. It was not connected with our own trench system. It had been
left derelict by both sides and was a ditch in No Man’s Land. But our men
were ordered to hold it—“to save sniping.” A battalion commander
protested to the Headquarters Staff. There was no object in holding J. 3.
It was a target for German guns and a temptation to German miners.

“J. 3,” came the staff command, “must be held until further orders.”

We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench and all in it were
thrown up by mines. Among those killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce, the
husband of Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown.

Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve Chapelle. “This is a
death sentence,” said the officers who were ordered to attack. But they
attacked, and died, with great gallantry, as usual.

“In the slums,” said our guest, “we are expected to die if G. H. Q. tells
us so, or if the corps arranges our funeral. And generally we do.”

That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened to the rumbling of
the gunning away in the salient, and seemed to hear the groans of men at
Hooge, at St.-Eloi, in other awful places. The irony of that guest of ours
was frightful. It was bitter beyond justice, though with truth in the
mockery, the truth of a soul shocked by the waste of life and heroism;…
when I met him later in the war he was on the staff.


XII

The world—our side of it—held its breath and felt its own
heart-beat when, in February of that year ’15, the armies of the German
Crown Prince launched their offensive against the French at Verdun. It was
the biggest offensive since their first drive down to the Marne; and as
the days passed and they hurled fresh masses of men against the French and
brought up new guns to replace their losses, there was no doubt that in
this battle the Germans were trying by all their weight to smash their way
to victory through the walls which the French had built against them by
living flesh and spirit.

“Will they hold?” was the question which every man among us asked of his
neighbor and of his soul.

On our front there was nothing of war beyond the daily routine of the
trenches and the daily list of deaths and wounds. Winter had closed down
upon us in Flanders, and through its fogs and snows came the news of that
conflict round Verdun to the waiting army, which was ours. The news was
bad, yet not the worst. Poring over maps of the French front, we in our
winter quarters saw with secret terror, some of us with a bluster of false
optimism, some of us with unjustified despair, that the French were giving
ground, giving ground slowly, after heroic resistance, after dreadful
massacre, and steadily. They were falling back to the inner line of forts,
hard pressed. The Germans, in spite of monstrous losses under the flail of
the soixante-quinzes, were forcing their way from slope to slope,
capturing positions which all but dominated the whole of the Verdun
heights.

“If the French break we shall lose the war,” said the pessimist.

“The French will never lose Verdun,” said the optimist.

“Why not? What are your reasons beyond that cursed optimism which has been
our ruin? Why announce things like that as though divinely inspired? For
God’s sake let us stare straight at the facts.”

“The Germans are losing the war by this attack on Verdun. They are just
pouring their best soldiers into the furnace—burning the flower of
their army. It is our gain. It will lead in the end to our victory.”

“But, my dear good fool, what about the French losses? Don’t they get
killed, too? The German artillery is flogging them with shell-fire from
seventeen-inch guns, twelve-inch, nine-inch, every bloody and monstrous
engine. The French are weak in heavy artillery. For that error, which has
haunted them from the beginning, they are now paying with their life’s
blood—the life blood of France.”

“You are arguing on emotion and fear. Haven’t you learned yet that the
attacking side always loses more than the defense?”

“That is a sweeping statement. It depends on relative man-power and
gun-power. Given a superiority of guns and men, and attack is cheap.
Defense is blown off the earth. Otherwise how could we ever hope to win?”

“I agree. But the forces at Verdun are about equal, and the French have
the advantage of position. The Germans are committing suicide.”

“Humbug! They know what they are doing. They are the greatest soldiers in
Europe.”

“Led by men with bone heads.”

“By great scientists.”

“By the traditional rules of medievalism. By bald—headed vultures in
spectacles with brains like penny-in—the-slot machines. Put in a
penny and out comes a rule of war. Mad egoists! Colossal blunderers!
Efficient in all things but knowledge of life.”

“Then God help our British G.H.Q.!”

A long silence. The silence of men who see monstrous forces at work, in
which human lives are tossed like straws in flame. A silence reaching back
to old ghosts of history, reaching out to supernatural aid. Then from one
speaker or another a kind of curse and a kind of prayer.

“Hell!… God help us all!”

So it was in our mess where war correspondents and censors sat down
together after futile journeys to dirty places to see a bit of shell-fire,
a few dead bodies, a line of German trenches through a periscope, a queue
of wounded men outside a dressing station, the survivors of a trench raid,
a bombardment before a “minor operation,” a trench-mortar “stunt,” a new
part of the line… Verdun was the only thing that mattered in March and
April until France had saved herself and all of us.


XIII

The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, but rendered great
service to France at that time. By February of 1915 we had taken over a
new line of front, extending from our positions round Loos southward to
the country round Lens and Arras. It was to this movement in February that
Marshal Joffre made allusion when, in a message to our Commander-in-Chief
on March 2d, he said that “the French army remembered that its recent call
on the comradeship of the British army met with an immediate and complete
response.”

By liberating an immense number of French troops of the Tenth Army and a
mass of artillery from this part of the front, we had the good fortune to
be of great service to France at a time when she needed many men and guns
to repel the assault upon Verdun.

Some of her finest troops—men who had fought in many battles and had
held the trenches with most dogged courage—were here in this sector
of the western front, and many batteries of heavy and light artillery had
been in these positions since the early months of the war. It was,
therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to the defense of Verdun
when British troops replaced them at the time the enemy made his great
attack.

The French went away from this part of their battlefront with regret and
emotion. To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long ridge of
Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to
Hebuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the Somme.
Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.

I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw the visible
reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn there, and told the story
of all the struggle there by the upheaval of earth, the wreckage of old
trenches, the mine—craters and shell-holes, and the litter of battle
in every part of that countryside.

I went there first—to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette looking
northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, which the enemy held as a
strong barrier against us above the village of Souchez and Ablain
St.-Nazaire and Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured—when
they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I saw in their places
the men who had lived there and fought there as one may read in the
terrible and tragic narrative of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu.

I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. (Never once did he admit any
fine weather to alleviate the suffering of his comrades, thereby
exaggerating their misery somewhat.) It was raining, and there was a
white, dank mist through the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny on the way to
the spur of Notre Dame. It clung to the undergrowth, which was torn by
shell-fire, and to every blade of grass growing rankly round the lips of
shell-craters in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the red
pantaloons of the first French armies who had fought through those woods
in the beginning of the war.

I roamed about a graveyard there, where shells had smashed down some of
the crosses, but had not damaged the memorial to the men who had stormed
up the slope of Notre Dame de Lorette and had fallen when their comrades
chased the Germans to the village below.

A few shells came over the hill as I pushed through the undergrowth with a
French captain, and they burst among the trees with shattering boughs. I
remember that little officer in a steel helmet, and I could see a Norman
knight as his ancestor with a falcon as his crest. He stood so often on
the sky-line, in full view of the enemy (I was thankful for the mist),
that I admired but deplored his audacity. Without any screen to hide us we
walked down the hillside, gathering clots of greasy mud in our boots,
stumbling, and once sprawling. Another French captain joined us and became
the guide.

“This road is often ‘Marmite,’” he said, “but I have escaped so often I
have a kind of fatalism.”

I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells which a few minutes
before had burst in our immediate neighborhood, cutting off twigs of trees
and one branch with a scatter of steel as sharp as knives and as heavy as
sledge-hammers.

Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which afterward I
passed through scores of times on the way to Vimy when that ridge was
ours. The ragged ruin of its church was white and ghostly in the mist. On
the right of the winding road which led through it was Souchez Wood, all
blasted and riven, and beyond a huddle of bricks which once was Souchez
village.

“Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground,” said the French
officer. “Their bodies lie thick below the soil. Poor France! Poor
France!”

He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all that
youth of France which even then, in March of ’16, had been offered up in
vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war. Rain was slashing down now,
beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of French soldiers who
stood shivering by the ruined walls while trench-mortars were making a
tumult in the neighborhood. They were the men of Henri Barbusse—his
comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed together in a
confraternity of misery. They were plastered with wet clay, and their
boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue
coats were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and made pools
round their feet. They were unshaven, and their wet faces were smeared
with the soil of the trenches.

“How goes it?” said the French captain with me.

“It does not go,” said the French sergeant. “’Cre nom de Dieu!—my
men are not gay to-day. They have been wet for three weeks and their bones
are aching. This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a little
fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the dirty Boche starts
shelling again. So we do not get dry, and we have no warmth, and we cannot
make even a cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up there on Vimy
looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his sleeve and says those poor
devils of Frenchmen are not gay to-day! That is true, mon Capitaine. Mais,
que voulez-vous? C’est pour la France.”

“Oui. C’est pour la France.”

The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those
comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of Neuville
St.-Vaast.

“Poor fellows,” he said, presently. “Not even a cup of hot coffee!… That
is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes—afterward! But at what a
price!”

So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine church,
old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little streets of
comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old hill of Vimy, and
within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish heap mingled with
unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies’ perambulators, bits of dead
bodies, and shattered farm-carts.

Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay under
a blood-soaked blanket.

“It is a bad wound?” asked the captain.

The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face,
waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a
pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.

“He may live as far as the dressing station,” said one of the Frenchmen.
“It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just now, over
there.”

The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sand—bags at the end
of a street of ruin.

Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, hobbling gait. Both of
them were wounded in the legs, and had tied rags round their wounds
tightly. They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed,
with brooding eyes.

“The German trench-mortars are very evil,” said the captain.

We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sand-bags to
look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and thrust out
by communication trenches to the edge of the village in which we walked. A
boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the captain, who stepped
back and said, in an emotional way:

“Tiens! C’est toi, Edouard?”

“Oui, mon Capitaine.”

The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes and long, black
eyelashes.

“You are a lieutenant, then? How does it go, Edouard?”

“It does not go,” answered the boy like that French sergeant in Ablain
St.-Nazaire. “This is a bad place. I lose my men every day. There were
three killed yesterday, and six wounded. To-day already there are two
killed and ten wounded.”

Something broke in his voice.

“Ce n’est pas bon du tout, du tout!” (“It is not good at all, at all!”)

The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.

“Courage, mon vieux!”

The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud. Sharp
stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the high,
long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette. Batteries
of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells cut through the
air above us like scythes. The caldron in this pit of war was being
stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us, covered by a bloody
blanket like the other one. From slimy sand-bags and wet ruins came the
sickening stench of human corruption. A boot with some pulp inside
protruded from a mud—bank where I stood, and there was a human head,
without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of a shell—hole.
Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year before, when swarms of
boys, of the ’16 class, boys of eighteen, the flower of French youth,
rushed forward from the crossroads at La Targette, a few hundred yards
away, to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They captured them,
and it cost them seven thousand in killed and wounded—at least three
thousand dead. They fought like young demons through the flaming streets.
They fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire. Machine—guns cut
them down as though they were ripe corn under the sickle. But these French
boys broke the Prussian Guard that day.

Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the
fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below
earth at the Labyrinth—sapping, mining, gaining a network of
trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by
frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and
hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in
the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for
something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the Labyrinth,
until in February of ’16 they went away after greeting our khaki men who
came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen
there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused trenches below
Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.


XIV

It was then, in that February of ’15, that the city of Arras passed for
defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our
strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted
forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many days
of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in steel
helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded
(three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their
laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in the surging tide
of traffic that poured through to victory that cost as much sometimes as
defeat.

When I first went into Arras during its occupation by the French I
remembered a day, fifteen months before, near the town of St.-Pol in
Artois, where I was caught up in one of those tides of fugitives which in
those early days of war used to roll back in a state of terror before the
German invasion. “Where do they come from?” I asked, watching this long
procession of gigs and farmers’ carts and tramping women and children. The
answer told me everything. “They are bombarding Arras, m’sieur.”

Since then “They” had never ceased to bombard Arras. From many points of
view, as I had come through the countryside at night, I had seen the
flashes of shells over that city and had thought of the agony inside. Four
days before I went in first it was bombarded with one hundred and fifty
seventeen-inch shells, each one of which would destroy a cathedral. It was
with a sense of being near to death—not a pleasant feeling, you
understand—that I went into Arras for the first time and saw what
had happened to it.

I was very near to the Germans. No more than ten yards away, when I stood
peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the suburb of
Blangy—it was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a piano in the
parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of sand-bags—and
no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy’s lines when I paced up
and down the great railway station of Arras, where no trains ever
traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been encamped outside the
city, and for all that time had tried to batter a way into and through it.
An endless battle had surged up against its walls, but in spite of all
their desperate attacks no German soldier had set foot inside the city
except as a prisoner of war. Many thousands of young Frenchmen had given
their blood to save it.

The enemy had not been able to prevail over flesh and blood and the spirit
of heroic men, but he had destroyed the city bit by bit. It was pitiful
beyond all expression. It was worse than looking upon a woman whose beauty
had been scarred by bloody usage.

For Arras was a city of beauty—a living expression in stone of all
the idealism in eight hundred years of history, a most sweet and gracious
place. Even then, after a year’s bombardment, some spiritual exhalation of
human love and art came to one out of all this ruin. When I entered the
city and wandered a little in its public gardens before going into its
dead heart—the Grande Place—I felt the strange survival. The
trees here were slashed by shrapnel. Enormous shell-craters had plowed up
those pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were beaten down.

Almost every house had been hit, every building was scarred and slashed,
but for the most part the city still stood, so that I went through many
long streets and passed long lines of houses, all deserted, all dreadful
in their silence and desolation and ruin.

Then I came to the cathedral of St.-Vaast. It was an enormous building of
the Renaissance, not beautiful, but impressive in its spaciousness and
dignity. Next to it was the bishop’s palace, with long corridors and
halls, and a private chapel. Upon these walls and domes the fury of great
shells had spent itself. Pillars as wide in girth as giant trees had been
snapped off to the base. The dome of the cathedral opened with a yawning
chasm. High explosives burst through the walls. The keystones of arches
were blown out, and masses of masonry were piled into the nave and aisles.

As I stood there, rooks had perched in the broken vaulting and flew with
noisy wings above the ruined altars. Another sound came like a great
beating of wings, with a swifter rush. It was a shell, and the vibration
of it stirred the crumbling masonry, and bits of it fell with a clatter to
the littered floor. On the way to the ruin of the bishop’s chapel I passed
a group of stone figures. They were the famous “Angels of Arras” removed
from some other part of the building to what might have been a safer
place.

Now they were fallen angels, mangled as they lay. But in the chapel
beyond, where the light streamed through the broken panes of stained-glass
windows, one figure stood untouched in all this ruin. It was a tall statue
of Christ standing in an attitude of meekness and sorrow, as though in the
presence of those who crucified Him.

Yet something more wonderful than this scene of tragedy lived in the midst
of it. Yet there were still people living in Arras.

They lived an underground life, for the most part, coming up from the
underworld to blink in the sunlight, to mutter a prayer or a curse or two,
to gaze for a moment at any change made by a new day’s bombardment, and
then to burrow down again at the shock of a gun.

Through low archways just above the pavement, I looked down into some of
the deep-vaulted cellars where the merchants used to stock their wine, and
saw old women, and sometimes young women there, cooking over little
stoves, pottering about iron bedsteads, busy with domestic work. Some of
them looked up as I passed, and my eyes and theirs stared into each other.
The women’s faces were lined and their eyes sunken. They had the look of
people who have lived through many agonies and have more to suffer.

Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. There was a
greengrocer’s shop still carrying on a little trade. I went into another
shop and bought some picture post-cards of the ruins within a few yards of
it. The woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and laughed because
she had no change. Only two days before a seventeen-inch shell had burst
fifty yards or so away from her shop, which was close enough for death. I
marveled at the risk she took with cheerful smiles. Was it courage or
stupidity?

One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in a friendly way and
called me cher petit ami, and described how she had been nearly killed a
hundred times. When I asked her why she stayed she gave an old woman’s
cackling laugh and said, “Que voulez-vous, jeune homme?” which did not
seem a satisfactory answer. As dusk crept into the streets of Arras I saw
small groups of boys and girls. They seemed to come out of holes in the
ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. “Are you afraid of the
shells?” I asked. They grimaced up at the sky and giggled. They had got
used to the hell of it all, and dodged death as they would a man with a
whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his lash. In one of the
vaulted cellars underground, when English soldiers first went in, there
lived a group of girls who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc
or two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to stay. Overhead
shells were howling. Their city was stricken with death. These women lived
like witches in a cave—a strange and dreadful life.

I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a
sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great factory
of some kind—probably for beet sugar—and then a street of
small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own
suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and
houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sand-bags,
and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers of
the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost in the
last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the enemy. As
we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly
and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which was a
combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary, for there
were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs
and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a chink no
wider than my finger I could see the red-brick ruins of the houses
inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai… The road to Douai as seen
through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks.

The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there were
many places where one had to step quietly and duck one’s head, or get
behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper’s bullet or the
rattle of bullets from a machine-gun.

As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its ruined
streets and shells were crashing over the city from French guns, answered
now and then by enemy batteries. But in a moment of rare silence I heard
the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet voice of that
old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and I thought of
that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly way.


XV

While we hung on the news from Verdun—it seemed as though the fate
of the world were in Fort Douaumont—our own lists of death grew
longer.

In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on
their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one
hand clutching at a comrade’s arm. More, and more, and more, with head
wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas.

“O Christ!” said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-bed
in the ambulance-train.

“Now you will be comfortable and happy,” said the R.A.M.C. orderly.

The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping a
strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his
forehead.

Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me
that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears
away and said:

“I’m lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed.”

So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.

It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the
shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung
over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the lines
round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our little
hells.

“Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have been
called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.” For days they
were under heavy fire, with 9.2’s flinging up volumes of sand and earth
and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and
bombs.

“It seemed like years!” said one of the Irish crowd. “None of us expected
to come out alive.”

Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a
midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully
beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black
coffee.

Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge—you remember Hooge?—the
14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in
shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst
like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in one
battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were killed on their way
out to “rest”—camps to the left of the road between Poperinghe and
Vlamertinghe.

* * *

On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers—the
old Fighting Fifth—captured six hundred yards of German trenches
near St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who
followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built of earth
and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the fork of two
roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this place and it blew
up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil in a black mass. Then
the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs through barbed wire and over
sand-bags which had escaped the radius of the mine-burst—in one
jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to kill, and to come
back. One German machine-gun got to work on them. It was knocked out by a
bomb flung by an officer who saved his company. The machine—gunners
were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was chaos out of which living men came,
shaking and moaning.

I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers come back from this
exploit, exhausted, caked from head to foot in wet clay. Their steel
helmets were covered with sand-bagging, their trench-waders, their rifles,
and smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white earth, and they looked
a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered from the fields of France. Some
of them had shawls tied about their helmets, and some of them wore the
shiny black helmets of the Jaeger Regiment and the gray coats of German
soldiers. They had had luck. They had not left many comrades behind, and
they had come out with life to the good world. Tired as they were, they
came along as though to carnival. They had proved their courage through an
ugly job. They had done “damn well,” as one of them remarked; and they
were out of the shell-fire which ravaged the ground they had taken, where
other men lay.


XVI

At the beginning of March there was a little affair—costing a lot of
lives—in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It
was a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had been held
for a long time by the 3d Division under General Haldane, whose men were
at last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the 17th Division
commanded by General Pilcher. The Germans took advantage of the change in
defense by a sudden attack after the explosion of a mine, and the men of
the 17th Division, new to this ground, abandoned a position of some local
importance.

General Haldane was annoyed. It was ground of which he knew every inch. It
was ground which men of his had died to hold. It was very annoying—using
a feeble word—to battalion officers and men of the 3d Division—Suffolks
and King’s Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal Scots—who had first
come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow and slush and shell-fire,
to a pretty village far behind the lines, on the road to Calais, where
they were getting back to a sense of normal life again. Sleeping in snug
billets, warming their feet at wood fires, listening with enchantment to
the silence about them, free from the noise of artillery. They were
hugging themselves with the thought of a month of this… Then because
they had been in the salient so long and had held this line so stubbornly,
they were ordered back again to recapture the position lost by new men.

After a day of field sports they were having a boxing—match in an
old barn, very merry and bright, before that news came to them. General
Haldane had given me a quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing, and
the faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity for the
frightful disappointment that was about to fall on them, like a
sledge-hammer. I knew some of their officers—Colonel Dyson of the
Royal Scots, and Captain Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways
with a deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and of their own
officers. Colonel Dyson was the seventeenth commanding officer of his
battalion, which had been commanded by every officer down to second
lieutenant, and had only thirty men left of the original crowd. They had
been slain in large numbers in that “holding attack” by Hooge on September
25th, during the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they were “going in”
again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid their feelings from
their men. The men were tough and stalwart lads, tanned by the wind and
rain of a foul winter, thinned down by the ordeal of those months in the
line under daily bouts of fire. In a wooden gallery of the barn a mass of
them lay in deep straw, exchanging caps, whistling, shouting, in high
spirits. Not yet did they know the call-back to the salient. Then word was
passed to them after the boxing finals. That night they had to march seven
miles to entrain for the railroad nearest to Ypres. I saw them march away,
silently, grimly, bravely, without many curses.

They were to recapture the Bluff, and early on the morning of March 2d,
before dawn had risen, I went out to the salient and watched the
bombardment which preceded the attack. There was an incessant tumult of
guns, and the noise rolled in waves across the flat country of the salient
and echoed back from Kemmel Hill and the Wytschaete Ridge. There was a
white frost over the fields, and all the battle-front was veiled by a mist
which clung round the villages and farmsteads behind the lines and made a
dense bank of gray fog below the rising ground.

This curtain was rent with flashes of light and little glinting stars
burst continually over one spot, where the Bluff was hidden beyond
Zillebeke Lake. When daybreak came, with the rim of a red sun over a clump
of trees in the east, the noise of guns increased in spasms of intensity
like a rising storm. Many batteries of heavy artillery were firing salvos.
Field-guns, widely scattered, concentrated their fire upon one area, where
their shells were bursting with a twinkle of light. Somewhere a
machine-gun was at work with sharp, staccato strokes, like an urgent
knocking at the door. High overhead was the song of an airplane coming
nearer, with a high, vibrant humming. It was an enemy searching through
the mist down below him for any movement of troops or trains.

It was the 76th Brigade of the 3d Division which attacked at four
thirty-two that morning, and they were the Suffolks, Gordons, and King’s
Own Liverpools who led the assault, commanded by General Pratt. They flung
themselves into the German lines in the wake of a heavy barrage fire,
smashing through broken belts of wire and stumbling in and out of
shell-craters. The Germans, in their front-lines, had gone to cover in
deep dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on the Bluff and its
neighborhood during the previous ten days and nights. At first only a few
men, not more than a hundred or so, could be discovered alive. The dead
were thick in the maze of trenches, and our men stumbled across them.

The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed by the shell-fire,
and cold with terror when our men sprang upon them in the darkness before
dawn. Small parties were collected and passed back as prisoners—marvelously
lucky men if they kept their sanity as well as their lives after all that
hell about them. Hours later, when our battalions had stormed their way up
other trenches into a salient jutting out of the German line and beyond
the boundary of the objective that had been given to them, other living
men were found to be still hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could
not be induced to come out. Terror kept them in those holes, and they were
like wild beasts at bay, still dangerous because they had their bombs and
rifles. An ultimatum was shouted down to them by men too busy for
persuasive talk. “If you don’t come out you’ll be blown in.” Some of them
came out and others were blown to bits. After that the usual thing
happened, the thing that inevitably happened in all these little murderous
attacks and counter-attacks. The enemy concentrated all its power of
artillery on that position captured by our men, and day after day hurled
over storms of shrapnel and high explosives, under which our men cowered
until many were killed and more wounded. The first attack on the Bluff and
its recapture cost us three thousand casualties, and that was only the
beginning of a daily toll of life and limbs in that neighborhood of hell.
Through driving snowstorms shells went rushing across that battleground,
ceaselessly in those first weeks of March, but the 3d Division repulsed
the enemy’s repeated attacks in bombing fights which were very fierce on
both sides.

I went to General Pilcher’s headquarters at Reninghelst on March 4th, and
found the staff of the 17th Division frosty in their greeting, while
General Pratt, the brigadier of the 3d Division, was conducting the attack
in their new territory. General Pilcher himself was much shaken. The old
gentleman had been at St.-Eloi when the bombardment had begun on his men.
With Captain Rattnag his A. D. C. he lay for an hour in a ditch with
shells screaming overhead and bursting close. More than once when I talked
with him he raised his head and listened nervously and said: “Do you hear
the guns?… They are terrible.”

I was sorry for him, this general who had many theories on war and
experimented in light-signals, as when one night I stood by his side in a
dark field, and had a courteous old-fashioned dignity and gentleness of
manner. He was a fine old English gentleman and a gallant soldier, but
modern warfare was too brutal for him. Too brutal for all those who hated
its slaughter.

Those men of the 3d Division—the “Iron Division,” as it was called
later in the war—remained in a hideous turmoil of wet earth up by
the Bluff until other men came to relieve them and take over this corner
of hell.

What remained of the trenches was deep in water and filthy mud, where the
bodies of many dead Germans lay under a litter of broken sand-bags and in
the holes of half-destroyed dugouts. Nothing could be done to make it less
horrible. Then the weather changed and became icily cold, with snow and
rain.

One dugout which had been taken for battalion headquarters was six feet
long by four wide, and here in this waterlogged hole lived three officers
of the Royal Scots to whom a day or two before I had wished “good luck.”

The servants lived in the shaft alongside which was a place measuring four
feet by four feet. There were no other dugouts where men could get any
shelter from shells or storms, and the enemy’s guns were never silent.

But the men held on, as most of our men held on, with a resignation to
fate and a stoic endurance beyond that ordinary human courage which we
seemed to know before the war.

The chaplain of this battalion had spent all the long night behind the
lines, stoking fires and going round the cook-houses and looking at his
wrist-watch to see how the minutes were crawling past. He had tea, rum,
socks, oil, and food all ready for those who were coming back, and the
lighted braziers were glowing red.

At the appointed time the padre went out to meet his friends, pressing
forward through the snow and listening for any sound of footsteps through
the great hush.

But there was no sound except the soft flutter of snowflakes. He strained
his eyes for any moving shadows of men. But there was only darkness and
the falling snow.

Two hours passed, and they seemed endless to that young chaplain whose
brain was full of frightful apprehensions, so that they were hours of
anguish to him.

Then at last the first men appeared. “I’ve never seen anything so splendid
and so pitiful,” said the man who had been waiting for them.

They came along at about a mile an hour, sometimes in groups, sometimes by
twos or threes, holding on to each other, often one by one. In this order
they crept through the ruined villages in the falling snow, which lay
thick upon the masses of fallen masonry. There was a profound silence
about them, and these snow-covered men were like ghosts walking through
cities of death.

No man spoke, for the sound of a human voice would have seemed a danger in
this great white quietude. They were walking like old men, weak-kneed, and
bent under the weight of their packs and rifles.

Yet when the young padre greeted them with a cheery voice that hid the
water in his heart every one had a word and a smile in reply, and made
little jests about their drunken footsteps, for they were like drunken men
with utter weariness.

“What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir?” was one man’s joke.

The last of those who came back—and there were many who never came
back—were some hours later than the first company, having found it
hard to crawl along that Via Dolorosa which led to the good place where
the braziers were glowing.

It was a heroic episode, for each one of these men was a hero, though his
name will never be known in the history of that silent and hidden war. And
yet it was an ordinary episode, no degree worse in its hardship than what
happened all along the line when there was an attack or counter-attack in
foul weather.

The marvel of it was that our men, who were very simple men, should have
“stuck it out” with that grandeur of courage which endured all things
without self-interest and without emotion. They were unconscious of the
virtue that was in them.


XVII

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in those
early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side of the
lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides.

Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind
the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells, saving them up
anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S rocket shot up a green
light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was concentrating
“hate.”

Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone
messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being shelled
to pieces by long—range howitzers, or from engineers whose
working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from a
brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could not
deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and piling
up the casualties. It was hard to say: “Sorry!… We’ve got to go slow
with ammunition.”

That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a new
crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal
increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate
the “heavies” had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more
sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the battlefields
by day and night.

There was a larger supply of shells for all those pieces, and no longer
the same need for thrift when there was urgent need for artillery support.
Retaliation was the order of the day, and if the enemy asked for trouble
by any special show of “hate” he got it quickly and with a double dose.

Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance of life, except in
places where, as in the salient, the German observers stared down at them
from high ground and saw every gun flash and registered every battery.
Going round the salient one day with General Burstall—and a very
good name, too!—who was then the Canadian gunner-general, I was
horrified at the way in which the enemy had the accurate range of our guns
and gun-pits and knocked them out with deadly shooting.

Here and there our amateur gunners—quick to learn their job—found
a good place, and were able to camouflage their position for a time, and
give praise to the little god of Luck, until one day sooner or later they
were discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were not caught too
soon.

So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond Kemmel village, where I
went to see a boy who had once been a rising hope of Fleet Street.

He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it—that was before
his men were blown to bits around him and he was sent down as a tragic
case of shell-shock—and as we walked through the village of Kemmel
he chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it topping. His
bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by the scene around him. He walked in
a jaunty, boyish way through that ruined place. It was not a pleasant
place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been blown to bits, except
where, on the outskirts, the chateau with its racing-stables remained
untouched—“German spies!” said the boy—and where a little
grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church was battered
and broken, and there were enormous shell-pits in the churchyard and open
vaults where old dead had been tumbled out of their tombs. We walked along
a sunken road and then to a barn in open fields. The roof was pierced by
shrapnel bullets, which let in the rain on wet days and nights, but it was
cozy otherwise in the room above the ladder where the officers had their
mess. There were some home-made chairs up there, and Kirchner prints of
naked little ladies were tacked up to the beams, among the trench maps,
and round the fireplace where logs were burning was a canvas screen to let
down at night. A gramophone played merry music and gave a homelike touch
to this parlor in war.

“A good spot!” I said. “Is it well hidden?”

“As safe as houses,” said the captain of the battery. “Touching wood, I
mean.”

There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at those
words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and
embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.

“What’s happened?” I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.

“Nothing,” said the boy, “except touching wood. The captain spoke too
loudly.”

We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found them
camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the battlefield,
all white after a morning’s snowstorm, except where the broken walls of
distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill showed black as ink.

The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them
through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle of
fire.

“It’s a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench,” said a bright-eyed boy by
my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he became a
gunner officer in Flanders). “With any luck we shall get ’em in the neck,
and I like to hear the Germans squeal… And my gun’s ready first, as
usual.”

The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery
fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the
staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull roar
of a “heavy.”

A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a mile
away.

Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.

“Repeat!”

“We’ve got’em,” said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way.

The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.

“We may as well give them a salvo. They won’t like it a bit.”

A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns fired
together. “Repeat!” came the high voice through the megaphone.

The still air was rent again… In a waterlogged trench, which we could
not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.

The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping for
the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in the
billet below.

The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially
in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches
slithered down under the weight of sand-bags.

The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it
necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station
from which he looked straight across the enemy’s trenches. But, once
there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from above
or a little mining operation underneath.

He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when he
turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman
there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat
there very solitary and watchful.

The rats worried him a little—they were bold enough to bare their
teeth when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called
Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one night.
But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress to the
soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to kill…
until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the boy was
broken.

It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer
apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in evening
dress—boiled shirt, white tie, and all—with a bowler hat bent
to the storm.

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

“It isn’t true,” he said. “I don’t believe it… We’re mad, that’s all!…
The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?”

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise of
gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard of
snow.

A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a
cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters.

Cimetiere reserve

Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me with a
world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and laughed.

“Mad!” he said. “We’re all mad!”


XVIII

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men
whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that
warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were
“bunkered” forever, and that all their training and tradition were made
futile by the digging in of armies. Now and again, when the infantry was
hard pressed, as in the second battle of Ypres and the battle of Loos,
they were called on to leave their horses behind and take a turn in the
trenches, and then they came back again, less some of their comrades, into
dirty billets remote from the fighting-lines, to exercise their horses and
curse the war.

Before they went into the line in February of ’16 I went to see some of
those cavalry officers to wish them good luck, and saw them in the
trenches and afterward when they came out. In the headquarters of a
squadron of “Royals”—the way in was by a ladder through the window—billeted
in a village, which on a day of frost looked as quaint and pretty as a
Christmas card, was a party of officers typical of the British cavalry as
a whole.

A few pictures cut out of La Vie Parisienne were tacked on to the walls to
remind them of the arts and graces of an older mode of life, and to keep
them human by the sight of a pretty face (oh, to see a pretty girl
again!).

Now they were going to change this cottage for the trenches, this quiet
village with a church-bell chiming every hour, for the tumult in the
battle-front—this absolute safety for the immediate menace of death.
They knew already the beastliness of life in trenches. They had no
illusions about “glory.” But they were glad to go, because activity was
better than inactivity, and because the risk would give them back their
pride, and because the cavalry should fight anyhow and somehow, even if a
charge or a pursuit were denied them.

They had a hot time in the trenches. The enemy’s artillery was active, and
the list of casualties began to tot up. A good officer and a fine fellow
was killed almost at the outset, and men were horribly wounded. But all
those troopers showed a cool courage.

Things looked bad for a few minutes when a section of trenches was blown
in, isolating one platoon from another. A sergeant-major made his way back
from the damaged section, and a young officer who was going forward to
find out the extent of damage met him on the way.

“Can I get through?” asked the officer.

“I’ve got through,” was the answer, “but it’s chancing one’s luck.”

The officer “chanced his luck,” but did not expect to come back alive.
Afterward he tried to analyze his feelings for my benefit.

“I had no sense of fear,” he said, “but a sort of subconscious knowledge
that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a conscious
determination to go on at all costs and find out what had happened.”

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the
unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when in
the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an
amiable suggestion.

“Don’t you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack
upon the enemy?”

There was something in those words, “a slight attack,” which is
irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern trench
war. But they were not spoken in jest.

So the cavalry did its “bit” again, though not as cavalry, and I saw some
of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone through that
bloody business so that no man might fling a scornful word as they passed
with their horses.

“It is queer,” said my friend, “how we go from this place of peace to the
battlefield, and then come back for a spell before going up again. It is
like passing from one life to another.”

In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. Those officers belonged
to the old families of England, the old caste of aristocracy, but the foul
outrage of the war—the outrage against all ideals of civilization—had
made them think, some of them for the first time, about the structure of
social life and of the human family.

They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but they looked deeper than
that and saw how the leaders of all great nations in Europe had maintained
the philosophy of forms and had built up hatreds and fears and alliances
over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with passion or duped
with lies.

“The politicians are the guilty ones,” said one cavalry officer. “I am all
for revolution after this bloody massacre. I would hang all politicians,
diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict impartiality.”

“I’m for the people,” said another. “The poor, bloody people, who are kept
in ignorance and then driven into the shambles when their rulers desire to
grab some new part of the earth’s surface or to get their armies going
because they are bored with peace.”

“What price Christianity?” asked another, inevitably. “What have the
churches done to stop war or preach the gospel of Christ? The Bishop of
London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all those conventional, patriotic,
cannon—blessing, banner-baptizing humbugs. God! They make me tired!”

Strange words to hear in a cavalry mess! Strange turmoil in the souls of
men! They were the same words I had heard from London boys in Ypres,
spoken just as crudely. But many young gentlemen who spoke those words
have already forgotten them or would deny them.


XIX

The winter of 1915-16 passed with its misery, and spring came again to
France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of
wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth was not made barren
by the fire of war and all trees killed.

For men there was no promise of life, but only new preparations for death,
and continued killing.

The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France had saved herself from
a mortal blow at the heart by a desperate, heroic resistance which cost
her five hundred and fifty thousand in dead and wounded. On the British
front there were still no great battles, but those trench raids, artillery
duels, mine fighting, and small massacres which filled the casualty
clearing stations with the average amount of human wreckage. The British
armies were being held in leash for a great offensive in the summer. New
divisions were learning the lessons of the old divisions, and here and
there generals were doing a little fancy work to keep things merry and
bright.

So it was when some mines were exploded under the German earthworks on the
lower slopes of the Vimy Ridge, where the enemy had already blown several
mines and taken possession of their craters. It was to gain those craters,
and new ones to be made by our mine charges, that the 74th Brigade of the
25th Division, a body of Lancashire men, the 9th Loyal North Lancashires
and the 11th Royal Fusiliers, with a company of Royal Engineers and some
Welsh pioneers, were detailed for the perilous adventure of driving in the
mine shafts, putting tremendous charges of high explosives in the
sapheads, and rushing the German positions.

It was on the evening of May 15th, after two days of wet and cloudy
weather preventing the enemy’s observation, that our heavy artillery fired
a short number of rounds to send the Germans into their dugouts. A few
minutes later the right group of mines exploded with a terrific roar and
blew in two of the five old German craters. After the long rumble of
heaving earth had been stilled there was just time enough to hear the
staccato of a German machine-gun. Then there was a second roar and a wild
upheaval of soil when the left group of mines destroyed two more of the
German craters and knocked out the machine-gun.

The moment for the infantry attack had come, and the men were ready. The
first to get away were two lieutenants of the 9th Loyal North Lancashires,
who rushed forward with their assaulting-parties to the remaining crater
on the extreme left, which had not been blown up.

With little opposition from dazed and terror-stricken Germans, bayoneted
as they scrambled out of the chaotic earth, our men flung themselves into
those smoking pits and were followed immediately by working-parties, who
built up bombing posts with earth and sand-bags on the crater lip and
began to dig out communication trenches leading to them. The
assaulting-parties of the Lancashire Fusiliers were away at the first
signal, and were attacking the other groups of craters under heavy fire.

The Germans were shaken with terror because the explosion of the mines had
killed and wounded a large number of them, and through the darkness there
rang out the cheers of masses of men who were out for blood. Through the
darkness there now glowed a scarlet light, flooding all that turmoil of
earth and men with a vivid, red illumination, as flare after flare rose
high into the sky from several points of the German line. Later the red
lights died down, and then other rockets were fired, giving a green light
to this scene of war.

The German gunners were now at work in answer to those beacons of
distress, and with every caliber of gun from howitzers to minenwerfers
they shelled our front-lines for two hours and killed for vengeance. They
were too late to stop the advance of the assaulting troops, who were
fighting in the craters against groups of German bombers who tried to
force their way up to the rescue of a position already lost. One of our
officers leading the assault on one of the craters on the right was killed
very quickly, but his men were not checked, and with individual resolution
and initiative, and the grit of the Lancashire man in a tight place,
fought on grimly, and won their purpose.

A young lieutenant fell dead from a bullet wound after he had directed his
men to their posts from the lip of a new mine-crater, as coolly as though
he were a master of ceremonies in a Lancashire ballroom. Another, a
champion bomb-thrower, with a range of forty yards, flung his
hand-grenades at the enemy with untiring skill and with a fierce contempt
of death, until he was killed by an answering shot. The N.C.O.’s took up
the command and the men “carried on” until they held all the chain of
craters, crouching and panting above mangled men.

They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who lay wounded and half
buried, or quite buried, in the chaos, of earth made by those mine-craters
now doubly upheaved. Their screams and moans sounding above the guns, the
frantic cries of men maddened under tons of earth, which kept them
prisoners in deep pits below the crater lips, and awful inarticulate
noises of human pain coming out of that lower darkness beyond the light of
the rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than our men could endure,
even in the heat of battle. They shouted across to the German grenadiers:

“We will cease fire if you will, and let you get in your wounded… Cease
fire for the wounded!”

The shout was repeated, and our bombers held their hands, still waiting
for an answer. But the answer was a new storm of bombs, and the fighting
went on, and the moaning of the men who were helpless and unhelped.

Working-parties followed up the assault to “consolidate” the position.
They did amazing things, toiling in the darkness under abominable
shell-fire, and by daylight had built communication trenches with
head-cover from the crater lips to our front-line trenches.

But now it was the enemy’s turn—the turn of his guns, which poured
explosive fire into those pits, churning up the earth again, mixing it
with new flesh and blood, and carving up his own dead; and it was the turn
of his bombers, who followed this fire in strong assaults upon the
Lancashire lads, who, lying among their killed and wounded, had to repel
those fierce attacks.

On May 17th I went to see General Doran of the 25th Division, an
optimistic old gentleman who took a bright view of things, and Colonel
Crosby, who was acting—brigadier of the 74th Brigade, which had made
the attack. He, too, was enthusiastic about the situation, though his
brigade had suffered eight hundred casualties in a month of routine
warfare.

In my simple way I asked him a direct question:

“Do you think your men can hold on to the craters, sir?”

Colonel Crosby stared at me sternly.

“Certainly. The position cannot be retaken overground. We hold it
strongly.”

As he spoke an orderly came into his billet (a small farmhouse), saluted,
and handed him a pink slip, which was a telephone message. I watched him
read it, and saw the sudden pallor of his face, and noticed how the room
shook with the constant reverberation of distant gun-fire. A big
bombardment was in progress over Vimy way.

“Excuse me,” said the colonel; “things seem to be happening. I must go at
once.”

He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad tidings
went with him.

His men had been blown out of the craters.

A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-brigadier
had gone raised his head and looked across to me.

“I am a critic of these affairs,” he said. “They seem to me too expensive.
But I’m here to do what I am told.”

We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the
Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.


XX

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of
beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The
grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden
oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as
though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks
rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes.

Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that believed
once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The enemy had
been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so said
Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in men,
and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were going to
be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare. No more dying in
ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit (Rawlinson’s) and a
quick break-through. It was to be “The Great Push.” The last battles were
to be fought before the year died again, though many men would die before
that time.

Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness of
the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot to do
elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way off. It was
the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly thing.

On June 2d a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their lines in
Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres, and tragedy
befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and stood in the
presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of that hell which had
been invented by human beings out of the earth’s chemistry, and yet had
kept their reason.

The enemy’s bombardment began suddenly, with one great crash of guns, at
half past eight on Friday morning. Generals Mercer and Williams had gone
up to inspect the trenches at six o’clock in the morning.

It had been almost silent along the lines when the enemy’s batteries
opened fire with one enormous thunderstroke, which was followed by
continuous salvos. The shells came from nearly every point of the compass—north,
east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was over our men again.

In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess Patricia’s Light
Infantry, with some battalions of the Royal Canadian Regiment south of
them, and some of the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been
dismounted), and units from another Canadian division at the extreme end
of their line of front. It was those men who had to suffer the tempest
of the enemy’s shells.

Earth below them opened up into great craters as high-explosive shells
burst continually, flinging up masses of soil, flattening out
breastworks and scattering sand-bags into dust.

Canadians in the front trenches held on in the midst of this uproar.
“They took it all,” said one of the officers, and in that phrase, spoken
simply by a man who was there, too, lies the spirit of pride and
sacrifice. “They took it all” and did not budge, though the sky seemed
to be opening above them and the earth below them.

The bombardment continued without a pause for five hours, by which time
most of our front trenches had been annihilated. At about a quarter past
one the enemy’s guns lifted a little, and through the dense smoke-clouds
which made a solid bar across No Man’s Land appeared a mass of German
infantry. They wore their packs and full field-kit, as though they had
come to stay.

Perhaps they expected that no one lived in the British trenches, and it
was a reasonable idea, but wrong. There were brave men remaining there,
alive and determined to fight. Although the order for retirement had
been given, single figures here and there were seen to get over the
broken parapets and go forward to meet the enemy halfway. They died to a
man, fighting. It seemed to me one of the most pitiful and heroic things
of this war, that little crowd of men, many of them wounded, some of
them dazed and deaf, stumbling forward to their certain death to oppose
the enemy’s advance.

From the network of trenches behind, not altogether smashed, there was
time for men to retire to a second line of defense, if they were still
unwounded and had strength to go. An officer—Captain Crossman—in command
of one of these support companies, brought several men out of a trench,
but did not follow on. He turned again, facing the enemy, and was last
seen—“a big, husky man,” says one of his comrades—as he fired his
revolver and then flung it into a German’s face.

Colonel Shaw of the 1st Battalion, C.M.R., rallied eighty men out of the
Cumberland dugouts, and died fighting. The Germans were kept at bay for
some time, but they flung their bombs into the square of men, so that very
few remained alive. When only eight were still fighting among the bodies
of their comrades these tattered and blood-splashed men, standing there
fiercely contemptuous of the enemy and death, were ordered to retire by
Major Palmer, the last officer among them.

Meanwhile the battalions in support were holding firm in spite of the
shell-fire, which raged above them also, and it was against this second
line of Canadians that the German infantry came up—and broke.

In the center the German thrust was hard toward Zillebeke Lake. Here some
of the Canadian Rifles were in support, and as soon as the infantry attack
began they were ordered forward to meet and check the enemy. An officer in
command of one of their battalions afterward told me that he led his men
across country to Maple Copse under such a fire as he had never seen.
Because of the comrades in front, in dire need of help, no notice was
taken as the wounded fell, but the others pressed on as fast as they could
go.

Maple Copse was reached, and here the men halted and awaited the enemy
with another battalion who were already holding this wood of six or seven
acres. When the German troops arrived they may have expected to meet no
great resistance. They met a withering fire, which caused them bloody
losses. The Canadians had assembled at various points, which became
strongholds of defense with machine-guns and bomb stores, and the men held
their fire until the enemy was within close range, so that they worked
havoc among them. But the German guns never ceased and many Canadians
fell. Col. E. H. Baker, a member of the Canadian Parliament, fell with a
piece of shell in his lung.

Hour after hour our gunners fed their breeches and poured out shells. The
edge of the salient was swept with fire, and, though the Canadian losses
were frightful, the Germans suffered also, so that the battlefield was one
great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought back, owe their lives to
the stretcher-bearers, who were supreme in devotion. They worked in and
out across that shell-swept ground hour after hour through the day and
night, rescuing many stricken men at a great cost in life to themselves.
Out of one party of twenty only five remained alive. “No one can say,”
said one of their officers, “that the Canadians do not know how to die.”

No one would deny that.

Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade their casualties
were twenty-two hundred.

There were 151 survivors from the 1st Battalion Canadian Mounted Rifles,
130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 from the 5th, 520 from the 2nd. Those are
the figures of massacre.

Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. Their own guns were
but a small part of the huge orchestra of “heavies” and field batteries
which played the devil’s tattoo upon the German positions in our old
trenches. It was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to endure the
same experience as their guns had given to Canadian troops on the same
ground. Trenches already battered were smashed again. The earth, which was
plowed with shells in their own attack, was flung up again by our shells.
It was hell again for poor human wretches.

The Canadian troops charged at two o’clock in the morning. Their attack
was directed to the part of the line from the southern end of Sanctuary
Wood to Mount Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh Wood, Observatory
Hill, and Mount Gorst itself.

The attack went quickly and the men expected greater trouble. The enemy’s
shell-fire was heavy, but the Canadians got through under cover of their
own guns, which had lengthened their fuses a little and continued an
intense bombardment behind the enemy’s first line. The men advanced in
open order and worked downward and southward into their old positions.

In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought desperately, were
killed almost to a man, just as Colonel Shaw had died on June 2d with his
party of eighty men who had rallied round him. It was one shambles for
another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems.

One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surrendered. The officer was
glad to escape from the death to which he had resigned himself when our
bombardment began.

“I knew how it would be,” he said. “We had orders to take this ground, and
took it; but we knew you would come back again. You had to do so. So here
I am.”

Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. In one place the
stores which had been buried by the Canadians before they left were still
there, untouched by the enemy. Our bombardment had made it impossible for
his troops to consolidate their position and to hold the line steady.

They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, in shell-holes and
craters, and behind scattered sand-bags, and had been pounded there. The
Canadians were back again.


PART FIVE. THE HEART OF A CITY

AMIENS IN TIME OF WAR


I

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of
progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was
the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of that
year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines; near
enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front and
ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty
minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or blinded in the
routine of the day’s work. One went out past Amiens station and across a
little stone bridge which afterward, in the enemy’s advance of 1918,
became the mark for German high velocities along the road to Querrieux,
where Rawlinson had his headquarters of the Fourth Army in an old chateau
with pleasant meadows round it and a stream meandering through fields of
buttercups in summer-time. Beyond the dusty village of Querrieux with its
white cottages, from which the plaster fell off in blotches as the war
went on, we went along the straight highroad to Albert, through the long
and straggling village of Lahoussoye, where Scottish soldiers in reserve
lounged about among frowsy peasant women and played solemn games with “the
bairns”; and so, past camps and hutments on each side of the road, to the
ugly red-brick town where the Golden Virgin hung head downward from the
broken tower of the church with her Babe outstretched above the fields of
death as though as a peace-offering to this world at war.

One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there the
clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road that turned
to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to Fricourt. There
was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road, bringing up new
ammunition for the guns that were firing without a pause over Fricourt and
Mametz. The high scream of a shell came through a blue sky and ended on
its downward note with a sharp crash. For a few minutes the transport
column was held up while a mass of raw flesh which a second before had
been two living men and their horses was cleared out of the way. Then the
gun wagons went at a harder pace down the road, raising a cloud of white
dust out of which I heard the curses of the drivers, swearing in a foul
way to disguise their fear.

I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond, and
watched its process of disintegration through those years, until it was
nothing but a wild scrap heap of read brick and twisted iron, and, in the
last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed to
escape all shell-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a mass of
masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard of
ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.

So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war, and
was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and men
who came out between one battle and another, and by “lorry-jumping” could
reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, according to their
views of civilization. To these men—boys, mostly—who had been
living in lousy ditches under hell fire, Amiens was Paradise, with little
hells for those who liked them. There were hotels in which they could go
get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck to be early on the
list. There were streets of shops with plate-glass windows unbroken,
shining, beautiful. There were well-dressed women walking about, with kind
eyes, and children as dainty, some of them, as in High Street, Kensington,
or Prince’s Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who had plenty of money to
spend—because there was no chance of spending money between a row of
blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead men were plastered into
the parapet—invaded the shops and bought fancy soaps, razors,
hair-oil, stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a
fabulous price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone records, and the
latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of spending, rather than
the joy of possessing, which made them go from one shop to another in
search of things they could carry hack to the line—that and the lure
of girls behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who understood
their execrable French, even English spoken with a Glasgow accent, and
were pleased to flirt for five minutes with any group of young
fighting-men—who broke into roars of laughter at the gallantry of
some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity, and paid outrageous
prices for the privilege of stammering out some foolish sentiment in
broken French, blushing to the roots of their hair (though captains and
heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in another five minutes,
would play the same part in the same scene with a different group of boys.

I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must have
been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except, perhaps, the
purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They knew that these
boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few hours and that some
of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There could be no romantic
episode, save of a transient kind, between them and these good-looking
lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger, because to them the
plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle, and feminine side of life,
as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and ugliness of war and death. The
shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions. They had lived too long in war not
to know the realities. They knew the risks of transient love and they were
not taking them—unless conditions were very favorable. They attended
strictly to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, and
were, I think, mostly good girls—as virtuous as life in war-time may
let girls be—wise beyond their years, and with pity behind their
laughter for these soldiers who tried to touch their hands over the
counters, knowing that many of them were doomed to die for France and
England. They had their own lovers—boys in blue somewhere between
Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns—weilerkopf—and apart from
occasional intimacies with English officers quartered in Amiens for long
spells, left the traffic of passion to other women who walked the streets.


II

The Street of the Three Pebbles—la rue des Trois Cailloux—which
goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded
highway. Here were the best shops—the hairdresser, at the left-hand
side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have
elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d’eau de quinine,
shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but because of the
joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth and stench of life
in the desolate fields; then the booksellers’ (Madame Carpentier et fille)
on the right-hand side, which was not only the rendezvous of the
miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and La Vie Parisienne, but of the
intellectuals who spoke good French and bought good books and liked ten
minutes’ chat with the mother and daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady
with vivid memories of 1870, when, as a child, she had first learned to
hate Germans.) She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would
have seen her own son dead a hundred times—he was a soldier in
Saloniki—rather than that France should make a compromise peace with
the enemy. She had been in Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August
of 1914, when the French army passed through in retreat from Bapaume, and
she and the people of her city knew for the first time that the Germans
were close upon them. She stood in the crowd as I did—in the
darkness, watching that French column pass with their transport, and their
wounded lying on the baggage wagons, men of many regiments mixed up, the
light of the street lamps shining on the casques of cuirassiers with their
long horsehair tails, leading their stumbling horses, and foot soldiers,
hunched under their packs, marching silently with dragging steps. Once in
a while one of the soldiers left the ranks and came on to the sidewalk,
whispering to a group of dark shadows. The crowds watched silently, in a
curious, dreadful silence, as though stunned. A woman near me spoke in a
low voice, and said, “Nous sommes perdus!” Those were the only words I
heard or remembered.

That night in the station of Amiens the boys of a new class were being
hurried away in truck trains, and while their army was in retreat sang “La
Marseillaise,” as though victory were in their hearts. Next day the German
army under von Kluck entered Amiens, and ten days afterward passed through
it on the way to Paris. Madame Carpentier told me of the first terror of
the people when the field-gray men came down the Street of the Three
Pebbles and entered their shops. A boy selling oranges fainted when a
German stretched out his hand to buy some. Women hid behind their counters
when German boots stamped into their shops. But Madame Carpentier was not
afraid. She knew the Germans and their language. She spoke frank words to
German officers, who saluted her respectfully enough. “You will never get
to Paris… France and England will be too strong for you… Germany will
be destroyed before this war ends.” They laughed at her and said: “We
shall be in Paris in a week from now. Have you a little diary, Madame?”
Madame Carpentier was haughty with them. Some women of Amiens—poor
drabs—did not show any haughtiness, nor any pride, with the enemy
who crowded into the city on their way toward Paris. A girl told me that
she was looking through the window of a house that faced the Place de la
Gare, and saw a number of German soldiers dancing round a piano-organ
which was playing to them. They were dancing with women of the town, who
were laughing and screeching in the embrace of big, blond Germans. The
girl who was watching was only a schoolgirl then. She knew very little of
the evil of life, but enough to know that there was something in this
scene degrading to womanhood and to France. She turned from the window and
flung herself on her bed and wept bitterly…

I used to call in at the bookshop for a chat now and then with Madame and
Mademoiselle Carpentier, while a crowd of officers came in and out. Madame
was always merry and bright in spite of her denunciations of the “Sale
Boches—les brigands, les bandits!” and Mademoiselle put my knowledge
of French to a severe but pleasant test. She spoke with alarming rapidity,
her words tumbling over one another in a cascade of volubility delightful
to hear but difficult to follow. She had a strong mind—masterly in
her methods of business—so that she could serve six customers at
once and make each one think that her attention was entirely devoted to
his needs—and a very shrewd and critical idea of military strategy
and organization. She had but a poor opinion of British generals and
generalship, although a wholehearted admiration for the gallantry of
British officers and men; and she had an intimate knowledge of our
preparations, plans, failures, and losses. French liaison-officers
confided to her the secrets of the British army; and English officers
trusted her with many revelations of things “in the wind.” But
Mademoiselle Carpentier had discretion and loyalty and did not repeat
these things to people who had no right to know. She would have been far
more efficient as a staff officer than many of the young gentlemen with
red tabs on their tunics who came into the shop, flipping beautiful
top-boots with riding-crops, sitting on the counter, and turning over the
pages of La Vie for the latest convention in ladies’ legs.

Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her
musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids,
which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror, when
hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed, and the
Germans brought their guns close to the city—close enough to scatter
high velocities about its streets—and the population came up out of
their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I passed the
bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this house which
had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned as I passed and
raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation and courage. “Ils ne
passeront pas!” she said. It was the spirit of the courage of French
womanhood which spoke in those words.


III

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three Pebbles
had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the British
armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never tired of
watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and studying
their types. All the types of young English manhood came down this street,
and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, especially
toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or more of
slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes; and Death
was the hunter. They stared into the shop windows in a dazed way, or
strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the right nor
to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as masks.
Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, the Hunter would track them down. Other
English officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or lack of
nerve-control, although the psychologist would have detected disorder of
soul in the rather deliberate note of hilarity with which they greeted
their friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause, at “Charlie’s
bar,” where they would drink three cocktails apiece on an empty stomach,
and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things that were very
funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the “Rhin,” the “Godebert,” or
the “Cathedrale,” with a kind of spiritual exaltation in good food and
drink, as though subconsciously they believed that this might be their
last dinner in life, with good pals about them. They wanted to make the
best of it—and damn the price. In that spirit many of them went
after other pleasures—down the byways of the city, and damned the
price again, which was a hellish one. Who blames them? It was war that was
to blame, and those who made war possible.

Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went English,
and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and Australian, and New
Zealand fighting—men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats all
splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, chalky mud of the
Somme battlefields, and their top—boots and puttees were plastered
with this mud, and their faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive or
a tramp down from the line. The rain beat with a metallic tattoo on their
steel hats. Their packs were all sodden.

French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to
some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their
packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots
and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging
with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields
beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques low
over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying a little
false hilarity, but grim and sullen—looking and resentful of English
soldiers walking or talking with French cocottes.


IV

I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three
Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were
fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like a
scene from “Gaspard.” The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk on
some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down by the river. In
the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the war to
happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and all poor
sacre poilus to rot to death in the trenches, away from their wives and
children, without a thought for them; and nothing but treachery in Paris:

“Nous sommes trahis!” said the man, raising his arms. “For the hundredth
time France is betrayed.”

A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No one
laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An agent de
police pushed his way between the people and caught hold of the soldier by
the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd murmured a protest, and
then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands of the police, on
this one day out of the trenches—after five months—flung
himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and supplication.

“Je suis pere de famille!… Je suis un soldat de France!… Dans les
tranchees pour cinq mois!… Qu’est-ce que mes camarades vont dire, ‘cre
nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C’est emmordant apres toute ma service
comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!”

“Viens donc, saligaud,” growled the agent de police.

The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent protest
on behalf of the poilu.

“C’est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les tranches! C’est affreux!
Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour—quoi pas! Apres cinq mois sur le
front qu’est-ce que cela signifie? Ca n’a aucune importance!”

A dandy French officer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into the center of the
scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.

“Leave him alone. Don’t you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of God, don’t
you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while you pigs
stand at street corners watching petticoats?”

He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.

“Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you.”

He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said:

“Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu etoile.”

The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of
France.


V

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond
the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two
poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their
wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of their
big, coarse hands. They ordered two “little glasses” and drank them at one
gulp. Then two more.

“See what I have got, my little cabbage,” said one of them, stooping to
the heavy pack which he had shifted from his shoulders to the other seat
beside him. “It is something to make you laugh.”

“And what is that, my old one?” said a woman sitting on the other side of
the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own class, from the
market nearby.

The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack, laughing a
little in a self-satisfied way.

“I killed a German to get it,” he said. “He was a pig of an officer, a
dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like a schoolboy.”

One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her eyes glistened.

“Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I’d like to get my fingers
round the neck of a dirty Boche!”

“I finished him with a grenade,” said the poilu. “It was good enough. It
knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It
will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?”

He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of reddish
brown. His big, clumsy fingers could hardly undo the little clasp.

“He wore this next his heart,” said the man. “Perhaps he thought it would
bring him luck. But I killed him all the same! ‘Cre nom de Dieu!”

He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the flap of the
pouch.

“It was from his woman, his German grue. Perhaps even now she doesn’t know
he’s dead. She thinks of him wearing this next to his heart. ‘Cre nom de
Dieu! It was I that killed him a week ago!”

He held up something in his hand, and the light through the estaminet
window gleamed on it. It was a woman’s lock of hair, like fine-spun gold.

The two women gave a shrill cry of surprise, and then screamed with
laughter. One of them tried to grab the hair, but the poilu held it high,
beyond her reach, with a gruff command of, “Hands off!” Other soldiers and
women in the estaminet gathered round staring at the yellow tress,
laughing, making ribald conjectures as to the character of the woman from
whose head it had come. They agreed that she was fat and ugly, like all
German women, and a foul slut.

“She’ll never kiss that fellow again,” said one man. “Our old one has cut
the throat of that pig of a Boche!”

“I’d like to cut off all her hair and tear the clothes off her back,” said
one of the women. “The dirty drab with yellow hair! They ought to be
killed, every one of them, so that the human race should by rid of them!”

“Her lover is a bit of clay, anyhow,” said the other woman. “A bit of
dirt, as our poilus will do for all of them.”

The soldier with the woman’s hair in his hand stroked it across his
forefinger.

“All the same it is pretty. Like gold, eh? I think of the woman,
sometimes. With blue eyes, like a German girl I kissed in Paris-a
dancing-girl!”

There was a howl of laughter from the two women.

“The old one is drunk. He is amorous with the German cow!”

“I will keep it as a mascot,” said the poilu, scrunching it up and
thrusting it into his pouch. “It’ll keep me in mind of that saligaud of a
German officer I killed. He was a chic fellow, tout de meme. A boy.”


VI

Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles with a grim look
under their wide-brimmed hats, having come down from Pozieres, where it
was always hell in the days of the Somme fighting. I liked the look of
them, dusty up to the eyes in summer, muddy up to their eyes in winter—these
gipsy fellows, scornful of discipline for discipline’s sake, but desperate
fighters, as simple as children in their ways of thought and speech
(except for frightful oaths), and looking at life, this life of war and
this life in Amiens, with frank, curious eyes, and a kind of humorous
contempt for death, and disease, and English Tommies, and French girls,
and “the whole damned show,” as they called it. They were lawless except
for the laws to which their souls gave allegiance. They behaved as the
equals of all men, giving no respect to generals or staff-officers or the
devils of hell. There was a primitive spirit of manhood in them, and they
took what they wanted, and were ready to pay for it in coin or in disease
or in wounds. They had no conceit of themselves in a little, vain way, but
they reckoned themselves the only fighting-men, simply, and without
boasting. They were hard as steel, and finely tempered. Some of them were
ruffians, but most of them were, I imagine, like those English yeomen who
came into France with the Black Prince, men who lived “rough,” close to
nature, of sturdy independence, good-humored, though fierce in a fight,
and ruthless. That is how they seemed to me, in a general way, though
among them were boys of a more delicate fiber, and sensitive, if one might
judge by their clear-cut features and wistful eyes. They had money to
spend beyond the dreams of our poor Tommy. Six shillings and sixpence a
day and remittances from home. So they pushed open the doors of any
restaurant in Amiens and sat down to table next to English officers, not
abashed, and ordered anything that pleased their taste, and wine in
plenty.

In that High Street of Amiens one day I saw a crowd gathered round an
Australian, so tall that he towered over all other heads. It was at the
corner of the rue de Corps Nu sans Teste, the Street of the Naked Body
without a Head, and I suspected trouble. As I pressed on the edge of the
crowd I heard the Australian ask, in a loud, slow drawl, whether there was
any officer about who could speak French. He asked the question gravely,
but without anxiety. I pushed through the crowd and said:

“I speak French. What’s the trouble?”

I saw then that, like the French poilu I have described, this tall
Australian was in the grasp of a French agent de police, a small man of
whom he took no more notice than if a fly had settled on his wrist. The
Australian was not drunk. I could see that he had just drunk enough to
make his brain very clear and solemn. He explained the matter
deliberately, with a slow choice of words, as though giving evidence of
high matters before a court. It appeared that he had gone into the
estaminet opposite with four friends. They had ordered five glasses of
porto, for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and drank them. They
then ordered five more glasses of porto and paid the same price, and drank
them. After this they took a stroll up and down the street, and were
bored, and went into the estaminet again, and ordered five more glasses of
porto. It was then the trouble began. But it was not the Australian who
began it. It was the woman behind the bar. She served five glasses more of
porto and asked for thirty centimes each.

“Twenty centimes,” said the Australian. “Vingt, Madame.”

“Mais non! Trente centimes, chaque verre! Thirty, my old one. Six sous,
comprenez?”

“No comprennye,” said the Australian. “Vingt centimes, or go to hell.”

The woman demanded the thirty centimes; kept on demanding with a voice
more shrill.

“It was her voice that vexed me,” said the Australian. “That and the
bloody injustice.”

The five Australians drank the five glasses of porto, and the tall
Australian paid the thirty centimes each without further argument. Life is
too short for argument. Then, without words, he took each of the five
glasses, broke it at the stem, and dropped it over the counter.

“You will see, sir,” he said, gravely, “the justice of the matter on my
side.”

But when they left the estaminet the woman came shrieking into the street
after them. Hence the agent de police and the grasp on the Australian’s
wrist.

“I should be glad if you would explain the case to this little Frenchman,”
said the soldier. “If he does not take his hand off my wrist I shall have
to kill him.”

“Perhaps a little explanation might serve,” I said.

I spoke to the agent de police at some length, describing the incident in
the cafe. I took the view that the lady was wrong in increasing the price
so rapidly. The agent agreed gravely. I then pointed out that the
Australian was a very large-sized man, and that in spite of his quietude
he was a man in the habit of killing Germans. He also had a curious
dislike of policemen.

“It appears to me,” I said, politely, “that for the sake of your health
the other end of the street is better than this.”

The agent de police released his grip from the Australian’s wrist and
saluted me.

“Vous avez raison, monsieur. Je vous remercie. Ces Australiens sont
vraiment formidables, n’est-ce pas?”

He disappeared through the crowd, who were smiling with a keen sense of
understanding. Only the lady of the estaminet was unappeased.

“They are bandits, these Australians!” she said to the world about her.

The tall Australian shook hands with me in a comradely way.

“Thanks for your trouble,” he said. “It was the injustice I couldn’t
stick. I always pay the right price. I come from Australia.”

I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above all
the passers-by. He would be at Pozieres again next day.


VII

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in
the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of
the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a
wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every
line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of
Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove in
now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a
courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before the
Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name of
Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis
Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of
France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been in
the King’s Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the
Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to
think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the
little courtyard to high mass at the cathedral or to a game of bezique in
some other mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens, unless
in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with many hundreds of houses
by bombs and gun-fire. My little room was on the floor below the garret,
and here at night, after a long day in the fields up by Pozieres or
Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to Bapaume, in the long
struggle and slaughter over every inch of ground, I used to write my day’s
despatch, to be taken next day (it was before we were allowed to use the
military wires) by King’s Messenger to England.

Those articles, written at high speed, with an impressionism born out of
many new memories of tragic and heroic scenes, were interrupted sometimes
by air-bombardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens during the Somme
fighting, to unload their bombs as near to the station as they could
guess, which was not often very near. Generally they killed a few women
and children and knocked a few poor houses and a shop or two into a wild
rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote, listening to the
crashing of glass and the anti-aircraft fire of French guns from the
citadel, I used to wonder subconsciously whether I should suddenly be
hurled into chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence, and now and again
in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get my message done (the
censors were waiting for it downstairs) I had to get up and walk into the
passage to listen to the infernal noise in the dark city of Amiens. But I
went back again and bent over my paper, concentrating on the picture of
war which I was trying to set down so that the world might see and
understand, until once again, ten minutes later or so, my will-power would
weaken and the little devil of fear would creep up to my heart and I would
go uneasily to the door again to listen. Then once more to my writing…
Nothing touched the house in the rue Amiral Courbet while we were there.
But it was into my bedroom that a shell went crashing after that night in
March when Amiens was badly wrecked, and we listened to the noise of
destruction all around us from a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other
side of the way. I should have been sleeping still if I had slept that
night in my little old bedroom when the shell paid a visit.

There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and when I think of
darkness I think of that city in time of war, when all the streets were
black tunnels and one fumbled one’s way timidly, if one had no flash-lamp,
between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming into sharp
collision sometimes with other wayfarers. But up to midnight there were
little lights flashing for a second and then going out, along the Street
of the Three Pebbles and in the dark corners of side-streets. They were
carried by girls seeking to entice English officers on their way to their
billets, and they clustered like glowworms about the side door of the
Hotel du Rhin after nine o’clock, and outside the railings of the public
gardens. As one passed, the bright bull’s-eye from a pocket torch flashed
in one’s eyes, and in the radiance of it one saw a girl’s face, laughing,
coming very close, while her fingers felt for one’s badge.

“How dark it is to-night, little captain! Are you not afraid of darkness?
I am full of fear. It is so sad, this war, so dismal! It is comradeship
that helps one now!… A little love… a little laughter, and then—who
knows?”

A little love… a little laughter—alluring words to boys out of one
battle, expecting another, hating it all, lonely in their souls because of
the thought of death, in exile from their own folk, in exile from all
womanhood and tender, feminine things, up there in the ditches and
shellcraters of the desert fields, or in the huts of headquarters staffs,
or in reserve camps behind the fighting-line. A little love, a little
laughter, and then—who knows? The sirens had whispered their own
thoughts. They had translated into pretty French the temptation of all the
little devils in their souls.

“Un peu d’amour-”

One flash-lamp was enough for two down a narrow street toward the
riverside, and then up a little dark stairway to a lamp-lit room…
Presently this poor boy would be stricken with disease and wish himself
dead.


VIII

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into which
I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet
made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading articles of English
papers. (There was never any news of French fighting beyond the official
communique and imaginary articles of a romantic kind written by French
journalists in Paris about episodes of war.) In one corner of the
estaminet was a group of bourgeois gentlemen talking business for a time,
and then listening to a monologue from the woman behind the counter. I
could not catch many words of the conversation, owing to the general
chatter, but when the man went out the woman and I were left alone
together, and she came over to me and put a photograph down on the table
before me, and, as though carrying on her previous train of thought, said,
in French, of course:

“Yes, that is what the war has done to me.”

I could not guess her meaning. Looking at the photograph, I saw it was of
a young girl in evening dress with her hair coiled in an artistic way and
a little curl on each cheek. Madame’s daughter, I thought, looking up at
the woman standing in front of me in a grubby bodice and tousled hair. She
looked a woman of about forty, with a wan face and beaten eyes.

“A charming young lady,” I said, glancing again at the portrait.

The woman repeated her last sentence, word for word.

“Yes… that is what the war has done to me.”

I looked up at her again and saw that she had the face of the young girl
in the photograph, but coarsened, aged, raddled, by the passing years and
perhaps by tragedy.

“It is you?” I asked.

“Yes, in 1913, before the war. I have changed since then—n’est-ce
pas, Monsieur?”

“There is a change,” I said. I tried not to express my thought of how much
change.

“You have suffered in the war—more than most people?”

“Ah, I have suffered!”

She told me her story, and word for word, if I could have written it down
then, it would have read like a little novel by Guy de Maupassant. She was
the daughter of people in Lille, well-to-do merchants, and before the war
married a young man of the same town, the son of other manufacturers. They
had two children and were very happy. Then the war came. The enemy drove
down through Belgium, and one day drew near and threatened Lille. The
parents of the young couple said: “We will stay. We are too old to leave
our home, and it is better to keep watch over the factory. You must go,
with the little ones, and there is no time to lose.”

There was no time to lose. The trains were crowded with fugitives and
soldiers—mostly soldiers. It was necessary to walk. Weeping, the
young husband and wife said farewell to their parents and set out on the
long trail, with the two babies in a perambulator, under a load of bread
and wine, and a little maid carrying some clothes in a bundle. For days
they tramped the roads until they were all dusty and bedraggled and
footsore, but glad to be getting farther away from that tide of field-gray
men which had now swamped over Lille. The young husband comforted his
wife. “Courage!” he said. “I have money enough to carry us through the
war. We will set up a little shop somewhere.” The maid wept bitterly now
and then, but the young husband said: “We will take care of you, Margot.
There is nothing to fear. We are lucky in our escape.” He was a delicate
fellow, rejected for military service, but brave. They came to Amiens, and
hired the estaminet and set up business. There was a heavy debt to work
off for capital and expenses before they would make money, but they were
doing well. The mother was happy with her children, and the little maid
had dried her tears. Then one day the young husband went away with the
little maid and all the money, leaving his wife in the estaminet with a
big debt to pay and a broken heart.

“That is what the war has done to me,” she said again, picking up the
photograph of the girl in the evening frock with a little curl on each
cheek.

“C’est triste, Madame!”

“Oui, c’est triste, Monsieur!”

But it was not war that had caused her tragedy, except that it had
unloosened the roots of her family life. Guy de Maupassant would have
given just such an ending to his story.


IX

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private houses,
became very friendly with the families who received them. Young girls of
good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and schoolmasters, and
merchants in a good way of business, found it delightful to wait on
handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French, to take walks with them,
and to arrange musical evenings with other girl friends who brought their
young officers and sang little old French songs with them or English songs
in the prettiest French accent. These young officers of ours found the
home life very charming. It broke the monotony of exile and made them
forget the evil side of war. They paid little gallantries to the girls,
bought them boxes of chocolate until fancy chocolate was forbidden in
France, and presented flowers to decorate the table, and wrote amusing
verses in their autograph albums or drew sketches for them. As this went
on they gained to the privilege of brotherhood, and there were kisses
before saying “good night” outside bedroom doors, while the parents
downstairs were not too watchful, knowing the ways of young people, and
lenient because of their happiness. Then a day came in each one of these
households when the officer billeted there was ordered away to some other
place. What tears! What lamentations! And what promises never to forget
little Jeanne with her dark tresses, or Suzanne with the merry eyes! Were
they not engaged? Not formally, perhaps, but in honor and in love. For a
time letters arrived, eagerly waited for by girls with aching hearts. Then
picture post-cards with a line or two of affectionate greeting. Then
nothing. Nothing at all, month after month, in spite of all the letters
addressed with all the queer initials for military units. So it happened
again and again, until bitterness crept into girls’ hearts, and hardness
and contempt.

“In my own little circle of friends,” said a lady of Amiens, “I know
eighteen girls who were engaged to English officers and have been
forsaken. It is not fair. It is not good. Your English young men seem so
serious, far more serious than our French boys. They have a look of
shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, at first, and blush when
one pays a pretty compliment. They are a long time before they take
liberties. So we trust them, and take them seriously, and allow intimacies
which we should refuse to French boys unless formally engaged. But it is
all camouflage. At heart your English young men are just flirts. They play
with us, make fools of us, steal our hearts, and then go away, and often
do not send so much as a post-card. Not even one little post-card to the
girls who weep their hearts out for them! You English are all hypocrites.
You boast that you ‘play the game.’ I know your phrase. It is untrue.

“You play with good girls as though they were grues, and that no Frenchman
would dare to do. He knows the difference between good girls and bad
girls, and behaves, with reverence to those who are good. When the English
army goes away from France it will leave many bitter memories because of
that.”


X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before going
to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless nights there
was always a luminance over the water and one could see to walk along the
quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was quivering with flashes of
white light, like summer lightning, and now and then there was a long,
vivid glare of red touching the high clouds with rosy feathers; one of our
dumps, or one of the enemy’s, had been blown up by that gun-fire, sullen
and menacing, which never ceased for years. In that quiet half-hour,
alone, or with some comrade, like Frederic Palmer or Beach Thomas, as
tired and as thoughtful as oneself after a long day’s journeying in the
swirl of war, one’s brain roved over the scenes of battle, visualizing
anew, and in imagination, the agony up there, the death which was being
done by those guns, and the stupendous sum of all this conflict. We saw,
after all, only one patch of the battlefields of the world, and yet were
staggered by the immensity of its massacre, by the endless streams of
wounded, and by the growth of those little forests of white crosses behind
the fighting-lines. We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind’s eye—even
in the darkness of an Amiens night—the vastness of the human energy
which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and
Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every village on the way
the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the
trains on their way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more
food and more shells, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured
boys, the ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching
forward from back roads to the front, from which many would never come
marching back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare
horses, along hundreds of miles of roads—all the machinery of
slaughter on the move. It was staggering in its enormity, in its detail,
and in its activity. Yet beyond our sphere in the British section of the
western front there was the French front, larger than ours, stretching
right through France, and all their roads were crowded with the same
traffic, and all their towns and villages were stirred by the same
activity and for the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were
crammed with the wreckage of youth. On the other side of the lines the
Germans were busy in the same way, as busy as soldier ants, and the roads
behind their front were cumbered by endless columns of transport and
marching men, and guns and ambulances laden with bashed, blinded, and
bleeding boys. So it was in Italy, in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria,
Serbia, Mesopotamia, Egypt… In the silence of Amiens by night, under the
stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our foreheads, with a
glamour of light over the waters of the Somme, our spirit was stricken by
the thought of this world-tragedy, and cried out in anguish against this
bloody crime in which all humanity was involved. The senselessness of it!
The futility! The waste! The mockery of men’s faith in God!…

Often Palmer and I—dear, grave old Palmer, with sphinx-like face and
honest soul—used to trudge along silently, with just a sigh now and
then, or a groan, or a sudden cry of “O God!… O Christ!” It was I,
generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: “Yes… and it’s
going to last a long time yet. A long time… It’s a question who will
hold out twenty-four hours longer than the other side. France is tired,
more tired than any of us. Will she break first? Somehow I think not. They
are wonderful! Their women have a gallant spirit… How good it is, the
smell of the trees to-night!”

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at the cathedral, high
and beautiful above the huddle of old, old houses on the quayside, with a
faint light on its pinnacle and buttresses and immense blackness beyond
them.

“Those builders of France loved their work,” said Palmer. “There was
always war about the walls of this cathedral, but they went on with it,
stone by stone, without hurry.”

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, but many times,
and out of those little dark streets below the cathedral of Amiens came
the spirit of history to teach our spirit with wonderment at the nobility
and the brutality of men, and their incurable folly, and their patience
with tyranny.

“When is it all going to end, Palmer, old man?”

“The war, or the folly of men?”

“The war. This cursed war. This bloody war.”

“Something will break one day, on our side or the other. Those who hold
out longest and have the best reserves of man-power.”

We were starting early next day—before dawn—to see the
beginning of another battle. We walked slowly over the little iron bridge
again, through the vegetable market, where old men and women were
unloading cabbages from a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue
des Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de la
Rochefoucauld in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was a light burning in the
window of the censor’s room. In there the colonel was reading The Times in
the Louis Quinze salon, with a grave pucker on his high, thin forehead. He
could not get any grasp of the world’s events. There was an attack on the
censor by Northcliffe. Now what did he mean by that? It was really very
unkind of him, after so much civility to him. Charteris would be furious.
He would bang the telephone—but—dear, dear, why should people
be so violent? War correspondents were violent on the slightest
provocation. The world itself was very violent. And it was all so
dangerous. Don’t you think so, Russell?

The cars were ordered for five o’clock. Time for bed.


XI

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain fell heavily out of a
moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp flashed out except where a solitary
woman scurried down the wet streets to lonely rooms. There were no British
officers strolling about. They had turned in early, to hot baths and
unaccustomed beds, except for one or two, with their burberries buttoned
tight at the throat, and sopping field-caps pulled down about the ears,
and top—boots which went splash, splash through deep puddles as they
staggered a little uncertainly and peered up at dark corners to find their
whereabouts, by a dim sense of locality and the shapes of the houses. The
rain pattered sharply on the pavements and beat a tattoo on leaden gutters
and slate roofs. Every window was shuttered and no light gleamed through.

On such a night I went out with Beach Thomas, as often before, wet or
fine, after hard writing.

“A foul night,” said Thomas, setting off in his quick, jerky step. “I like
to feel the rain on my face.”

We turned down as usual to the river. It was very dark—the rain was
heavy on the quayside, where there was a group of people bareheaded in the
rain and chattering in French, with gusts of laughter.

“Une bouteille de champagne!” The words were spoken in a clear boy’s
voice, with an elaborate caricature of French accent, in musical cadence,
but unmistakably English.

“A drunken officer,” said Thomas.

“Poor devil!”

We drew near among the people and saw a young officer arm in arm with a
French peasant—one of the market porters—telling a tale in
broken French to the audience about him, with comic gesticulations and
extraordinary volubility.

A woman put her hand on my shoulder and spoke in French.

“He has drunk too much bad wine. His legs walk away from him. He will be
in trouble, Monsieur. And a child—no older than my own boy who is
fighting in the Argonne.”

“Apportez-moi une bouteille de champagne, vite!…” said the young
officer. Then he waved his arm and said: “J’ai perdu mon cheval” (“A
kingdom for a bloody horse!”), “as Shakespeare said. Y a-t’il quelqu’un
qui a vu mon sacre cheval? In other words, if I don’t find that
four-legged beast which led to my damnation I shall be shot at dawn.
Fusille, comprenez? On va me fusiller par un mur blanc—or is it une
mure blanche? quand l’aurore se leve avec les couleurs d’une rose et
l’odeur d’une jeune fille lavee et parfumee. Pretty good that, eh, what?
But the fact remains that unless I find my steed, my charger, my
war-horse, which in reality does not belong to me at all, because I
pinched it from the colonel, I shall be shot as sure as fate, and, alas! I
do not want to die. I am too young to die, and meanwhile I desire encore
une bouteille de champagne!”

The little crowd of citizens found a grim humor in this speech, one-third
of which they understood. They laughed coarsely, and a man said:

“Quel drole de type! Quel numero!”

But the woman who had touched me on the sleeve spoke to me again.

“He says he has lost his horse and will be shot as a deserter. Those
things happen. My boy in the Argonne tells me that a comrade of his was
shot for hiding five days with his young woman. It would be sad if this
poor child should be condemned to death.”

I pushed my way through the crowd and went up to the officer.

“Can I help at all?”

He greeted me warmly, as though he had known me for years.

“My dear old pal, you can indeed! First of all I want a bottle of
champagne-une bouteille de champagne-” it was wonderful how much music he
put into those words—“and after that I want my runaway horse, as I
have explained to these good people who do not understand a bloody word,
in spite of my excellent French accent. I stole the colonel’s horse to
come for a joy-ride to Amiens. The colonel is one of the best of men, but
very touchy, very touchy indeed. You would be surprised. He also has the
worst horse in the world, or did, until it ran away half an hour ago into
the blackness of this hell which men call Amiens. It is quite certain that
if I go back without that horse most unpleasant things will happen to a
gallant young British officer, meaning myself, who with most innocent
intentions of cleansing his soul from the filth of battle, from the horror
of battle, from the disgusting fear of battle—oh yes, I’ve been
afraid all right, and so have you unless you’re a damned hero or a damned
liar—desired to get as far as this beautiful city (so fair without,
so foul within!) in order to drink a bottle, or even two or three, of
rich, sparkling wine, to see the loveliness of women as they trip about
these pestilential streets, to say a little prayer in la cathedrale, and
then to ride back, refreshed, virtuous, knightly, all through the quiet
night, to deliver up the horse whence I had pinched it, and nobody any the
wiser in the dewy morn. You see, it was a good scheme.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“It happened thuswise,” he answered, breaking out into fresh eloquence,
with fantastic similes and expressions of which I can give only the
spirit. “Leaving a Pozieres, which, as you doubtless know, unless you are
a bloody staff-officer, is a place where the devil goes about like a
roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, where he leaves his victims’
entrails hanging on to barbed wire, and where the bodies of your friends
and mine lie decomposing in muddy holes—you know the place?—I
put my legs across the colonel’s horse, which was in the wagonlines, and
set forth for Amiens. That horse knew that I had pinched him—forgive
my slang. I should have said it in the French language, vole—and
resented me. Thrice was I nearly thrown from his back. Twice did he
entangle himself in barbed wire deliberately. Once did I have to coerce
him with many stripes to pass a tank. Then the heavens opened upon us and
it rained. It rained until I was wet to the skin, in spite of sheltering
beneath a tree, one branch of which, owing to the stubborn temper of my
steed, struck me a stinging blow across the face. So in no joyful spirit I
came at last to Amiens, this whited sepulcher, this Circe’s capital, this
den of thieves, this home of vampires. There I dined, not wisely, but too
well. I drank of the flowing cup—une bouteille de champagne—and
I met a maiden as ugly as sin, but beautiful in my eyes after Pozieres—you
understand—and accompanied her to her poor lodging—in a most
verminous place, sir—where we discoursed upon the problems of life
and love. O youth! O war! O hell!… My horse, that brute who resented me,
was in charge of an ‘ostler, whom I believe verily is a limb of Satan, in
the yard without. It was late when I left that lair of Circe, where young
British officers, even as myself, are turned into swine. It was late and
dark, and I was drunk. Even now I am very drunk. I may say that I am
becoming drunker and drunker.”

It was true. The fumes of bad champagne were working in the boy’s brain,
and he leaned heavily against me.

“It was then that that happened which will undoubtedly lead to my undoing,
and blast my career as I have blasted my soul. The horse was there in the
yard, but without saddle or bridle.

“’Where is my saddle and where is my bridle, oh, naughty ‘ostler?’ I
shouted, in dismay.

“The ‘ostler, who, as I informed you, is one of Satan’s imps, answered in
incomprehensible French, led the horse forth from the yard, and, giving it
a mighty blow on the rump, sent it clattering forth into the outer
darkness. In my fear of losing it—for I must be at Pozieres at dawn—I
ran after it, but it ran too fast in the darkness, and I stopped and tried
to grope my way back to the stableyard to kill that ‘ostler, thereby
serving God, and other British officers, for he was the devil’s agent. But
I could not find the yard again. It had disappeared! It was swallowed up
in Cimmerian gloom. So I was without revenge and without horse, and, as
you will perceive, sir—unless you are a bloody staff-officer who
doesn’t perceive anything—I am utterly undone. I am also horribly
drunk, and I must apologize for leaning so heavily on your arm. It’s
awfully good of you, anyway, old man.”

The crowd was mostly moving, driven indoors by the rain. The woman who had
spoken to me said, “I heard a horse’s hoofs upon the bridge, la-bas.”

Then she went away with her apron over her head.

Thomas and I walked each side of the officer, giving him an arm. He could
not walk straight, and his legs played freakish tricks with him. All the
while he talked in a strain of high comedy interlarded with grim little
phrases, revealing an underlying sense of tragedy and despair, until his
speech thickened and he became less fluent. We spent a fantastic hour
searching for his horse. It was like a nightmare in the darkness and rain.
Every now and then we heard, distinctly, the klip-klop of a horse’s hoofs,
and went off in that direction, only to be baffled by dead silence, with
no sign of the animal. Then again, as we stood listening, we heard the
beat of hoofs on hard pavements, in the opposite direction, and walked
that way, dragging the boy, who was getting more and more incapable of
walking upright. At last we gave up hope of finding the horse, though the
young officer kept assuring us that he must find it at all costs. “It’s a
point of honor,” he said, thickly. “Not my horse, you know Doctor’s horse.
Devil to pay to-morrow.”

He laughed foolishly and said:

“Always devil to pay in morning.”

We were soaked to the skin.

“Come home with me,” I said. “We can give you a shake-down.”

“Frightfully good, old man. Awfully sorry, you know, and all that. Are you
a blooming general, or something? But I must find horse.”

By some means we succeeded in persuading him that the chase was useless
and that it would be better for him to get into our billet and start out
next morning, early. We dragged him up the rue des Augustins, to the rue
Amiral Courbet. Outside the iron gates I spoke to him warningly:

“You’ve got to be quiet. There are staff-officers inside…”

“What?… Staff officers?… Oh, my God!”

The boy was dismayed. The thought of facing staff-officers almost sobered
him; did, indeed, sober his brain for a moment, though not his legs.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Go quietly, and I will get you upstairs
safely.”

It was astonishing how quietly he went, hanging on to me. The little
colonel was reading The Times in the salon. We passed the open door, and
saw over the paper his high forehead puckered with perplexity as to the
ways of the world. But he did not raise his head or drop The Times at the
sound of our entry. I took the boy upstairs to my room and guided him
inside. He said, “Thanks awfully,” and then lay down on the floor and fell
into so deep a sleep that I was scared and thought for a moment he might
be dead. I went downstairs to chat with the little colonel and form an
alibi in case of trouble. An hour later, when I went into my room, I found
the boy still lying as I had left him, without having stirred a limb. He
was a handsome fellow, with his head hanging limply across his right arm
and a lock of damp hair falling across his forehead. I thought of a son of
mine, who in a few years would be as old as he, and I prayed God mine
might be spared this boy’s tragedy… Through the night he slept in a
drugged way, but just at dawn he woke up and stretched himself, with a
queer little moan. Then he sat up and said:

“Where am I?”

“In a billet at Amiens. You lost your horse last night and I brought you
here.”

Remembrance came into his eyes and his face was swept with a sudden flush
of shame and agony.

“Yes… I made a fool of myself. The worst possible. How can I get back to
Pozieres?”

“You could jump a lorry with luck.”

“I must. It’s serious if I don’t get back in time. In any case, the loss
of that horse—”

He thought deeply for a moment, and I could see that his head was aching
to the beat of sledge-hammers.

“Can I wash anywhere?”

I pointed to a jug and basin, and he said, “Thanks, enormously.”

He washed hurriedly, and then stared down with a shamed look at his muddy
uniform, all creased and bedraggled. After that he asked if he could get
out downstairs, and I told him the door was unlocked.

He hesitated for a moment before leaving my room.

“I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was very decent of you.
Many thanks.”

The boy was a gentleman when sober. I wonder if he died at Pozieres, or
farther on by the Butte de Warlencourt… A week later I saw an
advertisement in an Amiens paper: “Horse found. Brown, with white sock on
right foreleg. Apply—”

I have a fancy it was the horse for which we had searched in the rain.


XII

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand side
of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie’s bar was on the left-hand
side of the street, always crowded after six o’clock by officers of every
regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry cobblers, and other
liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the beastliness of war,
and gave them the gift of laughter, and made them careless of the battles
which would have to be fought. Young staff-officers were there, explaining
carefully how hard worked they were and how often they went under
shell-fire. The fighting officers, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered
at them, laughed hugely at the latest story of mirthful horror, arranged
rendezvous at the Godebert restaurant, where they would see the beautiful
Marguerite (until she transferred to la cathedrale in the same street) and
our checks which Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in
British honesty, not often, as he told me, being hurt by a “stumor.”
Charlie’s bar was wrecked by shell-fire afterward, and he went to
Abbeville and set up a more important establishment, which was wrecked,
too, in a fierce air raid, before the paint was dry on the walls.

The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and women went all through
the war, called into its white halls by the spirit of beauty which dwelt
there, and by its silence and peace. The great west door was screened from
bomb-splinters by sand-bags piled high, and inside there were other walls
of sand-bags closing in the sanctuary and some of the windows. But these
signs of war did not spoil the majesty of the tall columns and high roof,
nor the loveliness of the sculptured flowers below the clerestory arches,
nor the spiritual mystery of those great, dim aisles, where light
flickered and shadows lurked, and the ghosts of history came out of their
tombs to pace these stones again where five, six, seven centuries before
they had walked to worship God, in joy or in despair, or to show their
beauty of young womanhood—peasant girl or princess—to lovers
gazing by the pillars, or to plight their troth as royal brides, or get a
crown for their heads, or mercy for their dead bodies in velvet-draped
coffins.

Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before other English
soldiers, who came out with Edward the Black Prince, by way of Crecy, or
with Harry the King, through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence, if
Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous
conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time will
think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who tramped up
the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each
footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old flagstones, awed by
the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden heartache for a closer
knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God worshiped there—the God of
Love—while, not far away, men were killing one another by high
explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, bayonets,
poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close fighting, with short
daggers like butchers’ knives, or clubs with steel knobs. I watched the
faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like the Australians and
New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not religious by instinct
or training, wandered round in a wondering way, with a touch of scorn,
even of hostility, now and then, for these mysteries—the chanting of
the Office, the tinkling of the bells at the high mass—which were
beyond their understanding, and which they could not link up with any
logic of life, as they knew it now, away up by Bapaume or Bullecourt,
where God had nothing to do, seemingly, with a night raid into Boche
lines, when they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping Stoke bombs
down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German boys, mad with fear, when
the Australians jumped on them in the darkness and made haste with their
killing. All the same, this great church was wonderful, and the
Australians, scrunching their slouch-hats, stared up at the tall columns
to the clerestory arches, and peered through the screen to the golden sun
upon the high-altar, and touched old tombs with their muddy hands, reading
the dates on them—1250, 1155, 1415—with astonishment at their
antiquity. Their clean-cut hatchet faces, sun—baked, tanned by rain
and wind, their simple blue-gray eyes, the fine, strong grace of their
bodies, as they stood at ease in this place of history, struck me as being
wonderfully like all that one imagines of those English knights and
squires—Norman-English—who rode through France with the Black
Prince. It is as though Australia had bred back to the old strain. Our own
English soldiers were less arresting to the eye, more dapper and neat, not
such evident children of nature. Gravely they walked up the aisles,
standing in groups where a service was in progress, watching the movements
of the priests, listening to the choir and organ with reverent, dreamy
eyes. Some of them—country lads—thought back, I fancy, to some
village church in England where they had sung hymns with mother and
sisters in the days before the war. England and that little church were a
long way off now, perhaps all eternity away. I saw one boy standing quite
motionless, with wet eyes, without self-consciousness. This music, this
place of thoughtfulness, had made something break in his heart… Some of
our young officers, but not many, knelt on the cane chairs and prayed,
face in hands. French officers crossed themselves and their medals tinkled
as they walked up the aisles. Always there were women in black weeds
kneeling before the side—altars, praying to the Virgin for husbands
and sons, dead or alive, lighting candles below holy pictures and statues.
Our men tiptoed past them, holding steel hats or field—caps, and
putting their packs against the pillars. On the steps of the cathedral I
heard two officers talking one day.

“How can one reconcile all this with the war?”

“Why not?… I suppose we’re fighting for justice and all that. That’s
what The Daily Mail tells us.”

“Seriously, old man. Where does Christ come in?”

“He wasn’t against righteous force. He chased the money-changers out of
the Temple.”

“Yes, but His whole teaching was love and forgiveness. ‘Thou shalt not
kill.’ ‘Little children, love one another!’ ‘Turn the other cheek.’. .. Is
it all sheer tosh? If so, why go on pretending?… Take chaplains in khaki—these
lieutenant-colonels with black crosses. They make me sick. It’s either one
thing or the other. Brute force or Christianity. I am harking back to the
brute—force theory. But I’m not going to say ‘God is love’ one day
and then prod a man in the stomach the next. Let’s be consistent.”

“The other fellows asked for it. They attacked first.”

“Yes, but we are all involved. Our diplomacy, our secret treaties, our
philosophical dope over the masses, our imperial egotism, our trade
rivalries—all that was a direct challenge of Might against Right.
The Germans are more efficient and more logical—that’s all. They
prepared for the inevitable and struck first. We knew the inevitable was
coming, but didn’t prepare, being too damned inefficient… I have a
leaning toward religion. Instinctively I’m for Christ. But it doesn’t work
in with efficiency and machine-guns.”

“It belongs to another department, that’s all. We’re spiritual and animal
at the same time. In one part of my brain I’m a gentleman. In another, a
beast. It’s conflict. We can’t eliminate the beast, but we can control it
now and then when it gets too obstreperous, and that’s where religion
helps. It’s the high ideal—otherworldliness.”

“The Germans pray to the same God. Praise Christ and ask for victory.”

“Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems to me God is above all
the squabbles of humanity—doesn’t care a damn about them!—but
the human soul can get into touch with the infinite and the ideal, even
while he is doing butcher’s work, and beastliness. That doesn’t matter
very much. It’s part of the routine of life.”

“But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation in the world. It creates
cruelty and tyranny, and all bloody things. Surely if we believe in God—anyhow
in Christian ethics—this war is a monstrous crime in which all
humanity is involved.”

“The Hun started it… Let’s go and give the glad eye to Marguerite.”

At night, in moonlight, Amiens cathedral was touched with a new
spirituality, a white magic beyond all words of beauty. On many nights of
war I walked round the cathedral square, looking up at that grand mass of
masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming like silver and its
sculptured tracery like lacework, and a flood of milky light glamorous on
walls in which every stone was clear-cut beyond a vast shadow-world. How
old it was! How many human eyes through many centuries had come in the
white light of the moon to look at this dream in stone enshrining the
faith of men! The Revolution had surged round these walls, and the screams
of wild women, and their shrill laughter, and their cries for the blood of
aristocrats, had risen from this square. Pageants of kingship and royal
death had passed across these pavements through the great doors there.
Peasant women, in the darkness, had wept against these walls, praying for
God’s pity for their hearts. Now the English officers were lighting
cigarettes in the shelter of a wall, the outline of their features—knightly
faces—touched by the moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in
the sky beyond the river.

“A good night for a German air raid,” said one of the officers.

“Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep,” said the other
man.

The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their
shutters.


XIII

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the rue
des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice—a big, grim
building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways, and
above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her scales. There
was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French soldiers
with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that woman in stone. They
used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition of
war for passers-by to see. Many of them revealed no faces, but were white
masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round their heads. Others showed only the
upper parts of their faces, and the places where their jaws had been were
tied up with white rags. There were men without noses, and men with half
their scalps torn away. French children used to stare through the railings
at them, gravely, with childish curiosity, without pity. English soldiers
gave them a passing glance, and went on to places where they might be made
like this, without faces, or jaws, or noses, or eyes. By their uniforms I
saw that there were Chasseurs Alpins, and Chasseurs d’Afrique, and young
infantrymen of the line, and gunners. They sat, without restlessness,
watching the passers-by if they had eyes to see, or, if blind, feeling the
breeze about them, and listening to the sound of passing feet.


XIV

The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside the
city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the tow-path,
past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite bank, and past
the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness in days of peace.
They were of fantastic architecture—these Cottages where well-to-do
citizens of Amiens used to come for week-ends of boating and fishing—and
their garden gates at the end of wooden bridges over back-waters were of
iron twisted into the shapes of swans or flowers, and there were snails of
terra-cotta on the chimney-pots, and painted woodwork on the walls, in the
worst taste, yet amusing and pleasing to the eye in their green bowers. I
remember one called Mon Idee, and wondered that any man should be proud of
such a freakish conception of a country house. They were abandoned during
the war, except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French
officers and their light o’ loves, and the tow-path was used only by stray
couples who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers walking out with
French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the river in long, shallow
boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, cauliflowers, and
asparagus, and farther up-stream there was a boat-house where orderlies
from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour’s
rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral
rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with
fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the
red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there
was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant
gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French
soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It
was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort—the
ruffle of the drums of death. The winding waters of the Somme flowed in
higher reaches through the hell of war by Biaches and St.-Christ, this
side of Peronne, where dead bodies floated in slime and blood, and there
was a litter of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and
ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, and there came
back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the wreckage of human life, fresh
from the torturers. These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed
men at a carpenter’s yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and
often as I passed I saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on
stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were the bad cases—French
boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or
hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the
stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like
wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of the
lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The
sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the color out of
the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the great cathedral,
splendid above the river. Women watched them from the bridge, straining
their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of them
looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me one day.

“That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!”

“Yes. That is war, Madame.”

She put a skinny hand on my arm.

“Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?”

“Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old
and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines.”

“The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?”

“Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields.”

“Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I have
lost mine.”

“Where was that, Madame?”

“Over there.”

She pointed up the Somme.

“He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my
breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades.”

“It is sad, Madame.”

“Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur.”

“Au revoir, Madame.”


XV

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station,
organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the
autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the city and
gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments abandoned
by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who took me
round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he had
refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did not
guess that one day I should be a patient there. That was two years later,
at the end of the Somme battles. I was worn out and bloodless after five
months of hard strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten me up
in the fields where lay the unburied dead.

“Trench fever,” said the doctor.

“You look in need of a rest,” said the matron. “My word, how white you
are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?”

I lay in bed at the end of the officers’ ward, with only one other bed
between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of the
New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which officers
lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.

“That’s all right. You’re going to die!” said a rosy—cheeked young
orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his way
of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in the
Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in reminiscences
with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of silence, but glinting
eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy with a fine, delicate face,
a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a pile of books at his elbow—all
by Anatole France. It was the first time I had ever laid in hospital, and
I felt amazingly weak and helpless, but interested in my surroundings. The
day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand girl whom the general chaffed with
sarcastic humor, and who gave back more than she got, went off duty with a
cheery, “Good night, all!” and the night nurse took her place, and made a
first visit to each bed. She was a dainty little woman with the complexion
of a delicate rose and large, luminous eyes. She had a nunlike look,
utterly pure, but with a spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for
all these men, who were like children in her hands. They seemed glad at
her coming.

“Good evening, sister!” said one man after another, even one who had laid
with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on his
face.

She knelt down beside each one, saying, “How are you to-night?” and
chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I heard
a boy’s voice say: “Oh, don’t go yet, sister! You have only given me two
minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in love with you, you
know, and I have been waiting all day for your beauty!”

There was a gust of laughter in the ward.

“The child is at it again!” said one of the officers.

“When are you going to write me another sonnet?” asked the nurse. “The
last one was much admired.”

“The last one was rotten,” said the boy. “I have written a real corker
this time. Read it to yourself, and don’t drop its pearls before these
swine.”

“Well, you must be good, or I won’t read it at all.”

An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the bedclothes
off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas.

“I’m fed up with everything! I hate war! I don’t want to be a hero! I
don’t want to die! I want to be loved!… I’m a glutton for love!”

In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a schoolboy who was
mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother. With his
tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been
Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to chide him. It was
a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had thrown off his clothes he
snuggled under them again and said: “All right, I’ll be good. Only I want
a kiss before I go to sleep.”

I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and a
joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the muck
and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish
wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life.
But he was killed… I had a letter from his stricken mother months
afterward. The child was “Missing” then, and her heart cried out for him.

Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire—I suppose he
had been in a cotton-mill or a factory—a hard-headed, simple-hearted
fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of “the wife.” But his nerves
had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the dreams that
came to him.

“Sister,” he said, “don’t let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me
dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can’t bear
it.”

“You will sleep better to-night,” she said. “I am putting something in
your milk. Something to stop the dreaming.”

But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man
opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a
long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in a
dazed way, saying:

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” trembling with fear, so that the bed was shaken.
The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he called out,
hushing him down, whispering to him.

“I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep,” he told me.
“It’s what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown
off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn’t it? Nerves, you
know. I didn’t think I had a nerve in my body before this war.”

The little night nurse came to my bedside.

“Can’t you sleep?”

“I’m afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?”

She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.

“Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep.”

In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red glasses, and
now and then all through the night matches were lighted, illuminating the
room for a second, followed by the glowing end of a cigarette shining like
a star in the darkness.

The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about violently, gave strange
jerks and starts. Sometimes they spoke aloud in their sleep.

“That isn’t a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell.”

“Now then, get on with it, can’t you?”

“Look out! They’re coming! Can’t you see them moving by the wire?”

The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their sleep;
lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness. Sights which
they had tried to forget stared at them through their closed eyelids. The
daylight came and the night nurse slipped away, and the day nurse shook
one’s shoulders and said: “Time to wash and shave. No malingering!”

It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as rats had to sit up
in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave themselves.

“You’re merciless!” I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse dabbed
my back with cold iodine at six o’clock on a winter morning, with the
windows wide open.

“Oh, there’s no mercy in this place!” said the strong-minded girl. “It’s
kill or cure here, and no time to worry.”

“You’re all devils,” said the New Zealand general. “You don’t care a damn
about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the time the
doctor comes around. I’m a general, I am, and you can’t order ME about,
and if you think I’m going to shave at this time in the morning you are
jolly well mistaken. I am down with dysentery, and don’t you forget it. I
didn’t get through the Dardanelles to be murdered at Amiens.”

“That’s where you may be mistaken, general,” said the imperturbable girl.
“I have to carry out orders, and if they lead to your death it’s not my
responsibility. I’m paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my duty, rough
or smooth, kill or cure.”

“You’re a vampire. That’s what you are.”

“I’m a nurse.”

“If ever I hear you’re going to marry a New Zealand boy I’ll warn him
against you.”

“He’ll be too much of a fool to listen to you.”

“I’ve a good mind to marry you myself and beat you every morning.”

“Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm!”

* * *

Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as the German mark was
the railway station we were in the center of the danger-zone. There was a
frightful noise of splintering glass and smashing timber between each
crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the anti—aircraft
guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of those officers who had
come down from the fighting—lines nerve-racked and fever-stricken.
They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about from bed to bed, with her
flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed no other sign of fear and
was braver than her patients at that time, though they had done the hero’s
job all right.

It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that an
officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, “If there is another air raid I
shall go mad.” He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les
Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over
sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until he
could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients had
their heads under the bedclothes like little children.


XVI

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all its
people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered
forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest
tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old
battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st, when
our lines were stormed and broken by his men’s odds against our defending
troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like all who
knew what had happened better than the troops themselves. Every day after
the first break-through we pushed out in different directions—Hamilton
Fyfe and I went together sometimes until we came up with the backwash of
the great retreat, ebbing back and back, day after day, with increasing
speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It was a kind of ordered chaos,
terrible to see. It was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with
each ant trying to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly
way, directed by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead
of eggs and sticks these soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind
our front-lines, were trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks,
ambulances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, agricultural
implements, transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A. tents, gun-horse
and mule columns, while rear-guard actions were being fought within
gunfire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back along the roads in
this uproar of traffic, and word came that a further retreat was happening
and that the enemy had broken through again…

Amiens seemed threatened on the morning when, to the north, Albert was
held by a mixed crowd of Scottish and English troops, too thin, as I could
see when I passed through them, to fight any big action, with an enemy
advancing rapidly from Courcellette and outflanking our line by Montauban
and Fricourt. I saw our men marching hastily in retreat to escape that
tightening net, and while the southern side of Amiens was held by a crowd
of stragglers with cyclist battalions, clerks from headquarters staffs,
and dismounted cavalry, commanded by Brigadier-General Carey, sent down
hurriedly to link them together and stop a widening gap until the French
could get to our relief on the right and until the Australians had come
down from Flanders. There was nothing on that day to prevent the Germans
breaking through to Amiens except the courage of exhausted boys thinly
strung out, and the lagging footsteps of the Germans themselves, who had
suffered heavy losses all the way and were spent for a while by their
progress over the wild ground of the old fighting-fields. Their heavy guns
were far behind, unable to keep pace with the storm troops, and the enemy
was relying entirely on machine-guns and a few field-guns, but most of our
guns were also out of action, captured or falling back to new lines, and
upon the speed with which the enemy could mass his men for a new assault
depended the safety of Amiens and the road to Abbeville and the coast. If
he could hurl fresh divisions of men against our line on that last night
of March, or bring up strong forces of cavalry, or armored cars, our line
would break and Amiens would be lost, and all our work would be in
jeopardy. That was certain. It was visible. It could not be concealed by
any camouflage of hope or courage.

It was after a day on the Somme battlefields, passing through our retiring
troops, that I sat down, with other war correspondents and several
officers, to a dinner in the old Hotel du Rhin in Amiens. It was a dismal
meal, in a room where there had been much laughter and, throughout the
battles of the Somme, in 1916, a coming and going of generals and staffs
and officers of all grades, cheery and high-spirited at these little
tables where there were good wine and not bad food, and putting away from
their minds for the time being the thought of tragic losses or forlorn
battles in which they might fall. In the quietude of the hotel garden, a
little square plot of grass bordered by flower-beds, I had had strange
conversations with boys who had revealed their souls a little, after
dinner in the darkness, their faces bared now and then by the light of
cigarettes or the flare of a match.

“Death is nothing,” said one young officer just down from the Somme fields
for a week’s rest-cure for jangled nerves. “I don’t care a damn for death;
but it’s the waiting for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the
sight of one’s pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear under
shell-fire, that break one’s pluck… My nerves are like fiddle-strings.”

In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between their
stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and ditches under
frightful fire which had “wiped out” their platoons or companies. A
bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling gull, used to
listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his wing, and its
head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on the figures in
khaki—until suddenly it would clap its long bill rapidly in a
wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire—“Curse the bloody bird!”
said officers startled by this evil and reminiscent noise—and caper
with ridiculous postures round the imperturbable gull… Beyond the lines,
from the dining-room, would come the babble of many tongues and the
laughter of officers telling stories against one another over their
bottles of wine, served by Gaston the head-waiter, between our discussions
on strategy—he was a strategist by virtue of service in the trenches
and several wounds—or by “Von Tirpitz,” an older, whiskered man, or
by Joseph, who had a high, cackling laugh and strong views against the
fair sex, and the inevitable cry, “C’est la guerre!” when officers
complained of the service… There had been merry parties in this room,
crowded with the ghosts of many heroic fellows, but it was a gloomy
gathering on that evening at the end of March when we sat there for the
last time. There were there officers who had lost their towns, and
“Dadoses” (Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies) whose stores
had gone up in smoke and flame, and a few cavalry officers back from
special leave and appalled by what had happened in their absence, and a
group of Y.M.C.A. officials who had escaped by the skin of their teeth
from huts now far behind the German lines, and censors who knew that no
blue pencil could hide the truth of the retreat, and war correspondents
who had to write the truth and hated it.

Gaston whispered gloomily behind my chair: “Mon petit caporal”—he
called me that because of a fancied likeness to the young Napoleon—“dites
donc. Vous croyex quils vont passer par Amiens? Non, ce n’est pas
possible, ca! Pour la deuxieme fois? Non. Je refuse a le croire. Mais
c’est mauvais, c’est affreux, apres tant de sacrifice!”

Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for company’s sake,
fixing up accounts as though the last day of reckoning had come…as it
had. Her hair, with its little curls, was still in perfect order. She had
two dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a waxen pallor.
She was working out accounts with a young officer, who smoked innumerable
cigarettes to steady his nerves. “Von Tirpitz” was going round in an
absent-minded way, pulling at his long whiskers.

The war correspondents talked together. We spoke gloomily, in low voices,
so that the waiters should not hear.

“If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the coast.”

“Will that be a win for the Germans, even then?”

“It will make it hell in the Channel.”

“We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire.”

“France won’t give in now, whatever happens. And England never gives in.”

“We’re exhausted, all the same. It’s a question of man-power.”

“They’re bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow.”

“I don’t see that at all. There’s still a line…”

“A line! A handful of tired men.”

“It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux to-night. It
commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map.”

“They won’t.”

“We keep on saying, ‘They won’t.’ We said, ‘They won’t get the Somme
crossings!’ but they did. Let’s face it squarely, without any damned false
optimism. That has been our curse all through.”

“Better than your damned pessimism.”

“It’s quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is to
keep them back? There’s nothing up the road.”

“It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. How they would
laugh!”

“We shouldn’t laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on things.”

“How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication.
Anything may happen in the night.”

Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There were
two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All the
windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise of
rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass.
Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the
floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways.
Then some one laughed.

“Not this time!”

The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table, and
lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the loud hum
of airplanes, the well known “zooz-zooz” of the Gothas’ double fuselage.
More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the same sound of
explosives and falling masonry. The anti—aircraft guns got to work
and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells winging over the roofs.

“Bang!… Crash!”

That was nearer again.

Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.

“They’re making a mess outside. Perhaps we’d better get away before it
gets too hot.”

Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the
increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she
controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer who
was settling up for a group of others.

The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly bright
and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets were flooded
with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver above intense black
shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by projecting walls.

“Curse the moon!” said one officer. “How I hate its damned light”

But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and into
this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were running
close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one doorway to
another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of the Three
Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and paving-stones
were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions. Many horses were
killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding monstrously so that
there were large pools of blood around them.

An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white
under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.

“A fellow was killed just by my side.” he said. “We were standing in a
doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a log,
without a sound, as dead as a door-nail.”

There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note
which vibrated like ‘cello strings, very loudly, and with that sinister
noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they passed across
the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel
below them. From time to time they went away until they were specks of
silver and black; but always they came back again, or others came, with
new stores of bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went on all
through the night.

I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was
impossible. My will-power was not strong enough to disregard those crashes
in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful falling
noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the ceiling above me
pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which I lay engulfed in the
chaos of this wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many times I said, “To hell with
it all… I’m going to sleep,” and then sat up in the darkness at the
renewal of that tumult and switched on the electric light. No, impossible
to sleep! Outside in the corridor there was a stampede of heavy boots.
Officers were running to get into the cellars before the next crash, which
might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The thought of that cellar pulled
me down like the law of gravity. I walked along the corridor, now
deserted, and saw a stairway littered with broken glass, which my feet
scrunched. There were no lights in the basement of the hotel, but I had a
flash-lamp, going dim, and by its pale eye fumbled my way to a stone
passage leading to the cellar. That flight of stone steps was littered
also with broken glass. In the cellar itself was a mixed company of men
who had been dining earlier in the evening, joined by others who had come
in from the streets for shelter. Some of them had dragged down mattresses
from the bedrooms and were lying there in their trench-coats, with their
steel hats beside them. Others were sitting on wooden cases, wearing their
steel hats, while there were others on their knees, and their faces in
their hands, trying to sleep. There were some of the town majors who had
lost their towns, and some Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three
private soldiers, and some motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young
cooks of the hotel lying together on dirty straw. By one of the stone
pillars of the vaulted room two American war correspondents—Sims and
Mackenzie—were sitting on a packing-case playing cards on a board
between them. They had stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the
flickering light played on their faces and cast deep shadows under their
eyes. I stood watching these men in that cellar and thought what a good
subject it would be for the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a
comfortable place. There was only one place on the bare stones, and when I
lay down there my bones ached abominably, and it was very cold. Through an
aperture in the window came a keen draft and I could see in a square of
moonlit sky a glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A direct hit on
the Hotel du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this vaulted room and end a
game of cards. After fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that
the room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this damp
cellar and these hard stones. I returned to it and lay down on the bed
again and switched off the light. But the noises outside, the loneliness
of the room, the sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up
again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again. Many
houses round about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage was
being made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the room, smoking
cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty explosion, very close, made
all my nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the best place. If
one had to die it was better to be in the company of friends. Down I went
again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He, too, was a wanderer
between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.

“I am getting bored with this,” he said. “It’s absurd to think that this
filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense calls one
down. Anyhow, I can’t sleep.”

We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well as
sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the mattresses,
vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or
gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the old
school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ol’ Bill, with a fierce
frown above his black mustache. Sims and Mackenzie still played their game
of cards, silently, between the guttering candles.

I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the
cellar, six times that night. There was never ten minutes’ relief from the
drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens. It was at four
in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me wandering before.

“Let us go for a walk,” he said. “The birds will be away by dawn.”

It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hotel du
Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was still
the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler sky. It
shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of horses and
fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway was
littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had
collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been
stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by
bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had
been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The air
raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first light of dawn came into the
sky….

That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military
authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving
everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops—where
there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many people
must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own houses—I
never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of the tragedy
in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the first high
velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them about the city,
destroying many other houses. A fire started by these shells formed a
great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois Cailloux,
where there had been an arcade and many good shops and houses. I saw the
fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted ironwork when I went
through the city after the day of exodus.


XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its
desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its loneliness.
All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect—I often think of Douai,
which was left with all its people under compulsion of the enemy—but
Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its narrow streets,
and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in flight above its
roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in another.

One of our sentries came out of a little house near the Place and said:

“Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, sir. They’ve been
falling pretty thick on the east side. Made no end of a mess!”

On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Australian headquarters,
on the left bank of the Somme, we ate sandwiches in the public gardens
outside the Hotel du Rhin. There were big shell-holes in the flower-beds,
and trees had been torn down and flung across the pathway, and there was a
broken statue lying on the grass. Some French and English soldiers tramped
past. Then there was no living soul about in the place which had been so
crowded with life, with pretty women and children, and young officers
doing their shopping, and the business of a city at work.

“It makes one understand what Rome was like after the barbarians had
sacked and left it,” said a friend of mine.

“There is something ghastly about it,” said another.

We stood round the Hotel du Rhin, shut up and abandoned. The house next
door had been wrecked, and it was scarred and wounded, but still stood
after that night of terror.

One day during its desolation I went to a banquet in Amiens, in the
cellars of the Hotel de Ville. It was to celebrate the Fourth of July, and
an invitation had been sent to me by the French commandant de place and
the English A. P. M.

It was a beau geste, gallant and romantic in those days of trouble, when
Amiens was still closely beleaguered, but safer now that Australians and
British troops were holding the lines strongly outside, with French on
their right southward from Boves and Hangest Wood. The French commandant
had procured a collection of flags and his men had decorated the battered
city with the Tricolor. It even fluttered above some of the ruins, as
though for the passing of a pageant. But only a few cars entered the city
and drew up to the Town Hall, and then took cover behind the walls.

Down below, in the cellars, the damp walls were garlanded with flowers
from the market-gardens of the Somme, now deserted by their gardeners, and
roses were heaped on the banqueting-table. General Monash, commanding the
Australian corps, was there, with the general of the French division on
his right. A young American officer sat very grave and silent, not,
perhaps, understanding much of the conversation about him, because most of
the guests were French officers, with Senators and Deputies of Amiens and
its Department. There was good wine to drink from the cold vaults of the
Hotel de Ville, and with the scent of rose and hope for victory in spite
of all disasters—the German offensive had been checked and the
Americans were now coming over in a tide—it was a cheerful
luncheon-party. The old general, black-visaged, bullet-headed, with a
bristly mustache like a French bull—terrier, sat utterly silent,
eating steadily and fiercely. But the French commandant de place, as
handsome as Athos, as gay as D’Artagnan, raised his glass to England and
France, to the gallant Allies, and to all fair women. He became
reminiscent of his days as a sous-lieutenant. He remembered a girl called
Marguerite—she was exquisite; and another called Yvonne—he had
adored her. O life! O youth!… He had been a careless young devil, with
laughter in his heart….


XVIII

I suppose it was three months later when I saw the first crowds coming
back to their homes in Amiens. The tide had turned and the enemy was in
hard retreat. Amiens was safe again! They had never had any doubt of this
homecoming after that day nearly three months before, when, in spite of
the enemy’s being so close, Foch said, in his calm way, “I guarantee
Amiens.” They believed what Marshal Foch said. He always knew. So now they
were coming back again with their little bundles and their babies and
small children holding their hands or skirts, according as they had
received permits from the French authorities. They were the lucky ones
whose houses still existed. They were conscious of their own good fortune
and came chattering very cheerfully from the station up the Street of the
Three Pebbles, on their way to their streets. But every now and then they
gave a cry of surprise and dismay at the damage done to other people’s
houses.

“O la la! Regardez ca! c’est affreux!”

There was the butcher’s shop, destroyed; and the house of poor little
Madeleine; and old Christopher’s workshop; and the milliner’s place, where
they used to buy their Sunday hats; and that frightful gap where the
Arcade had been. Truly, poor Amiens had suffered martyrdom; though, thank
God, the cathedral still stood in glory, hardly touched, with only one
little shellhole through the roof.

Terrible was the damage up the rue de Beauvais and the streets that went
out of it. To one rubbish heap which had been a corner house two girls
came back. Perhaps the French authorities had not had that one on their
list. The girls came tripping home, with light in their eyes, staring
about them, ejaculating pity for neighbors whose houses had been
destroyed. Then suddenly they stood outside their own house and saw that
the direct hit of a shell had knocked it to bits. The light went out of
their eyes. They stood there staring, with their mouths open… Some
Australian soldiers stood about and watched the girls, understanding the
drama.

“Bit of a mess, missy!” said one of them. “Not much left of the old home,
eh?”

The girls were amazingly brave. They did not weep. They climbed up a
hillock of bricks and pulled out bits of old, familiar things. They
recovered the whole of a child’s perambulator, with its wheels crushed.
With an air of triumph and shrill laughter they turned round to the
Australians.

“Pour les bebes!” they cried.

“While there’s life there’s hope,” said one of the Australians, with
sardonic humor.

So the martyrdom of Amiens was at an end, and life came back to the city
that had been dead, and the soul of the city had survived. I have not seen
it since then, but one day I hope I shall go back and shake hands with
Gaston the waiter and say, “Comment ca va, mon vieux?” (“How goes it, my
old one?”) and stroll into the bookshop and say, “Bon jour, mademoiselle!”
and walk round the cathedral and see its beauty in moonlight again when no
one will look up and say, “Curse the moon!”

There will be many ghosts in the city at night—the ghosts of British
officers and men who thronged those streets in the great war and have now
passed on.


PART SIX. PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME


I

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come.
Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the
big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than
generalship—by the fate which decides the doom of men.

The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by
Ypres, were defensive actions of rear—guards holding the enemy back
by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race
were being raised.

The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks
which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the
science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no
meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly
mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life’s children. They were only
diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench warfare by
which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School of Courage, so
that the new boys already coming out might learn their lessons without
more grievous interruption than came from the daily visits of that
Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two years it was France
which fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons against the enemy’s
ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach them. At Verdun, in the
months that followed the first month of ’16, it was France which sustained
the full weight of the German offensive on the western front and broke its
human waves, until they were spent in a sea of blood, above which the
French poilus, the “hairy ones,” stood panting and haggard, on their
death-strewn rocks. The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the
heart of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds,
but defiant still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses—six
hundred thousand casualties—already conscious, icily, of a dwindling
man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their
order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash
Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out by sledge-hammer blows,
left and right, west and east, from that ring of nations which girdled
them. On the west they would stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of
their strength, but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by
that enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the back of the narrow
brains of those bald-headed vultures on the German General Staff), they
most feared as their future peril—England. They had been fools to
let the British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the folly of the
madness by which they had flung the gauntlet down to the souls of proud
peoples arrayed against them.

Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six hundred
thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England, immense
reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks before the
summer foliage turned to russet tints.

Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the
year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean harness
and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get their targets.
We were strong in “heavies,” twelve-inchers, 9.2’s, eight-inchers, 4.2’s,
mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled sixty-pounders terrible in their
long range and destructiveness. Our aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon
squadron, and our aviators had been trained in the school of General
Trenchard, who sent them out over the German lines to learn how to fight,
and how to scout, and how to die like little gentlemen.

For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned “buses”—primitive
machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying Fokkers who waited for
them behind a screen of cloud and then “stooped” on them like hawks sure
of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer came later models, out of
date a few weeks after their delivery, replaced by still more powerful
types more perfectly equipped for fighting. Our knights-errant of the air
were challenging the German champions on equal terms, and beating them
back from the lines unless they flew in clusters. There were times when
our flying-men gained an absolute supremacy by greater daring—there
was nothing they did not dare—and by equal skill. As a caution, not
wasting their strength in unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and
enabled them to come back again in force and hold the field for a time by
powerful concentrations. But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a
heavy cost of life, kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes.

The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long trail
down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of aircraft
factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in this
direction a merry hell was being prepared.

There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast to
the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts and
tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing
stations near the front the wounded—the human wreckage of routine
warfare—were being evacuated “in a hurry” to the base, and from the
base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so that all the
wards might be empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous
numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying up. There was a
sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being made for a multitude
that was coming.

“We shall be very busy,” said the doctors.

“We must get all the rest we can now,” said the nurses.

“In a little while every bed will be filled,” said the matrons.

Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four wounded Germans,
Wurtemburgers and Bavarians, too ill to move just then. Each of them had
lost a leg under the surgeon’s knife. They were eating strawberries, and
seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them.

“Wie befinden sie sich?”

“Ganz wohl; wir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung.”

I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard where the “shell-shocks”
sat about, dumb, or making queer, foolish noises, or staring with a look
of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room came a sound of singing.
Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of laughter. It all seemed so
funny to him, that war, so mad!

“We are clearing them out,” said the medical officer. “There will be many
more soon.”

How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. It was the only secret,
and even that was known in London, where little ladies in society were
naming the date, “in confidence,” to men who were directly concerned with
it—having, as they knew, only a few more weeks, or days, of certain
life. But I believe there were not many officers who would have
surrendered deliberately all share in “The Great Push.” In spite of all
the horror which these young officers knew it would involve, they had to
be “in it” and could not endure the thought that all their friends and all
their men should be there while they were “out of it.” A decent excuse for
the safer side of it—yes. A staff job, the Intelligence branch, any
post behind the actual shambles—and thank God for the luck. But not
an absolute shirk.

Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, rows and rows of bell
tents and pavilions stained to a reddish brown. Small cities of them were
growing up on the right of the road between Amiens and Albert—at
Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous-Corbie. I thought they might be for
troops in reserve until I saw large flags hoisted to tall staffs and men
of the R.A.M.C. busy painting signs on large sheets stretched out on the
grass. It was always the same sign—the Sign of the Cross that was
Red.

There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains were
traveling on light railways day and night to railroads just beyond
shell-range. What was all the weight they carried? No need to ask. The
“dumps” were being filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells, covered
by tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. Enormous shells,
some of them, like gigantic pigs without legs. Those were for the
fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2’s. There was enough high-explosive force
littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map.

“It does one good to see,” said a cheery fellow. “The people at home have
been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been packing
those things. Well done, Munitions!”

I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of satisfaction that at
least when our men attacked they would have a power of artillery behind
them. It might help them to smash through to a finish, if that were the
only way to end this long-drawn suicide of nations.

My friend was shocked when I said:

“Curse all munitions!”


II

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the approach of that new
phase of war which they called “The Great Push,” as though it were to be a
glorified football-match. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know the
thoughts of vast masses of men moved by some sensational adventure. But a
man would be a liar if he pretended that British troops went forward to
the great attack with hangdog looks or any visible sign of fear in their
souls. I think most of them were uplifted by the belief that the old days
of trench warfare were over forever and that they would break the enemy’s
lines by means of that enormous gun-power behind them, and get him “on the
run.” There would be movement, excitement, triumphant victories—and
then the end of the war. In spite of all risks it would be enormously
better than the routine of the trenches. They would be getting on with the
job instead of standing still and being shot at by invisible earth-men.

“If we once get the Germans in the open we shall go straight through
them.”

That was the opinion of many young officers at that time, and for once
they agreed with their generals.

It seemed to be a question of getting them in the open, and I confess that
when I studied the trench maps and saw the enemy’s defensive earthworks
thirty miles deep in one vast maze of trenches and redoubts and barbed
wire and tunnels I was appalled at the task which lay before our men. They
did not know what they were being asked to do.

They had not seen, then, those awful maps.

We were at the height and glory of our strength. Out of England had come
the flower of our youth, and out of Scotland and Wales and Canada and
Australia and New Zealand. Even out of Ireland, with the 16th Division of
the south and west, and the 36th of Ulster. The New Armies were made up of
all the volunteers who had answered the call to the colors, not waiting
for the conscription by class, which followed later. They were the ardent
ones, the young men from office, factory, shop, and field, university and
public school. The best of our intelligence were there, the noblest of our
manhood, the strength of our heart, the beauty of our soul, in those
battalions which soon were to be flung into explosive fires.


III

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads behind
the front.

I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there was
a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-day and
the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and old ladies
in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their black frocks,
and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people scattered, and there was
a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line of transport wagons came
through the square.

“By Jove!… Australians!”

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told one at a glance, but
without them I should have known. They had a distinctive type of their
own, which marked them out from all other soldiers of ours along those
roads of war.

They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding through the little old
market town; British unmistakably, yet not English, not Irish, nor
Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the hardness of a boyhood
and a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the softer
training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially for the girls
round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and they rode their
horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though born to riding, and
drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that was
justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman’s table of
colored ribbons.

Those clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered men, who had come out of the
hell of the Dardanelles and the burning drought of Egyptian sands, looked
wonderfully fresh in France. Youth, keen as steel, with a flash in the
eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the
street.

They were glad to be there. Everything was new and good to them (though so
old and stale to many of us), and after their adventures in the East they
found it splendid to be in a civilized country, with water in the sky and
in the fields, with green trees about them, and flowers in the grass, and
white people who were friendly.

When they came up in the train from Marseilles they were all at the
windows, drinking in the look of the French landscape, and one of their
officers told me that again and again he heard the same words spoken by
those lads of his.

“It’s a good country to fight for… It’s like being home again.”

At first they felt chilly in France, for the weather had been bad for them
during the first weeks in April, when the wind had blown cold and
rain-clouds had broken into sharp squalls.

Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard their teeth
chatter, but they said they liked a moist climate with a bite in the wind,
after all the blaze and glare of the Egyptian sun.

One of their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying
sweets! “They can’t have too much of them,” said one of the officers, and
the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities had
been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an amusing
touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they were, those
Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a wonderful simplicity
of youth and the gift of laughter.

I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried on the gas-masks
which none of us ever left behind when we went near the fighting-line.
That horror of war on the western front was new to them.

Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the Turks, and the gas-masks
seemed a joke to the groups of Australians trying on the headgear in the
fields, and changing themselves into obscene specters … But one man
watching them gave a shudder and said, “It’s a pity such splendid boys
should have to risk this foul way of death.” They did not hear his words,
and we heard their laughter again.

On that first day of their arrival I stood in a courtyard with a young
officer whose gray eyes had a fine, clear light, which showed the spirit
of the man, and as we talked he pointed out some of the boys who passed in
and out of an old barn. One of them had done fine work on the Peninsula,
contemptuous of all risks. Another had gone out under heavy fire to bring
in a wounded friend… “Oh, they are great lads!” said the captain of the
company. “But now they want to get at the Germans and finish the job
quickly. Give them a fair chance and they’ll go far.”

They went far, from that time to the end, and fought with a simple,
terrible courage.

They had none of the discipline imposed upon our men by Regular
traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with none but the gipsy law in their
hearts, intolerant of restraint, with no respect for rank or caste unless
it carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind the lines,
quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, primitive men, but lovable, human, generous
souls when their bayonets were not red with blood. Their discipline in
battle was the best. They wanted to get to a place ahead. They would fight
the devils of hell to get there.

The New-Zealanders followed them, with rosy cheeks like English boys of
Kent, and more gentle manners than the other “Anzacs,” and the same
courage. They went far, too, and set the pace awhile in the last lap. But
that, in the summer of ’16, was far away.

In those last days of June, before the big battles began, the countryside
of the Somme valley was filled with splendor. The mustard seed had spread
a yellow carpet in many meadows so that they were Fields of the Cloth of
Gold, and clumps of red clover grew like flowers of blood. The hedges
about the villages of Picardy were white with elderflower and drenched
with scent. It was haymaking time and French women and children were
tossing the hay on wooden pitchforks during hot days which came between
heavy rains. Our men were marching through that beauty, and were conscious
of it, I think, and glad of life.


IV

Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed between England and
the long, straight road which led to No Man’s Land. The seven-day-leave
men were coming back by every tide, and all other leave was canceled.

New “drafts” were pouring through the port by tens of thousands—all
manner of men of all our breed marching in long columns from the quayside,
where they had orders yelled at them through megaphones by A.P.M.’s,
R.T.O.’s, A.M.L.O.’s, and other blue tabbed officers who dealt with them
as cattle for the slaughterhouses. I watched them landing from the
transports which came in so densely crowded with the human freight that
the men were wedged together on the decks like herrings in barrels. They
crossed from one boat to another to reach the gangways, and one by one,
interminably as it seemed, with rifle gripped and pack hunched, and steel
hat clattering like a tinker’s kettle, came down the inclined plank and
lurched ashore. They were English lads from every country; Scots, Irish,
Welsh, of every regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders, South Africans,
Canadians, West Indian negroes of the Garrison Artillery; Sikhs, Pathans,
and Dogras of the Indian Cavalry. Some of them had been sick and there was
a greenish pallor on their faces. Most of them were deeply tanned. Many of
them stepped on the quayside of France for the first time after months of
training, and I could tell those, sometimes, by the furtive look they gave
at the crowded scene about them, and by a sudden glint in their eyes, a
faint reflection of the emotion that was in them, because this was another
stage on their adventure of war, and the drawbridge was down at last
between them and the enemy. That was all, just that look, and lips
tightened now grimly, and the pack hunched higher. Then they fell in by
number and marched away, with Redcaps to guard them, across the bridge,
into the town of Boulogne and beyond to the great camp near Etaples (and
near the hospital, so that German aircraft had a good argument for
smashing Red Cross huts), where some of them would wait until somebody
said, “You’re wanted.” They were wanted in droves as soon as the fighting
began on the first day of July.

The bun shops in Boulogne were filled with nurses, V.A.D.’s, all kinds of
girls in uniforms which glinted with shoulder-straps and buttons. They ate
large quantities of buns at odd hours of mornings and afternoons.
Flying-men and officers of all kinds waiting for trains crowded the
Folkestone Hotel and restaurants, where they spent two hours over luncheon
and three hours over dinner, drinking red wine, talking “shop”—the
shop of trench-mortar units, machine-gun sections, cavalry squadrons,
air-fighting, gas schools, and anti-gas schools. Regular inhabitants of
Boulogne, officers at the base, passed to inner rooms with French ladies
of dangerous appearance, and the transients envied them and said: “Those
fellows have all the luck! What’s their secret? How do they arrange these
cushie jobs?” From open windows came the music of gramophones. Through
half-drawn curtains there were glimpses of khaki tunics and Sam Brown
belts in juxtaposition with silk blouses and coiled hair and white arms.
Opposite the Folkestone there was a park of ambulances driven by “Scottish
women,” who were always on the move from one part of the town to the
other. Motor-cars came hooting with staff-officers, all aglow in red tabs
and armbands, thirsty for little cocktails after a dusty drive. Everywhere
in the streets and on the esplanade there was incessant saluting. The arms
of men were never still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and
Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive
energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a
multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a
monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of
men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification
of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out
against it, and went by all officers except their own with a careless
slouch and a look of “To hell with all that handwagging.”

Seated on high stools in the Folkestone, our young officers clinked their
cocktails, and then whispered together.

“When’s it coming?”

“In a few days… I’m for the Gommecourt sector.”

“Do you think we shall get through?”

“Not a doubt of it. The cavalry are massing for a great drive. As soon as
we make the gap they’ll ride into the blue.”

“By God!… There’ll be some slaughter”

“I think the old Boche will crack this time.”

“Well, cheerio!”

There was a sense of enormous drama at hand, and the excitement of it in
boys’ hearts drugged all doubt and fears. It was only the older men, and
the introspective, who suffered from the torture of apprehension. Even
timid fellows in the ranks were, I imagine, strengthened and exalted by
the communal courage of their company or battalion, for courage as well as
fear is infectious, and the psychology of the crowd uplifts the individual
to immense heights of daring when alone he would be terror—stricken.
The public-school spirit of pride in name and tradition was in each
battalion of the New Army, extended later to the division, which became
the unit of esprit de corps. They must not “let the battalion down.” They
would do their damnedest to get farther than any other crowd, to bag more
prisoners, to gain more “kudos.” There was rivalry even among the platoons
and the companies. “A” Company would show “B” Company the way to go! Their
sergeant-major was a great fellow! Their platoon commanders were fine
kids! With anything like a chance—

In that spirit, as far as I, an outsider could see and hear, did our
battalions of boys march forward to “The Great Push,” whistling, singing,
jesting, until their lips were dry and their throats parched in the dust,
and even the merriest jesters of all were silent under the weight of their
packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day, through the beauty of that
June in France, thousands of men, hundreds of thousands to the edge of the
battlefields of the Somme, where the enemy was intrenched in fortress
positions and where already, before the last days of June, gunfire was
flaming over a vast sweep of country.


V

On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only lulled
down at times during two and a half years more, when our British armies
fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning;
when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month after month,
recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when those boys were mown
down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits by shell-fire, gassed in
thousands, until all that country became a graveyard; when they went
forward to new assaults or fell back in rearguard actions with a certain
knowledge that they had in their first attack no more than one chance in
five of escape, next time one chance in four, then one chance in three,
one chance in two, and after that no chance at all, on the line of
averages, as worked out by their experience of luck. More boys came out to
take their places, and more, and more, conscripts following volunteers,
younger brothers following elder brothers. Never did they revolt from the
orders that came to them. Never a battalion broke into mutiny against
inevitable martyrdom. They were obedient to the command above them. Their
discipline did not break. However profound was the despair of the
individual, and it was, I know, deep as the wells of human tragedy in many
hearts, the mass moved as it was directed, backward or forward, this way
and that, from one shambles to another, in mud and in blood, with the same
massed valor as that which uplifted them before that first day of July
with an intensified pride in the fame of their divisions, with a more
eager desire for public knowledge of their deeds, with a loathing of war’s
misery, with a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their
souls to acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each
battle there were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a
kind of ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number
of these feats the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass
followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were many,
as in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as the
center of the fury before their knees gave way or they dropped dead.

Each wave of boyhood that came out from England brought a new mass of
physical and spiritual valor as great as that which was spent, and in the
end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers and
swept through in a rush to victory, which we gained at the cost of nearly
a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and all our wealth, and a
spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that now England is for
a time sick to death and drained of her old pride and power.


VI

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years
ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme. With
a group of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert, looking over
to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, on the left side of the
German salient, and then, by crossing the road, to Fricourt, Mametz, and
Montauban on the southern side. From Albert westward past Thiepval Wood
ran the little river of the Ancre, and on the German side the ground rose
steeply to Usna Hill by La Boisselle, and to Thiepval Chateau above the
wood. It was a formidable defensive position, one fortress girdled by line
after line of trenches, and earthwork redoubts, and deep tunnels, and
dugouts in which the German troops could live below ground until the
moment of attack. The length of our front of assault was about twenty
miles round the side of the salient to the village of Bray, on the Somme,
where the French joined us and continued the battle.

From where we stood we could see a wide panorama of the German positions,
and beyond, now and then, when the smoke of shellfire drifted, I caught
glimpses of green fields and flower patches beyond the trench lines, and
church spires beyond the range of guns rising above clumps of trees in
summer foliage. Immediately below, in the foreground, was the village of
Albert, not much ruined then, with its red-brick church and tower from
which there hung, head downward, the Golden Virgin with her Babe
outstretched as though as a peace-offering over all this strife. That
leaning statue, which I had often passed on the way to the trenches, was
now revealed brightly with a golden glamour, as sheets of flame burst
through a heavy veil of smoke over the valley. In a field close by some
troops were being ticketed with yellow labels fastened to their backs. It
was to distinguish them so that artillery observers might know them from
the enemy when their turn came to go into the battleground. Something in
the sight of those yellow tickets made me feel sick. Away behind, a French
farmer was cutting his grass with a long scythe, in steady, sweeping
strokes. Only now and then did he stand to look over at the most frightful
picture of battle ever seen until then by human eyes. I wondered, and
wonder still, what thoughts were passing through that old brain to keep
him at his work, quietly, steadily, on the edge of hell. For there, quite
close and clear, was hell, of man’s making, produced by chemists and
scientists, after centuries in search of knowledge. There were the fires
of hate, produced out of the passion of humanity after a thousand years of
Christendom and of progress in the arts of beauty. There was the
devil-worship of our poor, damned human race, where the most civilized
nations of the world were on each side of the bonfires. It was worth
watching by a human ant.

I remember the noise of our guns as all our batteries took their parts in
a vast orchestra of drumfire. The tumult of the fieldguns merged into
thunderous waves. Behind me a fifteen-inch “Grandmother” fired single
strokes, and each one was an enormous shock. Shells were rushing through
the air like droves of giant birds with beating wings and with strange
wailings. The German lines were in eruption. Their earthworks were being
tossed up, and fountains of earth sprang up between columns of smoke,
black columns and white, which stood rigid for a few seconds and then sank
into the banks of fog. Flames gushed up red and angry, rending those banks
of mist with strokes of lightning. In their light I saw trees falling,
branches tossed like twigs, black things hurtling through space. In the
night before the battle, when that bombardment had lasted several days and
nights, the fury was intensified. Red flames darted hither and thither
like little red devils as our trench mortars got to work. Above the
slogging of the guns there were louder, earth-shaking noises, and
volcanoes of earth and fire spouted as high as the clouds. One convulsion
of this kind happened above Usna Hill, with a long, terrifying roar and a
monstrous gush of flame.

“What is that?” asked some one.

“It must be the mine we charged at La Boisselle. The biggest that has ever
been.”

It was a good guess. When, later in the battle, I stood by the crater of
that mine and looked into its gulf I wondered how many Germans had been
hurled into eternity when the earth had opened. The grave was big enough
for a battalion of men with horses and wagons, below the chalk of the
crater’s lips. Often on the way to Bapaume I stepped off the road to look
into that white gulf, remembering the moment when I saw the gust of flame
that rent the earth about it.


VII

There was the illusion of victory on that first day of the Somme battles,
on the right of the line by Fricourt, and it was not until a day or two
later that certain awful rumors I had heard from wounded men and officers
who had attacked on the left up by Gommecourt, Thiepval, and Serre were
confirmed by certain knowledge of tragic disaster on that side of the
battle-line.

The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me
when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villages of Mametz and
Montauban and our barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first lines
of German trenches, and our support troops moving forward in masses to
captured ground. We had broken through! By the heroic assault of our
English and Scottish troops. West Yorks, Yorks and Lancs, Lincolns,
Durhams, Northumberland Fusiliers, Norfolks and Berkshires, Liverpools,
Manchesters, Gordons, and Royal Scots, all those splendid men I had seen
marching to their lines. We had smashed through the ramparts of the German
fortress, through that maze of earthworks and tunnels which had appalled
me when I saw them on the maps, and over which I had gazed from time to
time from our front-line trenches when those places seemed impregnable. I
saw crowds of prisoners coming back under escort, fifteen hundred had been
counted in the first day, and they had the look of a defeated army. Our
lightly wounded men, thousands of them, were shouting and laughing as they
came down behind the lines, wearing German caps and helmets. From Amiens
civilians straggled out along the roads as far as they were allowed by
military police, and waved hands and cheered those boys of ours. “Vive
l’Angleterre!” cried old men, raising their hats. Old women wept at the
sight of those gay wounded, the lightly touched, glad of escape, rejoicing
in their luck and in the glory of life which was theirs still and cried
out to them with shrill words of praise and exultation.

“Nous les aurons les sales Boches! Ah, ils sont foutus, ces bandits! C’est
la victoire, grace a vous, petits soldats anglais!”

Victory! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting men, and of women
excited by the sight of those bandaged heads, those bare, brawny arms
splashed with blood, those laughing heroes.

It looked like victory, in those days, as war correspondents, we were not
so expert in balancing the profit and loss as afterward we became. When I
went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last Germans, who
had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the Yorkshires and
Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had been so humiliated
at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when the Manchesters and
Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban and repulsed fierce
counter-attacks.

It looked like victory, because of the German dead that lay there in their
battered trenches and the filth and stench of death over all that mangled
ground, and the enormous destruction wrought by our guns, and the fury of
fire which we were still pouring over the enemy’s lines from batteries
which had moved forward.

I went down flights of steps into German dugouts, astonished by their
depth and strength. Our men did not build like this. This German industry
was a rebuke to us, yet we had captured their work and the dead bodies of
their laborers lay in those dark caverns, killed by our bombers, who had
flung down handgrenades. I drew back from those fat corpses. They looked
monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul litter of clothes,
stickbombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead lay in ditches which
had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that bombardment I had seen.
They had been bayoneted. I remember one man, an elderly fellow sitting up
with his back to a bit of earth with his hands half raised. He was smiling
a little, though he had been stabbed through the belly and was stone dead.
Victory! some of the German dead were young boys, too young to be killed
for old men’s crimes, and others might have been old or young. One could
not tell, because they had no faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in
rags and uniforms. Legs and arms lay separate, without any bodies
thereabouts.

Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. Young Gordons and
Manchesters of the 30th Division, they had been caught by blasts of
machinegun fire, but our dead seemed scarce in the places where I walked.

Victory? Well, we had gained some ground, and many prisoners, and here and
there some guns. But as I stood by Montauban I saw that our line was a
sharp salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping sharply
southward to Fricourt. O God! had we only made another salient after all
that monstrous effort? To the left there was fury at La Boisselle, where a
few broken trees stood black on the skyline on a chalky ridge. Storms of
German shrapnel were bursting there, and machineguns were firing in
spasms. In Contalmaison, round a chateau which stood high above ruined
houses, shells were bursting with thunderclaps, our shells. German gunners
in invisible batteries were sweeping our lines with barrage fire, it
roamed up and down this side of Montauban Wood, just ahead of me, and now
and then shells smashed among the houses and barns of Fricourt, and over
Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of “hate.” Our men were working like
ants in those muck heaps, a battalion moved up toward Boisselle. From a
ridge above Fricourt, where once I had seen a tall crucifix between two
trees, which our men called the “Poodles,” a body of men came down and
shrapnel burst among them and they fell and disappeared in tall grass.
Stretcher bearers came slowly through Fricourt village with living
burdens. Some of them were German soldiers carrying our wounded and their
own. Walking wounded hobbled slowly with their arms round each other’s
shoulders, Germans and English together. A boy in a steel hat stopped me
and held up a bloody hand. “A bit of luck!” he said. “I’m off, after
eighteen months of it.”

German prisoners came down with a few English soldiers as their escort. I
saw distant groups of them, and a shell smashed into one group and
scattered it. The living ran, leaving their dead. Ambulances driven by
daring fellows drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a healthy place, and
loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a tunnel there.

It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and shambles. But was
it Victory? I knew then that it was only a breach in the German bastion,
and that on the left, Gommecourt way, there had been black tragedy.


VIII

On the left, where the 8th and 10th Corps were directing operations, the
assault had been delivered by the 4th, 29th, 36th, 49th, 32nd, 8th, and
56th Divisions.

The positions in front of them were Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel on the
left side of the River Ancre, and Thiepval Wood on the right side of the
Ancre leading up to Thiepval Chateau on the crest of the cliff. These were
the hardest positions to attack, because of the rising ground and the
immense strength of the enemy’s earthworks and tunneled defenses. But our
generals were confident that the gun power at their disposal was
sufficient to smash down that defensive system and make an easy way
through for the infantry. They were wrong. In spite of that tornado of
shell-fire which I had seen tearing up the earth, many tunnels were still
unbroken, and out of them came masses of German machine-gunners and
riflemen, when our infantry rose from their own trenches on that morning
of July 1st.

Our guns had shifted their barrage forward at that moment, farther ahead
of the infantry than was afterward allowed, the men being trained to
follow close to the lines of bursting shells, trained to expect a number
of casualties from their own guns—it needs some training—in
order to secure the general safety gained by keeping the enemy below
ground until our bayonets were round his dugouts.

The Germans had been trained, too, to an act of amazing courage. Their
discipline, that immense power of discipline which dominates men in the
mass, was strong enough to make them obey the order to rush through that
barrage of ours, that advancing wall of explosion and, if they lived
through it, to face our men in the open with massed machine-gun fire. So
they did; and as English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh battalions of our
assaulting divisions trudged forward over what had been No Man’s Land,
machine-gun bullets sprayed upon them, and they fell like grass to the
scythe. Line after line of men followed them, and each line crumpled, and
only small groups and single figures, seeking comradeship, hurried
forward. German machine-gunners were bayoneted as their thumbs were still
pressed to their triggers. In German front-line trenches at the bottom of
Thiepval Wood, outside Beaumont Hamel and on the edge of Gommecourt Park,
the field-gray men who came out of their dugouts fought fiercely with
stick-bombs and rifles, and our officers and men, in places where they had
strength enough, clubbed them to death, stuck them with bayonets, and blew
their brains out with revolvers at short range. Then those English and
Irish and Scottish troops, grievously weak because of all the dead and
wounded behind them, struggled through to the second German line, from
which there came a still fiercer rattle of machine-gun and rifle-fire.
Some of them broke through that line, too, and went ahead in isolated
parties across the wild crater land, over chasms and ditches and fallen
trees, toward the highest ground, which had been their goal. Nothing was
seen of them. They disappeared into clouds of smoke and flame. Gunner
observers saw rockets go up in far places—our rockets—showing
that outposts had penetrated into the German lines. Runners came back—survivors
of many predecessors who had fallen on the way—with scribbled
messages from company officers. One came from the Essex and King’s Own of
the 4th Division, at a place called Pendant Copse, southeast of Serre.
“For God’s sake send us bombs.” It was impossible to send them bombs. No
men could get to them through the deep barrage of shell-fire which was
between them and our supporting troops. Many tried and died.

The Ulster men went forward toward Beaumont Hamel with a grim valor which
was reckless of their losses. Beaumont Hamel was a German fortress.
Machine-gun fire raked every yard of the Ulster way. Hundreds of the Irish
fell. I met hundreds of them wounded—tall, strong, powerful men,
from Queen’s Island and Belfast factories, and Tyneside Irish and Tyneside
Scots.

“They gave us no chance,” said one of them—a sergeant-major. “They
just murdered us.”

But bunches of them went right into the heart of the German positions, and
then found behind them crowds of Germans who had come up out of their
tunnels and flung bombs at them. Only a few came back alive in the
darkness.

Into Thiepval Wood men of ours smashed their way through the German
trenches, not counting those who fell, and killing any German who stood in
their way. Inside that wood of dead trees and charred branches they
reformed, astonished at the fewness of their numbers. Germans coming up
from holes in the earth attacked them, and they held firm and took two
hundred prisoners. Other Germans came closing in like wolves, in packs,
and to a German officer who said, “Surrender!” our men shouted, “No
surrender!” and fought in Thiepval Wood until most were dead and only a
few wounded crawled out to tell that tale.

The Londoners of the 56th Division had no luck at all. Theirs was the
worst luck because, by a desperate courage in assault, they did break
through the German lines at Gommecourt. Their left was held by the London
Rifle Brigade. The Rangers and the Queen Victoria Rifles—the old
“Vics “—formed their center. Their right was made up by the London
Scottish, and behind came the Queen’s Westminsters and the Kensingtons,
who were to advance through their comrades to a farther objective. Across
a wide No Man’s Land they suffered from the bursting of heavy crumps, and
many fell. But they escaped annihilation by machine-gun fire and stormed
through the upheaved earth into Gommecourt Park, killing many Germans and
sending back batches of prisoners. They had done what they had been asked
to do, and started building up barricades of earth and sand-bags, and then
found they were in a death-trap. There were no troops on their right or
left. They had thrust out into a salient, which presently the enemy saw.
The German gunners, with deadly skill, boxed it round with shell-fire, so
that the Londoners were inclosed by explosive walls, and then very slowly
and carefully drew a line of bursting shells up and down, up and down that
captured ground, ravaging its earth anew and smashing the life that
crouched there—London life.

I have written elsewhere (in The Battles of the Somme) how young officers
and small bodies of these London men held the barricades against German
attacks while others tried to break a way back through that murderous
shell-fire, and how groups of lads who set out on that adventure to their
old lines were shattered so that only a few from each group crawled back
alive, wounded or unwounded.

At the end of the day the Germans acted with chivalry, which I was not
allowed to tell at the time. The general of the London Division (Philip
Howell) told me that the enemy sent over a message by a low-flying
airplane, proposing a truce while the stretcher-bearers worked, and
offering the service of their own men in that work of mercy. This offer
was accepted without reference to G.H.Q., and German stretcher-bearers
helped to carry our wounded to a point where they could be reached.

Many, in spite of that, remained lying out in No Man’s Land, some for
three or four days and nights. I met one man who lay out there wounded,
with a group of comrades more badly hurt than he was, until July 6th. At
night he crawled over to the bodies of the dead and took their
water-bottles and “iron” rations, and so brought drink and food to his
stricken friends. Then at last he made his way through roving shells to
our lines and even then asked to lead the stretcher-bearers who
volunteered on a search-party for his “pals.”

“Physical courage was very common in the war,” said a friend of mine who
saw nothing of war. “It is proved that physical courage is the commonest
quality of mankind, as moral courage is the rarest.” But that soldier’s
courage was spiritual, and there were many like him in the battles of the
Somme and in other later battles as tragic as those.


IX

I have told how, before “The Big Push,” as we called the beginning of
these battles, little towns of tents were built under the sign of the Red
Cross. For a time they were inhabited only by medical officers, nurses,
and orderlies, busily getting ready for a sudden invasion, and spending
their surplus energy, which seemed inexhaustible, on the decoration of
their camps by chalk-lined paths, red crosses painted on canvas or built
up in red and white chalk on leveled earth, and flowers planted outside
the tents—all very pretty and picturesque in the sunshine and the
breezes over the valley of the Somme.

On the morning of battle the doctors, nurses, and orderlies waited for
their patients and said, “Now we shan’t be long!” They were merry and
bright with that wonderful cheerfulness which enabled them to face the
tragedy of mangled manhood without horror, and almost, it seemed, without
pity, because it was their work, and they were there to heal what might be
healed. It was with a rush that their first cases came, and the M.O.’s
whistled and said, “Ye gods! how many more?” Many more. The tide did not
slacken. It became a spate brought down by waves of ambulances. Three
thousand wounded came to Daours on the Somme, three thousand to Corbie,
thousands to Dernancourt, Heilly, Puchevillers, Toutencourt, and many
other “clearing stations.”

At Daours the tents were filled to overflowing, until there was no more
room. The wounded were laid down on the grass to wait their turn for the
surgeon’s knife. Some of them crawled over to haycocks and covered
themselves with hay and went to sleep, as I saw them sleeping there, like
dead men. Here and there shell-shocked boys sat weeping or moaning, and
shaking with an ague. Most of the wounded were quiet and did not give any
groan or moan. The lightly wounded sat in groups, telling their
adventures, cursing the German machine-gunners. Young officers spoke in a
different way, and with that sporting spirit which they had learned in
public schools praised their enemy.

“The machine-gunners are wonderful fellows—topping. Fight until
they’re killed. They gave us hell.”

Each man among those thousands of wounded had escaped death a dozen times
or more by the merest flukes of luck. It was this luck of theirs which
they hugged with a kind of laughing excitement.

“It’s a marvel I’m here! That shell burst all round me. Killed six of my
pals. I’ve got through with a blighty wound. No bones broken… God! What
luck!”

The death of other men did not grieve them. They could not waste this
sense of luck in pity. The escape of their own individuality, this
possession of life, was a glorious thought. They were alive! What luck!
What luck!

We called the hospital at Corbie the “Butcher’s Shop.” It was in a pretty
spot in that little town with a big church whose tall white towers looked
down a broad sweep of the Somme, so that for miles they were a landmark
behind the battlefields. Behind the lines during those first battles, but
later, in 1918, when the enemy came nearly to the gates of Amiens, a
stronghold of the Australians, who garrisoned it and sniped pigeons for
their pots off the top of the towers, and took no great notice of
“whizz-bangs” which broke through the roofs of cottages and barns. It was
a safe, snug place in July of ’16, but that Butcher’s Shop at a corner of
the square was not a pretty spot. After a visit there I had to wipe cold
sweat from my forehead, and found myself trembling in a queer way. It was
the medical officer—a colonel—who called it that name. “This
is our Butcher’s Shop,” he said, cheerily. “Come and have a look at my
cases. They’re the worst possible; stomach wounds, compound fractures, and
all that. We lop off limbs here all day long, and all night. You’ve no
idea!”

I had no idea, but I did not wish to see its reality. The M.O. could not
understand my reluctance to see his show. He put it down to my desire to
save his time—and explained that he was going the rounds and would
take it as a favor if I would walk with him. I yielded weakly, and cursed
myself for not taking to flight. Yet, I argued, what men are brave enough
to suffer I ought to have the courage to see… I saw and sickened.

These were the victims of “Victory” and the red fruit of war’s
harvest-fields. A new batch of “cases” had just arrived. More were being
brought in on stretchers. They were laid down in rows on the floor-boards.
The colonel bent down to some of them and drew their blankets back, and
now and then felt a man’s pulse. Most of them were unconscious, breathing
with the hard snuffle of dying men. Their skin was already darkening to
the death-tint, which is not white. They were all plastered with a gray
clay and this mud on their faces was, in some cases, mixed with thick
clots of blood, making a hard incrustation from scalp to chin.

“That fellow won’t last long,” said the M. O., rising from a stretcher.
“Hardly a heart-beat left in him. Sure to die on the operating-table if he
gets as far as that… Step back against the wall a minute, will you?”

We flattened ourselves against the passage wall while ambulance-men
brought in a line of stretchers. No sound came from most of those bundles
under the blankets, but from one came a long, agonizing wail, the cry of
an animal in torture.

“Come through the wards,” said the colonel. “They’re pretty bright, though
we could do with more space and light.”

In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, and in each bed lay
a young British soldier, or part of a young British soldier. There was not
much left of one of them. Both his legs had been amputated to the thigh,
and both his arms to the shoulder-blades.

“Remarkable man, that,” said the colonel. “Simply refuses to die. His
vitality is so tremendous that it is putting up a terrific fight against
mortality… There’s another case of the same kind; one leg gone and the
other going, and one arm. Deliberate refusal to give in. ‘You’re not going
to kill me, doctor,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stick it through.’ What
spirit, eh?”

I spoke to that man. He was quite conscious, with bright eyes. His right
leg was uncovered, and supported on a board hung from the ceiling. Its
flesh was like that of a chicken badly carved-white, flabby, and in
tatters. He thought I was a surgeon, and spoke to me pleadingly:

“I guess you can save that leg, sir. It’s doing fine. I should hate to
lose it.”

I murmured something about a chance for it, and the M. O. broke in
cheerfully.

“You won’t lose it if I can help it. How’s your pulse? Oh, not bad. Keep
cheerful and we’ll pull you through.” The man smiled gallantly.

“Bound to come off,” said the doctor as we passed to another bed. “Gas
gangrene. That’s the thing that does us down.”

In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, who had been lopped of
limbs a few hours ago or a few minutes, some of them unconscious, some of
them strangely and terribly conscious, with a look in their eyes as though
staring at the death which sat near to them, and edged nearer.

“Yes,” said the M. O., “they look bad, some of ’em, but youth is on their
side. I dare say seventy-five per cent. will get through. If it wasn’t for
gas gangrene—”

He jerked his head to a boy sitting up in bed, smiling at the nurse who
felt his pulse.

“Looks fairly fit after the knife, doesn’t he? But we shall have to cut
higher up. The gas again. I’m afraid he’ll be dead before to-morrow. Come
into the operating-theater. It’s very well equipped.”

I refused that invitation. I walked stiffly out of the Butcher’s Shop of
Corbie past the man who had lost both arms and both legs, that vital
trunk, past rows of men lying under blankets, past a stench of mud and
blood and anesthetics, to the fresh air of the gateway, where a column of
ambulances had just arrived with a new harvest from the fields of the
Somme.

“Come in again, any time!” shouted out the cheery colonel, waving his
hand.

I never went again, though I saw many other Butcher’s Shops in the years
that followed, where there was a great carving of human flesh which was of
our boyhood, while the old men directed their sacrifice, and the
profiteers grew rich, and the fires of hate were stoked up at patriotic
banquets and in editorial chairs.


X

The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial success on the
right caused a sudden pause in the operations, camouflaged by small
attacks on minor positions around and above Fricourt and Mametz. The
Lincolns and others went over to Fricourt Wood and routed out German
machine-gunners. The West Yorks attacked the sunken road at Fricourt. The
Dorsets, Manchesters, Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire Fusiliers, and
Borderers of the 32d Division were in possession of La Boisselle and
clearing out communication trenches to which the Germans were hanging on
with desperate valor. The 21st Division—Northumberland Fusiliers,
Durhams, Yorkshires-were making a flanking attack on Contalmaison, but
weakened after their heavy losses on the first day of battle. The fighting
for a time was local, in small copses—Lozenge Wood, Peak Wood,
Caterpillar Wood, Acid Drop Copse—where English and German troops
fought ferociously for yards of ground, hummocks of earth, ditches.

G. H. Q. had been shocked by the disaster on the left and the failure of
all the big hopes they had held for a break-through on both sides of the
German positions. Rumors came to us that the Commander-in-Chief had
decided to restrict future operations to minor actions for strengthening
the line and to abandon the great offensive. It was believed by officers I
met that Sir Henry Rawlinson was arguing, persuading, in favor of
continued assaults on the grand scale.

Whatever division of opinion existed in the High Command I do not know; it
was visible to all of us that for some days there were uncertainty of
direction, hesitation, conflicting orders. On July 7th the 17th Division,
under General Pilcher, attacked Contalmaison, and a whole battalion of the
Prussian Guard hurried up from Valenciennes and, thrown on to the
battlefield without maps or guidance, walked into the barrage which
covered the advance of our men and were almost annihilated. But although
some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison, in an attack which I was able
to see, they were smashed out of it again by storms of fire followed by
masses of men who poured out from Mametz Wood. The Welsh were attacking
Mametz Wood.

They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a Napoleonic battle, “like
turnips.” Battalion commanders received orders in direct conflict with one
another. Bodies of Welshmen were advanced, and then retired, and left to
lie nakedly without cover, under dreadful fire. The 17th Division, under
General Pilcher, did not attack at the expected time. There was no
co-ordination of divisions; no knowledge among battalion officers of the
strategy or tactics of a battle in which their men were involved.

“Goodness knows what’s happening,” said an officer I met near Mametz. He
had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who had
expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under harassing fire.

On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so
clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old chateau set in a
little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct hit of
a fifteen-inch shell. At four o’clock in the afternoon our guns
concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men
advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the
garrison of the 122d Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies of
hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time
German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and left nothing
but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking
with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled in
that place.

Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had
been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has
removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick. The
Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches and their
dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was ordered to drive
them out—a division of English county troops, including the Sussex,
Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex—and those country boys of ours fought
their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels, crouched
below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets and broken
rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and any weapon that
would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by
the capture of small batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days
of this one hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of
their garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and
came out with their hands up. Ovillers was a shambles, in a fight of
primitive earth-men like human beasts. Yet our men were not beast-like.
They came out from those places—if they had the luck to come out—apparently
unchanged, without any mark of the beast on them, and when they cleansed
themselves of mud and filth, boiled the lice out of their shirts, and
assembled in a village street behind the lines, they whistled, laughed,
gossiped, as though nothing had happened to their souls—though
something had really happened, as now we know.

It was not until July 14th that our High Command ordered another general
attack after the local fighting which had been in progress since the first
day of battle. Our field-batteries, and some of our “heavies,” had moved
forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison—where German
shells came searching for them all day long—and new divisions had
been brought up to relieve some of the men who had been fighting so hard
and so long. It was to be an attack on the second German line of defense
on the ridges by the village of Bazentin le Grand and Bazentin le Petit to
Longueval on the right and Delville Wood. I went up in the night to see
the bombardment and the beginning of the battle and the swirl of its
backwash, and I remember now the darkness of villages behind the lines
through which our cars crawled, until we reached the edge of the
battlefields and saw the sky rent by incessant flames of gun-fire, while
red tongues of flames leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was on
fire, and the two Bazentins, and another belt of land in France, so
beautiful to see, even as I had seen it first between the sand-bags of our
parapets, was being delivered to the charcoal-burners.

I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its deviltry, but one
picture which I passed on the way to the battlefield could not then be
told. Yet it was significant of the mentality of our High Command, as was
afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim. It proved the strange
unreasoning optimism which still lingered in the breasts of old-fashioned
generals in spite of what had happened on the left on the first day of
July, and their study of trench maps, and their knowledge of German
machine-guns. By an old mill-house called the Moulin Vivier, outside the
village of Meaulte, were masses of cavalry—Indian cavalry and
Dragoons—drawn up densely to leave a narrow passageway for
field-guns and horse-transport moving through the village, which was in
utter darkness. The Indians sat like statues on their horses, motionless,
dead silent. Now and again there was a jangle of bits. Here and there a
British soldier lit a cigarette and for a second the little flame of his
match revealed a bronzed face or glinted on steel helmets.

Cavalry!… So even now there was a serious purpose behind the joke of
English soldiers who had gone forward on the first day, shouting, “This
way to the gap!” and in the conversation of some of those who actually did
ride through Bazentin that day.

A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground and skirted
Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged a machine-gun in a cornfield,
and killed the gunners. Germans rounded up by them clung to their stirrup
leathers crying: “Pity! Pity!” The Indians lowered their lances, but took
prisoners to show their chivalry. But it was nothing more than a beau
geste. It was as futile and absurd as Don Quixote’s charge of the
windmill. They were brought to a dead halt by the nature of the ground and
machine-gun fire which killed their horses, and lay out that night with
German shells searching for their bodies.

One of the most disappointed men in the army was on General Haldane’s
staff. He was an old cavalry officer, and this major of the old, old
school (belonging in spirit to the time of Charles Lever) was excited by
the thought that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one of those
who swore that if he had his chance he would “ride into the blue.” It was
the chance he wanted and he nursed his way to it by delicate attentions to
General Haldane. The general’s bed was not so comfortable as his. He
changed places. He even went so far as to put a bunch of flowers on the
general’s table in his dugout.

“You seem very attentive to me, major,” said the general, smelling a rat.

Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead a squadron round
Delville Wood? Could he take that ride into the blue? He would give his
soul to do it.

“Get on with your job,” said General Haldane.

That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry to the belief that
they would be of real value in a warfare of trench lines and barbed wire,
but for a long time later they were kept moving backward and forward
between the edge of the battlefields and the back areas, to the great
incumbrance of the roads, until they were “guyed” by the infantry, and
irritable, so their officers told me, to the verge of mutiny. Their
irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in the trenches, and
I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston Steps, this
side of Thiepval, and cursing their spade-work.

In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that, fighting in the
summer and autumn of 1916, which I have written with many details of each
day’s scene in my collected despatches called The Battles of the Somme.
There is little that I can add to those word-pictures which I wrote day by
day, after haunting experiences amid the ruin of those fields, except a
summing-up of their effect upon the mentality of our men, and upon the
Germans who were in the same “blood-bath,” as they called it, and a closer
analysis of the direction and mechanism of our military machine.

Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowledge gained in the
years that followed, it seems clear that our High Command was too prodigal
in its expenditure of life in small sectional battles, and that the army
corps and divisional staffs had not established an efficient system of
communication with the fighting units under their control. It seemed to an
outsider like myself that a number of separate battles were being fought
without reference to one another in different parts of the field. It
seemed as though our generals, after conferring with one another over
telephones, said, “All right, tell So-and-so to have a go at Thiepval,”
or, “To-day we will send such-and-such a division to capture Delville
Wood,” or, “We must get that line of trenches outside Bazentin.” Orders
were drawn up on the basis of that decision and passed down to brigades,
who read them as their sentence of death, and obeyed with or without
protest, and sent three or four battalions to assault a place which was
covered by German batteries round an arc of twenty miles, ready to open
out a tempest of fire directly a rocket rose from their infantry, and to
tear up the woods and earth in that neighborhood if our men gained ground.
If the whole battle-line moved forward the German fire would have been
dispersed, but in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood and
Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast concentration of
explosives which plowed up our men.

So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and
became “Devil’s” Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of
massed gun-fire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious
brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by
another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil’s caldron, or to
recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had followed
in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen trees, and in
the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their dead to keep them
company. In Delville Wood the South African Brigade of the 9th Division
was cut to pieces, and I saw the survivors come out with few officers to
lead them.

In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, there had been great
slaughter of English troops and Welsh. The 18th Division and the 38th
suffered horribly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to pieces
before these South Africans. And after that came High Wood.. . All that
was left of High Wood in the autumn of 1916 was a thin row of branchless
trees, but in July and August there were still glades under heavy foliage,
until the branches were lopped off and the leaves scattered by our
incessant fire. It was an important position, vital for the enemy’s
defense, and our attack on the right flank of the Pozieres Ridge, above
Bazentin and Delville Wood, giving on the reverse slope a fine observation
of the enemy’s lines above Martinpuich and Courcellette away to Bapaume.
For that reason the Germans were ordered to hold it at all costs, and many
German batteries had registered on it to blast our men out if they gained
a foothold on our side of the slope or theirs.

So High Wood became another hell, on a day of great battle—September
14, 1916—when for the first time tanks were used, demoralizing the
enemy in certain places, though they were too few in number to strike a
paralyzing blow. The Londoners gained part of High Wood at frightful cost
and then were blown out of it. Other divisions followed them and found the
wood stuffed with machine-guns which they had to capture through
hurricanes of bullets before they crouched in craters amid dead Germans
and dead English, and then were blown out like the Londoners, under
shell-fire, in which no human life could stay for long.

The 7th Division was cut up there. The 33d Division lost six thousand men
in an advance against uncut wire in the wood, which they were told was
already captured.

Hundreds of men were vomiting from the effect of gas-shells, choking and
blinded. Behind, the transport wagons and horses were smashed to bits.

The divisional staffs were often ignorant of what was happening to the
fighting-men when the attack was launched. Light signals, rockets,
heliographing, were of small avail through the dust—and
smoke-clouds. Forward observing officers crouching behind parapets, as I
often saw them, and sometimes stood with them, watched fires burning, red
rockets and green, gusts of flame, and bursting shells, and were doubtful
what to make of it all. Telephone wires trailed across the ground for
miles, were cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high explosive.
Accidents happened as part of the inevitable blunders of war. It was all a
vast tangle and complexity of strife.

On July 17th I stood in a tent by a staff-officer who was directing a
group of heavy guns supporting the 3d Division. He was tired, as I could
see by the black lines under his eyes and tightly drawn lips. On a
camp-table in front of him, upon which he leaned his elbows, there was a
telephone apparatus, and the little bell kept ringing as we talked. Now
and then a shell burst in the field outside the tent, and he raised his
head and said: “They keep crumping about here. Hope they won’t tear this
tent to ribbons….That sounds like a gas-shell.”

Then he turned to the telephone again and listened to some voice speaking.

“Yes, I can hear you. Yes, go on. ‘Our men seen leaving High Wood.’ Yes.
‘Shelled by our artillery.’ Are you sure of that? I say, are you sure they
were our men? Another message. Well, carry on. ‘Men digging on road from
High Wood southeast to Longueval.’ Yes, I’ve got that. ‘They are our men
and not Boches.’ Oh, hell!… Get off the line. Get off the line, can’t
you?… ‘Our men and not Boches.’ Yes, I have that. ‘Heavily shelled by
our guns.’”

The staff-officer tapped on the table with a lead-pencil a tattoo, while
his forehead puckered. Then he spoke into the telephone again.

“Are you there, ‘Heavies’?… Well, don’t disturb those fellows for half
an hour. After that I will give you new orders. Try and confirm if they
are our men.”

He rang off and turned to me.

“That’s the trouble. Looks as if we had been pounding our own men like
hell. Some damn fool reports ‘Boches.’ Gives the reference number. Asks
for the ‘Heavies’. Then some other fellow says: ‘Not Boches. For God’s
sake cease fire!’ How is one to tell?”

I could not answer that question, but I hated the idea of our men sent
forward to capture a road or a trench or a wood and then “pounded” by our
guns. They had enough pounding from the enemy’s guns. There seemed a
missing link in the system somewhere. Probably it was quite inevitable.

Over and over again the wounded swore to God that they had been shelled by
our own guns. The Londoners said so from High Wood. The Australians said
so from Mouquet Farm. The Scots said so from Longueval! They said: “Why
the hell do we get murdered by British gunners? What’s the good of
fighting if we’re slaughtered by our own side?”

In some cases they were mistaken. It was enfilade fire from German
batteries. But often it happened according to the way of that telephone
conversation in the tent by Bronfay Farm.

The difference between British soldiers and German soldiers crawling over
shell-craters or crouching below the banks of a sunken road was no more
than the difference between two tribes of ants. Our flying scouts, however
low they flew, risking the Archies and machine-gun bullets, often mistook
khaki for field gray, and came back with false reports which led to
tragedy.


XI

People who read my war despatches will remember my first descriptions of
the tanks and those of other correspondents. They caused a sensation, a
sense of excitement, laughter which shook the nation because of the
comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of quicker victory,
which caught hold of the imagination of people who heard for the first
time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in appearance and
performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due to the censorship,
which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and exact definition, so that
we had to compare them to giant toads, mammoths, and prehistoric animals
of all kinds. Our accounts did, however, reproduce the psychological
effect of the tanks upon the British troops when these engines appeared
for the first time to their astonished gaze on September 13th. Our
soldiers roared with laughter, as I did, when they saw them lolloping up
the roads. On the morning of the great battle of September 15th the
presence of the tanks going into action excited all the troops along the
front with a sense of comical relief in the midst of the grim and deadly
business of attack. Men followed them, laughing and cheering. There was a
wonderful thrill in the airman’s message, “Tank walking up the High Street
of Flers with the British army cheering behind.” Wounded boys whom I met
that morning grinned in spite of their wounds at our first word about the
tanks. “Crikey!” said a cockney lad of the 47th Division. “I can’t help
laughing every time I think of them tanks. I saw them stamping down German
machine-guns as though they were wasps’ nests.” The adventures of Creme de
Menthe, Cordon Rouge, and the Byng Boys, on both sides of the Bapaume
road, when they smashed down barbed wire, climbed over trenches, sat on
German redoubts, and received the surrender of German prisoners who held
their hands up to these monsters and cried, “Kamerad!” were like
fairy-tales of war by H. G. Wells.

Yet their romance had a sharp edge of reality as I saw in those battles of
the Somme, and afterward, more grievously, in the Cambrai salient and
Flanders, when the tanks were put out of action by direct hits of
field-guns and nothing of humankind remained in them but the charred bones
of their gallant crews.

Before the battle in September of ’16 I talked with the pilots of the
first tanks, and although they were convinced of the value of these new
engines of war and were out to prove it, they did not disguise from me nor
from their own souls that they were going forth upon a perilous adventure
with the odds of luck against them. I remember one young pilot—a
tiny fellow like a jockey, who took me on one side and said, “I want you
to do me a favor,” and then scribbled down his mother’s address and asked
me to write to her if “anything” happened to him.

He and other tank officers were anxious. They had not complete confidence
in the steering and control of their engines. It was a difficult and
clumsy kind of gear, which was apt to break down at a critical moment, as
I saw when I rode in one on their field of maneuver. These first tanks
were only experimental, and the tail arrangement was very weak. Worse than
all mechanical troubles was the short-sighted policy of some authority at
G.H.Q., who had insisted upon A.S.C. drivers being put to this job a few
days before the battle, without proper training.

“It is mad and murderous,” said one of the officers, “These fellows may
have pluck, all right—I don’t doubt it—but they don’t know
their engines, nor the double steering trick, and they have never been
under shell-fire. It is asking for trouble.”

As it turned out, the A.S.C. drivers proved their pluck, for the most
part, splendidly, but many tanks broke down before they reached the
enemy’s lines, and in that action and later battles there were times when
they bitterly disappointed the infantry commanders and the troops.

Individual tanks, commanded by gallant young officers and served by brave
crews, did astounding feats, and some of these men came back dazed and
deaf and dumb, after forty hours or more of fighting and maneuvering
within steel walls, intensely hot, filled with the fumes of their engines,
jolted and banged about over rough ground, and steering an uncertain
course, after the loss of their “tails,” which had snapped at the spine.
But there had not been anything like enough tanks to secure an
annihilating surprise over the enemy as afterward was attained in the
first battle of Cambrai; and the troops who had been buoyed up with the
hope that at last the machine—gun evil was going to be scotched were
disillusioned and dejected when they saw tanks ditched behind the lines or
nowhere in sight when once again they had to trudge forward under the
flail of machine-gun bullets from earthwork redoubts. It was a failure in
generalship to give away our secret before it could be made effective.

I remember sitting in a mess of the Gordons in the village of Franvillers
along the Albert road, and listening to a long monologue by a Gordon
officer on the future of the tanks. He was a dreamer and visionary, and
his fellow-officers laughed at him.

“A few tanks are no good,” he said. “Forty or fifty tanks are no good on a
modern battle-front. We want hundreds of tanks, brought up secretly, fed
with ammunition by tank carriers, bringing up field-guns and going into
action without any preliminary barrage. They can smash through the enemy’s
wire and get over his trenches before he is aware that an attack has been
organized. Up to now all our offensives have been futile because of our
preliminary advertisement by prolonged bombardment. The tanks can bring
back surprise to modern warfare, but we must have hundreds of them.”

Prolonged laughter greeted this speech. But the Celtic dreamer did not
smile. He was staring into the future… And what he saw was true, though
he did not live to see it, for in the Cambrai battle of November 11th the
tanks did advance in hundreds, and gained an enormous surprise over the
enemy, and led the way to a striking victory, which turned to tragedy
because of risks too lightly taken.


XII

One branch of our military machine developed with astonishing rapidity and
skill during those Somme battles. The young gentlemen of the Air Force
went “all out” for victory, and were reckless in audacity. How far they
acted under orders and against their own judgment of what was sensible and
sound in fighting-risks I do not know. General Trenchard, their supreme
chief, believed in an aggressive policy at all costs, and was a Napoleon
in this war of the skies, intolerant of timidity, not squeamish of heavy
losses if the balance were tipped against the enemy. Some young flying-men
complained to me bitterly that they were expected to fly or die over the
German lines, whatever the weather or whatever the risks. Many of them,
after repeated escapes from anti-aircraft shells and hostile craft, lost
their nerve, shirked another journey, found themselves crying in their
tents, and were sent back home for a spell by squadron commanders, with
quick observation for the breaking-point; or made a few more flights and
fell to earth like broken birds.

Sooner or later, apart from rare cases, every man was found to lose his
nerve, unless he lost his life first. That was a physical and mental law.
But until that time these flying-men were the knights-errant of the war,
and most of them did not need any driving to the risks they took with
boyish recklessness.

They were mostly boys—babes, as they seemed to me, when I saw them
in their tents or dismounting from their machines. On “dud” days, when
there was no visibility at all, they spent their leisure hours joy-riding
to Amiens or some other town where they could have a “binge.” They drank
many cocktails and roared with laughter over, bottles of cheap champagne,
and flirted with any girl who happened to come within their orbit. If not
allowed beyond their tents, they sulked like baby Achilles, reading
novelettes, with their knees hunched up, playing the gramophone, and
ragging each other.

There was one child so young that his squadron leader would not let him go
out across the battle-lines to challenge any German scout in the clouds or
do any of the fancy “stunts” that were part of the next day’s program. He
went to bed sulkily, and then came back again, in his pajamas, with
rumpled hair.

“Look here, sir,” he said. “Can’t I go? I’ve got my wings. It’s perfectly
rotten being left behind.”

The squadron commander, who told me of the tale, yielded.

“All right. Only don’t do any fool tricks.”

Next morning the boy flew off, played a lone hand, chased a German scout,
dropped low over the enemy’s lines, machine-gunned infantry on the march,
scattered them, bombed a train, chased a German motor-car, and after many
adventures came back alive and said, “I’ve had a rare old time!”

On a stormy day, which loosened the tent poles and slapped the wet canvas,
I sat in a mess with a group of flying-officers, drinking tea out of a tin
mug. One boy, the youngest of them, had just brought down his first “Hun.”
He told me the tale of it with many details, his eyes alight as he
described the fight. They had maneuvered round each other for a long time.
Then he shot his man en passant. The machine crashed on our side of the
lines. He had taken off the iron crosses on the wings, and a bit of the
propeller, as mementoes. He showed me these things (while the squadron
commander, who had brought down twenty-four Germans, winked at me) and
told me he was going to send them home to hang beside his college
trophies… I guessed he was less than nineteen years old. Such a kid!…
A few days later, when I went to the tent again, I asked about him. “How’s
that boy who brought down his first ‘Hun’?” The squadron commander said:

“Didn’t you hear? He’s gone west. Brought down in a dog-fight. He had a
chance of escape, but went back to rescue a pal… a nice boy.”

They became fatalists after a few fights, and believed in their luck, or
their mascots—teddy-bears, a bullet that had missed them, china
dolls, a girl’s lock of hair, a silver ring. Yet at the back of their
brains, most Of them, I fancy, knew that it was only a question of time
before they “went west,” and with that subconscious thought they crowded
in all life intensely in the hours that were given to them, seized all
chance of laughter, of wine, of every kind of pleasure within reach, and
said their prayers (some of them) with great fervor, between one escape
and another, like young Paul Bensher, who has revealed his soul in verse,
his secret terror, his tears, his hatred of death, his love of life, when
he went bombing over Bruges.

On the mornings of the battles of the Somme I saw them as the heralds of a
new day of strife flying toward the lines in the first light of dawn. When
the sun rose its rays touched their wings, made them white like cabbage
butterflies, or changed them to silver, all a sparkle. I saw them fly over
the German positions, not changing their course. Then all about them burst
black puffs of German shrapnel, so that many times I held my breath
because they seemed in the center of the burst. But generally when the
cloud cleared they were flying again, until they disappeared in the mists
over the enemy’s country. There they did deadly work, in single fights
with German airmen, or against great odds, until they had an air space to
themselves and skimmed the earth like albatrosses in low flight, attacking
machine-gun nests, killing or scattering the gunners by a burst of bullets
from their Lewis guns, dropping bombs on German wagon transports,
infantry, railway trains (one man cut a train in half and saw men and
horses falling out), and ammunition—dumps, directing the fire of our
guns upon living targets, photographing new trenches and works, bombing
villages crowded with German troops. That they struck terror into these
German troops was proved afterward when we went into Bapaume and Peronne
and many villages from which the enemy retreated after the battles of the
Somme. Everywhere there were signboards on which was written “Flieger
Schutz!” (aircraft shelter) or German warnings of: “Keep to the sidewalks.
This road is constantly bombed by British airmen.”

They were a new plague of war, and did for a time gain a complete mastery
of the air. But later the Germans learned the lesson of low flying and
night bombing, and in 1917 and 1918 came back in greater strength and made
the nights horrible in camps behind the lines and in villages, where they
killed many soldiers and more civilians.

The infantry did not believe much in our air supremacy at any time, not
knowing what work was done beyond their range of vision, and seeing our
machines crashed in No Man’s Land, and hearing the rattle of machine-guns
from hostile aircraft above their own trenches.

“Those aviators of ours,” a general said to me, “are the biggest liars in
the world. Cocky fellows claiming impossible achievements. What proof can
they give of their preposterous tales? They only go into the air service
because they haven’t the pluck to serve in the infantry.”

That was prejudice. The German losses were proof enough of our men’s
fighting skill and strength, and German prisoners and German letters
confirmed all their claims. But we were dishonest in our reckoning from
first to last, and the British public was hoodwinked about our losses.
“Three of our machines are missing.” “Six of our machines are missing.”
Yes, but what about the machines which crashed in No Man’s Land and behind
our lines? They were not missing, but destroyed, and the boys who had
flown in them were dead or broken.

To the end of the war those aviators of ours searched the air for their
adventures, fought often against overwhelming numbers, killed the German
champions in single combat or in tourneys in the sky, and let down tons of
high explosives which caused great death and widespread destruction; and
in this work they died like flies, and one boy’s life—one of those
laughing, fatalistic, intensely living boys—was of no more account
in the general sum of slaughter than a summer midge, except as one little
unit in the Armies of the Air.


XIII

I am not strong enough in the science of psychology to understand the
origin of laughter and to get into touch with the mainsprings of gaiety.
The sharp contrast between normal ethics and an abnormality of action
provides a grotesque point of view arousing ironical mirth. It is probable
also that surroundings of enormous tragedy stimulate the sense of humor of
the individual, so that any small, ridiculous thing assumes the proportion
of monstrous absurdity. It is also likely—certain, I think—that
laughter is an escape from terror, a liberation of the soul by mental
explosion, from the prison walls of despair and brooding. In the Decameron
of Boccaccio a group of men and women encompassed by plague retired into
seclusion to tell one another mirthful immoralities which stirred their
laughter. They laughed while the plague destroyed society around them and
when they knew that its foul germs were on the prowl for their own
bodies… So it was in this war, where in many strange places and in many
dreadful days there was great laughter. I think sometimes of a night I
spent with the medical officers of a tent hospital in the fields of the
Somme during those battles. With me as a guest went a modern Falstaff, a
“ton of flesh,” who “sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks
along.”

He was a man of many anecdotes, drawn from the sinks and stews of life,
yet with a sense of beauty lurking under his coarseness, and a voice of
fine, sonorous tone, which he managed with art and a melting grace.

On the way to the field hospital he had taken more than one nip of whisky.
His voice was well oiled when he sang a greeting to a medical major in a
florid burst of melody from Italian opera. The major was a little Irish
medico who had been through the South African War and in tropical places,
where he had drunk fire-water to kill all manner of microbes. He suffered
abominably from asthma and had had a heart-seizure the day before our
dinner at his mess, and told us that he would drop down dead as sure as
fate between one operation and another on “the poor, bloody wounded” who
never ceased to flow into his tent. But he was in a laughing mood, and
thirsty for laughter-making liquid. He had two whiskies before the dinner
began to wet his whistle. His fellow-officers were out for an evening’s
joy, but nervous of the colonel, an austere soul who sat at the head of
the mess with the look of a man afraid that merriment might reach
outrageous heights beyond his control. A courteous man he was, and rather
sad. His presence for a time acted as a restraint upon the company, until
all restraint was broken by the Falstaff with me, who told soul-crashing
stories to the little Irish major across the table and sang love lyrics to
the orderly who brought round the cottage pie and pickles. There was a
tall, thin young surgeon who had been carving up living bodies all day and
many days, and now listened to that fat rogue with an intensity of delight
that lit up his melancholy eyes, watching him gravely between gusts of
deep laughter, which seemed to come from his boots. There was another
young surgeon, once of Barts’, who made himself the cup-server of the fat
knight and kept his wine at the brim, and encouraged him to fresh
audacities of anecdotry, with a humorous glance at the colonel’s troubled
face… The colonel was forgotten after dinner. The little Irish major
took the lid off the boiling pot of mirth. He was entirely mad, as he
assured us, between dances of a wild and primitive type, stories of
adventure in far lands, and spasms of asthmatic coughing, when he beat his
breast and said, “A pox in my bleeding heart!”

Falstaff was playing Juliet to the Romeo of the tall young surgeon,
singing falsetto like a fat German angel dressed in loose-fitting khaki,
with his belt undone. There were charades in the tent. The boy from Barts’
did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a rival bird, of a cow
coming through a gate, of a general addressing his troops (most comical of
all). Several glasses were broken. The corkscrew was disregarded as a
useless implement, and whisky-bottles were decapitated against the tent
poles. I remember vaguely the crowning episode of the evening when the
little major was dancing the Irish jig with a kitchen chair; when Falstaff
was singing the Prologue of Pagliacci to the stupefied colonel; when the
boy, once of Barts’, was roaring like a lion under the mess table, and
when the tall, melancholy surgeon was at the top of the tent pole,
scratching himself like a gorilla in his native haunts… Outside, the
field hospital was quiet, under a fleecy sky with a crescent moon. Through
the painted canvas of the tent city candle-light glowed with a faint
rose-colored light, and the Red Cross hung limp above the camp where many
wounded lay, waking or sleeping, tossing in agony, dying in
unconsciousness. Far away over the fields, rockets were rising above the
battle-lines. The sky was flickering with the flush of gun-fire. A red
glare rose and spread below the clouds where some ammunition-dump had been
exploded… Old Falstaff fell asleep in the car on the way back to our
quarters, and I smiled at the memory of great laughter in the midst of
tragedy.


XIV

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a territory
forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five months of
fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of slaughter,
wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war. As an
eye-witness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw day by day the
tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred and fifty thousand
men had passed through our casualty clearing stations, and then were not
finished. I went among these men when the blood was wet on them, and
talked with hundreds of them, and heard their individual narratives of
escapes from death until my imagination was saturated with the spirit of
their conflict of body and soul. I saw a green, downy countryside,
beautiful in its summer life, ravaged by gun-fire so that the white chalk
of its subsoil was flung above the earth and grass in a wide, sterile
stretch of desolation pitted with shell-craters, ditched by deep trenches,
whose walls were hideously upheaved by explosive fire, and littered yard
after yard, mile after mile, with broken wire, rifles, bombs, unexploded
shells, rags of uniform, dead bodies, or bits of bodies, and all the filth
of battle. I saw many villages flung into ruin or blown clean off the map.
I walked into such villages as Contalmaison, Martinpuich, Le Sars,
Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of burning and the fumes of
explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose up to one’s nostrils and
one’s very soul, when our dead and German dead lay about, and newly
wounded came walking through the ruins or were carried shoulder high on
stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously the living, unwounded men
who went through these places knew that death lurked about them and around
them and above them, and at any second might make its pounce upon their
own flesh. I saw our men going into battle with strong battalions and
coming out of it with weak battalions. I saw them in the midst of battle
at Thiepval, at Contalmaison, at Guillemont, by Loupart Wood, when they
trudged toward lines of German trenches, bunching a little in groups,
dodging shell-bursts, falling in single figures or in batches, and
fighting over the enemy’s parapets. I sat with them in their dugouts
before battle and after battle, saw their bodies gathered up for burial,
heard their snuffle of death in hospital, sat by their bedside when they
were sorely wounded. So the full tragic drama of that long conflict on the
Somme was burned into my brain and I was, as it were, a part of it, and I
am still seared with its remembrance, and shall always be.

But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if he
refused to admit the heroism, the gallantry of youth, even the gaiety of
men in these infernal months. Psychology on the Somme was not simple and
straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not their dominating
emotion, except in the worst hours. Men hated this fighting, but found
excitement in it, often exultation, sometimes an intense stimulus of all
their senses and passions before reaction and exhaustion. Men became
jibbering idiots with shell-shock, as I saw some of them, but others
rejoiced when they saw our shells plowing into the enemy’s earthworks,
laughed at their own narrow escapes and at grotesque comicalities of this
monstrous deviltry. The officers were proud of their men, eager for their
honor and achievement. The men themselves were in rivalry with other
bodies of troops, and proud of their own prowess. They were scornful of
all that the enemy might do to them, yet acknowledged his courage and
power. They were quick to kill him, yet quick also to give him a chance of
life by surrender, and after that were—nine times out of ten—chivalrous
and kindly, but incredibly brutal on the rare occasions when passion
overcame them at some tale of treachery. They had the pride of the skilled
laborer in his own craft, as machine-gunners, bombers, raiders,
trench-mortar—men, and were keen to show their skill, whatever the
risks. They were healthy animals, with animal courage as well as animal
fear, and they had, some of them, a spiritual and moral fervor which bade
them risk death to save a comrade, or to save a position, or to kill the
fear that tried to fetter them, or to lead men with greater fear than
theirs. They lived from hour to hour and forgot the peril or the misery
that had passed, and did not forestall the future by apprehension unless
they were of sensitive mind, with the worst quality men might have in
modern warfare—imagination.

They trained themselves to an intense egotism within narrow boundaries.
Fifty yards to the left, or five hundred, men were being pounded to death
by shell-fire. Fifty yards to the right, or five hundred, men were being
mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the time being their particular patch
was quiet. It was their luck. Why worry about the other fellow? The length
of a traverse in a ditch called a trench might make all the difference
between heaven and hell. Dead bodies were being piled up on one side of
the traverse. A shell had smashed into the platoon next door. There was a
nasty mess. Men sat under their own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of
bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop them out of their bit of earth.
This protective egotism seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in
dangerous places when I saw them in the line. In a little way, not as a
soldier, but as a correspondent, taking only a thousandth part of the
risks of fighting-men, I found myself using this self-complacency. They
were strafing on the left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very nasty
for the men in either of those places. Poor devils! But meanwhile I was on
a safe patch, it seemed. Thank Heaven for that!

“Here,” said an elderly officer—one of those rare exalted souls who
thought that death was a little thing to give for one’s country’s sake—“here
we may be killed at any moment!”

He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though
announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged as a
lieutenant and new to the scene of battle.

“But,” said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, “I
don’t want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!”

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man,
soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was in
connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He hated the
notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously, desperately,
heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times, when he paid
not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly
specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he thrust the
thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged a joke with
the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in a state of mental
exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement, he acted
regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost miraculous things,
hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do as he did by the
passion within him—passion of love, passion of hate, passion of
fear, or passion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were the leaders,
the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of their intensity
of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and the comfort that came
from their real or apparent self-confidence in frightful situations. Those
who got through were astonished at their own courage. Many of them became
convinced consciously or subconsciously that they were immune from shells
and bullets. They walked through harassing fire with a queer sense of
carelessness. They had escaped so often that some of them had a kind of
disdain of shell-bursts, until, perhaps, one day something snapped in
their nervous system, as often it did, and the bang of a door in a billet
behind the lines, or a wreath of smoke from some domestic chimney, gave
them a sudden shock of fear. Men differed wonderfully in their
nerve-resistance, and it was no question of difference in courage.

In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the mass they seemed
astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that Somme
fighting our troops before battle and after battle—a few days after—looked
bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy in their way of
laughter. It was optimism in the mass, heroism in the mass. It was only
when one spoke to the individual, some friend who bared his soul a second,
or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with whom one talked with truth,
that one saw the hatred of a man for his job, the sense of doom upon him,
the weakness that was in his strength, the bitterness of his grudge
against a fate that forced him to go on in this way of life, the
remembrance of a life more beautiful which he had abandoned—all
mingled with those other qualities of pride and comradeship, and that
illogical sense of humor which made up the strange complexity of his
psychology.


XV

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the
astounding belief that he was “immune” from shell-fire, and I met other
men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate
fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion had suffered
heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a
hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any
imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech to
me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in my despatches. He
believed that this was due to some personal spite—not knowing the
injustice of our military censorship under the orders of G.H.Q.

“Why the hell don’t we get a word?” he asked. “Haven’t we done as well as
anybody, died as much?”

I promised to do what I could—which was nothing—to put the
matter right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid
in self-revelation.

“I have a mystical power,” he said. “Nothing will ever hit me as long as I
keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute
belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage
unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive shells
and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my intelligence. They
are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch with the Universal
Spirit, as I am.”

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he
was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another
or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that
astonished me. I envied him his particular “kink.” I wished I could
cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of
knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men
of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man’s eyes and knew, and
he claimed that he never made a mistake… He was sorry to possess that
second sight, and it worried him.

There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed,
although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of
the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some cases I know they
were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general belief that
if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being the reverse side
of the argument.

I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many times
and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the Somme who
revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our front-line ran
just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side
of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their
fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have
mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut. John Wood who
took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sand-bags in a
German dug—out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were
the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about,
disemboweled by shell-fire. Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters
where bodies lay half buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky
and bursting with enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that
vast, desolate battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead
trees. It was the devil’s hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But
John Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, sturdy,
gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sand-bags, walked
on the top of communication trenches (not bothering to take cover) and
skirting round hedges of barbed wire, apparently unconscious of the
“crumps” that were bursting around. I found laughter and friendly greeting
in a hole in the earth where the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel
was courteous, but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that I should go
up farther, to the ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one’s
head into trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been
blowing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was insistent
that I should meet “old Thom,” afterward in command of the battalion. He
had just been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. So we
left the cover of the dugout and took to the open again. Long lines of
Jocks were digging a support trench—digging with a kind of rhythmic
movement as they threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them was
another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though asleep, out in the
open. They were the dead of the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up
against the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with his
steel hat on the back of his head—a handsome, laughing figure. He
did not look like a man who had just been buried and dug out again.

“It was a narrow shave,” he said. “A beastly shell covered me with a ton
of earth… Have a cigarette, won’t you?”

We gossiped as though in St. James’s Street. Other young Scottish officers
came up and shook hands, and said: “Jolly weather, isn’t it? What do you
think of our little show?” Not one of them gave a glance at the line of
dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some of the funny
things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim jokes by tough
Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn’t beat them. “Well, good
morning! Must get on with the job.” There was no anguish there, no sense
of despair, no sullen hatred of this life, so near to death. They seemed
to like it… They did not really like it. They only made the best of it,
without gloom. I saw they did not like this job of battle, one evening in
their mess behind the line. The colonel who commanded them at the time,
Celt of the Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his
manner, a little “fey.” He was annoyed with three of his officers who had
come back late from three days’ Paris leave. They were giants, but stood
like schoolboys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter words.
Later in the evening he mentioned casually that they must prepare to go
into the line again under special orders. What about the store of bombs,
small-arms ammunition, machine-guns?

The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as
though to say: “What does the old man mean? Is this true?” One of them
became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his
eyes. Another said, “Hell!” in a whisper. The adjutant answered the
colonel’s questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the
colonel’s face anxiously.

“Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?”

The colonel laughed.

“Don’t look so scared, all of you! It’s only a field-day for training.”

The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been
fairly taken in by the “old man’s” leg-pulling… No, it was clear they
did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line
trench as the most desirable place of residence.


XVI

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic—among
a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers,
having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of
their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high,
descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire,
Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and
its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a
battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. They gave a shock to our French
friends when they arrived as a division at the port of Boulogne.

“Name of a dog!” said the quayside loungers. “England is truly in a bad
way. She is sending out her last reserves!”

“But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!” exclaimed others.

“It is terrible that they should send these little ones,” said
kind-hearted fishwives.

Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became smart
and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched
with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to see
them strutting up and down as sentries outside divisional headquarters,
with their bayonets high above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they
did well—though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over
the top—and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in
their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants
struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly strong
enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit—steel
helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags—with which
other troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly,
behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval,
and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in
the cover they made under damnable fire, until many of them were blown to
bits. There was no “glory” in their job, only filth and blood, but they
held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance of
taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after
the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and they
brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the
Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that
humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as they
sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the
conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its grotesque
humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional, these
stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and
Northern dialects. There was one fellow—the jester of them all—whose
language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter,
outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of
himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into
bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of “glory.”
He advocated a trade—unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever
there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he
had no liking for Germans and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit
their throats, to disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town
and wondered what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself
like an ape, or lying with his head in the earth with shells bursting
around him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. “Oh,” said that five-foot
hero, “there will be a lot of murder after this bloody war. What’s human
life? What’s the value of one man’s throat? We’re trained up as murderers—I
don’t dislike it, mind you—and after the war we sha’n’t get out of
the habit of it. It’ll come nat’ral like!”

He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a group
of comrades who roared with laughter and said: “Go it, Bill! That’s the
stuff!” Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen, or
spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their eyes. Some of
them had big heads on small bodies, as though they suffered from water on
the brain… Many of them were sent home afterward. General Haldane, as
commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked his stick at the more
wizened ones, the obviously unfit, the degenerates, and said at each prod,
“You can go… You. ..You….” The Bantam Division ceased to exist.

They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A
Bantam died—of disease (“and he would,” said General Haldane)—and
a comrade came to see his corpse.

“Shut ze door ven you come out,” said the old woman of his billet. “Fermez
la porte, mon vieux.”

The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much moved
by grief.

“I’ve seed poor Bill,” he said.

“As-tu ferme la porte?” said the old woman, anxiously.

The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it.

“C’est a cause du chat!” said the old woman. “Ze cat, Monsieur, ‘e ‘ave
‘ad your friend in ze passage tree time already to-day. Trois fois!”

Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to a
man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their size.

They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval. It
was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade. He
came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which
could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded with a
spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst, which made
their tongues swell and set their throats on fire.

“Water!” they cried. “Water! For Christ’s sake, water!”

There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of
German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild
dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there in
a shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy, and
he was a dead shot.

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of that
chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the upright,
fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back the
trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pass. He passed many
times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into bad
places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made from the well
water for men in agony.


XVII

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied
their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers,
spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of
battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked degraded,
bestial men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest atrocities. But
in the mass they seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our own
lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not quite so bright and
brisk, as was only natural in their position as prisoners, with all the
misery of war in their souls. Afterward they worked with patient industry
in the prison-camps and established their own discipline, and gave very
little trouble if well handled. In each crowd of them there were fellows
who spoke perfect English, having lived in England as waiters and
hairdressers, or clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most
because it was easiest, but I know enough German to talk with the others,
and I found among them all the same loathing of war, the same bewilderment
as to its causes, the same sense of being driven by evil powers above
them. The officers were different. They lost a good deal of their
arrogance, but to the last had excuses ready for all that Germany had
done, and almost to the last professed to believe that Germany would win.
Their sense of caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the
same carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour in the same
inclosures with them. They regarded them, for the most part, as inferior
beings. And there were castes even among the officers. I remember that in
the last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry officers, these
elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry officers and would
not mix with them. One of them paced up and down all night alone, and all
next day, stiff in the corsets below that sky-blue uniform, not speaking
to a soul, though within a few yards of him were many officers of infantry
regiments.

Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after the blood of battle
was out of their eyes, with a good—natured kindness that astonished
the Germans themselves. I have seen them filling German water-bottles at
considerable trouble, and the escorts, two or three to a big batch of men,
were utterly trustful of them. “Here, hold my rifle, Fritz,” said one of
our men, getting down from a truck-train to greet a friend.

An officer standing by took notice of this.

“Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to guard your prisoners?”

Our man was astonished.

“Lor’ bless you, sir, they don’t want no guarding. They’re glad to be
took. They guard themselves.”

“Your men are extraordinary,” a German officer told me. “They asked me
whether I would care to go down at once or wait till the barrage had
passed.”

He seemed amazed at that thoughtfulness for his comfort. It was in the
early days of the Somme fighting, and crowds of our men stood on the banks
above a sunken road, watching the prisoners coming down. This officer who
spoke to me had an Iron Cross, and the men wanted to see it and handle it.

“Will they give it back again?” he asked, nervously, fumbling at the
ribbon.

“Certainly,” I assured him.

He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who passed it from one to
the other and then back to the owner.

“Your men are extraordinary,” he said. “They are wonderful.”

One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was a
tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle when
that place was smoking with shell-bursts. An English soldier was on each
side of him, and each man carried a hand-bag, while this black-bearded
giant chatted with them.

It was a strange group, and I edged nearer to them and spoke to one of the
men.

“Who’s this? Why do you carry his bags?”

“Oh, we’re giving him special privileges,” said the man. “He stayed behind
to look after our wounded. Said his job was to look after wounded, whoever
they were. So there he’s been, in a dugout bandaging our lads; and no
joke, either. It’s hell up there. We’re glad to get out of it.”

I spoke to the German doctor and walked with him. He discussed the
philosophy of the war simply and with what seemed like sincerity.

“This war!” he said, with a sad, ironical laugh. “We go on killing one
another-to no purpose. Europe is being bled to death and will be
impoverished for long years. We Germans thought it was a war for Kultur—our
civilization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur, against religion,
against all civilization.”

“How will it end?” I asked him.

“I see no end to it,” he answered. “It is the suicide of nations. Germany
is strong, and England is strong, and France is strong. It is impossible
for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to come?”

I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no end
of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity
on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918,
when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few
months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the
German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as
it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than
for the race to perish by bleeding to death?


XVIII

The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood lasted from the
beginning of August until the middle of September—six weeks of
fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that time.
The Australians dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet Farm,
where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and up to the
Windmill on the high ground of Pozieres, for which there was unceasing
slaughter on both sides because the Germans counter-attacked again and
again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that mound of forsaken
brick, which I saw as a reddish cone through flame and smoke.

Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their
quality. They had come believing that nothing could be worse than their
ordeal in the Dardanelles. Now they knew that Pozieres was the last word
in frightfulness. The intensity of the shell-fire under which they lay
shook them, if it did not kill them. Many of their wounded told me that it
had broken their nerve. They would never fight again without a sense of
horror.

“Our men are more highly strung than the English,” said one Australian
officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those
Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as tough as gristle in their
fiber.

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that the
earth was finely powdered. They stormed the Pozieres ridge yard by yard,
and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenches as
soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living flesh. In six
weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozieres now is an
Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts
of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and the
slopes below. Many English boys of the Sussex, West Kents, Surrey, and
Warwick regiments, in the 18th Division, died at their side, not less
patient in sacrifice, not liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th and 9th
Divisions, many New-Zealanders, many London men of the 47th and 56th
Divisions, fell, killed or wounded, to the right of them, on the way to
Martinpuich, and Eaucourt l’Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood and
Longueval, and Bazentin. The 3d Division of Yorkshires and Northumberland
Fusiliers, Royal Scots and Gordons, were earning that name of the Iron
Division, and not by any easy heroism. Every division in the British army
took its turn in the blood-bath of the Somme and was duly blooded, at a
cost of 25 per cent. and sometimes 50 per cent. of their fighting
strength. The Canadians took up the struggle at Courcelette and captured
it in a fierce and bloody battle. The Australians worked up on the right
of the Albert-Bapaume road to Thilloy and Ligny Thilloy. On the far left
the fortress of Thiepval had fallen at last after repeated and frightful
assaults, which I watched from ditches close enough to see our infantry—Wiltshires
and Worcesters of the 25th Division—trudging through infernal fire.
And then at last, after five months of superhuman effort, enormous
sacrifice, mass-heroism, desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each
individual human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed,
the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the
prolonged fury of our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across a
country which he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from
Bullecourt to St.-Quentin.


XIX

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume
after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering nearly
a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage, not much
difference in average of loss. By the end of that year’s fighting our
casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four hundred thousand
men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our graveyards were growing
forests of little white crosses. The German dead lay in heaps. There were
twelve hundred corpses littered over the earth below Loupart Wood, in one
mass, and eight hundred of them were German. I could not walk without
treading on them there. When I fell in the slime I clutched arms and legs.
The stench of death was strong and awful.

But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock kept their sanity
through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept—oh, marvelous!—their
spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory. I was with the
Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they brought
out trophies like men at a country fair… I remember an Australian
colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his saddle… Next day,
though shells were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian boys set
up some painted scenery which they had found among the rubbish, and
chalked up the name of the “Coo-ee Theater.”

The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg line, over a wide stretch of
country which he laid waste behind him, making a desert of French villages
and orchards and parks, so that even the fruit-trees were cut down, and
the churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their lead. It was the
enemy’s first retreat on the western front, and that ferocious fighting of
the British troops had smashed the strongest defenses ever built in war,
and our raw recruits had broken the most famous regiments of the German
army, so in spite of all tragedy and all agony our men were not downcast,
but followed up their enemy with a sense of excitement because it seemed
so much like victory and the end of war.

When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where so many boys of the 56th
(London) Division had fallen on the 1st of July, I went through that evil
place by way of Fonquevillers (which we called “Funky Villas”), and,
stumbling over the shell-craters and broken trenches and dead bodies
between the dead masts of slashed and branchless trees, came into the open
country to our outpost line. I met there a friendly sergeant who surprised
me by referring in a casual way to a little old book of mine.

“This place,” he said, glancing at me, “is a strange Street of Adventure.”

It reminded me of another reference to that tale of mine when I was among
a crowd of London lads who had just been engaged in a bloody fight at a
place called The Hairpin.

A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft of a stinking
barn, sitting in a tub as naked as he was born.

“I just wanted to ask you,” he said, “whether Katharine married Frank?”

The sergeant at Gommecourt was anxious to show me his own Street of
Adventure.

“I belong to Toc-emmas,” he said (meaning trench—mortars), “and my
officers would be very pleased if you would have a look at their latest
stunt. We’ve got a 9.2 mortar in Pigeon Wood, away beyond the infantry.
It’s never been done before and we’re going to blow old Fritz out of Kite
Copse.”

I followed him into the blue, as it seemed to me, and we fell in with a
young officer also on his way to Pigeon Wood. He was in a merry mood, in
spite of harassing fire round about and the occasional howl of a 5.9. He
kept stopping to look at enormous holes in the ground and laughing at
something that seemed to tickle his sense of humor.

“See that?” he said. “That’s old Charlie Lowndes’s work.”

At another pit in upheaved earth he said: “That’s Charlie Lowndes again…
Old Charlie gave ’em hell. He’s a topping chap. You must meet him… My
God! look at that!”

He roared with laughter again, on the edge of an unusually large crater.

“Who is Charlie?” I asked. “Where can I find him?”

“Oh, we shall meet him in Pigeon Wood. He’s as pleased as Punch at having
got beyond the infantry. First time it has ever been done. Took a bit of
doing, too, with the largest size of Toc-emma.”

We entered Pigeon Wood after a long walk over wild chaos, and, guided by
the officer and sergeant, I dived down into a deep dugout just captured
from the Germans, who were two hundred yards away in Kite Copse.

“What cheer, Charlie!” shouted the young officer.

“Hullo, fellow-my-lad!… Come in. We’re getting gloriously binged on a
rare find of German brandy.”

“Topping and I’ve brought a visitor.”

Capt. Charles Lowndes—“dear old Charlie”—received us most
politely in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, with smoothly paneled
walls fitted up with shelves, and good deal furniture made to match.

“This is a nice little home in hell,” said Charles. “At any moment, of
course, we may be blown to bits, but meanwhile it is very comfy down here,
and what makes everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy and an
unlimited supply of German soda-water. Also to add to the gaiety of
indecent minds there is a complete outfit of ladies’ clothing in a
neighboring dugout. Funny fellows those German officers. Take a pew, won’t
you? and have a drink. Orderly!”

He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of German soda-water.

We drank to the confusion of the enemy, in his own brandy and soda-water,
out of his own mugs, sitting on his own chairs at his own table, and “dear
old Charlie,” who was a little etoile, as afterward I became, with a sense
of deep satisfaction (the noise of shells seemed more remote), discoursed
on war, which he hated, German psychology, trench-mortar barrages (they
had simply blown the Boche out of Gommecourt), and his particular fancy
stunt of stealing a march on the infantry, who, said Captain Lowndes, are
“laps behind.” Other officers crowded into the dugout. One of them said:
“You must come round to mine. It’s a blasted palace,” and I went round
later and he told me on the way that he had escaped so often from
shell-bursts that he thought the average of luck was up and he was bound
to get “done in” before long.

Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with noble generosity. There was much
laughter among us, and afterward we went upstairs and to the edge of the
wood, to which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the trench-mortar
section play the devil with Kite Copse, over the way. Late in the
afternoon I took my leave of a merry company in that far-flung outpost of
our line, and wished them luck. A few shells crashed through the wood as I
left, but I was disdainful of them after that admirable brandy. It was a
long walk back to “Funky Villas,” not without the interest of arithmetical
calculations about the odds of luck in harassing fire, but a thousand
yards or so from Pigeon Wood I looked back and saw that the enemy had
begun to “take notice.” Heavy shells were smashing through the trees there
ferociously. I hoped my friends were safe in their dugouts again….

And I thought of the laughter and gallant spirit of the young men, after
five months of the greatest battles in the history of the world. It seemed
to me wonderful.


XX

I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful
losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the “Butchers’
Shops,” the agony in men’s souls, the shell-shock cases, the welter and
bewilderment of battle, the shelling of our own troops, the lack of
communication between fighting units and the command, the filth and stench
of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields. But to complete the
picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happened
on the German side of the lines, as I was able to piece the tale together
from German prisoners with whom I talked, German letters which I found in
their abandoned dugouts, and documents which fell into the hands of our
staff—officers.

Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that they were beating
their enemy back, in spite of their own bloody losses. The Germans had not
even that source of comfort, for whatever it might be worth under barrage
fire. The mistakes of our generalship, the inefficiency of our staff-work,
were not greater than the blunderings of the German High Command, and
their problem was more difficult than ours because of the weakness of
their reserves, owing to enormous preoccupation on the Russian front. The
agony of their men was greater than ours.

To understand the German situation it must be remembered that from January
to May, 1916, the German command on the western front was concentrating
all its energy and available strength in man-power and gun—power
upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince had staked his reputation upon
that adventure, which he believed would end in the capture of the
strongest French fortress and the destruction of the French armies. He
demanded men and more men, until every unit that could be spared from
other fronts of the line had been thrown into that furnace. Divisions were
called in from other theaters of war, and increased the strength on the
western front to a total of about one hundred and thirty divisions.

But the months passed and Verdun still held out above piles of German
corpses on its slopes, and in June Germany looked east and saw a great
menace. The Russian offensive was becoming violent. German generals on the
Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help. “Send us more men,” they
said, and from the western front four divisions containing thirty-nine
battalions were sent to them.

They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another menace threatened the
enemy, and it was ours. The British armies were getting ready to strike.
In spite of Verdun, France still had men enough—-withdrawn from that
part of the line in which they had been relieved by the British—-to
co-operate in a new attack.

It was our offensive that the German command feared most, for they had no
exact knowledge of our strength or of the quality of our new troops. They
knew that our army had grown prodigiously since the assault on Loos,
nearly a year before.

They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and the coming of the
Australians, and the steady increase of recruiting in England, and month
by month they had heard the louder roar of our guns along the line, and
had seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming more terrible.
They knew of the steady, quiet concentration of batteries and divisions on
the west and south of the Ancre.

The German command expected a heavy blow and, prepared for it, but as yet
had no knowledge of the driving force behind it. What confidence they had
of being able to resist the British attack was based upon the wonderful
strength of the lines which they had been digging and fortifying since the
autumn of the first year of war—“impregnable positions,” they had
called them—the inexperience of our troops, their own immense
quantity of machine-guns, the courage and skill of their gunners, and
their profound belief in the superiority of German generalship.

In order to prevent espionage during the coming struggle, and to conceal
the movement of troops and guns, they ordered the civil populations to be
removed from villages close behind their positions, drew cordons of
military police across the country, picketed crossroads, and established a
network of counter espionage to prevent any leakage of information.

To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial fervor (not easily
aroused to fever pitch after the bloody losses before Verdun) Orders of
the Day were issued to the battalions counseling them to hold fast against
the hated English, who stood foremost in the way of peace (that was the
gist of a manifesto by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, which I found in a
dugout at Montauban), and promising them a speedy ending to the war.

Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at rail-heads and
dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection of
German organization may well have seemed flawless—before the attack
began.

When they began they found that in “heavies” and in expenditure of high
explosives they were outclassed.

They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British gunners,
whom they had scorned as “amateurs,” and by the daring of our airmen, who
flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, “spotting” for the guns,
and registering on batteries, communication trenches, crossroads,
rail-heads, and every vital point of organization in the German
war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south of the
Ancre.

Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on July
1st, German officers behind the firing—lines saw with anxiety that
all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary
trench—warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under a
deadly storm of shells.

Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line trenches
without many casualties, and sometimes could not be sent up at all.
Telephone wires were cut, and communications broken between the front and
headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report were killed on the
way to the lines. Troops moving forward from reserve areas came under
heavy fire and lost many men before arriving in the support trenches.

Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this in personal
safety, must have known before July 1st that his resources in men and
material would be strained to the uttermost by the British attack, but he
could take a broader view than men closer to the scene of battle, and
taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no need to doubt
that), the immense strength of their positions, dug and tunneled beyond
the power of high explosives, the number of his machine-guns, the
concentration of his artillery, and the rawness of the British troops, he
could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite of a heavy
price to pay there would be no break in his lines.

At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left their
trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt, Beaumont
Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward from Fricourt,
below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German troops—Bavarians
and Prussians—had been crouching in their dugouts, listening to the
ceaseless crashing of the British “drum-fire.” In places like Beaumont
Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels—some of them large enough to
hold a battalion and a half—were safe as long as they stayed there.
But to get in or out was death. Trenches disappeared into a sea of
shell-craters, and the men holding them—for some men had to stay on
duty there—were blown to fragments.

Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and
officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days of
July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept their
courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting shells, and wrote
pitiful letters to their people at home describing the horror of those
hours.

“We are quite shut off from the rest of the world,” wrote one of them.
“Nothing comes to us. No letters. The English keep such a barrage on our
approaches it is terrible. To-morrow evening it will be seven days since
this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot
to pieces.”

Thirst was one of their tortures. In many of the tunneled shelters there
was food enough, but the water could not be sent up. The German soldiers
were maddened by thirst. When rain fell many of them crawled out and drank
filthy water mixed with yellow shell-sulphur, and then were killed by high
explosives. Other men crept out, careless of death, but compelled to
drink. They crouched over the bodies of the men who lay above, or in, the
shell-holes, and lapped up the puddles and then crawled down again if they
were not hit.

When our infantry attacked at Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval
they were received by waves of machine-gun bullets fired by men who, in
spite of the ordeal of our seven days’ bombardment, came out into the open
now, at the moment of attack which they knew through their periscopes was
coming. They brought their guns above the shell-craters of their destroyed
trenches under our barrage and served them. They ran forward even into No
Man’s Land, and planted their machine-guns there, and swept down our men
as they charged. Over their heads the German gunners flung a frightful
barrage, plowing gaps in the ranks of our men.

On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, the British attack failed,
as I have told, but southward the “impregnable” lines were smashed by a
tide of British soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed by the waves. Our
men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to Montauban on the right,
captured it, and flung a loop round Mametz village.

For the German generals, receiving their reports with great difficulty
because runners were killed and telephones broken, the question was: “How
will these British troops fight in the open after their first assault? How
will our men stand between the first line and the second?”

As far as the German troops were concerned, there were no signs of
cowardice, or “low morale” as we called it more kindly, in those early
days of the struggle. They fought with a desperate courage, holding on to
positions in rearguard actions when our guns were slashing them and when
our men were getting near to them, making us pay a heavy price for every
little copse or gully or section of trench, and above all serving their
machine-guns at La Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt, round
Contalmaison, and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a wonderful
obstinacy, until they were killed or captured. But fresh waves of British
soldiers followed those who were checked or broken.

After the first week of battle the German General Staff had learned the
truth about the qualities of those British “New Armies” which had been
mocked and caricatured in German comic papers. They learned that these
“amateur soldiers” had the qualities of the finest troops in the world—not
only extreme valor, but skill and cunning, not only a great power of
endurance under the heaviest fire, but a spirit of attack which was
terrible in its effect. They were fierce bayonet fighters. Once having
gained a bit of earth or a ruined village, nothing would budge them unless
they could be blasted out by gun-fire. General Sixt von Arnim put down
some candid notes in his report to Prince Rupprecht.

“The English infantry shows great dash in attack, a factor to which
immense confidence in its overwhelming artillery greatly contributes. ..
It has shown great tenacity in defense. This was especially noticeable in
the case of small parties, which, when once established with machine-guns
in the corner of a wood or a group of houses, were very difficult to drive
out.”

The German losses were piling up. The agony of the German troops under our
shell-fire was reaching unnatural limits of torture. The early prisoners I
saw—Prussians and Bavarians of the 14th Reserve Corps—were
nerve-broken, and told frightful stories of the way in which their
regiments had been cut to pieces. The German generals had to fill up the
gaps, to put new barriers of men against the waves of British infantry.
They flung new troops into the line, called up hurriedly from reserve
depots.

Now, for the first time, their staff-work showed signs of disorder and
demoralization. When the Prussian Guards Reserves were brought up from
Valenciennes to counter—attack at Contalmaison they were sent on to
the battlefield without maps or local guides, and walked straight into our
barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces and many others suffered
frightful things. Some of the prisoners told me that they had lost
three-quarters of their number in casualties, and our troops advanced over
heaps of killed and wounded.

The 122d Bavarian Regiment in Contalmaison was among those which suffered
horribly. Owing to our ceaseless gun-fire, they could get no food-supplies
and no water. The dugouts were crowded, so that they had to take turns to
get into these shelters, and outside our shells were bursting over every
yard of ground.

“Those who went outside,” a prisoner told me, “were killed or wounded.
Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them their arms. But
we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew
that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last most of those who came
into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.”
That is one little picture in a great panorama of bloodshed.

The German command was not thinking much about the human suffering of its
troops. It was thinking of the next defensive line upon which they would
have to fall back if the pressure of the British offensive could be
maintained—the Longueval-Bazentin-Pozires line. It was getting
nervous. Owing to the enormous efforts made in the Verdun offensive, the
supplies of ammunition were not adequate to the enormous demand.

The German gunners were trying to compete with the British in continuity
of bombardments and the shells were running short. Guns were wearing out
under this incessant strain, and it was difficult to replace them. General
von Gallwitz received reports of “an alarmingly large number of bursts in
the bore, particularly in field-guns.”

General von Arnim complained that “reserve supplies of ammunition were
only available in very small quantities.” The German telephone system
proved “totally inadequate in consequence of the development which the
fighting took.” The German air service was surprisingly weak, and the
British airmen had established temporary mastery.

“The numerical superiority of the enemy’s airmen,” noted General von
Arnim, “and the fact that their machines were better made, became
disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the
enemy’s artillery fire and in bomb-dropping.”

On July 15th the British troops broke the German second line at Longueval
and the Bazentins, and inflicted great losses upon the enemy, who fought
with their usual courage until the British bayonets were among them.

A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the remnants of the
garrison—one hundred and fifty strong—after a desperate and
gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to the
last, surrendered with honor.

Then began the long battle of the woods—Devil’s Wood, High Wood,
Trones Wood—continued through August with most fierce and bloody
fighting, which ended in our favor and forced the enemy back, gradually
but steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which filled those
woods with shell-fire and the constant counter-attacks delivered by the
Germans.

“Counter-attack!” came the order from the German staff, and battalions of
men marched out obediently to certain death, sometimes with incredible
folly on the part of their commanding officers, who ordered these attacks
to be made without the slightest chance of success.

I saw an example of that at close range during a battle at Falfemont Farm,
near Guillemont. Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I watched them
from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at a great pace over
shell-craters and broken wire, with a young observing officer who had been
detailed to report back to the guns. (Old “Falstaff,” whose songs and
stories had filled the tent under the Red Cross with laughter, toiled
after us gallantly, but grunting and sweating under the sun like his
prototype, until we lost him in our hurry.) Presently a body of Germans
came out of a copse called Leuze Wood, on rising ground, faced round among
the thin, slashed trees of Falfemont, and advanced toward our men,
shoulder to shoulder, like a solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our
men get their machineguns into action, and the right side of the living
bar frittered away, and then the whole line fell into the scorched grass.
Another line followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came
forward, but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to
death. They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some
invisible scythe had mown them down.

In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured by
us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror.

“I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life,” wrote one of
them. “They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a night
attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the evening of the
18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters of blood, ‘It is all
over with you.’ A handful of half-mad, wretched creatures, worn out in
body and mind, were all that was left of a whole battalion. We were that
handful.”

The losses of many of the German battalions were staggering (yet not
greater than our own), and by the middle of August the morale of the
troops was severely shaken. The 117th Division by Pozires suffered very
heavily. The 11th Reserve and 157th Regiments each lost nearly
three-quarters of their effectives. The 9th Reserve Corps had also lost
heavily. The 9th Reserve Jager Battalion lost about three-quarters, the
84th Reserve and 86th Reserve over half. On August 10th the 16th Division
had six battalions in reserve.

By August 19th, owing to the large number of casualties, the greater part
of those reserves had been absorbed into the front and support trenches,
leaving as available reserves two exhausted battalions.

The weakness of the division and the absolute necessity of reinforcing it
led to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment (2d Guards Division) being
brought up to strengthen the right flank in the Leipzig salient. This
regiment had suffered casualties to the extent of over 50 percent west of
Pozires during the middle of July, and showed no eagerness to return to
the fight. These are but a few examples of what was happening along the
whole of the German front on the Somme.

It became apparent by the end of August that the enemy was in trouble to
find fresh troops to relieve his exhausted divisions, and that the wastage
was faster than the arrival of new men. It was noticeable that he left
divisions in the line until incapable of further effort rather than
relieving them earlier so that after resting they might again be brought
on to the battlefield. The only conclusion to be drawn from this was that
the enemy had not sufficient formations available to make the necessary
reliefs.

In July three of these exhausted divisions were sent to the east, their
place being taken by two new divisions, and in August three more exhausted
divisions were sent to Russia, eight new divisions coming to the Somme
front. The British and French offensive was drawing in all the German
reserves and draining them of their life’s blood.

“We entrained at Savigny,” wrote a man of one of these regiments, “and at
once knew our destination. It was our old blood-bath—the Somme.”

In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme was called the “Bath of
Blood” by the German troops who waded across its shell-craters and in the
ditches which were heaped with their dead. But what I have described is
only the beginning of the battle, and the bath was to be filled deeper in
the months that followed.


XXI

The name (that “blood-bath”) and the news of battle could not be hidden
from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror by
the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve regiments quartered
in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St. Quentin, Cambrai,
Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting to go to the front,
nor from the civil population of those towns, held for two years by their
enemy—these blond young men who lived in their houses, marched down
their streets, and made love to their women.

The news was brought down from the Somme front by Red Cross trains,
arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled men.
German military policemen formed cordons round the railway stations,
pushed back civilians who came to stare with somber eyes at these
blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances rumbled through
the streets toward the hospitals—long processions of them, with the
soles of men’s boots turned up over the stretchers on which they lay quiet
and stiff—the tale was told, though no word was spoken.

The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increasing anxiety, was
told clearly enough—as I read in captured letters—by the faces
of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with
gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irritable
and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this cursing and
bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous breakdown because he
had to meet his colonel in the morning.

“He is dying with fear and anxiety,” wrote one of his comrades.

Other men, not battalion commanders, were even more afraid of their
superior officers, upon whom this bad news from the Somme had an evil
effect.

The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the line and sent back
to rest. The men reported that their battalions had been cut to pieces.
Some of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They
described the frightful effect of the British artillery—the smashed
trenches, the shell-crater, the horror.

It was not good for the morale of men who were just going up there to take
their turn.

The man who was afraid of his colonel “sits all day long writing home,
with the picture of his wife and children before his eyes.” He was afraid
of other things.

Bavarian soldiers quarreled with Prussians, accused them (unjustly) of
shirking the Somme battlefields and leaving the Bavarians to go to the
blood-bath.

“All the Bavarian troops are being sent to the Somme (this much is
certain, you can see no Prussians there), and this in spite of the losses
the 1st Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Verdun! And how we did
suffer!… It appears that we are in for another turn—at least the
5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking about it for a long
time. To the devil with it! Every Bavarian regiment is being sent into it,
and it’s a swindle.”

It was in no cheerful mood that men went away to the Somme battlefields.
Those battalions of gray-clad men entrained without any of the old
enthusiasm with which they had gone to earlier battles. Their gloom was
noticed by the officers.

“Sing, you sheeps’ heads, sing!” they shouted.

They were compelled to sing, by order.

“In the afternoon,” wrote a man of the 18th Reserve Division, “we had to
go out again; we were to learn to sing. The greater part did not join in,
and the song went feebly. Then we had to march round in a circle and sing,
and that went no better. After that we had an hour off, and on the way
back to billets we were to sing ‘Deutschland uber Alles,’ but this broke
down completely. One never hears songs of the Fatherland any more.”

They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets of French
and Belgian towns to be entrained for the Somme front, for they had
forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings were
equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which they were
flung.

The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of terror,
ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds searching
obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony
could surpass these scenes along the way to the German lines round
Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesboeufs.

Many times, long before a German battalion had arrived near the trenches,
it was but a collection of nerve—broken men bemoaning losses already
suffered far behind the lines and filled with hideous apprehension. For
British long-range guns were hurling high explosives into distant
villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to rail-heads and
ammunition-dumps, while British airmen were on bombing flights over
railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down which the German
troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the valley between Irles and
Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and many other places on the lines
of route.

German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by train found themselves
under the fire of a single airplane which flew very low and dropped bombs.
They exploded with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the first carriage
behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A second bomb hit the
station buildings, and there was a clatter of broken glass, the rending of
wood, and the fall of bricks. All lights went out, and the German soldiers
groped about in the darkness amid the splinters of glass and the fallen
bricks, searching for the wounded by the sound of their groans. It was but
one scene along the way to that blood-bath through which they had to wade
to the trenches of the Somme.

Flights of British airplanes circled over the villages on the way. At
Grevilliers, in August, eleven 112-16 bombs fell in the market square, so
that the center of the village collapsed in a state of ruin, burying
soldiers billeted there. Every day the British airmen paid these visits,
meeting the Germans far up the roads on their way to the Somme, and
swooping over them like a flying death. Even on the march in open country
the German soldiers tramping silently along—not singing in spite of
orders—were bombed and shot at by these British aviators, who flew
down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bullets. The Germans
lost their nerve at such times, and scattered into the ditches, falling
over one another, struck and cursed by their Unteroffizieren, and leaving
their dead and wounded in the roadway.

As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with the
traffic of war, with artillery and transport wagons and horse ambulances,
and always thousands of gray men marching up to the lines, or back from
them, exhausted and broken after many days in the fires of hell up there.
Officers sat on their horses by the roadside, directing all the traffic
with the usual swearing and cursing, and rode alongside the transport
wagons and the troops, urging them forward at a quicker pace because of
stern orders received from headquarters demanding quicker movement. The
reserves, it seemed, were desperately wanted up in the lines. The English
were attacking again. .. God alone knew what was happening. Regiments had
lost their way. Wounded were pouring back. Officers had gone mad. Into the
midst of all this turmoil shells fell—shells from long-range guns.
Transport wagons were blown to bits. The bodies and fragments of artillery
horses lay all over the roads. Men lay dead or bleeding under the debris
of gun-wheels and broken bricks. Above all the noise of this confusion and
death in the night the hard, stern voices of German officers rang out, and
German discipline prevailed, and men marched on to greater perils.

They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march was
tracked all along the way by British gun-fire directed from airplanes and
captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured officer I met who had
detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison.

At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of twelve-inch shells.
Nearer to the line they came under the fire of eight-inch and six-inch
shells. Four-point-sevens (4.7’s) found them somewhere by Bazentin. At
Contalmaison they marched into a barrage, and here the officer was taken
prisoner. Of his battalion there were few men left.

It was so with the 3d Jager Battalion, ordered up hurriedly to make a
counter-attack near Flers. They suffered so heavily on the way to the
trenches that no attack could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all the
work to do.

The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every kilometer was
passed, until the stench of corruption was wafted on the wind, so that men
were sickened, and tried not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to get on
the lee side of its foulness. They walked now through places which had
once been villages, but were sinister ruins where death lay in wait for
German soldiers.

“It seems queer to me,” wrote one of them, “that whole villages close to
the front look as flattened as a child’s toy run over by a steam-roller.
Not one stone remains on another. The streets are one line of shell—holes.
Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will see with what feelings
we come into the line—into trenches where for months shells of all
caliber have rained… Flers is a scrap heap.”

Again and again men lost their way up to the lines. The reliefs could only
be made at night lest they should be discovered by British airmen and
British gunners, and even if these German soldiers had trench maps the
guidance was but little good when many trenches had been smashed in and
only shell-craters could be found.

“In the front line of Flers,” wrote one of these Germans, “the men were
only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of
putrefaction which filled the trench—almost unbearably. The corpses
lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the
trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth
lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered in a
trench recess, and no one seems to trouble about them. One sees horrible
pictures—here an arm, here a foot, here a head, sticking out of the
earth. And these are all German soldiers-heroes!

“Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine men were buried, of
whom three were dead. All along the trench men kept on getting buried.
What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts completely
blown in… The men are getting weaker. It is impossible to hold out any
longer. Losses can no longer be reckoned accurately. Without a doubt many
of our people are killed.”

That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome pictures, true as the
death they described, true to the pictures on our side of the line as on
their side, which went back to German homes during the battles of the
Somme. Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men sitting in
wet ditches, in “fox-holes,” as they called their dugouts, “up to my waist
in mud,” as one of them described, scribbled pitiful things which they
hoped might reach their people at home, as a voice from the dead. For they
had had little hope of escape from the blood—bath. “When you get
this I shall be a corpse,” wrote one of them, and one finds the same
foreboding in many of these documents.

Even the lucky ones who could get some cover from the incessant
bombardment by English guns began to lose their nerves after a day or two.
They were always in fear of British infantry sweeping upon them suddenly
behind the Trommelfeuer, rushing their dugouts with bombs and bayonets.
Sentries became “jumpy,” and signaled attacks when there were no attacks.
The gas—alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of a bell in the
trench, and men put on their heavy gas-masks and sat in them until they
were nearly stifled.

Here is a little picture of life in a German dugout near the British
lines, written by a man now dead:

“The telephone bell rings. ‘Are you there? Yes, here’s Nau’s battalion.’
‘Good. That is all.’ Then that ceases, and now the wire is in again
perhaps for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the night is
interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the other, each
more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through the bombs and
shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing upon us, of all
possible possibilities, such as a train broken down, and we are tortured
by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our nerves quiver. We clench
our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors of the night.”

Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy.

“Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out the
trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G-. We were to
have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a few
sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in every limb,
poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again.”

Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about them.

The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to all
this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the cold,
scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war. The agony
of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no war without
agony. But the psychology of masses of men had to be considered, because
it affects the efficiency of the machine.

The German General Staff on the western front was becoming seriously
alarmed by the declining morale of its infantry under the increasing
strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it. But
it could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying on the
battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to the
dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves by the
French and British troops.

Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiepval, and the
German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in November, the enemy’s command was
already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its fighting
strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for increasing the number
of its divisions. It was forced to withdraw troops badly needed on other
fronts, and the successive shocks of the British offensive reached as far
as Germany itself, so that the whole of its recruiting system had to be
revised to fill up the gaps torn out of the German ranks.


XXII

All through July and August the enemy’s troops fought with wonderful and
stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every heap of
bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches smashed by heavy
shell-fire, with obstinacy.

It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the
Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute, and
inspired sometimes with the courage of despair, which was hardly less
dangerous than the courage of hope.

The Australians who struggled to get the high ground at Pozieres did not
have an easy task. The enemy made many counter-attacks against them. All
the ground thereabouts was, as I have said, so smashed that the earth
became finely powdered, and it was the arena of bloody fighting at close
quarters which did not last a day or two, but many weeks. Mouquet Farm was
like the phoenix which rose again out of its ashes. In its tunneled ways
German soldiers hid and came out to fight our men in the rear long after
the site of the farm was in our hands.

But the German troops were fighting what they knew to be a losing battle.
They were fighting rear-guard actions, trying to gain time for the hasty
digging of ditches behind them, trying to sell their lives at the highest
price.

They lived not only under incessant gun-fire, gradually weakening their
nerve-power, working a physical as well as a moral change in them, but in
constant terror of British attacks.

They could never be sure of safety at any hour of the day or night, even
in their deepest dugouts. The British varied their times of attack. At
dawn, at noon, when the sun was reddening in the west, just before the
dusk, in pitch darkness, even, the steady, regular bombardment that had
never ceased all through the days and nights would concentrate into the
great tumult of sudden drum-fire, and presently waves of men—English
or Scottish or Irish, Australians or Canadians—would be sweeping on
to them and over them, rummaging down into the dugouts with bombs and
bayonets, gathering up prisoners, quick to kill if men were not quick to
surrender.

In this way Thiepval was encircled so that the garrison there—the
180th Regiment, who had held it for two years—knew that they were
doomed. In this way Guillemont and Ginchy fell, so that in the first place
hardly a man out of two thousand men escaped to tell the tale of horror in
German lines, and in the second place there was no long fight against the
Irish, who stormed it in a wild, fierce rush which even machine-guns could
not check. The German General Staff was getting flurried, grabbing at
battalions from other parts of the line, disorganizing its divisions under
the urgent need of flinging in men to stop this rot in the lines, ordering
counter-attacks which were without any chance of success, so that thin
waves of men came out into the open, as I saw them several times, to be
swept down by scythes of bullets which cut them clean to the earth. Before
September 15th they hoped that the British offensive was wearing itself
out. It seemed to them at least doubtful that after the struggle of two
and a half months the British troops could still have spirit and strength
enough to fling themselves against new lines.

But the machinery of their defense was crumbling. Many of their guns had
worn out, and could not be replaced quickly enough. Many batteries had
been knocked out in their emplacements along the line of Bazentin and
Longueval before the artillery was drawn back to Grand-court and a new
line of safety. Battalion commanders clamored for greater supplies of
hand-grenades, intrenching-tools, trench-mortars, signal rockets, and all
kinds of fighting material enormously in excess of all previous
requirements.

The difficulties of dealing with the wounded, who littered the
battlefields and choked the roads with the traffic of ambulances, became
increasingly severe, owing to the dearth of horses for transport and the
longer range of British guns which had been brought far forward.

The German General Staff studied its next lines of defense away through
Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesboeufs, Morval, and Combles, and they did not
look too good, but with luck and the courage of German soldiers, and the
exhaustion—surely those fellows were exhausted!—of British
troops—good enough.

On September 15th the German command had another shock when the whole line
of the British troops on the Somme front south of the Ancre rose out of
their trenches and swept over the German defenses in a tide.

Those defenses broke hopelessly, and the waves dashed through. Here and
there, as on the German left at Morval and Lesboeufs, the bulwarks stood
for a time, but the British pressed against them and round them. On the
German right, below the little river of the Ancre, Courcelette fell, and
Martinpuich, and at last, as I have written, High Wood, which the Germans
desired to hold at all costs, and had held against incessant attacks by
great concentration of artillery, was captured and left behind by the
London men. A new engine of war had come as a demoralizing influence among
German troops, spreading terror among them on the first day out of the
tanks. For the first time the Germans were outwitted in inventions of
destruction; they who had been foremost in all engines of death. It was
the moment of real panic in the German lines—a panic reaching back
from the troops to the High Command.

Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British made a new advance—all
this time the French were pressing forward, too, on our right by Roye—Combles
was evacuated without a fight and with a litter of dead in its streets;
Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs, and Morval were lost by the Germans; and a day
later Thiepval, the greatest fortress position next to Beaumont Hamel,
fell, with all its garrison taken prisoners.

They were black days in the German headquarters, where staff-officers
heard the news over their telephones and sent stern orders to artillery
commanders and divisional generals, and after dictating new instructions
that certain trench systems must be held at whatever price, heard that
already they were lost.

It was at this time that the morale of the German troops on the Somme
front showed most signs of breaking. In spite of all their courage, the
ordeal had been too hideous for them, and in spite of all their
discipline, the iron discipline of the German soldier, they were on the
edge of revolt. The intimate and undoubted facts of this break in the
morale of the enemy’s troops during this period reveal a pitiful picture
of human agony.

“We are now fighting on the Somme with the English,” wrote a man of the
17th Bavarian Regiment. “You can no longer call it war. It is mere murder.
We are at the focal-point of the present battle in Foureaux Wood (near
Guillemont). All my previous experiences in this war—the slaughter
at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at Hulluch—are the purest
child’s play compared with this massacre, and that is much too mild a
description. I hardly think they will bring us into the fight again, for
we are in a very bad way.”

“From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme,” wrote a man of the
10th Bavarians, “and my regiment had fifteen hundred casualties.”

A detailed picture of the German losses under our bombardment was given in
the diary of an officer captured in a trench near Flers, and dated
September 22d.

“The four days ending September 4th, spent in the trenches, were
characterized by a continual enemy bombardment that did not abate for a
single instant. The enemy had registered on our trenches with light, as
well as medium and heavy, batteries, notwithstanding that he had no direct
observation from his trenches, which lie on the other side of the summit.
His registering was done by his excellent air service, which renders
perfect reports of everything observed.

“During the first day, for instance, whenever the slightest movement was
visible in our trenches during the presence, as is usually the case, of
enemy aircraft flying as low as three and four hundred yards, a heavy
bombardment of the particular section took place. The very heavy losses
during the first day brought about the resolution to evacuate the trenches
during the daytime. Only a small garrison was left, the remainder
withdrawing to a part of the line on the left of the Martinpuich-Pozieres
road.

“The signal for a bombardment by ‘heavies’ was given by the English
airplanes. On the first day we tried to fire by platoons on the airplanes,
but a second airplane retaliated by dropping bombs and firing his
machine-gun at our troops. Our own airmen appeared only once for a short
time behind our lines.

“While many airplanes are observing from early morning till late at night,
our own hardly ever venture near. The opinion is that our trenches cannot
protect troops during a barrage of the shortest duration, owing to lack of
dugouts.

“The enemy understands how to prevent, with his terrible barrage, the
bringing up of building material, and even how to hinder the work itself.
The consequence is that our trenches are always ready for an assault on
his part. Our artillery, which does occasionally put a heavy barrage on
the enemy trenches at a great expense of ammunition, cannot cause similar
destruction to him. He can bring his building material up, can repair his
trenches as well as build new ones, can bring up rations and ammunition,
and remove the wounded.

“The continual barrage on our lines of communication makes it very
difficult for us to ration and relieve our troops, to supply water,
ammunition, and building material, to evacuate wounded, and causes heavy
losses. This and the lack of protection from artillery fire and the
weather, the lack of hot meals, the continual necessity of lying still in
the same place, the danger of being buried, the long time the wounded have
to remain in the trenches, and chiefly the terrible effect of the machine—and
heavy-artillery fire, controlled by an excellent air service, has a most
demoralizing effect on the troops.

“Only with the greatest difficulty could the men be persuaded to stay in
the trenches under those conditions.”

There were some who could not be persuaded to stay if they could see any
chance of deserting or malingering. For the first time on our front the
German officers could not trust the courage of their men, nor their
loyalty, nor their sense of discipline. All this horror of men blown to
bits over living men, of trenches heaped with dead and dying, was stronger
than courage, stronger than loyalty, stronger than discipline. A moral rot
was threatening to bring the German troops on the Somme front to disaster.

Large numbers of men reported sick and tried by every kind of trick to be
sent back to base hospitals.

In the 4th Bavarian Division desertions were frequent, and several times
whole bodies of men refused to go forward into the front line. The morale
of men in the 393d Regiment, taken at Courcelette, seemed to be very weak.
One of the prisoners declared that they gave themselves up without firing
a shot, because they could trust the English not to kill them.

The platoon commander had gone away, and the prisoner was ordered to alarm
the platoon in case of attack, but did not do so on purpose. They did not
shoot with rifles or machine-guns and did not throw bombs.

Many of the German officers were as demoralized as the men, shirking their
posts in the trenches, shamming sickness, and even leading the way to
surrender. Prisoners of the 351st Regiment, which lost thirteen hundred
men in fifteen days, told of officers who had refused to take their men up
to the front-line, and of whole companies who had declined to move when
ordered to do so. An officer of the 74th Landwehr Regiment is said by
prisoners to have told his men during our preliminary bombardment to
surrender as soon as we attacked.

A German regimental order says: “I must state with the greatest regret
that the regiment, during this change of position, had to take notice of
the sad fact that men of four of the companies, inspired by shameful
cowardice, left their companies on their own initiative and did not move
into line.”

Another order contains the same fact, and a warning of what punishment may
be meted out:

“Proofs are multiplying of men leaving the position without permission and
hiding at the rear. It is our duty… each at his post—to deal with
this fact with energy and success.”

Many Bavarians complained that their officers did not accompany them into
the trenches, but went down to the hospitals with imaginary diseases. In
any case there was a great deal of real sickness, mental and physical. The
ranks were depleted by men suffering from fever, pleurisy, jaundice, and
stomach complaints of all kinds, twisted up with rheumatism after lying in
waterlogged holes, lamed for life by bad cases of trench-foot, and
nerve-broken so that they could do nothing but weep.

The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest number. Many men went
raving mad. The shell-shock victims clawed at their mouths unceasingly, or
lay motionless like corpses with staring eyes, or trembled in every limb,
moaning miserably and afflicted with a great terror.

To the Germans (barely less to British troops) the Somme battlefields were
not only shambles, but a territory which the devil claimed as his own for
the torture of men’s brains and souls before they died in the furnace
fires. A spirit of revolt against all this crept into the minds of men who
retained their sanity—a revolt against the people who had ordained
this vast outrage against God and humanity.

Into German letters there crept bitter, burning words against “the
millionaires—who grow rich out of the war,” against the high people
who live in comfort behind the lines. Letters from home inflamed these
thoughts.

It was not good reading for men under shell-fire.

“It seems that you soldiers fight so that official stay-at-homes can treat
us as female criminals. Tell me, dear husband, are you a criminal when you
fight in the trenches, or why do people treat women and children here as
such?…

“For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones, the
bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very eyes… All
soldiers—friend and foe—ought to throw down their weapons and
go on strike, so that this war which enslaves the people more than ever
may cease.”

Thousands of letters, all in this strain, were reaching the German
soldiers on the Somme, and they did not strengthen the morale of men
already victims of terror and despair.

Behind the lines deserters were shot in batches. To those in front came
Orders of the Day warning them, exhorting them, commanding them to hold
fast.

“To the hesitating and faint-hearted in the regiment,” says one of these
Orders, “I would say the following:

“What the Englishman can do the German can do also. Or if, on the other
hand, the Englishman really is a better and superior being, he would be
quite justified in his aim as regards this war, viz., the extermination of
the German. There is a further point to be noted: this is the first time
we have been in the line on the Somme, and what is more, we are there at a
time when things are more calm. The English regiments opposing us have
been in the firing-line for the second, and in some cases even the third,
time. Heads up and play the man!”

It was easy to write such documents. It was more difficult to bring up
reserves of men and ammunition. The German command was harder pressed by
the end of September.

From July 1st to September 8th, according to trustworthy information,
fifty-three German divisions in all were engaged against the Allies on the
Somme battlefront. Out of these fourteen were still in the line on
September 8th.

Twenty-eight had been withdrawn, broken and exhausted, to quieter areas.
Eleven more had been withdrawn to rest-billets. Under the Allies’
artillery fire and infantry attacks the average life of a German division
as a unit fit for service on the Somme was nineteen days. More than two
new German divisions had to be brought into the front-line every week
since the end of June, to replace those smashed in the process of
resisting the Allied attack. In November it was reckoned by competent
observers in the field that well over one hundred and twenty German
divisions had been passed through the ordeal of the Somme, this number
including those which have appeared there more than once.


XXIII

By September 25th, when the British troops made another attack, the morale
of the German troops was reaching its lowest ebb. Except on their right,
at Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyond the great system of
protective dugouts which had given them a sense of safety before July 1st.
Their second and third lines of defense had been carried, and they were
existing in shell-craters and trenches hastily scraped up under ceaseless
artillery fire.

The horrors of the battlefield were piled up to heights of agony and
terror. Living men dwelt among the unburied dead, made their way to the
front-lines over heaps of corpses, breathed in the smell of human
corruption and had always in their ears the cries of the wounded they
could not rescue. They wrote these things in tragic letters—thousands
of them—which never reached their homes in Germany, but lay in their
captured ditches.

“The number of dead lying about is awful. One stumbles over them.”

“The stench of the dead lying round us is unbearable.”

“We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts.”

“It is hell let loose.”… “It is horrible.”… “We’ve lived in misery.”

“If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps there would be a
change. But they are never told.”

“The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad.”

Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets to the real
truth of war-the “glory” and the “splendor” of it preached by the German
philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening
tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. Every line
these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from
both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death and the same
hell.

Behind the lines the German General Staff, counting up the losses of
battalions and divisions who staggered out weakly, performed juggling
tricks with what reserves it could lay its hands on, and flung up stray
units to relieve the poor wretches in the trenches. Many of those reliefs
lost their way in going up, and came up late, already shattered by the
shell-fire through which they passed.

“Our position,” wrote a German infantry officer, “was, of course, quite
different from what we had been told. Our company alone relieved a whole
battalion. We had been told we were to relieve a company of fifty men
weakened by casualties.

“The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he was,
or whether any of our own troops were in front of us. We got no idea of
our support position until six o’clock this evening. The English are four
hundred yards away, by the windmill over the hill.”

One German soldier wrote that the British “seem to relieve their infantry
very quickly, while the German commands work on the principle of relieving
only in the direst need, and leaving the divisions in as long as
possible.”

Another wrote that:

“The leadership of the divisions really fell through. For the most part we
did not get orders, and the regiment had to manage as best it could. If
orders arrived they generally came too late or were dealt out ‘from the
green table’ without knowledge of the conditions in front, so that to
carry them out was impossible.”

All this was a sign of demoralization, not only among the troops who were
doing the fighting and the suffering, but among the organizing generals
behind, who were directing the operations. The continual hammer-strokes of
the British and French armies on the Somme battlefields strained the
German war-machine on the western front almost to breaking-point.

It seemed as though a real debacle might happen, and that they would be
forced to effect a general retreat—a withdrawal more or less at ease
or a retirement under pressure from the enemy….

But they had luck—astonishing luck. At the very time when the morale
of the German soldiers was lowest and when the strain on the High Command
was greatest the weather turned in their favor and gave them just the
breathing-space they desperately needed. Rain fell heavily in the middle
of October, autumn mists prevented airplane activity and artillery-work,
and the ground became a quagmire, so that the British troops found it
difficult to get up their supplies for a new advance.

The Germans were able in this respite to bring up new divisions, fresh and
strong enough to make heavy counter—attacks in the Stuff and
Schwaben and Regina trenches, and to hold the lines more securely for a
time, while great digging was done farther back at Bapaume and the next
line of defense. Successive weeks of bad weather and our own tragic losses
checked the impetus of the British and French driving power, and the
Germans were able to reorganize and reform.

As I have said, the shock of our offensive reached as far as Germany, and
caused a complete reorganization in the system of obtaining reserves of
man-power. The process of “combing out,” as we call it, was pursued with
astounding ruthlessness, and German mothers, already stricken with the
loss of their elder sons, raised cries of despair when the youngest born
were also seized—boys of eighteen belonging to the 1918 class.

The whole of the 1917 class had joined the depots in March and May of this
year, receiving a three months’ training before being transferred to the
field-recruit depots in June and July. About the middle of July the first
large drafts joined their units and made their appearance at the front,
and soon after the beginning of our offensive at least half this class was
in the front-line regiments. The massacre of the boys had begun.

Then older men, men beyond middle age, who correspond to the French
Territorial class, exempted from fighting service and kept on lines of
communication, were also called to the front, and whole garrisons of these
gray heads were removed from German towns to fill up the ranks.

“The view is held here,” wrote a German soldier of the Somme, “that the
Higher Command intends gradually to have more and more Landsturm
battalions (men of the oldest reserves) trained in trench warfare for a
few weeks, as we have been, according to the quality of the men, and thus
to secure by degrees a body of troops on which it can count in an
emergency.”

In the month of November the German High Command believed that the British
attacks were definitely at an end, “having broken down,” as they claimed,
“in mud and blood,” but another shock came to them when once more British
troops—the 51st Highland Division and the 63d Naval Division—left
their trenches, in fog and snow, and captured the strongest fortress
position on the enemy’s front, at Beaumont Hamel, bringing back over six
thousand prisoners. It was after that they began their retreat.

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting
lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write. But
they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or
in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the broken
heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that
frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men
were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted
fields, though they led to what we called “Victory.” More died there than
the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the world
died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict were
changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led up to
such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the same God,
loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it
had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and
their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the militarism which had
plunged him into that horror. The British soldier cursed the German as the
direct cause of all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines
and saw an evil there which was also his enemy—the evil of a secret
diplomacy which juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be
sprung upon them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of
rulers who hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but
because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of
men which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and
patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catch—word
of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles there were many
other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only confirmed greater
numbers of men in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its
“make-up” and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service to Christian
ethics was not good enough as an argument for this. Either the heart of
the world must be changed by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or
Christianity must be abandoned for a new creed which would give better
results between men and nations. There could be no reconciling of
bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words “Love one another.” Or if
bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in
preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put
hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the
fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion
of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for
gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity,
would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel
of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high
velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, when
German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its machine or by
the revolt of its people—not until then—there must be a new
order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in the fair
fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of many
peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and reaching out to one
another in a fellowship of common sense based on common interests, and
inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like rivalry of nations. So
thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier—poets who wrote
from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk
like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that
after the war—as many of them are now talking—and the revolt
of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced
this devil’s trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as
they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of
the Somme.


PART SEVEN. THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON


I

During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded in
my daily despatches, republished in book form (“The Struggle in Flanders”
and “The Way to Victory”), the narrative of that continuous conflict in
which the British forces on the western front were at death-grips with the
German monster where now one side and then the other heaved themselves
upon their adversary and struggled for the knock-out blow, until at last,
after staggering losses on both sides, the enemy was broken to bits in the
last combined attack by British, Belgian, French, and American armies.
There is no need for me to retell all that history in detail, and I am
glad to know that there is nothing I need alter in the record of events
which I wrote as they happened, because they have not been falsified by
any new evidence; and those detailed descriptions of mine stand true in
fact and in the emotion of the hours that passed, while masses of men were
slaughtered in the fields of Armageddon.

But now, looking back upon those last two years of the war as an
eye-witness of many tragic and heroic things, I see the frightful drama of
them as a whole and as one act was related to another, and as the plot
which seemed so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not under
the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, to the climax in which
empires crashed and exhausted nations looked round upon the ruin which
followed defeat and victory. I see also, as in one picture, the colossal
scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon of our civilization, which
at the time one reckoned only by each day’s success or failure, each day’s
slaughter on that side or the other. One may add up the whole sum
according to the bookkeeping of Fate, by double-entry, credit and debit,
profit and loss. One may set our attacks in the battles of Flanders
against the strength of the German defense, and say our losses of three to
one (as Ludendorff reckons them, and as many of us guessed) were in our
favor, because we could afford the difference of exchange and the enemy
could not put so many human counters into the pool for the final “kitty”
in this gamble with life and death. One may balance the German offensive
in March of ’18 with the weight that was piling up against them by the
entry of the Americans. One may also see now, very clearly, the paramount
importance of the human factor in this arithmetic of war, the morale of
men being of greater influence than generalship, though dependent on it,
the spirit of peoples being as vital to success as the mechanical
efficiency of the war-machine; and above all, one is now able to observe
how each side blundered on in a blind, desperate way, sacrificing masses
of human life without a clear vision of the consequences, until at last
one side blundered more than another and was lost. It will be impossible
to pretend in history that our High Command, or any other, foresaw the
thread of plot as it was unraveled to the end, and so arranged its plan
that events happened according to design. The events of March, 1918, were
not foreseen nor prevented by French or British. The ability of our
generals was not imaginative nor inventive, but limited to the piling up
of men and munitions, always more men and more munitions, against
positions of enormous strength and overcoming obstacles by sheer weight of
flesh and blood and high explosives. They were not cunning so far as I
could see, nor in the judgment of the men under their command, but simple
and straightforward gentlemen who said “once more unto the breach,” and
sent up new battering-rams by brigades and divisions. There was no
evidence that I could find of high directing brains choosing the weakest
spot in the enemy’s armor and piercing it with a sharp sword, or avoiding
a direct assault against the enemy’s most formidable positions and leaping
upon him from some unguarded way. Perhaps that was impossible in the
conditions of modern warfare and the limitations of the British front
until the arrival of the tanks, which, for a long time, were wasted in the
impassable bogs of Flanders, where their steel skeletons still lie rusting
as a proof of heroic efforts vainly used. Possible or not, and rare genius
alone could prove it one way or another, it appeared to the onlooker, as
well as to the soldier who carried out commands that our method of warfare
was to search the map for a place which was strongest in the enemy’s
lines, most difficult to attack, most powerfully defended, and then after
due advertisement, not to take an unfair advantage of the enemy, to launch
the assault. That had always been the English way and that was our way in
many battles of the great war, which were won (unless they were lost) by
the sheer valor of men who at great cost smashed their way through all
obstructions.

The Germans, on the whole, showed more original genius in military
science, varying their methods of attack and defense according to
circumstances, building trenches and dugouts which we never equaled;
inventing the concrete blockhouse or “pill-box” for a forward defensive
zone thinly held in advance of the main battle zone, in order to lessen
their slaughter under the weight of our gun-fire (it cost us dearly for a
time); scattering their men in organized shell-craters in order to
distract our barrage fire; using the “elastic system of defense” with
frightful success against Nivelle’s attack in the Champagne; creating the
system of assault of “infiltration” which broke the Italian lines at
Caporetto in 1917 and ours and the French in 1918. Against all that we may
set only our tanks, which in the end led the way to victory, but the
German High Command blundered atrociously in all the larger calculations
of war, so that they brought about the doom of their empire by a series of
acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were merely
blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the risk of
adding the greatest power in the world—in numbers of men and in
potential energy—to their list of enemies at a time when their own
man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted the
United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation, of course,
was great. The British naval blockade was causing severe suffering by food
shortage to the German people and denying them access to raw material
which they needed for the machinery of war.

The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would and did inflict
immense damage upon British and Allied shipping, and was a deadly menace
to England. But German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff in
his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time needed to break
her bonds by submarine warfare before America could send over great armies
to Europe. The German war lords were wrong again in underestimating the
defensive and offensive success of the British navy and mercantile marine
against submarine activities. By those miscalculations they lost the war
in the long run, and by other errors they made their loss more certain.

One mistake they made was their utter callousness regarding the psychology
and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They put a greater
strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by driving their
fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they doped their
people with false promises which were never fulfilled, they sowed the
seeds of revolt and despair which finally launched them into gulfs of
ruin. I have read nothing more horrible than the cold-blooded cruelty of
Ludendorff’s Memoirs, in which, without any attempt at self-excuse, he
reveals himself as using the lives of millions of men upon a gambling
chance of victory with the hazards weighted against him, as he admits.
Writing of January, 1917, he says: “A collapse on the part of Russia was
by no means to be contemplated and was, indeed, not reckoned upon by any
one… Failing the U-boat campaign we reckoned with the collapse of the
Quadruple Alliance during 1917.” Yet with that enormous risk visible
ahead, Ludendorff continued to play the grand jeu, the great game, and did
not advise any surrender of imperial ambitions in order to obtain a peace
for his people, and was furious with the Majority party in the Reichstag
for preparing a peace resolution. The collapse of Russia inspired him with
new hopes of victory in the west, and again he prepared to sacrifice
masses of men in the slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and this
time fatally. His time-table was out of gear. The U—boat war had
failed. American manhood was pouring into France, and German soldiers on
the Russian front had been infected with ideas most dangerous to German
discipline and the “will to win.” At the end, as at the beginning, the
German war lords failed to understand the psychology of human nature as
they had failed to understand the spirit of France, of Belgium, of Great
Britain, and of America. One of the most important admissions in history
is made by Ludendorff when he writes:

“Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the outbreak of the
revolution in Russia. On the one side the government was dominated by the
fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the feeling of
their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses of the people
and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was through a
combination of innumerable circumstances.”

So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing the
destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like
puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death
which has happened before in the folly of mankind.


II

During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full
ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying
waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but by
carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that it
was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is only that our
laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity above that of
primitive savages. “The decision to retreat,” he says, “was not reached
without a painful struggle. It implied a confession of weakness that was
bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to lower our own. But as it was
necessary for military reasons we had no choice. It had to be carried
out… The whole movement was a brilliant performance… The retirement
proved in a high degree remunerative.”

I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I went into beautiful
little towns like Peronne, where the houses were being gutted by
smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the enemy had just
gone out of them after touching off explosive charges which had made all
their cottages collapse like card houses, their roofs spread flat upon
their ruins, and their churches, after centuries of worship in them, fall
into chaotic heaps of masonry. I wandered through the ruins of old French
chateaux, once very stately in their terraced gardens, now a litter of
brickwork, broken statuary, and twisted iron—work above open vaults
where not even the dead had been left to lie in peace. I saw the little
old fruit-trees of French peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall
trees along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar our
passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the roadways, which had to be
bridged for our traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the enemy’s
retreat.

There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this
desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand as
before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon close
approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown out from
cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the ruins in a
silence that was broken only by the sound of one’s own voice or by a few
shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy was in the next village,
or the next but one, with a few field-guns and a rear-guard of
machine-gunners.

In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with objects
lying amid the litter, he had left “booby traps” to blow our men to bits
if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a
fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was
eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little knew
when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in another
week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and ashes. Only a
few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-tricks. Our
engineers found most of them before they were touched off, but one went
down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of imminent danger. All
through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an
evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It
exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts
and in the ruins they had made.

In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds
in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had been driven in
from the other villages burning around them, their own villages, whose
devastation they wept to see. I met these people who had lived under
German rule and talked with many of them—old women, wrinkled like
dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp
cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of French chateaux,
and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger that was not quite
starvation. It was from these people that I learned a good deal about the
psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the Somme. They told
me of the terror of these men at the increasing fury of our gun-fire, of
their desertion and revolt to escape the slaughter, and of their rage
against the “Great People” who used them for gun-fodder. Habitually many
of them talked of the war as the “Great Swindle.” These French civilians
hated the Germans in the mass with a cold, deadly hatred. They spoke with
shrill passion at the thought of German discipline, fines, punishments,
requisitions, which they had suffered in these years. The hope of
vengeance was like water to parched throats. Yet I noticed that nearly
every one of these people had something good to say about some German
soldier who had been billeted with them. “He was a good-natured fellow. He
chopped wood for me and gave the children his own bread. He wept when he
told me that the village was to be destroyed.” Even some of the German
officers had deplored this destruction. “The world will have a right to
call us barbarians,” said one of them in Ham. “But what can we do? We are
under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot. It is the cruelty of the
High Command. It is the cruelty of war.”

On the whole it seemed they had not misused the women. I heard no tales of
actual atrocity, though some of brutal passion. But many women shrugged
their shoulders when I questioned them about this and said: “They had no
need to use violence in their way of love—making. There were many
volunteers.”

They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as though touching money and
said, “You understand?”

I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of young
mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the liberated
districts. “All those are the children of German fathers,” said the old
Reverend Mother. “That is the worst tragedy of war. How will God punish
all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”

Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne,
where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a
babies’ creche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty
little ones whose chorus of “Guten Tag! Guten Tag!” was like the quacking
of ducks.

“After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them,” she said.

“And then?” I asked.

“And then many of them will die.”

She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of the
old Reverend Mother.

“How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the
guilty.”

Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs, which
deal with the strategy and machinery of war.


III

Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the German
retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He sent
forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and prepared
to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round Arras. This new
battle by British troops was dictated by French strategy rather than by
ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was organizing a great
offensive in the Champagne and desired the British army to strike first
and keep on striking in order to engage and exhaust German divisions until
he was ready to launch his own legions. The “secret” of his preparations
was known by every officer in the French army and by Hindenburg and his
staff, who prepared a new method of defense to meet it. The French
officers with whom I talked were supremely confident of success. “We shall
go through,” they said. “It is certain. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a
traitor who betrays his country by the poison of pessimism. Nivelle will
deal the death—blow.” So spoke an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins,
and a friend in the infantry of the line, over a cup of coffee in an
estaminet crammed with other French soldiers who were on their way to the
Champagne front.

Nivelle did not launch his offensive until April 16th, seven days after
the British had captured the heights of Vimy and gone far to the east of
Arras. Hindenburg was ready. He adopted his “elastic system of defense,”
which consisted in withdrawing the main body of his troops beyond the
range of the French barrage fire, leaving only a few outposts to
camouflage the withdrawal and be sacrificed for the sake of the others
(those German outposts must have disliked their martyrdom under orders,
and I doubt whether they, poor devils, were exhilarated by the thought of
their heroic service). He also withdrew the full power of his artillery
beyond the range of French counter-battery work and to such a distance
that when it was the German turn to fire the French infantry would be
beyond the effective protection of their own guns. They were to be allowed
an easy walk through to their death-trap. That is what happened. The
French infantry, advancing with masses of black troops in the Colonial
Corps in the front-line of assault, all exultant and inspired by a belief
in victory, swept through the forward zone of the German defenses,
astonished, and then disconcerted by the scarcity of Germans, until an
annihilating barrage fire dropped upon them and smashed their human waves.
From French officers and nurses I heard appalling tales of this tragedy.
The death—wail of the black troops froze the blood of Frenchmen with
horror. Their own losses were immense in a bloody shambles. I was told by
French officers that their losses on the first day of battle were 150,000
casualties, and these figures were generally believed. They were not so
bad as that, though terrible. Semi-official figures state that the
operations which lasted from April 16th to April 25th cost France 28,000
killed on the field of battle, 5,000 who died of wounds in hospital, 4,000
prisoners, and 80,000 wounded. General Nivelle’s offensive was called off,
and French officers who had said, “We shall break through… It is
certain,” now said: “We came up against a bec de gaz. As you English would
say, we ‘got it in the neck.’ It is a great misfortune.”

The battle of Arras, in which the British army was engaged, began on April
9th, an Easter Sunday, when there was a gale of sleet and snow. From
ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment when
the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the German lines
beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old Vauban’s
earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault
beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, through a
veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was immense and devastating, and the
first blow that fell upon the enemy was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was
captured from end to end by the Canadians on the left and the 51st
Division of Highlanders on the right. By the afternoon the entire living
German population, more than seven thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were
down below in the valley on our side of the lines, and on the ridge were
many of their dead as I saw them afterward horribly mangled by shell-fire
in the upheaved earth. The Highland Division, commanded by General Harper—“Uncle
Harper,” he was called—had done as well as the Canadians, though
they had less honor, and took as many prisoners. H.D. was their divisional
sign as I saw it stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war. “Well,
General,” said a Scottish sergeant, “they don’t call us Harper’s Duds any
more!”… On the right English county troops of the 12th Division, 3d
Division, and others, the 15th (Scottish) and the 36th (London) had broken
through, deeply and widely, capturing many men and guns after hard
fighting round machine-gun redoubts. That night masses of German prisoners
suffered terribly from a blizzard in the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by
Arras, where Julius Caesar had his camp for a year in other days of
history. They herded together with their bodies bent to the storm, each
man sheltering his fellow and giving a little human warmth. All night
through a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with his head
bowed on his breast. Every now and then he said: “It is cold! It is cold!”
And our men lay out in the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy
Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild
blizzard, with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about
them.

Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.

“The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the capital
fighting during this year.

“April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach twelve
thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six thousand yards
and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without more ado. It takes a
good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men and guns as well as
munitions that results from such a breach. It was the business of the
Supreme Command to provide reserves on a large scale. But in view of the
troops available, and of the war situation, it was simply not possible to
hold a second division in readiness behind each division that might,
perhaps, be about to drop out. A day like April 9th upset all
calculations. It was a matter of days before a new front could be formed
and consolidated. Even after the troops were ultimately in line the issue
of the crisis depended, as always in such cases, very materially upon
whether the enemy followed up his initial success with a fresh attack and
by fresh successes made it difficult for us to create a firm front. In
view of the weakening of the line that inevitably resulted, such successes
were only too easy to achieve.

“From April 10th onward the English attacked in the breach in great
strength, but after all not in the grand manner; they extended their
attack on both wings, especially to the southward as far as Bullecourt. On
April 11th they gained Monchy, while we during the night before the 12th
evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23d and 28th, and also May 3d, were
again days of heavy, pitched battle. In between there was some bitter
local fighting. The struggle continued, we delivered minor successful
counter-attacks, and on the other hand lost ground slightly at various
points.”

I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras in the days that
followed the first day. I remember the sinister beauty of the city itself,
when there was a surging traffic of men and guns through its ruined
streets in spite of long-range shells which came crashing into the houses.
Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked like medieval
men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras had their pipe-bands there
and they played in the Petite Place, and the skirl of the pipes shattered
against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels beneath Arras through
which our men advanced to the German lines, and I went along them when one
line of men was going into battle and another was coming back, wounded,
some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the fumes of gas in their lungs—their
steel hats clinking as they groped past one another. In vaults each side
of these passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of candles
stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, with gas-masks for
their pillows. Outside the Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under Louis
XIV, there were long queues of wounded men taking their turn to the
surgeons who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted roof. One
day there were three thousand of them, silent, patient, muddy,
blood-stained. Blind boys or men with smashed faces swathed in bloody rags
groped forward to the dark passage leading to the vault, led by comrades.
On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and stomach wounds. The way
past the station to the Arras-Cambrai road was a death-trap for our
transport and I saw the bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there.
Dead horses were thick on each side of an avenue of trees on the southern
side of the city, lying in their blood and bowels. The traffic policeman
on “point duty” on the Arras-Cambrai road had an impassive face under his
steel helmet, as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a
little at the scream of a shell which plunged through the gable of a
corner house above him. There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out
to Observatory Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending the
road beyond the last trench, through which our men had smashed their way.
They were busy with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells
plowing holes in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one
morning a number of them lay covered with blankets, as though asleep. They
were dead, but their comrades worked on grimly, with no joy of labor in
their sweat.

Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the valley of the Scarpe. I
saw it first when there was a white village there, hardly touched by fire,
and afterward when there was no village. I was in the village below
Observatory Ridge on the morning of April 11th when cavalry was massed on
that ground, waiting for orders to go into action. The headquarters of the
cavalry division was in a ditch covered by planks, and the cavalry
generals and their staffs sat huddled together with maps over their knees.
“I am afraid the general is busy for the moment,” said a young
staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked about the fields and said,
“It’s very unhealthy here.” I agreed with him. The bodies of many young
soldiers lay about. Five-point-nines (5.9’s) were coming over in a
haphazard way. It was no ground for cavalry. But some squadrons of the
10th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, and the Blues were ordered to take Monchy,
and rode up the hill in a flurry of snow and were seen by German gunners
and slashed by shrapnel. Most of their horses were killed in the village
or outside it, and the men suffered many casualties, including their
general—Bulkely Johnson—whose body I saw carried back on a
stretcher to the ruin of Thilloy, where crumps were bursting. It is an
astonishing thing that two withered old French women stayed in the village
all through the fighting. When our troops rode in these women came running
forward, frightened and crying “Camarades!” as though in fear of the
enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full of joy and held up
their scraggy old faces to be kissed by these troopers. Afterward Monchy
was filled with a fury of shell-fire and the troopers crawled out from the
ruins, leaving the village on the hill to be attacked and captured again
by our infantry of the 15th and 37th Divisions, who were also badly
hammered.

Heroic folly! The cavalry in reserve below Observatory Hill stood to their
horses, staring up at a German airplane which came overhead, careless of
our “Archies.” The eye of the German pilot must have widened at the sight
of that mass of men and horses. He carried back glad tidings to the guns.

One of the cavalry officers spoke to me.

“You look ill.”

“No, I’m all right. Only cold.”

The officer himself looked worn and haggard after a night in the open.

“Do you think the Germans will get their range as far as this? I’m nervous
about the men and the horses. We’ve been here for hours, and it seems no
good.”

I did not remind him that the airplane was undoubtedly the herald of
long-range shells. They came within a few minutes. Some men and horses
were killed. I was with a Highland officer and we took cover in a ditch
not more than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close, scattering
us with dirt.

“Let’s strike away from the road,” said Major Schiach. “They always tape
it out.”

We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get there… other men
had to stay.

The battles to the east of Arras that went before the capture of Monchy
and followed it were hard, nagging actions along the valley of the Scarpe,
which formed a glacis, where our men were terribly exposed to machine—gun
fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after week, for no object
apparent to our battalion officers and men, who did not know that they
were doing team-work for the French. The Londoners of the 56th Division
made a record advance through Neuville-Vitasse to Henin and Heninel, and
broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg system across the little Cojeul
River by Wancourt. There was a fatal attack in the dark on May 3d, when
East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn come, revealing the
enemy between them and our main line, and had to hack their way through if
they could, There were many who could not, and even divisional generals
were embittered by these needless losses and by the hard driving of their
men, saying fierce things about our High Command.

Their language was mild compared with that of some of our young officers.
I remember one I met near Henin. He was one of a group of three, all
gunner officers who were looking about for better gun positions not so
clearly visible to the enemy, who was in two little woods—the Bois
de Sart and Bois Vert—which stared down upon them like green eyes.
Some of their guns had been destroyed, many of their horses killed; some
of their men. A few minutes before our meeting a shell had crashed into a
bath close to their hut, where men were washing themselves. The explosion
filled the bath with blood and bits of flesh. The younger officer stared
at me under the tilt forward of his steel hat and said, “Hullo, Gibbs!” I
had played chess with him at Groom’s Cafe in Fleet Street in days before
the war. I went back to his hut and had tea with him, close to that bath,
hoping that we should not be cut up with the cake. There were noises
“off,” as they say in stage directions, which were enormously
disconcerting to one’s peace of mind, and not very far off. I had heard
before some hard words about our generalship and staff-work, but never
anything so passionate, so violent, as from that gunner officer. His view
of the business was summed up in the word “murder.” He raged against the
impossible orders sent down from headquarters, against the brutality with
which men were left in the line week after week, and against the
monstrous, abominable futility of all our so-called strategy. His nerves
were in rags, as I could see by the way in which his hand shook when he
lighted one cigarette after another. His spirit was in a flame of revolt
against the misery of his sleeplessness, filth, and imminent peril of
death. Every shell that burst near Henin sent a shudder through him. I
stayed an hour in his hut, and then went away toward Neuville-Vitasse with
harassing fire following along the way. I looked back many times to the
valley, and to the ridges where the enemy lived above it, invisible but
deadly. The sun was setting and there was a tawny glamour in the sky, and
a mystical beauty over the landscape despite the desert that war had made
there, leaving only white ruins and slaughtered trees where once there
were good villages with church spires rising out of sheltering woods. The
German gunners were doing their evening hate. Crumps were bursting heavily
again amid our gun positions.

Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme
unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the Hindenburg
line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and
Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the
ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places,
stayed there too long to dodge them always. They were inhabitants, not
visitors. The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it
after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge against
tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were held up on
the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian
Division lost three thousand men in an experimental attack directed by the
Fifth Army. They made their gun emplacements in the Noreuil Valley, the
valley of death as they called it, and Australian gunners made little slit
trenches and scuttled into them when the Germans ranged on their
batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and breech-blocks into the air.
Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line, stared straight down the
valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when I went walking there with
another war correspondent and an Australian officer who at a great pace
led us round about, amid 5.9’s, and debouched a little to see one of our
ammunition-dumps exploding like a Brock’s Benefit, and chattered brightly
under “woolly bears” which made a rending tumult above our heads. I think
he enjoyed his afternoon out from staff-work in the headquarters huts.
Afterward I was told that he was mad, but I think he was only brave. I
hated those hours, but put on the mask that royalty wears when it takes an
intelligent interest in factory-work.

The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty clearing stations day
by day, week by week, and I saw the crowded Butchers’ Shops of war, where
busy surgeons lopped at limbs and plugged men’s wounds.

Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the beginning and as at
the end, the spirits of British soldiers kept high unless their bodies
were laid low. Between battles they enjoyed their spells of rest behind
the lines. In that early summer of ’17 there was laughter in Arras, lots
of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of massed pipers and brass
bands, jolly comradeship in billets with paneled walls upon which perhaps
Robespierre’s shadow had fallen in the candle-light before the Revolution,
when he was the good young man of Arras.

As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I listened to the pipers
who marched round the table and stood behind the colonel’s chair and mine,
and played the martial music of Scotland, until something seemed to break
in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a French friend to the mess, and
as a guest of honor he sat next to the colonel, and the eight pipers
played behind his chair. He went pale, deadly white, and presently swooned
off his chair… and the Gordons thought it the finest tribute to their
pipes!

The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challenging cries, Gaelic
exhortations, with fine grace and passion, though they were tangled
sometimes in the maze… many of them fell in the fields outside or in the
bogs of Flanders.

On the western side of Arras there were field sports by London men, and
Surreys, Buffs, Sussex, Norfolks, Suffolks, and Devons. They played
cricket between their turns in the line, lived in the sunshine of the day,
and did not look forward to the morrow. At such times one found no trace
of war’s agony in their faces or their eyes nor in the quality of their
laughter.

My dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in an
old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored out to
the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street. The
contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was profound and
bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding walks through little
woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on his way to Agincourt;
tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils and all the
flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the springtime of France.
Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The tits twittered fearfully
at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain at one’s
heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and trudging over the
blasted fields of war, in the routine of our task, week by week, month by
month.

“This makes for madness,” said a friend of mine, a musician surprised to
find himself a soldier. “In the morning we see boys with their heads blown
off”—that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had passed
a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at them with a
silly smile and said, “They’ve copped it all right!” and went on to the
same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth when shells had
scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we felt a little
sick in the stomach—“and in the afternoon we walk through this
garden where the birds are singing… There is no sense in it. It’s just
midsummer madness!”

But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and died.
One of the best, as I knew him at his best.


IV

The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th
there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army
revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning of a
vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through
Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the
Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack
with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at the
Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully successful, due to the
explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the German positions, followed
by an attack “in depth,” divisions passing through each other, or
“leap-frogging,” as it was called, to the final objectives against an
enemy demoralized by the earthquake of the explosions.

For two years there had been fierce underground fighting at Hill 60 and
elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the Germans had listened to one
another’s workings, racing to strike through first to their enemies’
galleries and touch off their high-explosive charges. Our miners, aided by
the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnelers, had beaten the
enemy into sheer terror of their method of fighting and they had abandoned
it, believing that we had also. But we did not, as they found to their
cost.

I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 and elsewhere. I had
gone into the darkness of the tunnels, crouching low, striking my steel
hat with sharp, spine-jarring knocks against the low beams overhead,
coming into galleries where one could stand upright and walk at ease in
electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of great engines, the murmur of
men’s voices in dark crypts, seeing numbers of men sleeping on bunks in
the gloom of caverns close beneath the German lines, and listening through
a queer little instrument called a microphone, by which I heard the
scuffle of German feet in German galleries a thousand yards away, the
dropping of a pick or shovel, the knocking out of German pipes against
charcoal stoves. It was by that listening instrument, more perfect than
the enemy’s, that we had beaten him, and by the grim determination of
those underground men of ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in
which they worked, who coughed in the dampness of the caves, and who
packed high explosives at the shaft-heads—hundreds of tons of it—for
the moment when a button should be touched far away, and an electric
current would pass down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be blown
into dust.

That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the Wytschaete
and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, after a
quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired in a desultory
way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-shells, and before the
dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill. I saw the seventeen mines go
up, and earth and flame gush out of them as though the fires of hell had
risen. A terrible sight, as the work of men against their fellow—creatures…
It was the signal for seven hundred and fifty of our heavy guns and two
thousand of our field—guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of
bursting shells English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved forward in
dense waves. It was almost a “walk-over.” Only here and there groups of
Germans served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were
stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and
deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into
their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed
there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of
the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way
when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses and
a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had often
seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left
but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses were comparatively
small, though some brave men had died, including Major Willie Redmond,
whose death in Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in Ireland.

Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:

“The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering… The 7th of
June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy attack, the
price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the front
was again secure. The British army did not press its advantage; apparently
it only intended to improve its position for the launching of the great
Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed operations between the old Arras
battlefield and also between La Bassee and Lens. The object of the enemy
was to wear us down and distract our attention from Ypres.”

That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which I
saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the
enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of mining
villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a machine-gun
fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate struggles, covered in
clay, parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but indomitable. Lens was the
Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English troops of the First Army, and
it was only owing to other battles they were called upon to fight in
Flanders that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy to
escape.

All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its
ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was
getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had upset the
strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The failure and
abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were disastrous to
us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent up to relieve
exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the enemy when he
was weakening under assaults elsewhere, we attacked him when all was quiet
on the French front. The collapse of Russia was now happening and our
policy ought to have been to save men for the tremendous moment of 1918,
when we should need all our strength. So it seems certain now, though it
is easy to prophesy after the event.

I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport and saw secret
preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun
emplacements at Malo-les—Bains for long-range naval guns,
camouflaged in sand—dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting
in the dunes. Our artillery positions were mapped out.

“Three shots to one, sir,” said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King, “that’s
the stuff to give them!”

But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to the
strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st Division,
cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a
fury of fire.

At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new poison-gas—mustard
gas—which raised blisters and burned men’s bodies where the vapor
was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week or more,
if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw hundreds of these
cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station on the coast, and
there were thousands all along our front. At Oast Dunkerque, near
Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a burning sensation
about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward vomited at times, and
was scared by queer flutterings of the heart which at night seemed to have
but a feeble beat. It was enough to “put the wind up.” Our men dreaded the
new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in its approach. It was one of the
new plagues of war.


V

The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater
intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in this
war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle two
thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was strong
also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to enfilade our
lines of attack. The natural strength of his position along the ridges,
which were like a great bony hand outstretched through Flanders, with
streams or “beeks,” as they are called, flowing in the valleys which ran
between the fingers of that clawlike range, were strengthened by chains of
little concrete forts or “pill-boxes,” as our soldiers called them, so
arranged that they could defend one another by enfilade machine-gun fire.
These were held by garrisons of machine—gunners of proved
resolution, whose duty was to break up our waves of attack until, even if
successful in gaining ground, only small bodies of survivors would be in a
position to resist the counter-attacks launched by German divisions
farther back. The strength of the pill—boxes made of concrete two
inches thick resisted everything but the direct hit of heavy shells, and
they were not easy targets at long range. The garrisons within them fought
often with the utmost courage, even when surrounded, and again and again
this method of defense proved terribly effective against the desperate
heroic assaults of British infantry.

What our men had suffered in earlier battles was surpassed by what they
were now called upon to endure. All the agonies of war which I have
attempted to describe were piled up in those fields of Flanders. There was
nothing missing in the list of war’s abominations. A few days after the
battle began the rains began, and hardly ceased for four months. Night
after night the skies opened and let down steady torrents, which turned
all that country into one great bog of slime. Those little rivers or
“beeks,” which ran between the knobby fingers of the clawlike range of
ridges, were blown out of their channels and slopped over into broad
swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured upon the
enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up deep shell-craters
which intermingled and made pits which the rains and floods filled to the
brim. The only way of walking was by “duck-boards,” tracks laid down
across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by day, laid down again
under cover of darkness. Along a duckboard walk men must march in single
file, and if one of our men, heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled
on those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled at every few yards) and
fell off, he sank up to his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to
his neck, in mud and water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness
was about him, he could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless
otherwise. One of our divisions of Lancashire men—the 66th—took
eleven hours in making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground
on their way to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked.
Yet week after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every
division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on through
that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at
Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to
Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and
that Belgian coast attack was never launched.

Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six months’
horror were “exaggerated.” As a man who knows something of the value of
words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and went out
from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek Ridge and the
Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and Glencourse Wood,
and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his dead lay in the
swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks that had wallowed into
the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German gun-fire (thirty were knocked
out by direct hits on the first day of battle), and where our own guns
were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy shells, I say now that
nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the
abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or brush has yet
achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men
perished.

They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank up to
their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost unceasingly for
days and nights without sleep, and were living targets of shells which
burst about them. They were months of battle in which our men advanced
through slime into slime, under the slash of machine-gun bullets,
shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled to the bone,
plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back for walking
wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who could not walk.
The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to annihilation to
many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50 per cent of their
strength after a few days in action, before they were “relieved.” Those
were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no body of men could lose more
than 25 per cent of their fighting strength in an action without being
broken in spirit. Our men lost double that, and more than double, but kept
their courage, though in some cases they lost their hope.

The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of
pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the
Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,049. Those were
not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. One day’s fighting in
Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten thousand casualties,
and they were considered “light” by the Higher Command in relation to the
objects achieved.

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told me that in his opinion
the official communiques and the war correspondents’ articles gave only
one side of the picture of war and were too glowing in their optimism. (I
did not tell him that my articles were accused of being black in
pessimism, pervading gloom.) “We tell the public,” he said, “that an enemy
division has been ‘shattered.’ That is true. But so is mine. One of my
brigades has lost eighty-seven officers and two thousand men since the
spring.” He protested that there was not enough liaison between the
fighting-officers and the Higher Command, and could not blame them for
their hatred of “the Staff.”

The story of the two Irish divisions—the 36th Ulster; and 16th
(Nationalist)—in their fighting on August 16th is black in tragedy.
They were left in the line for sixteen days before the battle and were
shelled and gassed incessantly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every day
groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were bloody and the
living lay by the corpses of their comrades. Every day scores of wounded
crawled back through the bogs, if they had the strength to crawl. Before
the attack on August 16th the Ulster Division had lost nearly two thousand
men. Then they attacked and lost two thousand more, and over one hundred
officers. The 16th Division lost as many men before the attack and more
officers. The 8th Dublins had been annihilated in holding the line. On the
night before the battle hundreds of men were gassed. Then their comrades
attacked and lost over two thousand more, and one hundred and sixty—two
officers. All the ground below two knolls of earth called Hill 35 and Hill
37, which were defended by German pill-boxes called Pond Farm and
Gallipoli, Beck House and Borry Farm, became an Irish shambles. In spite
of their dreadful losses the survivors in the Irish battalion went forward
to the assault with desperate valor on the morning of August 16th,
surrounded the pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun
fire, and toward the end of the day small bodies of these men had gained a
footing on the objectives which they had been asked to capture, but were
then too weak to resist German counter-attacks. The 7th and 8th Royal
Irish Fusiliers had been almost exterminated in their efforts to dislodge
the enemy from Hill 37. They lost seventeen officers out of twenty-one,
and 64 per cent of their men. One company of four officers and one hundred
men, ordered to capture the concrete fort known as Borry Farm, at all
cost, lost four officers and seventy men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen
officers out of seventeen, and 66 per cent of their men.

The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their brigadiers called
it murder. They were violent in their denunciation of the Fifth Army for
having put their men into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy
shelling, and after the battle they complained that they were cast aside
like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort of the men who had
survived. No motor-lorries were sent to meet them and bring them down, but
they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the 16th
Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or baths,
straight into the line again, down south.

I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish
Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the
victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I
saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion.
Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were
arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of intelligence.
If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If
they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their own. General Gough,
commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward north and south of
St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was extremely courteous, of
most amiable character, with a high sense of duty. But in Flanders, if not
personally responsible for many tragic happenings, he was badly served by
some of his subordinates; and battalion officers and divisional staffs
raged against the whole of the Fifth Army organization, or lack of
organization, with an extreme passion of speech.

“You must be glad to leave Flanders,” I said to a group of officers
trekking toward the Cambrai salient.

One of them answered, violently: “God be thanked we are leaving the Fifth
Army area!”

In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid a tribute to the
Second Army, and especially to Sir John Harington, its chief of staff.
There was a thoroughness of method, a minute attention to detail, a care
for the comfort and spirit of the men throughout the Second Army staff
which did at least inspire the troops with the belief that whatever they
did in the fighting-lines had been prepared, and would be supported, with
every possible help that organization could provide. That belief was
founded not upon fine words spoken on parade, but by strenuous work, a
driving zeal, and the fine intelligence of a chief of staff whose brain
was like a high-power engine.

I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army headquarters at
Cassel, in a room where many of the great battles had been planned, when
Sir John Harington made the dramatic announcement that Sir Herbert Plumer,
and he, as General Plumer’s chief of staff, had been ordered to Italy—in
the middle of a battle—to report on the situation which had become
so grave there. He expressed his regret that he should have to leave
Flanders without completing all his plans, but was glad that Passchendaele
had been captured before his going.

In front of him was the map of the great range from Wytschaete to Staden,
and he laid his hand upon it and smiled and said: “I often used to think
how much of that range we should get this year. Now it is nearly all
ours.” He thanked the war correspondents for all their articles, which had
been very helpful to the army, and said how glad he had been to have our
co-operation.

“It was my ambition,” he said, speaking with some emotion, “to make
cordial relations between battalion officers and the staff, and to get rid
of that criticism (sometimes just) which has been directed against the
staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fighting soldiers that
the success of a battle depends greatly on efficient staff work, and has
inspired them with confidence in the preparations and organization behind
the lines.”

Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my memory
of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the Second Army
applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent, that after the
first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have been abandoned,
and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask masses of men to
attack in conditions where they had not a dog’s chance of victory, except
at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.

Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own strength in
man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than we could our
three, now that the United States had entered the war. Ludendorff has
described the German agony, and days of battle which he calls “terrific,”
inflicting “enormous loss” upon his armies and increasing his anxiety at
the “reduction of our fighting strength.”

“Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before
the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking out
but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime.
The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field before
Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable. And out of the
universe of slime the attacker wallowed forward, slowly but continually,
and in dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by the hail of our
projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our lonely men in the
shell-holes breathed again. Then the mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun
were beslimed. The struggle was man to man, and—only too often—it
was the mass that won.

“What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered during
the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a brazen
monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!

“The enemy’s losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we
occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its many
unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of them were
enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here a hero’s
death.

“And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted as
before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.

“October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of pitched
battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild bull against
the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base. He hurled
his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it against Poelcapelle,
Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and Zandvoorde; at very many points
he dented the line. It seemed as if he would charge down the wall; but,
although a slight tremor passed through its foundation, the wall held. The
impressions that I continued to receive were extremely grave. Tactically
everything had been done; the fore field was good. Our artillery practice
had materially improved. Behind nearly every fighting—division there
stood a second, as rear wave. In the third line, too, there were still
reserves. We knew that the wear and tear of the enemy’s forces was high.
But we also knew that the enemy was extraordinarily strong and, what was
equally important, possessed extraordinary will-power.”

That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of war
from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter of an
unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling
the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:

“If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day and
are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot and
bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these hours. On
the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen men was shot
to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood the maddening
bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot imagine the
frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few hours. After
crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades, and through the
smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of the raging
gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at any moment. You
do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means endless human endurance.
Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic
courage and faithfulness even unto death.”

To British and to Germans it meant the same.


VI

During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents
were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which
looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see
the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of
the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside
lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet was
in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of the town, and at
night my window was lighted by distant shell-fire, and I gazed out to a
sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets
rising high. The priests used to tap at my door when I came back from the
battlefields all muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously,
and an old padre used to plague me like that, saying:

“What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a
slaughter on both sides.”

“It is all your fault,” I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him. “You
do not pray enough.”

He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.

“Monsieur,” he whispered, “after eighty years I nearly lose my faith in
God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory? Alas!
perhaps we have sinned too much!”

One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to
boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and saw
the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of our
boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors of high
explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled corpses of
Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I saw dead horses
on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside their broken
wagons, and officers of ours with the look of doomed men, nerve-shaken,
soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses, where I took a nip of whisky with
them now and then before they attacked again; and groups of dazed
prisoners coming down the tracks through their own harrowing fire; and
always, always, streams of wounded by tens of thousands.

There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish Chateau,
which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores of times when
I passed it I saw it crowded with the “walking wounded,” who had trudged
down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, fourteen hours
sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer “cheerful” like the gay lads
who came lightly wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life, excited by
their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; boys in age, but
old and weary in the knowledge of war. The slime of the battlefields had
engulfed them. Their clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces
and hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel hats and rifles
were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those
corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat
motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were stark in
spirit still.

“Only the mud beat us,” they said. Man after man said that.

“We should have gone much farther except for the mud.”

Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded,
with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not
beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range
shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were
blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was
killed halfway through a sentence.

There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high
velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times in
passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according to
orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia because
of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond. Yet to the
soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and God’s heaven.

The little old town of Cassel on the hill—where once a Duke of York
marched up and then marched down again—was beyond shell-range,
though the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which
make holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There
is an inn there—the Hotel du Sauvage—which belongs now to
English history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and
Canadian. It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who
loved life could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a
table-cloth, with candle-light glinting in glasses, while outside the
windows the flickering fires of death told them how short might be their
tarrying in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the
blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was
Mademoiselle Suzanne, “a dainty rogue in porcelain,” with wonderfully
bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young officer
who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever so
long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long again.
Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to which
Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott, the
pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get that angle
of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often blusterous, very
dark, wet with heavy rain. The door opened, and other officers came in
with waterproofs sagging round their legs and top-boots muddy to the tags,
abashed because they made pools of water on polished boards.

“Pardon, Madame.”

“Ca ne fait rien, Monsieur.”

There was a klip-klop of horses’ hoofs in the yard. I thought of
D’Artagnan and the Musketeers who might have ridden into this very yard,
strode into this very room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Madame
played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all kinds, and any
accompaniment to any song. Our young officers sang. Some of them touched
the piano with a loving touch and said, “Ye gods, a piano again!” and
played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele was taken a
Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of all, after
other tunes, “The Long, Long Trail,” which his comrades sang.

“Come and play to us again,” said Madame.

“If I come back,” said the boy.

He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel.

From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On every moonlight
night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One could
see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie Capelle and
many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where peasants and children
were killed with them. For some strange reason Cassel itself was never
bombed.

“We are a nest of spies,” said some of the inhabitants, but others had
faith in a miraculous statue, and still others in Sir Herbert Plumer.

Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle Suzanne
behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an eyelid, though
officers in the room were startled.

“Vous n’avez pas peur, meme de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of
death?”) I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Je m’en fiche de la mort!” (“I don’t care a damn for death!”)

The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to
young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes
and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain hours of the day
without special permits from the A.P.M., who made trouble in granting
them. Three Scottish officers rode down into Cassel. They had ridden down
from hell-fire to sit at a table covered with a table-cloth, and drink tea
in a room again. They were refused permission, and their language to me
about the A.P.M. was unprintable. They desired his blood and bones. They
raised their hands to heaven to send down wrath upon all skunks dwelling
behind the lines in luxury and denying any kind of comfort to
fighting-men. They included the P.M. in their rage, and all staff-officers
from Cassel to Boulogne, and away back to Whitehall.

To cheer up the war correspondents’ mess when we assembled at night after
miserable days, and when in the darkness gusts of wind and rain clouted
the window-panes and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were falling in
near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their beds and soldiers
mangled in wayside burns, we had the company sometimes of an officer (a
black-eyed fellow) who told merry little tales of executions and prison
happenings at which he assisted in the course of his duty.

I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death for cowardice
(there were quite a number of lads like that). He was blindfolded by a
gas-mask fixed on the wrong way round, and pinioned, and tied to a post.
The firing—party lost their nerve and their shots were wild. The boy
was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and the A.P.M. had to shoot
him twice with his revolver before he died.

That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a gentleman who seemed
to like his job and to enjoy these reminiscences.

The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the
Canadians, and that year’s fighting on the western front cost us 800,000
casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he
reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for what was to
happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried. For the first time
the British army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of
deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch.
They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter,
such as that in Flanders.

Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the limitations
of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children, or mothers and
sisters, whom they desired to see again. They hated this war. Death had no
allurement for them, except now and then as an escape from intolerable
life under fire. They would have been superhuman if they had not revolted
in spirit, though still faithful to discipline, against the foul
conditions of warfare in the swamps, where, in spite of all they had, in
that four months or so of fighting, achieved the greatest effort of human
courage and endurance ever done by masses of men in obedience to command.


VII

At the end of those battles happened that surprising, audacious adventure
in the Cambrai salient organized by the Third Army under General Byng,
when on November 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke through the Hindenburg
line, and infantry streamed through the breach, captured hundreds of guns,
ten thousand prisoners, many villages and ridges, and gave a monstrous
shock to the German High Command.

The audacity of the adventure lay in the poverty of manpower with which it
was attempted and supported. The divisions engaged had all been through
the grinding mill of Flanders and were tired men. The artillery was made
up largely of those batteries which had been axle—deep in Flanders
mud. It was clearly understood by General Byng and Gen. Louis Vaughan, his
chief of staff, that Sir Douglas Haig could not afford to give them strong
reserves to exploit any success they might gain by surprise or to defend
the captured ground against certain counter-attacks. It was to be a
surprise assault by tanks and infantry, with the hope that the cavalry
corps might find its gap at last and sweep round Cambrai before the enemy
could recover and reorganize. With other correspondents I saw Gen. Louis
Vaughan, who expounded the scheme before it was launched. That charming
man, with his professional manner, sweetness of speech, gentleness of
voice and gesture, like an Oxford don analyzing the war correspondence of
Xenophon, made no secret of the economy with which the operation would
have to be made.

“We must cut our coat according to our cloth,” he said.

The whole idea was to seize only as much ground as the initial success
could gain, and not to press if resistance became strong. It was a gamble,
with a chance of luck. The cavalry might do nothing, or score a big
triumph. All depended on the surprise of the tanks. If they were
discovered before the assault the whole adventure would fail at the start.

They had been brought up secretly by night, four hundred of them, with
supply-tanks for ammunition and petrol lying hidden in woods by day. So
the artillery and infantry and cavalry had been concentrated also. The
enemy believed himself secure in his Hindenburg line, which had been
constructed behind broad hedges of barbed wire with such wide ditches that
no tank could cross.

How, then, would tanks cross? Ah, that was a little trick which would
surprise the Germans mightily. Each tank would advance through the early
morning mists with a bridge on its nose. The bridge was really a big
“fascine,” or bundle of fagots about a yard and a half in diameter, and
controlled by a lever and chain from the interior of the tank. Having
plowed through the barbed wire and reached the edge of the Hindenburg
trench, the tank would drop the fascine into the center of the ditch,
stretch out its long body, reach the bundle of fagots, find support on it,
and use it as a stepping-stone to the other side. Very simple in idea and
effect!

So it happened, and the mists favored us, as I saw on the morning of the
attack at a little place called Beaumont, near Villers Pluich. The enemy
was completely surprised, caught at breakfast in his dugouts, rounded up
in batches. The tanks went away through the breach they had made, with the
infantry swarming round them, and captured Havrincourt, Hermies,
Ribecourt, Gouzeaucourt, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and a wide stretch of
country forming a cup or amphitheater below a series of low ridges south
of Bourlon Wood, where the ground rose again.

It was a spectacular battle, such as we had never seen before, and during
the following days, when our troops worked up to Bourlon Wood and through
the intervening villages of Anneux, Graincourt, Containg, and Fontaine
Notre Dame, I saw tanks going into action and cruising about like
landships, with cavalry patrols riding over open ground, airplanes flying
low over German territory, and masses of infantry beyond all trench-lines,
and streams of liberated civilians trudging through the lines from
Marcoing. The enemy was demoralized the first day and made only slight
resistance. The chief losses of the tanks were due to a German major of
artillery who served his own guns and knocked out a baker’s dozen of these
monsters as they crawled over the Flesquieres Ridge. I saw them lying
there with the blood and bones of their pilots and crews within their
steel walls. It was a Highland soldier who checked the German major.

“You’re a brave man,” he said, “but you’ve got to dee,” and ran him
through the stomach with his bayonet. It was this check at the Flesquieres
Ridge, followed by the breaking of a bridge at Masnieres under the weight
of a tank and the holding of a trench-line called the Rumilly switch by a
battalion of Germans who raced to it from Cambrai before our men could
capture it, which thwarted the plans of the cavalry. Our cavalry generals
were in consultation at their headquarters, too far back to take immediate
advantage of the situation. They waited for the capture of the Rumilly
switch, and held up masses of cavalry whom I saw riding through the
village of Ribecourt, with excitement and exaltation, because they thought
that at last their chance had come. Finally orders were given to cancel
all previous plans to advance. Only one squadron, belonging to the
Canadian Fort Garry Horse in General Seely’s division, failed to receive
the order (their colonel rode after them, but his horse slipped and fell
before he caught them up), and it was their day of heroic folly. They rode
fast and made their way through a gap in the wire cut by the troopers, and
came under rifle and machine-gun fire, which wounded the captain and
several men.

The command was carried on by a young lieutenant, who rode with his men
until they reached the camouflaged road southeast of the village of
Rumilly, where they went through in sections under the fire of the enemy
hidden in the banks. Here they came up against a battery of field-guns,
one of which fired point-blank at them. They charged the battery, putting
the guns out of action and killing some of the gunners. Those who were not
destroyed surrendered, and the prisoners were left to be sent back by the
supports. The squadron then dealt with the German infantry in the
neighborhood. Some of them fled, while some were killed or surrendered.
All these operations were done at a gallop under fire from flanking
blockhouses. The squadron then slowed down to a walk and took up a
position in a sunken road one kilometer east of Rumilly. Darkness crept
down upon them, and gradually they were surrounded by German infantry with
machine-guns, so that they were in great danger of capture or destruction.
Only five of their horses remained unhit, and the lieutenant in command
decided that they must endeavor to cut their way through and get back. The
horses were stampeded in the direction of the enemy in order to draw the
machine-gun fire, and while these riderless horses galloped wildly out of
one end of the sunken road, the officer and his surviving troopers escaped
from the other end. On the way back they encountered four bodies of the
enemy, whom they attacked and routed. On one occasion their escape was due
to the cunning of another young lieutenant, who spoke German and held
conversations with the enemy in the darkness, deceiving them as to the
identity of his force until they were able to take the German troops by
surprise and hack a way through. This lieutenant was hit in the face by a
bullet, and when he arrived back in Masnieres with his men in advance of
the rear-guard he was only able to make his report before falling in a
state of collapse.

Other small bodies of cavalry—among them the 8th Dragoons and 5th
Hussars—had wild, heroic adventures in the Cambrai salient, where
they rode under blasts of machine-gun fire and rounded up prisoners in the
ruined villages of Noyelles and Fontaine Notre Dame. Some of them went
into the Folie Wood nearby and met seven German officers strolling about
the glades, as though no war was on. They took them prisoners, but had to
release some of them later, as they could not be bothered with them. Later
they came across six ammunition—wagons and destroyed them. In the
heart of the wood was one of the German divisional headquarters, and one
of our cavalry officers dismounted and approached the cottage stealthily,
and looked through the windows. Inside was a party of German officers
seated at a table, with beer mugs in front of them, apparently unconscious
of any danger near them. Our officer fired his revolver through the
windows and then, like a schoolboy who has thrown a stone, ran away as
hard as he could and joined his troop. Youthful folly of gallant hearts!

After the enemy’s surprise his resistance stiffened and he held the
village of Fontaine Notre Dame, and Bourlon Wood, on the hill above, with
strong rear-guards. Very quickly, too, he brought new batteries into
action, and things became unpleasant in fields and villages where our men,
as I saw them on those days, hunted around for souvenirs in German dugouts
and found field-glasses, automatic pistols, and other good booty.

It seemed to me that the plan as outlined by Gen. Louis Vaughan, not to
exploit success farther than justified by the initial surprise, was
abandoned for a time. A brigade of Guards was put in to attack Fontaine
Notre Dame, and suffered heavily from machine-gun fire before taking it.
The 62d (Yorkshire) Division lost many good men in Bourlon Village and
Bourlon Wood, into which the enemy poured gas-shells and high explosives.

Then on November 30th the Germans, under the direction of General von
Marwitz, came back upon us with a tiger’s pounce, in a surprise attack
which we ought to have anticipated. I happened to be on the way to
Gouzeaucourt early that morning, and, going through the village of Fins,
next to it, I saw men straggling back in some disorder, and gun-teams
wedged in a dense traffic moving in what seemed to me the wrong direction.

“I don’t know what to do,” said a young gunner officer. “My battery has
been captured and I can’t get into touch with the brigade.”

“What has happened?” I asked.

He looked at me in surprise.

“Don’t you know? The enemy has broken through.”

“Broken through where?”

The gunner officer pointed down the road.

“At the present moment he’s in Gouzeaucourt.”

I went northward, and saw that places like Hermies and Havrincourt, which
had been peaceful spots for a few days, were under heavy fire. Bourlon
Wood beyond was a fiery furnace. Hell had broken out again and things
looked bad. There was a general packing up of dumps and field hospitals
and heavy batteries. In Gouzeaucourt and other places our divisional and
brigade headquarters were caught napping. Officers were in their pajamas
or in their baths when they heard the snap of machine-gun bullets. I saw
the Guards go forward to Gouzeaucourt for a counter-attack. They came
along munching apples and whistling, as though on peace maneuvers. Next
day, after they had gained back Gouzeaucourt, I saw many of them wounded,
lying under tarpaulins, all dirty and bloody.

The Germans had adopted our own way of attack. They had assembled masses
of troops secretly, moving them forward by night under the cover of woods,
so that our air scouts saw no movement by day. Our line was weakly held
along the front—the 55th Division, thinned out by losses, was
holding a line of thirteen thousand yards, three times as much as any
troops can hold, in safety—and the German storm-troops, after a
short, terrific bombardment, broke through to a distance of five miles.

Our tired men, who had gained the first victory, fought heroic rear-guard
actions back from Masnieres and Marcoing, and back from Bourlon Wood on
the northern side of the salient. They made the enemy pay a high price in
blood for the success of his counter-attack, but we lost many thousands of
brave fellows, and the joy bells which had rung in London on November 20th
became sad and ironical music in the hearts of our disappointed people.

So ended 1917, our black year; and in the spring of 1918, after all the
losses of that year, our armies on the western front were threatened by
the greatest menace that had ever drawn near to them, and the British
Empire was in jeopardy.


VIII

In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened, and
Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and many
staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent to Italy
with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas Haig’s command.
At that very time, also, after the bloody losses in Flanders, the French
government and General Headquarters brought severe pressure upon the
British War Council to take over a greater length of line in France, in
order to release some of the older classes of the French army who had been
under arms since 1914. We yielded to that pressure and Sir Douglas Haig
extended his lines north and south of St.-Quentin, where the Fifth Army,
under General Gough, was intrusted with the defense.

I went over all that new ground of ours, out from Noyon to Chaulny and
Barisis and the floods of the Oise by La Fere; out from Ham to Holmon
Forest and Francilly and the Epine de Dullon, and the Fort de Liez by
St.-Quentin; and from Peronne to Hargicourt and Jeancourt and La Verguier.
It was a pleasant country, with living trees and green fields not
annihilated by shell-fire, though with the naked eye I could see the
scarred walls of St.-Quentin cathedral, and the villages near the
frontlines had been damaged in the usual way. It was dead quiet there for
miles, except for short bursts of harassing fire now and then, and odd
shells here and there, and bursts of black shrapnel in the blue sky of
mild days.

“Paradise, after Flanders!” said our men, but I knew that there was a
great movement of troops westward from Russia, and wondered how long this
paradise would last.

I looked about for trench systems, support lines, and did not see them,
and wondered what our defense would be if the enemy attacked here in great
strength. Our army seemed wonderfully thinned out. There were few men to
be seen in our outpost line or in reserve. It was all strangely quiet.
Alarmingly quiet.

Yet, pleasant for the time being. I had a brother commanding a battery
along the railway line south of St.-Quentin. I went to see him, and we had
a picnic meal on a little hill staring straight toward St.-Quentin
cathedral. One of his junior officers set the gramophone going. The
colonel of the artillery brigade came jogging up on his horse and called
out, “Fine morning, and a pretty spot!” The infantry divisions were
cheerful. “Like a rest-cure!” they said. They had sports almost within
sight of the German lines. I saw a boxing-match in an Irish battalion, and
while two fellows hammered each other I glanced away from them to winding,
wavy lines of chalk on the opposite hillsides, and wondered what was
happening behind them in that quietude.

“What do you think about this German offensive?” I asked the general of a
London division (General Gorringe of the 47th) standing on a wagon and
watching a tug-of—war. From that place also we could see the German
positions.

“G.H.Q. has got the wind-up,” he said. “It is all bluff.”

General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Division, was of the same
opinion, and took some pains to explain the folly of thinking the Germans
would attack. Yet day after day, week after week, the Intelligence reports
were full of evidence of immense movements of troops westward, of
intensive training of German divisions in back areas, of new hospitals,
ammunition-dumps, airplanes, battery positions. There was overwhelming
evidence as to the enemy’s intentions. Intelligence officers took me on
one side and said: “England ought to know. The people ought to be
prepared. All this is very serious. We shall be ‘up against it.’” G.H.Q.
was convinced. On February 23d the war correspondents published articles
summarizing the evidence, pointing out the gravity of the menace, and they
were passed by the censorship. But England was not scared. Dances were in
full swing in London. Little ladies laughed as usual, light-hearted.
Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, though the hospitals
were crowded with blind and maimed and shell-shocked.

“I am skeptical of the German offensive” said Mr. Bonar Law.

Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody ever did believe us, though
some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts of war
go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and
losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within our liberty of
the pen.

They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as
indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of the
world—our world, as we knew it—with our liberties and power.
For weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word
about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One
laughed, but the specter echoed one’s laughter and said, “Wait!” The mild
sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one’s spirit in the woods
above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a little, while
overhead our airplanes dodged German “Archies.” But the specter chilled
one’s blood at the reminder of vast masses of field-gray men drawing
nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored to many parts of
the front, and my companion sometimes was a little Frenchman who had lost
a leg in the war—D’Artagnan with a wooden peg, most valiant, most
gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard. At the journey’s end
one day he sang old French chansons, in an English mess, within gunshot of
the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed at the German positions,
and made sketches while he hummed little tunes and said between them, “Ah,
les sacres Boches!.. . If only I could fight again!”

I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little
restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with
their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe, O
Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night
there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were
brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square to
show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pass to stay
for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of the Grande
Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer wore his steel helmet. The
girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair. We did not let
her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I brought my brother
to the place from his battery near St. Quentin. We dined well, slept well.

“Noyon is a good spot,” he said. “I shall come here again when you give me
a lift.”

A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open
sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior
officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers and
men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were falling
into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the Romanesque
cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what happened to the
little family in the old hotel.

So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and
Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.

Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the
Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward redoubts
beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some words
which froze my blood.

“We may have to give ground,” he said, “if the enemy attacks in strength.
We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will not matter
very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our real
line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a tragedy if we hold
that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will, of course, be
serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be tragic if we lose
Amiens, and we must not do that.”

“The crossings of the Somme… Amiens!”

Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had
suggested terrible possibilities.

All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with
explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and measure
of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked by
one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back fighting stubborn
rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy to a dead halt outside
Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where afterward in
a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria broke
through the Portuguese between Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings
held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused us
to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been gained at such great
cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres. In this book I need not narrate
all this history again.

They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with
masterly skill, according to the new method of “infiltration” which had
been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of ’17 at
Caporetto.

It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-gunners
constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked
frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking fire
on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking advantage
of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to meteorological
forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between our forward
redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held out for a long
time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner battle zone. Through
the gaps they made they came in masses at a great pace with immense
machine—gun strength and light artillery. On the Third Army front
where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt between the 6th and
51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was upset for a time like a
watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch with
fighting units. Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not
received. After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was
choking the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather
than for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the
confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were
demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been
longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, there was no panic, and a
most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without sleep;
fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few
of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were
unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they had made a year
before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened
and they halted, in exhaustion.

I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and Hum;
then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at last on a
dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic fighting-ground,
where once again after many battles the enemy was in Courcelette and High
Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to the right through
Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That meant the loss of
all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a chill in one’s heart.
But what I marveled at always was the absence of panic, the fatalistic
acceptance of the turn of fortune’s wheel by many officers and men, and
the refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give way to despair in those
days of tragedy and crisis.

The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The
menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul and
captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to relieve
some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All through this country
between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and Bailleul,
thousands of civilians had been living on the edge of the battlefields,
believing themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line had slipped and
they were caught by German shell-fire and German guns, and after nearly
four years of war had to abandon their homes like the first fugitives. I
saw old women coming down lanes where 5.9’s were bursting and where our
gunners were getting into action. I saw young mothers packing their babies
and their bundles into perambulators while shells came hurtling over the
thatched roofs of their cottages. I stood on the Mont des Chats looking
down upon a wide sweep of battle, and saw many little farmsteads on fire
and Bailleul one torch of flame and smoke.

There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats which had been in the
midst of a cavalry battle in October of 1914, when Prince Max of Hesse,
the Kaiser’s cousin, was mortally wounded by a shot from one of our
troopers. He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who watched over
him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family and friends. Then his
body was borne down the hill at night and buried secretly by a parish
priest; and when the Kaiser wrote to the Pope, desiring to know the
whereabouts of his cousin’s grave, the priest to whom his message was
conveyed said, “Tell the Kaiser he shall know when the German armies have
departed from Belgium and when reparation has been made for all their evil
deeds.” It was the prior who told me that story and who described to me
how the British cavalry had forged their way up the hill. He showed me the
scars of bullets on the walls and the windows from which the monks looked
out upon the battle.

“All that is a wonderful memory,” said the prior. “Thanks to the English,
we are safe and beyond the range of German shells.”

I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to see the sweep of
battle beyond. The monastery was no longer beyond the range of German
shells. An eight—inch shell had just smashed into the prior’s
parlor. Others had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks had
fled by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the captain of a
sinking ship. His corridors resounded to the tramp of army boots. The
Ulster gunners had made their headquarters in the refectory, but did not
stay there long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin.

From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide of war our soldiers
helped the people to escape in lorries or on gun-wagons. They did not
weep, nor say much, but were wonderfully brave. I remember a little family
in Robecq whom I packed into my car when shells began to fall among the
houses. A pretty girl, with a little invalid brother in her arms, and a
mother by her side, pointed the way to a cottage in a wood some miles
away. She was gay and smiling when she said, “Au revoir et merci!” A few
days later the cottage and the wood were behind the German lines.

The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st Highlanders (who had
been all through the Somme retreat), the 25th Division of Cheshires,
Wiltshires and Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish Division, and
others, who fought “with their backs to the wall,” as Sir Douglas Haig
demanded of them, without reliefs, until they were worn thin, was heroic
and tragic in its ordeal, until Foch sent up his cavalry (I saw them
riding in clouds of dust and heard the panting of their horses), followed
by divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue lorries tearing up the roads,
and forming a strong blue line behind our thin brown line. Prince
Rupprecht of Bavaria had twenty-six fresh divisions in reserve, but had to
hold them until other plans were developed—the Crown Prince’s plan
against the French, and the attack on Arras.

The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions—the Iron Division
and the London Division on the left, and by the 15th Division and Guards
on the right, saved the center of our line and all our line. We had a
breathing—space while heavy blows fell against the French and
against three British divisions who had been sent to hold “a quiet sector”
on their right. The Germans drove across the Chemin des Dames, struck
right and left, terrific blows, beat the French back, reached the Marne
again, and threatened Paris.

Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he waited until the
last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of his
counter-stroke. For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but he
gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up behind
our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of our divisions went with
them, the 51st Highlanders and 15th Scottish, and the 48th English. The
flower of the French army, the veterans of many battles, was massed behind
the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American marines and infantry were
given their first big job to do. What happened all the world knows. The
Crown Prince’s army was attacked on both flanks and in the center, and was
sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation.


IX

Ludendorff’s great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of
the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into
the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its gaps
filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young brothers of the
elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to strike again, and on
August 8th the Canadians and Australians north and south of the Somme, led
by many tanks, broke the enemy’s line beyond Amiens and slowly but surely
rolled it back with enormous losses.

For the first time in the war the cavalry had their chance of pursuit, and
made full use of it, rounding up great batches of prisoners, capturing
batteries of heavy and light guns, and fighting in many actions.

“August 8th,” writes Ludendorff, “was the black day of the German army in
the history of this war.”

He describes from the German point of view what I and others have
described from the British point of view, and the general narrative is the
same—a succession of hammer-blows by the British armies, which broke
not only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. It was a marvelous
feat when the 19th Division and the Welsh waded at dusk across the foul
waters of the River Ancre, under the heights of Thiepval, assembled under
the guns of the enemy up there, and then, wet to their skins, and in small
numbers compared with the strength of the enemy, stormed the huge ridges
from both sides, and hurled the enemy back from what he thought was an
impregnable position, and followed him day by day, taking thousands of
prisoners and smashing his rear-guard defenses one by one.

The most decisive battle of the British front in the “come-back,” after
our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American troops of
the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands, the 46th
Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along the St.-Quentin
Canal. That canal was sixty feet wide, with steep cliffs rising sheer to a
wonderful system of German machine-gun redoubts and tunneled defenses,
between the villages of Bellicourt and Bellinglis. It seemed to me an
impossible place to assault and capture. If the enemy could not hold that
line they could hold nothing. In a dense fog on Sunday morning, September
30th, our men, with the Americans and Australians in support, went down to
the canal-bank, waded across where the water was shallow, swam across in
life-belts where it was deep, or got across somehow and anyhow, under
blasts of machine-gun fire, by rafts and plank bridges. A few hours after
the beginning of the battle they were far out beyond the German side of
the canal, with masses of prisoners in their hands. The Americans on the
left of the attack, where the canal goes below ground, showed superb and
reckless gallantry (they forgot, however, to “mop up” behind them, so that
the enemy came out of his tunnels and the Australians had to cut their way
through), and that evening I met their escorts with droves of captured
Germans. They had helped to break the last defensive system of the enemy
opposite the British front, and after that our troops fought through open
country on the way to victory.

I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and afterward
to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war passed when the enemy drew
back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we liberated
great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and scores of towns and
villages where the people had been waiting for us so long, and now wept
with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetable, when old men
and women and girls and boys and little children crowded round us and
kissed our hands. So it was in other places. Yet not all the horror had
passed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in Bohain, and other
villages, the enemy’s shell-fire and poison-gas killed and injured many of
the people who had been under the German yoke so long and now thought they
were safe. Hospitals were filled with women gasping for breath, with
gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying children. In Valenciennes the
cellars were flooded when I walked there on its day of capture, so that
when shells began to fall the people could not go down to shelter. Some of
them did not try to go down. At an open window sat an old veteran of 1870
with his medal on his breast, and with his daughter and granddaughter on
each side of his chair. He called out, “Merci! Merci!” when English
soldiers passed, and when I stopped a moment clasped my hands through the
window and could not speak for the tears which fell down his white and
withered cheeks. A few dead Germans lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge
on the day before the armistice I saw the last dead German of the war in
that part of the line. He lay stretched outside the railway station into
which many shells had crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own
comrades toward our line before a bullet caught him.

Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of how
his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole detachments
gave themselves up to tanks. “Retiring troops,” he wrote, “greeted one
particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and gallantly to
the attack, with shouts of ‘Blacklegs!’ and ‘War-prolongers!”’ That is
true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted out to the French girls:
“The English are coming. Bravo! The war will soon be over!” On a day in
September, when British troops broke the Drocourt-Queant line, I saw the
Second German Guards coming along in batches, like companies, and after
they had been put in barbed-wire inclosures they laughed and clapped at
the sight of other crowds of comrades coming down as prisoners. I thought
then, “Something has broken in the German spirit.” For the first time the
end seemed very near.

Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many places, especially in
the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the Canadian corps
had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter losses under
machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division and others were
badly cut up.

General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and
disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round Cambrai
than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon Wood, saw the
last German railway train steam out of the town, and went into the city
early on the morning of its capture, when there was a roaring fire in the
heart of it and the Canadians were routing out the last Germans from their
hiding-places.

The British army could not have gone on much farther after November 11th,
when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months our troops had
fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly garrisoned with
machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy fire, and losing many
comrades all along the way. The pace could not have been kept up. There is
a limit even to the valor of British troops, and for a time we had reached
that limit. There were not many divisions who could have staggered on to
new attacks without rest and relief. But they had broken the German armies
against them by a succession of hammer-strokes astounding in their
rapidity and in their continuity, which I need not here describe in
detail, because in my despatches, now in book form, I have narrated that
history as I was a witness of it day by day.

Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their part with steady,
driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their
fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of transport
and supplies, left the German High Command without hope even for a final
gamble.

Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the bloody,
futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light had come to
them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in this “Great Swindle”
against their race. It was defeat and agony which enlightened them, as
most people—even ourselves—are enlightened only by suffering
and disillusionment, and never by successes.


X

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered
Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four
and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no
wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering
army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility of
this strife, smote at one’s heart. What fools the Germans had been, what
tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasties and
powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this massacre! What had any
one gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death
and poverty and remorse and revolt.

The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us courtesy
and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for the Prussian in
the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty tyrant, shout
at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, bully shopkeepers, insult
unoffending citizens. A few young staff-officers behaved like that,
disgustingly. The officers of fighting battalions and the men were very
different. It was a strange study in psychology to watch them. Here they
were among the “Huns.” The men they passed in the streets and sat with in
the restaurants had been in German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few
days. They were “the enemy,” the men they had tried to kill, the men who
had tried to kill them. They had actually fought against them in the same
places. At the Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young
waiter and three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight
in the village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they
had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the
table-cloth. “I was just there.” The three cavalry officers laughed.
“Extraordinary! We were a few yards away.” They chatted with the waiter as
though he were an old acquaintance who had played against them in a famous
football-match. They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did
not put poison in the soup.

That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served
a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the
war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general. Among
these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal
simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for
wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in a
strident voice.

“Some English gentlemen are swine,” said the young waiter. “But all German
gentlemen are swine.”

Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or across
the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the “Huns.” But it was
impossible to be discourteous when the old lady of the house brought them
an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed their boots before the
kitchen fire, said, “God be praised, the war is over.” For English
soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in the presence of German
boys and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, kissed their
hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.

“Kids are kids,” said a sergeant-major. “I don’t want to cut their
throats! Queer, ain’t it?”

Many of the “kids” looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and
biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see
British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief at
this foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing—or a
profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow and even a
sense of protection against the revolutionary mob which had looted their
houses before our entry? Almost every family had lost one son. Some of
them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter. They had paid
a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been drowned in blood.

In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them playing
old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That was going too
far! I looked round the Cafe Bauer—a strange scene after four and a
half years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting with Germans,
clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans lifted their hats to English
“Tommies”; our men, Canadian and English, said “Cheerio!” to German
soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or buttons. English people
still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the maintenance of the
blockade, would have become hysterical if they had come suddenly to this
German cafe before the signing of peace.

Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the Rhine.
Stronger than the hate of war was human nature. Face to face, British
soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in
spite of being a “Hun.” As ecclesiastics would say when not roused to
patriotic fury, they had been made “in the image of God.” There were
pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses. Blue-eyed girls
with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English officers. They
were clean. Their houses were clean, more spotless even than English
homes. When soldiers turned on a tap they found water came out of it.
Wonderful! The sanitary arrangements were good. Servants were hard—working
and dutiful. There was something, after all, in German Kultur. At night
the children said their prayer to the Christian God. Most of them were
Catholics, and very pious.

“They seem good people,” said English soldiers.

At night, in the streets of Cologne, were women not so good. Shameless
women, though daintily dressed and comely. British soldiers—English,
Scottish, and Canadian—grinned back at their laughing eyes, entered
into converse with them, found they could all speak English, went down
side-streets with them to narrow-fronted houses. There were squalid scenes
when the A.P.M. raided these houses and broke up an entente cordiale that
was flagrant and scandalous.

Astonishing climax to the drama of war! No general orders could stop
fraternization before peace was signed. Human nature asserted itself
against all artificial restrictions and false passion. Friends of mine who
had been violent in their hatred of all Germans became thoughtful, and
said: “Of course there are exceptions,” and, “The innocent must not suffer
for the guilty,” and, “We can afford to be a little generous now.”

But the innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and we were not
generous. We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and
German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars, and
German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did
Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the streets
of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged themselves
on buns and cakes for afternoon tea. They were cakes of ersatz flour with
ersatz cream, and not very healthy or nutritious, though very expensive.
But in the side-streets, among the working—women, there was, as I
found, the wolf of hunger standing with open jaws by every doorway. It was
not actual starvation, but what the Germans call unternahrung
(under-nourishment), producing rickety children, consumptive girls, and
men out of whom vitality had gone They stinted and scraped on miserable
substitutes, and never had enough to eat. Yet they were the people who for
two years at least had denounced the war, had sent up petitions for peace,
and had written to their men in the trenches about the Great Swindle and
the Gilded Ones. They were powerless, as some of them told me, because of
the secret police and martial law. What could they do against the
government, with all their men away at the front? They were treated like
pigs, like dirt. They could only suffer and pray. They had a little hope
that in the future, if France and England were not too hard, they might
pay back for the guilt of their war lords and see a new Germany arise out
of its ruin, freed from militarism and with greater liberties. So humble
people talked to us when I went among them with a friend who spoke good
German, better than my elementary knowledge. I believed in their
sincerity, which had come through suffering, though I believed that
newspaper editors, many people in the official classes, and the old
military caste were still implacable in hatred and unrepentant.

The German people deserved punishment for their share in the guilt of war.
They had been punished by frightful losses of life, by a multitude of
cripples, by the ruin of their Empire. When they told me of their hunger I
could not forget the hungry wives and children of France and Belgium, who
had been captives in their own land behind German lines, nor our prisoners
who had been starved, until many of them died. When I walked through
German villages and pitied the women who yearned for their men, still
prisoners in our hands, nearly a year after the armistice, and long after
peace (a cruelty which shamed us, I think), I remembered hundreds of
French villages broken into dust by German gun-fire, burned by incendiary
shells, and that vast desert of the battlefields in France and Belgium
which never in our time will regain its life as a place of human
habitation. When Germans said, “Our industry is ruined,” “Our trade is
killed,” I thought of the factories in Lille and many towns from which all
machinery had been taken or in which all machinery had been broken. I
thought of the thousand crimes of their war, the agony of millions of
people upon whose liberties they had trampled and upon whose necks they
had imposed a brutal yoke. Yet even with all those memories of tragic
scenes which in this book are but lightly sketched, I hoped that the peace
we should impose would not be one of vengeance, by which the innocent
would pay for the sins of the guilty, the children for their fathers’
lust, the women for their war lords, the soldiers who hated war for those
who drove them to the shambles; but that this peace should in justice and
mercy lead the working-people of Europe out of the misery in which all
were plunged, and by a policy no higher than common sense, but as high as
that, establish a new phase of civilization in which military force would
be reduced to the limits of safety for European peoples eager to end the
folly of war and get back to work.

I hoped too much. There was no such peace.


PART EIGHT. FOR WHAT MEN DIED


I

In this book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as I
observed them, and gained first-hand knowledge of them in their daily
traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it was, nor selected
gruesome morsels and joined them together to make a jig-saw puzzle for
ghoulish delight. Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his dreadful book Le Feu,
gave the unrelieved blackness of this human drama, I have here and in
other books shown the light as well as the shade in which our men lived,
the gaiety as well as the fear they had, the exultation as well as the
agony of battle, the spiritual ardor of boys as well as the brutality of
the task that was theirs. I have tried to set down as many aspects of the
war’s psychology as I could find in my remembrance of these years, without
exaggeration or false emphasis, so that out of their confusion, even out
of their contradiction, the real truth of the adventure might be seen as
it touched the souls of men.

Yet when one strives to sum up the evidence and reach definite conclusions
about the motives which led men of the warring nations to kill one another
year after year in those fields of slaughter, the ideals for which so many
millions of men laid down their lives, and the effect of those years of
carnage upon the philosophy of this present world of men, there is no
clear line of thought or conviction.

It is difficult at least to forecast the changes that will be produced by
this experience in the social structure of civilized peoples, and in their
relations to one another though it is certain, even now, that out of the
passion of the war a new era in the world’s history is being born. The
ideas of vast masses of people have been revolutionized by the thoughts
that were stirred up in them during those years of intense suffering. No
system of government designed by men afraid of the new ideas will have
power to kill them, though they may throttle them for a time. For good or
ill, I know not which, the ideas germinated in trenches and dugouts, in
towns under shell—fire or bomb-fire, in hearts stricken by personal
tragedy or world-agony, will prevail over the old order which dominated
the nations of Europe, and the old philosophy of political and social
governance will be challenged and perhaps overthrown. If the new ideas are
thwarted by reactionary rulers endeavoring to jerk the world back to its
old-fashioned discipline under their authority, there will be anarchy
reaching to the heights of terror in more countries than those where
anarchy now prevails. If by fear or by wisdom the new ideas are allowed to
gain their ground gradually, a revolution will be accomplished without
anarchy. But in any case, for good or ill, a revolution will happen. It
has happened in the sense that already there is no resemblance between
this Europe after-the-war and that Europe-before-the-war, in the mental
attitude of the masses toward the problems of life. In every country there
are individuals, men and women, who are going about as though what had
happened had made no difference, and as though, after a period of
restlessness, the people will “settle down” to the old style of things.
They are merely sleep-walkers. There are others who see clearly enough
that they cannot govern or dupe the people with old spell-words, and they
are struggling desperately to think out new words which may help them to
regain their power over simple minds. The old gangs are organizing a new
system of defense, building a new kind of Hindenburg line behind which
they are dumping their political ammunition. But their Hindenburg line is
not impregnable. The angry murmur of the mob—highly organized,
disciplined, passionate, trained to fight, is already approaching the
outer bastions.

In Russia the mob is in possession, wiping the blood out of their eyes
after the nightmare of anarchy, encompassed by forces of the old regime,
and not knowing yet whether its victory is won or how to shape the new
order that must follow chaos.

In Germany there is only the psychology of stunned people, broken for a
time in body and spirit, after stupendous efforts and bloody losses which
led to ruin and the complete destruction of their old pride, philosophy,
and power. The revolution that has happened there is strange and rather
pitiful. It was not caused by the will—power of the people, but by a
cessation of will-power. They did not overthrow their ruling dynasty,
their tyrants. The tyrants fled, and the people were not angry, nor sorry,
nor fierce, nor glad. They were stupefied. Members of the old order joined
hands with those of the people’s parties, out to evolve a republic with
new ideals based upon the people’s will and inspired by the people’s
passion. The Germans, after the armistice and after the peace, had no
passion, as they had no will. They were in a state of coma. The “knock-out
blow” had happened to them, and they were incapable of action. They just
ceased from action. They had been betrayed to this ruin by their military
and political rulers, but they had not vitality enough to demand vengeance
on those men. The extent of their ruin was so great that it annihilated
anger, political passion, pride, all emotion except that of despair. How
could they save something out of the remnants of the power that had been
theirs? How could they keep alive, feed their women and children, pay
their monstrous debts? They had lost their faith as well as their war.
Nothing that they had believed was true. They had believed in their
invincible armies—and the armies had bled to death and broken. They
had believed in the supreme military genius of their war lords, and the
war lords, blunderers as well as criminals, had led them to the abyss and
dropped them over. They had believed in the divine mission of the German
people as a civilizing force, and now they were despised by all other
peoples as a brutal and barbarous race, in spite of German music, German
folk-songs, German art, German sentiment. They had been abandoned by God,
by the protecting hand of the altes gutes Deutsches Gottes to whom many
had prayed for comfort and help in those years of war, in Protestant
churches and Catholic churches, with deep piety and childlike faith. What
sins had they done that they should be abandoned by God? The invasion of
Belgium? That, they argued, was a tragic necessity. Atrocities? Those were
(they believed) the inventions of their enemies. There had been stern
things done, terrible things, but according to the laws of war.
Francs-tireurs had been shot. That was war. Hostages had been shot. It was
to save German lives from slaughter by civilians. Individual brutalities,
yes. There were brutes in all armies. The U-boat war? It was (said the
German patriot) to break a blockade that was starving millions of German
children to slow death, condemning millions to consumption, rickets, all
manner of disease. Nurse Cavell? She pleaded guilty to a crime that was
punishable, as she knew, by death. She was a brave woman who took her risk
open-eyed, and was judged according to the justice of war, which is very
cruel. Poison-gas? Why not, said German soldiers, when to be gassed was
less terrible than to be blown to bits by high explosives? They had been
the first to use that new method of destruction, as the English were the
first to use tanks, terrible also in their destructiveness. Germany was
guilty of this war, had provoked it against peaceful peoples? No! A
thousand times no. They had been, said the troubled soul of Germany,
encompassed with enemies. They had plotted to close her in. Russia was a
huge menace. France had entered into alliance with Russia, and was waiting
her chance to grab at Alsace-Lorraine. Italy was ready for betrayal.
England hated the power of Germany and was in secret alliance with France
and Russia. Germany had struck to save herself. “It was a war of
self-defense, to save the Fatherland.”

The German people still clung desperately to those ideas after the
armistice, as I found in Cologne and other towns, and as friends of mine
who had visited Berlin told me after peace was signed. The Germans refused
to believe in accusations of atrocity. They knew that some of these
stories had been faked by hostile propaganda, and, knowing that, as we
know, they thought all were false. They said “Lies-lies-lies!”—and
made counter—charges against the Russians and Poles. They could not
bring themselves to believe that their sons and brothers had been more
brutal than the laws of war allow, and what brutality they had done was
imposed upon them by ruthless discipline. But they deplored the war, and
the common people, ex-soldiers and civilians, cursed the rich and
governing classes who had made profit out of it, and had continued it when
they might have made peace with honor. That was their accusation against
their leaders—that and the ruthless, bloody way in which their men
had been hurled into the furnace on a gambler’s chance of victory, while
they were duped by faked promises of victory.

When not put upon their defense by accusations against the whole
Fatherland, the German people, as far as I could tell by talking with a
few of them, and by those letters which fell into our hands, revolted in
spirit against the monstrous futility and idiocy of the war, and were
convinced in their souls that its origin lay in the greed and pride of the
governing classes of all nations, who had used men’s bodies as counters in
a devil’s game. That view was expressed in the signboards put above the
parapet, “We’re all fools: let’s all go home”; and in that letter by the
woman who wrote:

“For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones, the
bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very eyes… All
soldiers—friend and foe—ought to throw down their weapons and
go on strike, so that this war, which enslaves the people more than ever,
may cease.”

It is that view, terrible in its simplicity, which may cause a more
passionate revolution in Germany when the people awaken from their stupor.
It was that view which led to the Russian Revolution and to Bolshevism. It
is the suspicion which is creeping into the brains of British working-men
and making them threaten to strike against any adventure of war, like that
in Russia, which seems to them (unless proved otherwise) on behalf of the
“gilded ones” and for the enslavement of the peoples.

Not to face that truth is to deny the passionate convictions of masses of
men in Europe. That is one key to the heart of the revolutionary movement
which is surging beneath the surface of our European state. It is a the
belief of many brooding minds that almost as great as the direct guilt of
the German war lords was the guilt of the whole political society of
Europe, whose secret diplomacy (unrevealed to the peoples) was based upon
hatred and fear and rivalry, in play for imperial power and the world’s
markets, as common folk play dominoes for penny points, and risking the
lives of common folk in a gamble for enormous stakes of territory,
imperial prestige, the personal vanity of politicians, the vast private
gain of trusts and profiteers. To keep the living counters quiet, to make
them jump into the pool of their own free will at the word “Go,” the
statesmen, diplomats, trusts, and profiteers debauch the name of
patriotism, raise the watchword of liberty, and play upon the ignorance of
the mob easily, skillfully, by inciting them to race hatred, by inflaming
the brute-passion in them, and by concocting a terrible mixture of false
idealism and self-interest, so that simple minds quick to respond to
sentiment, as well as those quick to hear the call of the beast, rally
shoulder to shoulder and march to the battlegrounds under the spell of
that potion. Some go with a noble sense of sacrifice, some with blood-lust
in their hearts, most with the herd-instinct following the lead, little
knowing that they are but the pawns of a game which is being played behind
closed doors by the great gamblers in the courts and Foreign Offices, and
committee-rooms, and counting-houses, of the political casinos in Europe.

I have heard the expression of this view from soldiers during the war and
since the war, at street-corners, in tram-cars, and in conversations with
railway men, mechanics, policemen, and others who were soldiers a year
ago, or stay-at-homes, thinking hard over the meaning of the war. I am
certain that millions of men are thinking these things, because I found
the track of those common thoughts, crude, simple, dangerous, among
Canadian soldiers crossing the Atlantic, in Canadian towns, and in the
United States, as I had begun to see the trail of them far back in the
early days of the war when I moved among French soldiers, Belgian
soldiers, and our own men.

My own belief is not so simple as that. I do not divorce all peoples from
their governments as victims of a subtle tyranny devised by statesmen and
diplomats of diabolical cunning, and by financial magnates ready to
exploit human life for greater gains. I see the evil which led to the
crime of the war and to the crimes of the peace with deep-spread roots to
the very foundation of human society. The fear of statesmen, upon which
all international relations were based, was in the hearts of peoples.
France was afraid of Germany and screwed up her military service, her war
preparations, to the limit of national endurance, the majority of the
people of France accepting the burden as inevitable and right. Because of
her fear of Germany France made her alliance with Russian Czardom, her
entente cordiale with Imperial England, and the French people poured their
money into Russian loans as a life insurance against the German menace.
French statesmen knew that their diplomacy was supported by the majority
of the people by their ignorance as well as by their knowledge.

So it was in Germany. The spell-words of the German war lords expressed
the popular sentiment of the German people, which was largely influenced
by the fear of Russia in alliance with France, by fear and envy of the
British Empire and England’s sea-power, and by the faith that Germany must
break through that hostile combination at all costs in order to fulfil the
high destiny which was marked out for her, as she thought, by the genius
and industry of her people. The greed of the “bloated aristocrats” was
only on a bigger scale than the greed of the small shopkeepers. The desire
to capture new markets belonged not only to statesmen, but to commercial
travelers. The German peasant believed as much in the might of the German
armies as Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The brutality of German generals was
not worse than that of the Unteroffizier or the foreman of works.

In England there was no traditional hatred of Germany, but for some years
distrust and suspicions, which had been vented in the newspapers, with
taunts and challenges, stinging the pride of Germans and playing into the
hands of the Junker caste.

Our war psychology was different from that of our allies because of our
island position and our faith in seapower which had made us immune from
the fear of invasion. It took some time to awaken the people to a sense of
real peril and of personal menace to their hearths and homes. To the very
end masses of English folk believed that we were fighting for the rescue
of other peoples—Belgian, French, Serbian, Rumanian—and not
for the continuance of our imperial power.

The official propaganda, the words and actions of British statesmen, did
actually express the conscious and subconscious psychology of the
multitude. The call to the old watchwords of national pride and imperial
might thrilled the soul of a people of proud tradition in sea—battles
and land-battles. Appeals for the rescue of “the little nations” struck
old chords of chivalry and sentiment—though with a strange lack of
logic and sincerity Irish demand for self-government was unheeded. Base
passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. Greedy was the
appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. The more revolting they were the
quicker they were swallowed. The foul absurdity of the “corpse-factory”
was not rejected any more than the tale of the “crucified Canadian”
(disproved by our own G.H.Q.) or the cutting off of children’s hands and
women’s breasts, for which I could find no evidence from the only British
ambulances working in the districts where such horrors were reported.
Spy-mania flourished in mean streets, German music was banned in English
drawing-rooms. Preachers and professors denied any quality of virtue or
genius to German poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars. A critical
weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and lack of patriotism.
Truth was delivered bound to passion. Hatred at home, inspired largely by
feminine hysteria and official propaganda, reached such heights that when
fighting-men came back on leave their refusal to say much against their
enemy, their straightforward assertions that Fritz was not so black as he
was painted, that he fought bravely, died gamely, and in the prison-camps
was well-mannered, decent, industrious, good-natured, were heard with
shocked silence by mothers and sisters who could only excuse this absence
of hate on the score of war-weariness.


II

The people of all countries were deeply involved in the general
blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no passionate appeal in the name of
Christ or in the name of humanity for the cessation of the slaughter of
boys and the suicide of nations and for a reconciliation of peoples upon
terms of some more reasonable argument than that of high explosives. Peace
proposals from the Pope, from Germany, from Austria, were rejected with
fierce denunciation, most passionate scorn, as “peace plots” and “peace
traps,” not without the terrible logic of the vicious circle, because,
indeed, there was no sincerity of renunciation in some of those offers of
peace, and the powers hostile to us were simply trying our strength and
our weakness in order to make their own kind of peace which should be that
of conquest. The gamblers, playing the game of “poker,” with crowns and
armies as their stakes, were upheld generally by the peoples, who would
not abate one point of pride, one fraction of hate, one claim of
vengeance, though all Europe should fall in ruin and the last legions of
boys be massacred. There was no call from people to people across the
frontiers of hostility: “Let us end this homicidal mania! Let us get back
to sanity and save our younger sons. Let us hand over to justice those who
will continue the slaughter of our youth!” There was no forgiveness, no
generous instinct, no large-hearted common sense in any combatant nation
of Europe. Like wolves they had their teeth in one another’s throats, and
would not let go, though all bloody and exhausted, until one should fall
at the last gasp, to be mangled by the others. Yet in each nation, even in
Germany, there were men and women who saw the folly of the war and the
crime of it, and desired to end it by some act of renunciation and
repentance, and by some uplifting of the people’s spirit to vault the
frontiers of hatred and the barbed wire which hedged in patriotism. Some
of them were put in prison. Most of them saw the impossibility of
counteracting the forces of insanity which had made the world mad, and
kept silent, hiding their thoughts and brooding over them. The leaders of
the nations continued to use mob-passion as their argument and
justification, excited it anew when its fires burned low, focused it upon
definite objectives, and gave it a sense of righteousness by the
high-sounding watchwords of liberty, justice, honor, and retribution. Each
side proclaimed Christ as its captain and invoked the blessing and aid of
the God of Christendom, though Germans were allied with Turks and France
was full of black and yellow men. The German people did not try to avert
their ruin by denouncing the criminal acts of their war lords nor by
deploring the cruelties they had committed. The Allies did not help them
to do so, because of their lust for bloody vengeance and their desire for
the spoils of victory. The peoples shared the blame of their rulers
because they were not nobler than their rulers. They cannot now plead
ignorance or betrayal by false ideals which duped them, because character
does not depend on knowledge, and it was the character of European peoples
which failed in the crisis of the world’s fate, so that they followed the
call-back of the beast in the jungle rather than the voice of the
Crucified One whom they pretended to adore.


III

The character of European peoples failed in common sense and in Christian
charity. It did not fail in courage to endure great agonies, to suffer
death largely, to be obedient to the old tradition of patriotism and to
the stoic spirit of old fighting races.

In courage I do not think there was much difference between the chief
combatants. The Germans, as a race, were wonderfully brave until their
spirit was broken by the sure knowledge of defeat and by lack of food.
Many times through all those years they marched shoulder to shoulder,
obedient to discipline, to certain death, as I saw them on the Somme, like
martyrs. They marched for their Fatherland, inspired by the spirit of the
German race, as it had entered their souls by the memory of old German
songs, old heroic ballads, their German home life, their German women,
their love of little old towns on hillsides or in valleys, by all the
meaning to them of that word Germany, which is like the name of England to
us—who is fool enough to think otherwise?—and fought often, a
thousand times, to the death, as I saw their bodies heaped in the fields
of the Somme and round their pill-boxes in Flanders and in the last phase
of the war behind the Hindenburg line round their broken batteries on the
way of Mons and Le Cateau. The German people endured years of
semi-starvation and a drain of blood greater than any other fighting
people—two million dead—before they lost all vitality, hope,
and pride and made their abject surrender. At the beginning they were out
for conquest, inspired by arrogance and pride. Before the end they fought
desperately to defend the Fatherland from the doom which cast its black
shadow on them as it drew near. They were brave, those Germans, whatever
the brutality of individual men and the cold-blooded cruelty of their
commanders.

The courage of France is to me like an old heroic song, stirring the
heart. It was medieval in its complete adherence to the faith of valor and
its spirit of sacrifice for La Patrie. If patriotism were enough as the
gospel of life—Nurse Cavell did not think so—France as a
nation was perfect in that faith. Her people had no doubt as to their
duty. It was to defend their sacred soil from the enemy which had invaded
it. It was to hurl the brutes back from the fair fields they had ravaged
and despoiled. It was to liberate their brothers and sisters from the
outrageous tyranny of the German yoke in the captured country. It was to
seek vengeance for bloody, foul, and abominable deeds.

In the first days of the war France was struck by heavy blows which sent
her armies reeling back in retreat, but before the first battle of the
Marne, when her peril was greatest, when Paris seemed doomed, the spirit
of the French soldiers rose to a supreme act of faith—which was
fulfilled when Foch attacked in the center, when Manoury struck on the
enemy’s flank and hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen hurled
themselves, reckless of life, upon the monster which faltered and then
fled behind the shelter of the Aisne. With bloodshot eyes and parched
throats and swollen tongues, blind with sweat and blood, mad with the heat
and fury of attack, the French soldiers fought through that first battle
of the Marne and saved France from defeat and despair.

After that, year after year, they flung themselves against the German
defense and died in heaps, or held their lines, as at Verdun, against
colossal onslaught, until the dead lay in masses. But the living said,
“They shall not pass!” and kept their word.

The people of France—above all, the women of France—behind the
lines, were the equals of the fighting-men in valor. They fought with
despair, through many black months, and did not yield. They did the work
of their men in the fields, and knew that many of them—the sons or
brothers or lovers or husbands—would never return for the
harvest-time, but did not cry to have them back until the enemy should be
thrust out of France. Behind the German line, under German rule, the
French people, prisoners in their own land, suffered most in spirit, but
were proud and patient in endurance.

“Why don’t your people give in?” asked a German officer of a woman in
Nesle. “France is bleeding to death.”

“We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, or five, and in
the end we shall smash you,” said the woman who told me this.

The German officer stared at her and said, “You people are wonderful!”

Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred of the Germans,
their desire for vengeance, complete and terrible, at all cost of life,
even though France should bleed to death and die after victory, is to be
understood in the heights and depths of its hatred and in the passion of
its love for France and liberty. When I think of France I am tempted to
see no greater thing than such patriotism as that to justify the gospel of
hate against such an enemy, to uphold vengeance as a sweet virtue. Yet if
I did so I should deny the truth that has been revealed to many men and
women by the agony of the war—that if civilization may continue
patriotism is “not enough,” that international hatred will produce other
wars worse than this, in which civilization will be submerged, and that
vengeance, even for dreadful crimes, cannot be taken of a nation without
punishing the innocent more than the guilty, so that out of its cruelty
and injustice new fires of hatred are lighted, the demand for vengeance
passes to the other side, and the devil finds another vicious circle in
which to trap the souls of men and “catch ’em all alive O!”

To deny that would also be a denial of the faith with which millions of
young Frenchmen rushed to the colors in the first days of the war. It was
they who said, “This is a war to end war.” They told me so. It was they
who said: “German militarism must be killed so that all militarism shall
be abolished. This is a war for liberty.” So soldiers of France spoke to
me on a night when Paris was mobilized and the tragedy began. It is a
Frenchman—Henri Barbusse—who, in spite of the German invasion,
the outrages against his people, the agony of France, has the courage to
say that all peoples in Europe were involved in the guilt of that war
because of their adherence to that old barbaric creed of brute force and
the superstitious servitude of their souls to symbols of national pride
based upon military tradition. He even denounces the salute to the flag,
instinctive and sacred in the heart of every Frenchman, as a fetish
worship in which the narrow bigotry of national arrogance is raised above
the rights of the common masses of men. He draws no distinction between a
war of defense and a war of aggression, because attack is the best means
of defense, and all peoples who go to war dupe themselves into the belief
that they do so in defense of their liberties, and rights, and power, and
property. Germany attacked France first because she was ready first and
sure of her strength. France would have attacked Germany first to get back
Alsace-Lorraine, to wipe out 1870, if she also had been ready and sure of
her strength. The political philosophy on both sides of the Rhine was the
same. It was based on military power and rivalry of secret alliances and
imperial ambitions. The large-hearted internationalism of Jean Jaures, who
with all his limitations was a great Frenchman, patriot, and idealist, had
failed among his own people and in Germany, and the assassin’s bullet was
his reward for the adventure of his soul to lift civilization above the
level of the old jungle law and to save France from the massacre which
happened.

In war France was wonderful, most heroic in sacrifice, most splendid in
valor. In her dictated peace, which was ours also, her leaders were
betrayed by the very evil which millions of young Frenchmen had gone out
to kill at the sacrifice of their own lives. Militarism was exalted in
France above the ruins of German militarism. It was a peace of vengeance
which punished the innocent more than the guilty, the babe at the breast
more than the Junker in his Schloss, the poor working-woman more than the
war lord, the peasant who had been driven to the shambles more than Sixt
von Arnim or Rupprecht of Bavaria, or Ludendorff, or Hindenburg. It is a
peace that can only be maintained by the power of artillery and by the
conscription of every French boy who shall be trained for the next “war of
defense” (twenty years hence, thirty years hence), when Germany is strong
again—stronger than France because of her population, stronger then,
enormously, than France, in relative numbers of able-bodied men than in
August, 1914. So if that philosophy continue—and I do not think it
will—the old fear will be re-established, the old burdens of
armament will be piled up anew, the people of France will be weighed down
as before under a military regime stifling their liberty of thought and
action, wasting the best years of their boyhood in barracks, seeking
protective alliances, buying allies at great cost, establishing the old
spy system, the old diplomacy, the old squalid ways of inter—national
politics, based as before on fear and force. Marshal Foch was a fine
soldier. Clemenceau was a strong Minister of War. There was no man great
enough in France to see beyond the passing triumph of military victory and
by supreme generosity of soul to lift their enemy out of the dirt of their
despair, so that the new German Republic should arise from the ruins of
the Empire, remorseful of their deeds in France and Belgium, with all
their rage directed against their ancient tyranny, and with a new-born
spirit of democratic liberty reaching across the old frontiers.

Is that the foolish dream of the sentimentalist? No, more than that; for
the German people, after their agony, were ready to respond to generous
dealing, pitiful in their need of it, and there is enough sentiment in
German hearts—the most sentimental people in Europe—to rise
with a surge of emotion to a new gospel of atonement if their old enemies
had offered a chance of grace. France has not won the war by her terms of
peace nor safeguarded her frontiers for more than a few uncertain years.
By harking back to the old philosophy of militarism she has re-established
peril amid a people drained of blood and deeply in debt. Her support of
reactionary forces in Russia is to establish a government which will
guarantee the interest on French loans and organize a new military regime
in alliance with France and England. Meanwhile France looks to the United
States and British people to protect her from the next war, when Germany
shall be strong again. She is playing the militarist role without the
strength to sustain it.


IV

What of England?… Looking back at the immense effort of the British
people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure, and
the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, and does, indeed,
acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called out by this
supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The traditions of a thousand
years of history filled with war and travail and adventure, by which old
fighting races had blended with different strains of blood and temper—Roman,
Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman-survived in the fiber of our modern youth,
country-bred or city-bred, in spite of the weakening influences of
slumdom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerkship, and sedentary
life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were
hard and tough in attack and defense. The South Country battalions of
Devons and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of
death. The Scots had not lost their fire and passion, but were terrible in
their onslaught. The Irish battalions, with recruiting cut off at the
base, fought with their old gallantry, until there were few to answer the
last roll-call. The Welsh dragon encircled Mametz Wood, devoured the
“Cockchafers” on Pilkem Ridge, and was hard on the trail of the Black
Eagle in the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had all the
British quality of courage and the benefit of a harder physique, gained by
outdoor life and unweakened ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic
types here and there among officers and men, the stock was true and
strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has the salt in its blood
from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s and back again to Wapping had not been
destroyed, but answered the ruffle of Drake’s drum and, with simplicity
and gravity in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the highways of
the seas, hunted worse monsters than any fabulous creatures of the deep,
and shirked no dread adventure in the storms and darkness of a spacious
hell. The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who fought
the Spanish Armada and singed the King o’ Spain’s beard in Cadiz harbor.
The victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson’s (the
scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and not less
brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British seamen the
war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium, and all of us.

The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt,
Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine flower
of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal except by
intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous in instinct,
without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and dutiful. That is God’s
truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and brutal fellows
in many battalions, as in all crowds of men.

In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of our
troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness,
suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day the
incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor of their
stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of mythology
were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great war, went
forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid high
explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of poison-gas
more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept above mine-craters
which upheaved the hell-fire of Pluto, and defied thunderbolts more
certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.

Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure
these things without revolt—ideals higher than the selfish motives
of life. They did not fight for greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for
vengeance. Hatred was not the inspiration of the mass of them, for I am
certain that except in hours when men “see red” there was no direct hatred
of the men in the opposite trenches, but, on the other hand, a queer sense
of fellow—feeling, a humorous sympathy for “old Fritz,” who was in
the same bloody mess as themselves. Our generals, it is true, hated the
Germans. “I should like one week in Cologne,” one of them told me, before
there seemed ever a chance of getting there, “and I would let my men loose
in the streets and turn a blind eye to anything they liked to do.”

Some of our officers were inspired by a bitter, unrelenting hate.

“If I had a thousand Germans in a row,” one of them said to me, “I would
cut all their throats, and enjoy the job.”

But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, except those who
were murderers by nature and pleasure. They gave their cigarettes to
prisoners and filled their water-bottles and chatted in a friendly way
with any German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them time and
time again on days of battle, in the fields of battle. There were
exceptions to this treatment, but even the Australians and the Scots, who
were most fierce in battle, giving no quarter sometimes, treated their
prisoners with humanity when they were bundled back. Hatred was not the
motive which made our men endure all things. It was rather, as I have
said, a refusal in their souls to be beaten in manhood by all the devils
of war, by all its terrors, or by its beastliness, and at the back of all
the thought that the old country was “up against it” and that they were
there to avert the evil.

Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of “other ranks,” as
they were called, were inspired at the beginning, and some of them to the
end, with a simple, boyish idealism. They saw no other causes of war than
German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster who had to be
destroyed lest the world and its beauty should perish—and that was
true so long as the individual German, who loathed the war, obeyed the
discipline of the herd-leaders and did not revolt against the natural laws
which, when the war had once started, bade him die in defense of his own
Fatherland. Many of those boys of ours made a dedication of their lives
upon the altar of sacrifice, believing that by this service and this
sacrifice they would help the victory of civilization over barbarism, and
of Christian morality over the devil’s law. They believed that they were
fighting to dethrone militarism, to insure the happiness and liberties of
civilized peoples, and were sure of the gratitude of their nation should
they not have the fate to fall upon the field of honor, but go home blind
or helpless.

I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that
faith.

“Do not grieve for me,” wrote one of them, “for I shall be proud to die
for my country’s sake.”

“I am happy,” wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters), “because,
though I hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war. We are the last
victims of this way of argument. By smashing the German war-machine we
shall prove for all time the criminal folly of militarism and Junkerdom.”

There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for their
faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from humble
homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I think, at
the beginning of the war there were many like that. But as it continued
year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of truth more complex
than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against sacrifice unequally
shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that for which they had been
called to fight.

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first
lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which
made the private soldier no more than a number. They were ordered about
like galley—slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually
and in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being.
Often, as I know, they were detrained at rail-heads in the wind and rain
and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they
were weak and famished. In the base camps men of one battalion were
drafted into other battalions, where they lost their old comrades and were
unfamiliar with the speech and habits of a crowd belonging to different
counties, the Sussex men going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorkshire men
being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R.T.O.’s and A.M.L.O.’s and camp
commandments and town majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled
about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand ways
injustice, petty tyranny, hard work, degrading punishments for trivial
offenses, struck at their souls and made the name of personal liberty a
mockery. From their own individuality they argued to broader issues. Was
this war for liberty? Were the masses of men on either side fighting with
free will as free men? Those Germans—were they not under discipline,
each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or not? Compelled
to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them to shoot them
down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What liberty had they
to follow their conscience or their judgment—“Theirs not to reason
why, theirs but to do and die”—like all soldiers in all armies. Was
it not rather that the masses of men engaged in slaughter were serving the
purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for one another’s
markets, covetous of one another’s wealth, and callous of the lives of
humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring nations were put together
for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt,
afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice,
rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or
dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle the business and come to
terms before the week was out. I heard that proposition put forward many
times by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their own
sacrifice they found it unanswerable.


V

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about it in
the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets, filled
some of these young men with distress and disgust, strengthened into rage
when they went home on leave. The deliberate falsification of news (the
truth of which they heard from private channels) made them discredit the
whole presentation of our case and state. They said, “Propaganda!” with a
sharp note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public men, preachers, and
journalists, never downcast by black news, never agonized by the slaughter
in these fields, minimizing horrors and loss and misery, crowing over the
enemy, prophesying early victory which did not come, accepting all the
destruction of manhood (while they stayed safe) as a necessary and
inevitable “misfortune,” had a depressing effect on men who knew they were
doomed to die, in the law of averages, if the war went on. “Damn their
optimism!” said some of our officers. “It’s too easy for those behind the
lines. It is only we who have the right of optimism. It’s we who have to
do the dirty work! They seem to think we like the job! What are they doing
to bring the end nearer?”

The frightful suspicion entered the heads of some of our men (some of
those I knew) that at home people liked the war and were not anxious to
end it, and did not care a jot for the sufferings of the soldiers. Many of
them came back from seven days’ leave fuming and sullen. Everybody was
having a good time. Munition-workers were earning wonderful wages and
spending them on gramophones, pianos, furs, and the “pictures.” Everybody
was gadding about in a state of joyous exultation. The painted flapper was
making herself sick with the sweets of life after office hours in
government employ, where she did little work for a lot of pocket-money.
The society girl was dancing bare-legged for “war charities,” pushing into
bazaars for the “poor, dear wounded,” getting her pictures into the papers
as a “notable warworker,” married for the third time in three years; the
middle-class cousin was driving staff-officers to Whitehall, young
gentlemen of the Air Service to Hendon, junior secretaries to their
luncheon. Millions of girls were in some kind of fancy dress with buttons
and shoulder—straps, breeches and puttees, and they seemed to be
making a game of the war and enjoying it thoroughly. Oxford dons were
harvesting, and proud of their prowess with the pitchfork—behold
their patriotism!—while the boys were being blown to bits on the
Yser Canal. Miners were striking for more wages, factory hands were
downing tools for fewer hours at higher pay, the government was paying any
price for any labor—while Tommy Atkins drew his one-and-twopence and
made a little go a long way in a wayside estaminet before jogging up the
Menin road to have his head blown off. The government had created a world
of parasites and placemen housed in enormous hotels, where they were
engaged at large salaries upon mysterious unproductive labors which seemed
to have no result in front-line trenches. Government contractors were
growing fat on the life of war, amassing vast fortunes, juggling with
excess profits, battening upon the flesh and blood of boyhood in the
fighting-lines. These old men, these fat men, were breathing out fire and
fury against the Hun, and vowing by all their gods that they would see
their last son die in the last ditch rather than agree to any peace except
that of destruction. There were “fug committees” (it was Lord Kitchener’s
word) at the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, the Home
Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Information, where
officials on enormous salaries smoked cigars of costly brands and decided
how to spend vast sums of public money on “organization” which made no
difference to the man stifling his cough below the parapet in a wet fog of
Flanders, staring across No Man’s Land for the beginning of a German
attack.

In all classes of people there was an epidemic of dancing, jazzing,
card-playing, theater-going. They were keeping their spirits up
wonderfully. Too well for men slouching about the streets of London on
leave, and wondering at all this gaiety, and thinking back to the things
they had seen and forward to the things they would have to do. People at
home, it seemed, were not much interested in the life of the trenches;
anyhow, they could not understand. The soldier listened to excited tales
of air raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The windows had been
broken. Many people had been killed in a house somewhere in Hackney. It
was frightful. The Germans were devils. They ought to be torn to pieces,
every one of them. The soldier on leave saw crowds of people taking
shelter in underground railways, working—men among them, sturdy
lads, panic-stricken. But for his own wife and children he had an evil
sense of satisfaction in these sights. It would do them good. They would
know what war meant—just a little. They would not be so easy in
their damned optimism. An air raid? Lord God, did they know what a German
barrage was like? Did they guess how men walked day after day through
harassing fire to the trenches? Did they have any faint idea of life in a
sector where men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch
shells, five-point—nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades,
machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range
fire on the billets in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air
raids above wooden hutments so closely crowded into a small space that
hardly a bomb could fall without killing a group of men.

“Oh, but you have your dugouts!” said a careless little lady.

The soldier smiled.

It was no use talking. The people did not want to hear the tragic side of
things. Bairnsfather’s “Ole Bill” seemed to them to typify the spirit of
the fighting-man… “’Alf a mo’, Kaiser!”…

The British soldier was gay and careless of death—always. Shell-fire
meant nothing to him. If he were killed—well, after all, what else
could he expect? Wasn’t that what he was out for? The twice-married girl
knew a charming boy in the air force. He had made love to her even before
Charlie was “done in.” These dear boys were so greedy for love. She could
not refuse them, poor darlings! Of course they had all got to die for
liberty, and that sort of thing. It was very sad. A terrible thing—war!…
Perhaps she had better give up dancing for a week, until Charlie had been
put into the casualty lists.

“What are we fighting for?” asked officers back from leave, turning over
the pages of the Sketch and Tatler, with pictures of race-meetings,
strike-meetings, bare—backed beauties at war bazaars, and portraits
of profiteers in the latest honors list. “Are we going to die for these
swine? These parasites and prostitutes? Is this the war for noble ideals,
liberty, Christianity, and civilization? To hell with all this filth! The
world has gone mad and we are the victims of insanity.”

Some of them said that below all that froth there were deep and quiet
waters in England. They thought of the anguish of their own wives and
mothers, their noble patience, their uncomplaining courage, their
spiritual faith in the purpose of the war. Perhaps at the heart England
was true and clean and pitiful. Perhaps, after, all, many people at home
were suffering more than the fighting-men, in agony of spirit. It was
unwise to let bitterness poison their brains. Anyhow, they had to go on.
How long, how long, O Lord?

“How long is it going to last?” asked the London Rangers of their
chaplain. He lied to them and said another three months. Always he had
absolute knowledge that the war would end three months later. That was
certain. “Courage!” he said. “Courage to the end of the last lap!”

Most of the long-service men were dead and gone long before the last lap
came. It was only the new boys who went as far as victory. He asked
permission of the general to withdraw nineteen of them from the line to
instruct them for Communion. They were among the best soldiers, and not
afraid of the ridicule of their fellows because of their religious zeal.
The chaplain’s main purpose was to save their lives, for a while, and give
them a good time and spiritual comfort. They had their good time. Three
weeks later came the German attack on Arras and they were all killed.
Every man of them.

The chaplain, an Anglican, found it hard to reconcile Christianity with
such a war as this, but he did not camouflage the teachings of the Master
he tried to serve. He preached to his men the gospel of love and
forgiveness of enemies. It was reported to the general, who sent for him.

“Look here, I can’t let you go preaching ‘soft stuff’ to my men. I can’t
allow all that nonsense about love. My job is to teach them to hate. You
must either cooperate with me or go.”

The chaplain refused to change his faith or his teaching, and the general
thought better of his intervention.

For all chaplains it was difficult. Simple souls were bewildered by the
conflict between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of war. Many of
them—officers as well as men—were blasphemous in their scorn
of “parson stuff,” some of them frightfully ironical.

A friend of mine watched two chaplains passing by. One of them was a tall
man with a crown and star on his shoulder-strap.

“I wonder,” said my friend, with false simplicity, “whether Jesus Christ
would have been a lieutenant—colonel?”

On the other hand, many men found help in religion, and sought its comfort
with a spiritual craving. They did not argue about Christian ethics and
modern warfare. Close to death in the midst of tragedy, conscious in a
strange way of their own spiritual being and of a spirituality present
among masses of men above the muck of war, the stench of corruption, and
fear of bodily extinction, they groped out toward God. They searched for
some divine wisdom greater than the folly of the world, for a divine aid
which would help them to greater courage. The spirit of God seemed to come
to them across No Man’s Land with pity and comradeship. Catholic soldiers
had a simpler, stronger faith than men of Protestant denominations, whose
faith depended more on ethical arguments and intellectual reasonings.
Catholic chaplains had an easier task. Leaving aside all argument, they
heard the confessions of the soldiers, gave them absolution for their
sins, said mass for them in wayside barns, administered the sacraments,
held the cross to their lips when they fell mortally wounded, anointed
them when the surgeon’s knife was at work, called the names of Jesus and
Mary into dying ears. There was no need of argument here. The old faith
which has survived many wars, many plagues, and the old wickedness of men
was still full of consolation to those who accepted it as little children,
and by their own agony hoped for favor from the Man of Sorrows who was
hanged upon a cross, and found a mother-love in the vision of Mary, which
came to them when they were in fear and pain and the struggle of death.
The padre had a definite job to do in the trenches and for that reason was
allowed more liberty in the line than other chaplains. Battalion officers,
surgeons, and nurses were patient with mysterious rites which they did not
understand, but which gave comfort, as they saw, to wounded men; and the
heroism with which many of those priests worked under fire, careless of
their own lives, exalted by spiritual fervor, yet for the most part human
and humble and large-hearted and tolerant, aroused a general admiration
throughout the army. Many of the Protestant clergy were equally devoted,
but they were handicapped by having to rely more upon providing physical
comforts for the men than upon spiritual acts, such as anointing and
absolution, which were accepted without question by Catholic soldiers.

Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all other churches
claiming that they teach the gospel of Christ, have been challenged to
explain their attitude during the war and the relation of their teaching
to the world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. It will not be
easy for them to do so. They will have to explain how it is that German
bishops, priests, pastors, and flocks, undoubtedly sincere in their
professions of faith, deeply pious, as our soldiers saw in Cologne, and
fervent in their devotion to the sacraments on their side of the
fighting-line, as the Irish Catholics on our side, were able to reconcile
this piety with their war of aggression. The faith of the Austrian
Catholics must be explained in relation to their crimes, if they were
criminal, as we say they were, in leading the way to this war by their
ultimatum to Serbia. If Christianity has no restraining influence upon the
brutal instincts of those who profess and follow its faith, then surely it
is time the world abandoned so ineffective a creed and turned to other
laws likely to have more influence on human relationships. That, brutally,
is the argument of the thinking world against the clergy of all nations
who all claimed to be acting according to the justice of God and the
spirit of Christ. It is a powerful argument, for the simple mind,
rejecting casuistry, cuts straight to the appalling contrast between
Christian profession and Christian practice, and says: “Here, in this war,
there was no conflict between one faith and another, but a murderous
death-struggle between many nations holding the same faith, preaching the
same gospel, and claiming the same God as their protector. Let us seek
some better truth than that hypocrisy! Let us, if need be, in honesty, get
back to the savage worship of national gods, the Ju-ju of the tribe.”

My own belief is that the war was no proof against the Christian faith,
but rather is a revelation that we are as desperately in need of the
spirit of Christ as at any time in the history of mankind. But I think the
clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few, subordinated
their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national limitations. They
were patriots before they were priests, and their patriotism was sometimes
as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as bloodthirsty as that of the
people who looked to them for truth and light. They were often fiercer,
narrower, and more desirous of vengeance than the soldiers who fought,
because it is now a known truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian,
French and Italian and British, were sick of the unending slaughter long
before the ending of the war, and would have made a peace more fair than
that which now prevails if it had been put to the common vote in the
trenches; whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne,
and the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many nations, under the
Cross of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the armies to
go on fighting “in the cause of justice,” “for the defense of the
Fatherland,” “for Christian righteousness,” to the bitter end. Those words
are painful to write, but as I am writing this book for truth’s sake, at
all cost, I let them stand….


VI

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution,
followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of
Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word
“Bolshevism,” and knew not what it meant.

The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war, with
an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay, betrayed by
a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous that arms and
armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on their way from one
official to another, and never reached the front, so foul in callousness
of human life that soldiers were put into the fighting-line without rifle
or ammunition, these Russian peasants flung themselves not once, but many
times, against the finest troops of Germany, with no more than naked
bayonets against powerful artillery and the scythe of machine-gun fire,
and died like sheep in the slaughter-houses of Chicago. Is it a wonder
that at the last they revolted against this immolation, turned round upon
their tyrants, and said: “You are the enemy. It is you that we will
destroy”?

By this new revelation they forgot their hatred of Germans. They said:
“You are our brothers; we have no hatred against you. We do not want to
kill you. Why should you kill us? We are all of us the slaves of
bloodthirsty castes, who use our flesh for their ambitions. Do not shoot
us, brothers, but join hands against the common tyranny which enslaves our
peoples.” They went forward with outstretched hands, and were shot, down
like rabbits by some Germans, and by others were not shot, because German
soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, at this new gospel, as it seemed, and said:
“They speak words of truth. Why should we kill one another?”

The German war lords ordered a forward movement, threatened their own men
with death if they fraternized with Russians, and dictated their terms of
peace on the old lines of military conquest. But as Ludendorff has
confessed, and as we now know from other evidence, many German soldiers
were “infected” with Bolshevism and lost their fighting spirit.

Russia was already in anarchy. Constitutional government had been replaced
by the soviets and by committees of soldiers and workmen. Kerensky had
fled. Lenin and Trotzky were the Marat and Danton of the Revolution, and
decreed the Reign of Terror. Tales of appalling atrocity, some true, some
false (no one can tell how true or how false), came through to France and
England. It was certain that the whole fabric of society in Russia had
dissolved in the wildest anarchy the world has seen in modern times, and
that the Bolshevik gospel of “brotherhood” with humanity was, at least,
rudely “interrupted” by wholesale murder within its own boundaries.

One other thing was certain. Having been relieved of the Russian menace,
Germany was free to withdraw her armies on that front and use all her
striking force in the west. It should have cautioned our generals to save
their men for the greatest menace that had confronted them. But without
caution they fought the battles of 1917, in Flanders, as I have told.

In 1917 and in the first half of 1918 there seemed no ending to the war by
military means. Even many of our generals who had been so breezy in their
optimism believed now that the end must come by diplomatic means—a
“peace by understanding.” I had private talks with men in high command,
who acknowledged that the way must be found, and the British mind prepared
for negotiations, because there must come a limit to the drain of blood on
each side. It was to one man in the world that many men in all armies
looked for a way out of this frightful impasse.

President Wilson had raised new hope among many men who otherwise were
hopeless. He not only spoke high words, but defined the meanings of them.
His definition of liberty seemed sound and true, promising the
self-determination of peoples. His offer to the German people to deal
generously with them if they overthrew their tyranny raised no quarrel
among British soldiers. His hope of a new diplomacy, based upon “open
covenants openly arrived at,” seemed to cut at the root of the old evil in
Europe by which the fate of peoples had been in the hands of the few. His
Fourteen Points set out clearly and squarely a just basis of peace. His
advocacy of a League of Nations held out a vision of a new world by which
the great and small democracies should be united by a common pledge to
preserve peace and submit their differences to a supreme court of
arbitration. Here at last was a leader of the world, with a clear call to
the nobility in men rather than to their base passions, a gospel which
would raise civilization from the depths into which it had fallen, and a
practical remedy for that suicidal mania which was exhausting the
combatant nations.

I think there were many millions of men on each side of the fighting-line
who thanked God because President Wilson had come with a wisdom greater
than the folly which was ours to lead the way to an honorable peace and a
new order of nations. I was one of them… Months passed, and there was
continual fighting, continued slaughter, and no sign that ideas would
prevail over force. The Germans launched their great offensive, broke
through the British lines, and afterward through the French lines, and
there were held and checked long enough for our reserves to be flung
across the Channel—300,000 boys from England and Scotland, who had
been held in hand as the last counters for the pool. The American army
came in tidal waves across the Atlantic, flooded our back areas, reached
the edge of the battlefields, were a new guaranty of strength. Their
divisions passed mostly to the French front. With them, and with his own
men, magnificent in courage still, and some of ours, Foch had his army of
reserve, and struck.

So the war ended, after all, by military force, and by military victory
greater than had seemed imaginable or possible six months before.

In the peace terms that followed there was but little trace of those
splendid ideas which had been proclaimed by President Wilson. On one point
after another he weakened, and was beaten by the old militarism which sat
enthroned in the council-chamber, with its foot on the neck of the enemy.
The “self-determination of peoples” was a hollow phrase signifying
nothing. Open covenants openly arrived at were mocked by the closed doors
of the Conference. When at last the terms were published their merciless
severity, their disregard of racial boundaries, their creation of hatreds
and vendettas which would lead, as sure as the sun should rise, to new
warfare, staggered humanity, not only in Germany and Austria, but in every
country of the world, where at least minorities of people had hoped for
some nobler vision of the world’s needs, and for some healing remedy for
the evils which had massacred its youth. The League of Nations, which had
seemed to promise so well, was hedged round by limitations which made it
look bleak and barren. Still it was peace, and the rivers of blood had
ceased to flow, and the men were coming home again… Home again!


VII

The men came home in a queer mood, startling to those who had not watched
them “out there,” and to those who welcomed peace with flags. Even before
their homecoming, which was delayed week after week, month after month,
unless they were lucky young miners out for the victory push and back
again quickly, strange things began to happen in France and Flanders,
Egypt and Palestine. Men who had been long patient became suddenly
impatient. Men who had obeyed all discipline broke into disobedience
bordering on mutiny. They elected spokesmen to represent their grievances,
like trade-unionists. They “answered back” to their officers in such large
bodies, with such threatening anger, that it was impossible to give them
“Field Punishment Number One,” or any other number, especially as their
battalion officers sympathized mainly with their point of view. They
demanded demobilization according to their terms of service, which was for
“the duration of the war.” They protested against the gross inequalities
of selection by which men of short service were sent home before those who
had been out in 1914, 1915, 1916. They demanded justness, fair play, and
denounced red tape and official lies. “We want to go home!” was their
shout on parade. A serious business, subversive of discipline.

Similar explosions were happening in England. Bodies of men broke camp at
Folkestone and other camps, demonstrated before town halls, demanded to
speak with mayors, generals, any old fellows who were in authority, and
refused to embark for France until they had definite pledges that they
would receive demobilization papers without delay. Whitehall, the sacred
portals of the War Office, the holy ground of the Horse Guards’ Parade,
were invaded by bodies of men who had commandeered ambulances and lorries
and had made long journeys from their depots. They, too, demanded
demobilization. They refused to be drafted out for service to India,
Egypt, Archangel, or anywhere. They had “done their bit,” according to
their contract. It was for the War Office to fulfil its pledges. “Justice”
was the word on their lips, and it was a word which put the wind up (as
soldiers say) any staff-officers and officials who had not studied the
laws of justice as they concern private soldiers, and who had dealt with
them after the armistice and after the peace as they had dealt with them
before—as numbers, counters to be shifted here and there according
to the needs of the High Command. What was this strange word “justice” on
soldiers’ lips?… Red tape squirmed and writhed about the business of
demobilization. Orders were made, communicated to the men, canceled even
at the railway gates. Promises were made and broken. Conscripts were
drafted off to India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Archangel, against their will
and contrary to pledge. Men on far fronts, years absent from their wives
and homes, were left to stay there, fever-stricken, yearning for home,
despairing. And while the old war was not yet cold in its grave we
prepared for a new war against Bolshevik Russia, arranging for the
spending of more millions, the sacrifice of more boys of ours, not openly,
with the consent of the people, but on the sly, with a fine art of
camouflage.

The purpose of the new war seemed to many men who had fought for “liberty”
an outrage against the “self—determination of peoples” which had
been the fundamental promise of the League of Nations, and a blatant
hypocrisy on the part of a nation which denied self—government to
Ireland. The ostensible object of our intervention in Russia was to
liberate the Russian masses from “the bloody tyranny of the Bolsheviks,”
but this ardor for the liberty of Russia had not been manifest during the
reign of Czardom and grand dukes when there were massacres of mobs in
Moscow, bloody Sundays in St. Petersburg, pogroms in Riga, floggings of
men and girls in many prisons, and when free speech, liberal ideas, and
democratic uprisings had been smashed by Cossack knout and by the torture
of Siberian exile.

Anyhow, many people believed that it was none of our business to suppress
the Russian Revolution or to punish the leaders of it, and it was
suspected by British working-men that the real motive behind our action
was not a noble enthusiasm for liberty, but an endeavor to establish a
reactionary government in Russia in order to crush a philosophy of life
more dangerous to the old order in Europe than high explosives, and to get
back the gold that had been poured into Russia by England and France. By a
strange paradox of history, French journalists, forgetting their own
Revolution, the cruelties of Robespierre and Marat, the September
Massacres, the torture of Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries, the
guillotining of many fair women of France, and after 1870 the terrors of
the Commune, were most horrified by the anarchy in Russia, and most fierce
in denunciation of the bloody struggle by which a people made mad by long
oppression and infernal tyrannies strove to gain the liberties of life.

Thousands of British soldiers newly come from war in France were sullenly
determined that they would not be dragged off to the new adventure. They
were not alone. As Lord Rothermere pointed out, a French regiment mutinied
on hearing a mere unfounded report that it was being sent to the Black
Sea. The United States and Japan were withdrawing. Only a few of our men,
disillusioned by the ways of peace, missing the old comradeship of the
ranks, restless, purposeless, not happy at home, seeing no prospect of
good employment, said: “Hell!… Why not the army again, and Archangel, or
any old where?” and volunteered for Mr. Winston Churchill’s little war.

After the trouble of demobilization came peace pageants and celebrations
and flag-wavings. But all was not right with the spirit of the men who
came back. Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again, looked
to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to
business in the peaceful days before the August of ’14. But they had not
come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject
to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating
with a restless desire for pleasure. Many of them were easily moved to
passion when they lost control of themselves. Many were bitter in their
speech, violent in opinion, frightening. For some time, while they drew
their unemployment pensions, they did not make any effort to get work for
the future. They said: “That can wait. I’ve done my bit. The country can
keep me for a while. I helped to save it… Let’s go to the ‘movies.’”
They were listless when not excited by some “show.” Something seemed to
have snapped in them; their will-power. A quiet day at home did not appeal
to them.

“Are you tired of me?” said the young wife, wistfully. “Aren’t you glad to
be home?”

“It’s a dull sort of life,” said some of them.

The boys, unmarried, hung about street-corners, searched for their pals,
formed clubs where they smoked incessantly, and talked in an aimless way.

Then began the search for work. Boys without training looked for jobs with
wages high enough to give them a margin for amusement, after the cost of
living decently had been reckoned on the scale of high prices, mounting
higher and higher. Not so easy as they had expected. The girls were
clinging to their jobs, would not let go of the pocket-money which they
had spent on frocks. Employers favored girl labor, found it efficient and,
on the whole, cheap. Young soldiers who had been very skilled with
machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found that they were classed
with the ranks of unskilled labor in civil life. That was not good enough.
They had fought for their country. They had served England. Now they
wanted good jobs with short hours and good wages. They meant to get them.
And meanwhile prices were rising in the shops. Suits of clothes, boots,
food, anything, were at double and treble the price of pre-war days. The
profiteers were rampant. They were out to bleed the men who had been
fighting. They were defrauding the public with sheer, undisguised robbery,
and the government did nothing to check them. England, they thought, was
rotten all through.

Who cared for the men who had risked their lives and bore on their bodies
the scars of war? The pensions doled out to blinded soldiers would not
keep them alive. The consumptives, the gassed, the paralyzed, were
forgotten in institutions where they lay hidden from the public eye.
Before the war had been over six months “our heroes,” “our brave boys in
the trenches” were without preference in the struggle for existence.

Employers of labor gave them no special consideration. In many offices
they were told bluntly (as I know) that they had “wasted” three or four
years in the army and could not be of the same value as boys just out of
school. The officer class was hardest hit in that way. They had gone
straight from the public schools and universities to the army. They had
been lieutenants, captains, and majors in the air force, or infantry
battalions, or tanks, or trench-mortars, and they had drawn good pay,
which was their pocket-money. Now they were at a loose end, hating the
idea of office-work, but ready to knuckle down to any kind of decent job
with some prospect ahead. What kind of job? What knowledge had they of use
in civil life? None. They scanned advertisements, answered likely
invitations, were turned down by elderly men who said: “I’ve had two
hundred applications. And none of you young gentlemen from the army are
fit to be my office-boy.” They were the same elderly men who had said:
“We’ll fight to the last ditch. If I had six sons I would sacrifice them
all in the cause of liberty and justice.”

Elderly officers who had lost their businesses for their country’s sake,
who with a noble devotion had given up everything to “do their bit,” paced
the streets searching for work, and were shown out of every office where
they applied for a post. I know one officer of good family and
distinguished service who hawked round a subscription—book to
private houses. It took him more courage than he had needed under
shell-fire to ring the bell and ask to see “the lady of the house.” He
thanked God every time the maid handed back his card and said, “Not at
home.” On the first week’s work he was four pounds out of pocket… Here
and there an elderly officer blew out his brains. Another sucked a rubber
tube fastened to the gas-jet… It would have been better if they had
fallen on the field of honor.

Where was the nation’s gratitude for the men who had fought and died, or
fought and lived? Was it for this reward in peace that nearly a million of
our men gave up their lives? That question is not my question. It is the
question that was asked by millions of men in England in the months that
followed the armistice, and it was answered in their own brains by a
bitterness and indignation out of which may be lit the fires of the
revolutionary spirit.

At street-corners, in tramway cars, in tea-shops where young men talked at
the table next to mine I listened to conversations not meant for my ears,
which made me hear in imagination and afar off (yet not very far, perhaps)
the dreadful rumble of revolution, the violence of mobs led by fanatics.
It was the talk, mostly, of demobilized soldiers. They asked one another,
“What did we fight for?” and then other questions such as, “Wasn’t this a
war for liberty?” or, “We fought for the land, didn’t we? Then why
shouldn’t we share the land?” Or, “Why should we be bled white by
profiteers?”

They mentioned the government, and then laughed in a scornful way.

“The government,” said one man, “is a conspiracy against the people. All
its power is used to protect those who grow fat on big jobs, big trusts,
big contracts. It used us to smash the German Empire in order to
strengthen and enlarge the British Empire for the sake of those who grab
the oil-wells, the gold-fields, the minerals, and the markets of the
world.”


VIII

Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted by
pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such thoughts are
not seething among our working-classes. It will only be averted by cutting
at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our political state of its
corruption and folly, and by a clear, strong call of noble-minded men to a
new way of life in which a great people believing in the honor and honesty
of its leadership and in fair reward for good labor shall face a period of
poverty with courage, and co-operate unselfishly for the good of the
commonwealth, inspired by a sense of fellowship with the workers of other
nations. We have a long way to go and many storms to weather before we
reach that state, if, by any grace that is in us, and above us, we reach
it.

For there are disease and insanity in our present state, due to the
travail of the war and the education of the war. The daily newspapers for
many months have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes, of
violence and passion. Most of them have been done by soldiers or
ex-soldiers. The attack on the police station at Epsom, the destruction of
the town hall at Luton, revealed a brutality of passion, a murderous
instinct, which have been manifested again and again in other riots and
street rows and solitary crimes. Those last are the worst because they are
not inspired by a sense of injustice, however false, or any mob passion,
but by homicidal mania and secret lust. The many murders of young women,
the outrages upon little girls, the violent robberies that have happened
since the demobilizing of the armies have appalled decent—minded
people. They cannot understand the cause of this epidemic after a period
when there was less crime than usual.

The cause is easy to understand. It is caused by the discipline and
training of modern warfare. Our armies, as all armies, established an
intensive culture of brutality. They were schools of slaughter. It was the
duty of officers like Col. Ronald Campbell—“O.C. Bayonets” (a
delightful man)—to inspire blood-lust in the brains of gentle boys
who instinctively disliked butcher’s work. By an ingenious system of
psychology he played upon their nature, calling out the primitive
barbarism which has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating the
brute which has been long chained up by law and the social code of gentle
life, but lurks always in the secret lairs of the human heart. It is
difficult when the brute has been unchained, for the purpose of killing
Germans, to get it into the collar again with a cry of, “Down, dog, down!”
Generals, as I have told, were against the “soft stuff” preached by
parsons, who were not quite militarized, though army chaplains. They
demanded the gospel of hate, not that of love. But hate, when it dominates
the psychology of men, is not restricted to one objective, such as a body
of men behind barbed wire. It is a spreading poison. It envenoms the whole
mind. Like jealousy.

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the
ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man’s
Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly,
silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with
men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a
shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon their
enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat if need
be with nails and teeth. The code of the ape-man is bad for some
temperaments. It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up again
when there are no Germans present, but some old woman behind an open till,
or some policeman with a bull’s-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in a
street riot where fellow-citizens are for the time being “the enemy.”

Death, their own or other people’s, does not mean very much to some who,
in the trenches, sat within a few yards of stinking corpses, knowing that
the next shell might make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is it not
cheap in peace?…

The discipline of military life is mainly an imposed discipline—mechanical,
and enforced in the last resort not by reason, but by field punishment or
by a firing platoon. Whereas many men were made brisk and alert by
discipline and saw the need of it for the general good, others were always
in secret rebellion against its restraints of the individual will, and as
soon as they were liberated broke away from it as slaves from their
chains, and did not substitute self-discipline for that which had weighed
heavy on them. With all its discipline, army life was full of lounging,
hanging about, waste of time, waiting for things to happen. It was an
irresponsible life for the rank and file. Food was brought to them,
clothes were given to them, entertainments were provided behind the line,
sports organized, their day ordered by high powers. There was no need to
think for themselves, to act for themselves. They moved in herds dependent
on their leaders. That, too, was a bad training for the individualism of
civil life. It tended to destroy personal initiative and willpower.
Another evil of the abnormal life of war sowed the seeds of insanity in
the brains of men not strong enough to resist it. Sexually they were
starved. For months they lived out of the sight and presence of women. But
they came back into villages or towns where they were tempted by any poor
slut who winked at them and infected them with illness. Men went to
hospital with venereal disease in appalling numbers. Boys were ruined and
poisoned for life. Future generations will pay the price of war not only
in poverty and by the loss of the unborn children of the boys who died,
but by an enfeebled stock and the heritage of insanity.

The Prime Minister said one day, “The world is suffering from
shell-shock.” That was true. But it suffered also from the symptoms of all
that illness which comes from syphilis, whose breeding-ground is war.

The majority of our men were clean-living and clean—hearted fellows
who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of war.
They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed by the
gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they looked up
to the light, and had visions of some better law of life than that which
led to the world-tragedy. It would be a foul libel on many of them to
besmirch their honor by a general accusation of lowered morality and
brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our race and in the quality
of our home life kept great numbers of them sound, chivalrous,
generous-hearted, in spite of the frightful influences of degradation
bearing down upon them out of the conditions of modern warfare. But the
weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the primitive, were overwhelmed by
these influences, and all that was base in them was intensified, and their
passions were unleashed, with what result we have seen, and shall see, to
our sorrow and the nation’s peril.

The nation was in great peril after this war, and that peril will not pass
in our lifetime except by heroic remedies. We won victory in the field and
at the cost of our own ruin. We smashed Germany and Austria and Turkey,
but the structure of our own wealth and industry was shattered, and the
very foundations of our power were shaken and sapped. Nine months after
the armistice Great Britain was spending at the rate of £2,000,000 a day
in excess of her revenue. She was burdened with a national debt which had
risen from 645 millions in 1914 to 7,800 millions in 1919. The pre-war
expenditure of £200,000,000 per annum on the navy, army, and civil service
pensions and interest on national debt had risen to 750 millions.

Our exports were dwindling down, owing to decreased output, so that
foreign exchanges were rising against us and the American dollar was
increasing in value as our proud old sovereign was losing its ancient
standard. So that for all imports from the United States we were paying
higher prices, which rose every time the rate of exchange dropped against
us. The slaughter of 900,000 men of ours, the disablement of many more
than that, had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a paralysis of
all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery for purposes
of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the crippling effect of high
taxation, the rise in wages to meet high prices, and the lethargy of the
workers. Ruin, immense, engulfing, annihilating to our strength as a
nation and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes at the time I
write this book, and I find no consolation in the thought that other
nations in Europe, including the German people, are in the same desperate
plight, or worse.


IX

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has overtaken
us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange splendor,
like a ship that goes down with drums beating and banners flying, we are
racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are sorely stricken and in
dire poverty and debt, we have extended the responsibilities of empire and
of world—power as though we had illimitable wealth. Our sphere of
influence includes Persia, Thibet, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt—a vast
part of the Mohammedan world. Yet if any part of our possessions were to
break into revolt or raise a “holy war” against us, we should be hard
pressed for men to uphold our power and prestige, and our treasury would
be called upon in vain for gold. After the war which was to crush
militarism the air force alone proposed an annual expenditure of more than
twice as much money as the whole cost of the army before the war. While
the armaments of the German people, whom we defeated in the war against
militarism, are restricted to a few warships and a navy of 100,000 men at
a cost reckoned as £10,000,000 a year, we are threatened with a naval and
military program costing £300,000,000 a year. Was it for this our men
fought? Was it to establish a new imperialism upheld by the power of guns
that 900,000 boys of ours died in the war of liberation? I know it was
otherwise. There are people at the street-corners who know; and in the
tram-cars and factories and little houses in mean streets where there are
empty chairs and the portraits of dead boys.

It will go hard with the government of England if it plays a grandiose
drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will go
hard with the nation, for it will be engulfed in anarchy.

At the present time, in this August of 1919, when I write these words,
five years after another August, this England of ours, this England which
I love because its history is in my soul and its blood is in my body, and
I have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick, nigh unto death. Only great
physicians may heal it, and its old vitality struggling against disease,
and its old sanity against insanity. Our Empire is greater now in
spaciousness than ever before, but our strength to hold it has ebbed low
because of much death, and a strain too long endured, and strangling
debts. The workman is tired and has slackened in his work. In his scheme
of life he desires more luxury than our poverty affords. He wants higher
wages, shorter hours, and less output—reasonable desires in our
state before the war, unreasonable now because the cost of the war has put
them beyond human possibility. He wants low prices with high wages and
less work. It is false arithmetic and its falsity will be proved by a
tremendous crash.

Some crash must come, tragic and shocking to our social structure. I see
no escape from that, and only the hope that in that crisis the very shock
of it will restore the mental balance of the nation and that all classes
will combine under leaders of unselfish purpose, and fine vision, eager
for evolution and not revolution, for peace and not for blood, for
Christian charity and not for hatred, for civilization and not for
anarchy, to reshape the conditions of our social life and give us a new
working order, with more equality of labor and reward, duty and sacrifice,
liberty and discipline of the soul, combining the virtue of patriotism
with a generous spirit to other peoples across the old frontiers of hate.
That is the hope but not the certainty.

It is only by that hope that one may look back upon the war with anything
but despair. All the lives of those boys whom I saw go marching up the
roads of France and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid, so
lovely in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their
sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little higher than the
barbarity which was let loose in Europe. They will have been betrayed if
the agony they suffered is forgotten and “the war to end war” leads to
preparations for new, more monstrous conflict.

Or is war the law of human life? Is there something more powerful than
kaisers and castes which drives masses of men against other masses in
death-struggles which they do not understand? Are we really poor beasts in
the jungle, striving by tooth and claw, high velocity and poison-gas, for
the survival of the fittest in an endless conflict? If that is so, then
God mocks at us. Or, rather, if that is so, there is no God such as we men
may love, with love for men.

The world will not accept that message of despair; and millions of men
to-day who went through the agony of the war are inspired by the humble
belief that humanity may be cured of its cruelty and stupidity, and that a
brotherhood of peoples more powerful than a League of Nations may be
founded in the world after its present sickness and out of the conflict of
its anarchy.

That is the new vision which leads men on, and if we can make one step
that way it will be better than that backward fall which civilization took
when Germany played the devil and led us all into the jungle. The devil in
Germany had to be killed. There was no other way, except by helping the
Germans to kill it before it mastered them. Now let us exorcise our own
devils and get back to kindness toward all men of good will. That also is
the only way to heal the heart of the world and our own state. Let us seek
the beauty of life and God’s truth somehow, remembering the boys who died
too soon, and all the falsity and hatred of these past five years. By
blood and passion there will be no healing. We have seen too much blood.
We want to wipe it out of our eyes and souls. Let us have Peace.

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