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Now It Can Be Told

by Philip Gibbs · English · Gutenberg #3317 · 1,058,403 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Now It Can Be Told

Author: Philip Gibbs


        
Release date: July 1, 2002 [eBook #3317]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3317

Credits: Produced by Alan Earls, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOW IT CAN BE TOLD ***




Produced by Alan Earls





NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

by Philip Gibbs




CONTENTS


        PREFACE

       Part One  OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS

       Part Two  THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE

     Part Three  THE NATURE OF A BATTLE

      Part Four  A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

      Part Five  THE HEART OF A CITY

       Part Six  PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME

     Part Seven  THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON

     Part Eight  FOR WHAT MEN DIED




PREFACE


In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I
believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of
men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen
again--surely--if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the
hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as
it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on
all the fronts where conditions were the same.

What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, nor deny anything
in my daily narratives of events on the western front as they are now
published in book form. They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly,
as a truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in France and
Belgium during the years of war, broadly pictured out as far as I could
see and know. My duty, then, was that of a chronicler, not arguing why
things should have happened so nor giving reasons why they should not
happen so, but describing faithfully many of the things I saw, and
narrating the facts as I found them, as far as the censorship would
allow. After early, hostile days it allowed nearly all but criticism,
protest, and of the figures of loss.

The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war and
of all war--not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather as
the truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out
of their experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however
painful, to add something to the world's knowledge out of which men of
good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one
people and another, some new code of international morality, preventing
or at least postponing another massacre of youth like that five years'
sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness.





PART ONE. OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS




I


When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England
knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German
victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw only
the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and a glorious
adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out from London to
report the proceedings, and I was one of them.

We went in civilian clothes without military passports--the War Office
was not giving any--with bags of money which might be necessary for the
hire of motor-cars, hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in the
antechambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan War, and
others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office
for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior
staff-officers who knew that “K” hated these men and thought the press
ought to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into false
hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them and were told to
buy horses and sleeping-bags and be ready to start at a moment's notice
for the front.

The moment's notice was postponed for months....

The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of “seeing
something,” without authority, and made wild, desperate efforts to break
through the barrier that had been put up against them by French and
British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were arrested, put
into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, rearrested, and
expelled from France. That was after fantastic adventures in which they
saw what war meant in civilized countries where vast populations were
made fugitives of fear, where millions of women and children and old
people became wanderers along the roads in a tide of human misery, with
the red flame of war behind them and following them, and where the first
battalions of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so confident of
victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did not know), came back
maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat,
which presently became a spate through Belgium and the north of France,
swamping over many cities and thousands of villages and many fields.
Those young writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went
back to Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write
the things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen
and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which would
convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all
civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of
heroic pageantry.

“Had a good time?” asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly waiting
for an answer.

“A good time!”... God!... Did people think it was amusing to be an
onlooker of world-tragedy?... One of them remembered a lady of France
with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and
smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her
flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the battle that was
now being fought round their own town. She was brave--pointed out the
line of the German advance on the map--and it was in a troop-train
crowded with French soldiers--and then burst into wild weeping, clasping
the hand of an English writing-man so that her nails dug into his flesh.
I remember her still.

“Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!” said the boy of eight.

Through Amiens at night had come a French army in retreat. There were
dead and wounded on their wagons. Cuirassiers stumbled as they led their
tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in the
darkness, stared at their men retreating like this through their city,
and knew that the enemy was close behind.

“Nous sommes perdus!” whispered a woman, and gave a wailing cry.

People were fighting their way into railway trucks at every station for
hundreds of miles across northern France. Women were beseeching a place
for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on journeys of
nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and hunger. An old woman
died, and her corpse blocked up the lavatory. At night they slept on the
pavements in cities invaded by fugitives.

At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of France, there were
columns of ambulances bringing in an endless tide of wounded. They were
laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-yards, five hundred at a
time. Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood. Some of their
bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with a hard snuffle. A foul
smell came from them.

At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with disinfecting
fluid after getting through with one day's wounded. The French doctor
in charge had received a telegram from the director of medical services:
“Make ready for forty thousand wounded.” It was during the first battle
of the Marne.

“It is impossible!” said the French doctor....

Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which
big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened themselves
against the walls and said, “God in heaven!” Two hundred and
fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats,
sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no
food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in their
breasts. It was cold at night and there were only a few canal-boats and
fishermen's cottages, and in them were crowds of fugitives. The odor
of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, and sicken in
remembrance....

Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many other towns from the
Belgian coast to Switzerland. In Dixmude young boys of France--fusiliers
marins--lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall, falling to
bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting for death amid
the dead bodies of his men--one so young, so handsome, lying there on
his back, with a waxen face, staring steadily at the sky through the
broken roof....

At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the esplanade,
and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of a red-brick
villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a town that had
been built for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the world.
British monitors lying close into shore were answering the German
bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by Ostend. From one
monitor came a group of figures with white masks of cotton-wool tipped
with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with the dead body of an
officer tied up in a sack....

“O Jesu!... O maman!... O ma pauvre p'tite femme!... O Jesu! O Jesu!”

From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or parched in the
burning sun before the battle of the Marne these cries went up to the
blue sky of France in August of '14. They were the cries of youth's
agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and
saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the victory that
saved France and us. The German dead had been gathered into heaps like
autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising from
them....

That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all
their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw our
little Regular Army, the “Old Contemptibles,” on their way back, with
the German hordes following close. Sir John French had his headquarters
for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish soldiers, stragglers
from units still keeping some kind of order, were coming in, bronzed,
dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied round with rags,
with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty as dogs,
crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been retreating and
retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty bridges of France.
Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied out the diary of
their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men. “Wait,” they said.
“In a few days we shall give them a hard knock. They will never get
Paris. Jamais de la vie!”...

In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English
correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German
hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to
blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken
bottles... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where
grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and where
French and British soldiers--stragglers all--drank together, and sang
above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans.

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month
of that first six months of war--as afterward--came back the tide of
wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals
crowded with blind and dying and moaning men....

“Had an interesting time?” asked a man I wanted to kill because of his
smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity
of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes
which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had
helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons. As an
onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because they could
not understand. All these things I had seen in the first nine months I
put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that some might know;
but it was only a few who understood....




II


In 1915 the War Office at last moved in the matter of war
correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against them, was being
broken down a little by the pressure of public opinion (mentioned from
time to time by members of the government), which demanded more news of
their men in the field than was given by bald communiqués from
General Headquarters and by an “eye-witness” who, as one paper had
the audacity to say, wrote nothing but “eye-wash.” Even the enormous,
impregnable stupidity of our High Command on all matters of psychology
was penetrated by a vague notion that a few “writing fellows” might be
sent out with permission to follow the armies in the field, under the
strictest censorship, in order to silence the popular clamor for more
news. Dimly and nervously they apprehended that in order to stimulate
the recruiting of the New Army now being called to the colors by vulgar
appeals to sentiment and passion, it might be well to “write up”
 the glorious side of war as it could be seen at the base and in the
organization of transport, without, of course, any allusion to dead or
dying men, to the ghastly failures of distinguished generals, or to the
filth and horror of the battlefields. They could not understand, nor did
they ever understand (these soldiers of the old school) that a nation
which was sending all its sons to the field of honor desired with a deep
and poignant craving to know how those boys of theirs were living and
how they were dying, and what suffering was theirs, and what chances
they had against their enemy, and how it was going with the war which
was absorbing all the energy and wealth of the people at home.

“Why don't they trust their leaders?” asked the army chiefs. “Why don't
they leave it to us?”

“We do trust you--with some misgivings,” thought the people, “and we do
leave it to you--though you seem to be making a mess of things--but
we want to know what we have a right to know, and that is the life and
progress of this war in which our men are engaged. We want to know more
about their heroism, so that it shall be remembered by their people and
known by the world; about their agony, so that we may share it in our
hearts; and about the way of their death, so that our grief may be
softened by the thought of their courage. We will not stand for this
anonymous war; and you are wasting time by keeping it secret, because
the imagination of those who have not joined cannot be fired by cold
lines which say, 'There is nothing to report on the western front.'”

In March of 1915 I went out with the first body of accredited war
correspondents, and we saw some of the bad places where our men lived
and died, and the traffic to the lines, and the mechanism of war in
fixed positions as were then established after the battle of the Marne
and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an experimental
visit. It was not until June of that year, after an adventure on the
French front in the Champagne, that I received full credentials as a war
correspondent with the British armies on the western front, and joined
four other men who had been selected for this service, and began that
long innings as an authorized onlooker of war which ended, after long
and dreadful years, with the Army of Occupation beyond the Rhine.




III


In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by courtesy
a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General Headquarters
at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time to time,
according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was very
peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women worked
while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied us by
the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick ride over
Cassel Hill to the edge of the Ypres salient and the farthest point
where any car could go without being seen by a watchful enemy and blown
to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we walked, up sinister roads, or
along communication trenches, to the fire-step in the front line, or
into places like “Plug Street” wood and Kemmel village, and the ruins
of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle--the training-schools of
British armies--where always birds of death were on the wing, screaming
with high and rising notes before coming to earth with the cough that
killed... After hours in those hiding-places where boys of the New Army
were learning the lessons of war in dugouts and ditches under the range
of German guns, back again to the little white chateau at Tatinghem,
with a sweet scent of flowers from the fields, and nightingales singing
in the woods and a bell tinkling for Benediction in the old church tower
beyond our gate.

“To-morrow,” said the colonel--our first chief--before driving in for
a late visit to G. H. Q., “we will go to Armentieres and see how the
'Kitchener' boys are shaping in the line up there. It ought to be
interesting.”

The colonel was profoundly interested in the technic of war, in its
organization of supplies and transport, and methods of command. He was
a Regular of the Indian Army, a soldier by blood and caste and training,
and the noblest type of the old school of Imperial officer, with
obedience to command as a religious instinct; of stainless honor, I
think, in small things as well as great, with a deep love of England,
and a belief and pride in her Imperial destiny to govern many peoples
for their own good, and with the narrowness of such belief. His
imagination was limited to the boundaries of his professional interests,
though now and then his humanity made him realize in a perplexed way
greater issues at stake in this war than the challenge to British
Empiry.

One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield,
with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in chalky
ditches below their breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a colleague
of mine and said in a startled way:

“This must never happen again! Never!”

It will never happen again for him, as for many others. He was too tall
for the trenches, and one day a German sniper saw the red glint of his
hat-band--he was on the staff of the 11th Corps--and thought, “a gay
bird”! So he fell; and in our mess, when the news came, we were sad at
his going, and one of our orderlies, who had been his body-servant, wept
as he waited on us.

Late at night the colonel--that first chief of ours--used to come home
from G. H. Q., as all men called General Headquarters with a sense of
mystery, power, and inexplicable industry accomplishing--what?--in those
initials. He came back with a cheery shout of, “Fine weather to-morrow!”
 or, “A starry night and all's well!” looking fine and soldierly as the
glare of his headlights shone on his tall figure with red tabs and a
colored armlet. But that cheeriness covered secret worries. Night after
night, in those early weeks of our service, he sat in his little office,
talking earnestly with the press officers--our censors. They seemed
to be arguing, debating, protesting, about secret influences and
hostilities surrounding us and them. I could only guess what it was all
about. It all seemed to make no difference to me when I sat down before
pieces of blank paper to get down some kind of picture, some kind
of impression, of a long day in place where I had been scared awhile
because death was on the prowl in a noisy way and I had seen it pounce
on human bodies. I knew that tomorrow I was going to another little
peep-show of war, where I should hear the same noises. That talk
downstairs, that worry about some mystery at G. H. Q. would make no
difference to the life or death of men, nor get rid of that coldness
which came to me when men were being killed nearby. Why all that
argument?

It seemed that G. H. Q.--mysterious people in a mysterious place--were
drawing up rules for war correspondence and censorship; altering rules
made the day before, formulating new rules for to-morrow, establishing
precedents, writing minutes, initialing reports with, “Passed to you,”
 or, “I agree,” written on the margin. The censors who lived with us and
traveled with us and were our friends, and read what we wrote before the
ink was dry, had to examine our screeds with microscopic eyes and with
infinite remembrance of the thousand and one rules. Was it safe to
mention the weather? Would that give any information to the enemy?
Was it permissible to describe the smell of chloride-of-lime in the
trenches, or would that discourage recruiting? That description of
the traffic on the roads of war, with transport wagons, gun-limbers,
lorries, mules--how did that conflict with Rule No. 17a (or whatever it
was) prohibiting all mention of movements of troops?

One of the censors working late at night, with lines of worry on his
forehead and little puckers about his eyes, turned to me with a queer
laugh, one night in the early days. He was an Indian Civil Servant, and
therefore, by every rule, a gentleman and a charming fellow.

“You don't know what I am risking in passing your despatch! It's too
good to spoil, but G. H. Q. will probably find that it conveys accurate
information to the enemy about the offensive in 1925. I shall get the
sack--and oh, the difference to me!”

It appeared that G. H. Q. was nervous of us. They suggested that our
private letters should be tested for writing in invisible ink between
the lines. They were afraid that, either deliberately for some
journalistic advantage, or in sheer ignorance as “outsiders,” we might
hand information to the enemy about important secrets. Belonging to
the old caste of army mind, they believed that war was the special
prerogative of professional soldiers, of which politicians and people
should have no knowledge. Therefore as civilians in khaki we were hardly
better than spies.

The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in the moonlight,
after a day up the line, where young men were living and dying in dirty
ditches. I could see that he was worried, even angry.

“Those people!” he said.

“What people?”

“G. H. Q.”

“Oh, Lord!” I groaned. “Again?” and looked across the fields of corn
to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were
learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn
came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that
day--or yesterday was it?--kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with
his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer... How sweet was
the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star twinkled above the
low flashes of gun-fire away there in the salient.

“They want us to waste your time,” said the officer. “Those were the
very words used by the Chief of Intelligence--in writing which I have
kept. 'Waste their time!'... I'll be damned if I consider my work is to
waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good fools see that
this is not a professional adventure, like their other little wars; that
the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to know what its
men are doing? They have a right to know.”




IV


Just at first--though not for long--there was a touch of hostility
against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but
not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their
quarters, wondered why we should come “spying around,” trying to “see
things.” I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early
times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a
brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy
nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy clouds
in a blue sky. There was a long straight road leading to the village of
Vermelles, with a crisscross of communication trenches on one side,
and, on the other, fields where corn and grass grew rankly in abandoned
fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though this were Arcady
in days of peace. It was not. The red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or
so away, were sharply defined, as through stereoscopic lenses, in the
quiver of sunlight, and had the sinister look of a death-haunted place.
It was where the French had fought their way through gardens, walls,
and houses in murderous battle, before leaving it for British troops to
hold. Across it now came the whine of shells, and I saw that shrapnel
bullets were kicking up the dust of a thousand yards down the straight
road, following a small body of brown men whose tramp of feet raised
another cloud of dust, like smoke. They were the only representatives of
human life--besides ourselves--in this loneliness, though many men must
have been in hiding somewhere. Then heavy “crumps” burst in the fields
where the sheep were browsing, across the way we had to go to the
brigade headquarters.

“How about it?” asked the captain with me. “I don't like crossing that
field, in spite of the buttercups and daisies and the little frisky
lambs.”

“I hate the idea of it,” I said.

Then we looked down the road at the little body of brown men. They were
nearer now, and I could see the face of the officer leading them--a boy
subaltern, rather pale though the sun was hot. He halted and saluted my
companion.

“The enemy seems to have sighted our dust, sir. His shrapnel is
following up pretty closely. Would you advise me to put my men under
cover, or carry on?”

The captain hesitated. This was rather outside his sphere of influence.
But the boyishness of the other officer asked for help.

“My advice is to put your men into that ditch and keep them there until
the strafe is over.” Some shrapnel bullets whipped the sun-baked road as
he spoke.

“Very good, sir.”

The men sat in the ditch, with their packs against the bank, and wiped
the sweat off their faces. They looked tired and dispirited, but not
alarmed.

In the fields behind them--our way--the 4.2's (four--point-twos) were
busy plugging holes in the grass and flowers, rather deep holes, from
which white smoke-clouds rose after explosive noises.

“With a little careful strategy we might get through,” said the captain.
“There's a general waiting for us, and I have noticed that generals are
impatient fellows. Let's try our luck.”

We walked across the wild flowers, past the sheep, who only raised their
heads in meek surprise when shells came with a shrill, intensifying
snarl and burrowed up the earth about them. I noticed how loudly and
sweetly the larks were singing up in the blue. Several horses lay dead,
newly killed, with blood oozing about them, and their entrails smoking.
We made a half-loop around them and then struck straight for the chateau
which was the brigade headquarters. Neither of us spoke now. We were
thoughtful, calculating the chance of getting to that red-brick house
between the shells. It was just dependent on the coincidence of time and
place.

Three men jumped up from a ditch below a brown wall round the chateau
garden and ran hard for the gateway. A shell had pitched quite close
to them. One man laughed as though at a grotesque joke, and fell as he
reached the courtyard. Smoke was rising from the outhouses, and there
was a clatter of tiles and timbers, after an explosive crash.

“It rather looks,” said my companion, “as though the Germans knew there
is a party on in that charming house.”

It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never good to go back
before reaching one's objective. That was bad for the discipline of the
courage that is just beyond fear.

Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the chateau, and as we went
in through the gateway a sergeant made a quick jump for a barn as a
shell burst somewhere close. As visitors we hesitated between two ways
into the chateau, and chose the easier; and it was then that I became
dimly aware of hostility against me on the part of a number of officers
in the front hall. The brigade staff was there, grouped under the
banisters. I wondered why, and guessed (rightly, as I found) that the
center of the house might have a better chance of escape than the
rooms on either side, in case of direct hits from those things falling
outside.

It was the brigade major who asked our business. He was a tall, handsome
young man of something over thirty, with the arrogance of a Christ
Church blood.

“Oh, he has come out to see something in Vermelles? A pleasant place for
sightseeing! Meanwhile the Hun is ranging on this house, so he may see
more than he wants.”

He turned on his heel and rejoined his group. They all stared in my
direction as though at a curious animal. A very young gentleman--the
general's A. D. C.--made a funny remark at my expense and the others
laughed. Then they ignored me, and I was glad, and made a little study
in the psychology of men awaiting a close call of death. I was perfectly
conscious myself that in a moment or two some of us, perhaps all of us,
might be in a pulp of mangled flesh beneath the ruins of a red-brick
villa--the shells were crashing among the outhouses and in the
courtyard, and the enemy was making good shooting--and the idea did not
please me at all. At the back of my brain was Fear, and there was a
cold sweat in the palms of my hands; but I was master of myself, and
I remember having a sense of satisfaction because I had answered the
brigade major in a level voice, with a touch of his own arrogance. I saw
that these officers were afraid; that they, too, had Fear at the back of
the brain, and that their conversation and laughter were the camouflage
of the soul. The face of the young A. D. C. was flushed and he laughed
too much at his own jokes, and his laughter was just a tone too shrill.
An officer came into the hall, carrying two Mills bombs--new toys in
those days--and the others fell back from him, and one said:

“For Christ's sake don't bring them here--in the middle of a
bombardment!”

“Where's the general?” asked the newcomer.

“Down in the cellar with the other brigadier. They don't ask us down to
tea, I notice.”

Those last words caused all the officers to laugh--almost excessively.
But their laughter ended sharply, and they listened intently as there
was a heavy crash outside.

Another officer came up the steps and made a rapid entry into the hall.

“I understand there is to be a conference of battalion commanders,”
 he said, with a queer catch in his breath. “In view of
this--er--bombardment, I had better come in later, perhaps?”

“You had better wait,” said the brigade major, rather grimly.

“Oh, certainly.”

A sergeant-major was pacing up and down the passage by the back door.
He was calm and stolid. I liked the look of him and found something
comforting in his presence, so that I went to have a few words with him.

“How long is this likely to last, Sergeant-major”

“There's no saying, sir. They may be searching for the chateau to pass
the time, so to speak, or they may go on till they get it. I'm sorry
they caught those gunners. Nice lads, both of them.”

He did not seem to be worrying about his own chance.

Then suddenly there was silence. The German guns had switched off. I
heard the larks singing through the open doorway, and all the little
sounds of a summer day. The group of officers in the hall started
chatting more quietly. There was no more need of finding jokes and
laughter. They had been reprieved, and could be serious.

“We'd better get forward to Vermelles,” said my companion.

As we walked away from the chateau, the brigade major passed us on his
horse. He leaned over his saddle toward me and said, “Good day to you,
and I hope you'll like Vermelles.”

The words were civil, but there was an underlying meaning in them.

“I hope to do so, sir.”

We walked down the long straight road toward the ruins of Vermelles with
a young soldier-guide who on the outskirts of the village remarked in a
casual way:

“No one is allowed along this road in daylight, as a rule. It's under
hobservation of the henemy.”

“Then why the devil did you come this way?” asked my companion.

“I thought you might prefer the short cut, sir.”

We explored the ruins of Vermelles, where many young Frenchmen had
fallen in fighting through the walls and gardens. One could see the
track of their strife, in trampled bushes and broken walls. Bits of
red rag--the red pantaloons of the first French soldiers--were still
fastened to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches,
water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs
littered the ditches which had been dug as trenches across streets of
burned-out houses.




V


A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front
of the chateau of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still
standing, and told us the story of its capture.

“It was a wild scrap. I was told all about it by a French sergeant who
was in it. They were under the cover of that wall over there, about a
hundred yards away, and fixing up a charge of high explosives to knock
a breach in the wall. The chateau was a machine-gun fortress, with
the Germans on the top floor, the ground floor, and in the basement,
protected by sand-bags, through which they fired. A German officer made
a bad mistake. He opened the front door and came out with some of his
machine-gunners from the ground floor to hold a trench across the square
in front of the house. Instantly a French lieutenant called to his men.
They climbed over the wall and made a dash for the chateau, bayoneting
the Germans who tried to stop them. Then they swarmed into the
chateau--a platoon of them with the lieutenant. They were in the
drawing-room, quite an elegant place, you know, with the usual gilt
furniture and long mirrors. In one corner was a pedestal, with a statue
of Venus standing on it. Rather charming, I expect. A few Germans were
killed in the room, easily. But upstairs there was a mob who fired
down through the ceiling when they found what had happened. The French
soldiers prodded the ceiling with their bayonets, and all the plaster
broke, falling on them. A German, fat and heavy, fell half-way through
the rafters, and a bayonet was poked into him as he stuck there. The
whole ceiling gave way, and the Germans upstairs came downstairs, in a
heap. They fought like wolves--wild beasts--with fear and rage. French
and Germans clawed at one another's throats, grabbed hold of noses,
rolled over each other. The French sergeant told me he had his teeth
into a German's neck. The man was all over him, pinning his arms, trying
to choke him. It was the French lieutenant who did most damage. He fired
his last shot and smashed a German's face with his empty revolver. Then
he caught hold of the marble Venus by the legs and swung it above his
head, in the old Berserker style, and laid out Germans like ninepins...
The fellows in the basement surrendered.”




VI


The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin,
and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the
marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles
of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner officer took
us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had their battery
nearby. We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through undergrowth
to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and wire frames
with immortelles remained as relics of that garden where the people of
Vermelles had laid their dead to rest. New dead had followed old dead.
I stumbled over something soft, like a ball of clay, and saw that it was
the head of a faceless man, in a battered kepi. From a ditch close by
came a sickly stench of half-buried flesh.

“The whole place is a pest-house,” said the gunner.

Another voice spoke from some hiding-place.

“Salvo!”

The earth shook and there was a flash of red flame, and a shock of noise
which hurt one's ear-drums.

“That's my battery,” said the gunner officer. “It's the very devil when
one doesn't expect it.”

I was introduced to the gentleman who had said “Salvo!” He was the
gunner-major, and a charming fellow, recently from civil life. All the
battery was made up of New Army men learning their job, and learning it
very well, I should say. There was no arrogance about them.

“It's sporting of you to come along to a spot like this,” said one of
them. “I wouldn't unless I had to. Of course you'll take tea in our
mess?”

I was glad to take tea--in a little house at the end of the ruined
high-street of Vermelles which had by some miracle escaped destruction,
though a shell had pierced through the brick wall of the parlor and had
failed to burst. It was there still, firmly wedged, like a huge nail.
The tea was good, in tin mugs. Better still was the company of the
gunner officers. They told me how often they were “scared stiff.” They
had been very frightened an hour before I came, when the German gunners
had ranged up and down the street, smashing up ruined houses into
greater ruin.

“They're so methodical!” said one of the officers.

“Wonderful shooting!” said another.

“I will say they're topping gunners,” said the major. “But we're
learning; my men are very keen. Put in a good word for the new
artillery. It would buck them up no end.”

We went back before sunset, down the long straight road, and past the
chateau which we had visited in the afternoon. It looked very peaceful
there among the trees.

It is curious that I remember the details of that day so vividly,
as though they happened yesterday. On hundreds of other days I had
adventures like that, which I remember more dimly.

“That brigade major was a trifle haughty, don't you think?” said my
companion. “And the others didn't seem very friendly. Not like those
gunner boys.”

“We called at an awkward time. They were rather fussed.”

“One expects good manners. Especially from Regulars who pride themselves
on being different in that way from the New Army.”

“It's the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier.
The Regular crowd think the war belongs to them... But I liked their
pluck. They're arrogant to Death himself when he comes knocking at the
door.”




VII


It was not long before we broke down the prejudice against us among
the fighting units. The new armies were our friends from the first, and
liked us to visit them in their trenches and their dugouts, their
camps and their billets. Every young officer was keen to show us his
particular “peep-show” or to tell us his latest “stunt.” We made many
friends among them, and it was our grief that as the war went on so many
of them disappeared from their battalions, and old faces were replaced
by new faces, and those again by others when they had become familiar.
Again and again, after battle, twenty-two officers in a battalion mess
were reduced to two or three, and the gaps were filled up from the
reserve depots. I was afraid to ask, “Where is So-and-so?” because I
knew that the best answer would be, “A Blighty wound,” and the worst was
more likely.

It was the duration of all the drama of death that seared one's soul as
an onlooker; the frightful sum of sacrifice that we were recording day
by day. There were times when it became intolerable and agonizing, and
when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace by negotiation,
by compromise, that the river of blood might cease to flow. The men
looked so splendid as they marched up to the lines, singing, whistling,
with an easy swing. They looked so different when thousands came down
again, to field dressing-stations--the walking wounded and the stretcher
cases, the blind and the gassed--as we saw them on the mornings of
battle, month after month, year after year.

Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether “soft,” though
we did not go “over the top” or live in the dirty ditches with them. We
had to travel prodigiously to cover the ground between one division and
another along a hundred miles of front, with long walks often at the
journey's end and a wet way back. Sometimes we were soaked to the skin
on the journey home. Often we were so cold and numbed in those long wild
drives up desolate roads that our limbs lost consciousness and the wind
cut into us like knives. We were working against time, always against
time, and another tire-burst would mean that no despatch could be
written of a great battle on the British front, or only a short record
written in the wildest haste when there was so much to tell, so much
to describe, such unforgetable pictures in one's brain of another day's
impressions in the fields and on the roads.

There were five English correspondents and, two years later, two
Americans. On mornings of big battle we divided up the line of front and
drew lots for the particular section which each man would cover. Then
before the dawn, or in the murk of winter mornings, or the first glimmer
of a summer day, our cars would pull out and we would go off separately
to the part of the line allotted to us by the number drawn, to see the
preliminary bombardment, to walk over newly captured ground, to get into
the backwash of prisoners and walking wounded, amid batteries firing
a new barrage, guns moving forward on days of good advance, artillery
transport bringing up new stores of ammunition, troops in support
marching to repel a counter-attack or follow through the new objectives,
ambulances threading their way back through the traffic, with loads
of prostrate men, mules, gunhorses, lorries churning up the mud in
Flanders.

So we gained a personal view of all this activity of strife, and from
many men in its whirlpool details of their own adventure and of
general progress or disaster on one sector of the battle-front. Then in
divisional headquarters we saw the reports of the battle as they came in
by telephone, or aircraft, or pigeon-post, from half-hour to half-hour,
or ten minutes by ten minutes. Three divisions widely separated provided
all the work one war correspondent could do on one day of action, and
later news on a broader scale, could be obtained from corps headquarters
farther back. Tired, hungry, nerve-racked, splashed to the eyes in mud,
or covered in a mask of dust, we started for the journey back to our own
quarters, which we shifted from time to time in order to get as near as
we could to the latest battle-front without getting beyond reach of the
telegraph instruments--by relays of despatch-riders--at “Signals,” G. H.
Q., which remained immovably fixed in the rear.

There was a rendezvous in one of our rooms, and each man outlined the
historical narrative of the day upon the front he had covered, reserving
for himself his own adventures, impressions, and emotions.

Time slipped away, and time was short, while the despatch-riders
waited for our unwritten despatches, and censors who had been our
fellow-travelers washed themselves cleaner and kept an eye on the clock.

Time was short while the world waited for our tales of tragedy or
victory... and tempers were frayed, and nerves on edge, among five
men who hated one another, sometimes, with a murderous hatred (though,
otherwise, good comrades) and desired one another's death by slow
torture or poison-gas when they fumbled over notes, written in a jolting
car, or on a battlefield walk, and went into past history in order
to explain present happenings, or became tangled in the numbers of
battalions and divisions.

Percival Phillips turned pink-and-white under the hideous strain of
nervous control, with an hour and a half for two columns in The Morning
Post. A little pulse throbbed in his forehead. His lips were tightly
pressed. His oaths and his anguish were in his soul, but unuttered.
Beach Thomas, the most amiable of men, the Peter Pan who went a
bird-nesting on battlefields, a lover of beauty and games and old poems
and Greek and Latin tags, and all joy in life--what had he to do with
war?--looked bored with an infinite boredom, irritable with a scornful
impatience of unnecessary detail, gazed through his gold-rimmed
spectacles with an air of extreme detachment (when Percy Robinson
rebuilt the map with dabs and dashes on a blank sheet of paper), and
said, “I've got more than I can write, and The Daily Mail goes early to
press.”

“Thanks very much... It's very kind of you.”

We gathered up our note-books and were punctiliously polite. (Afterward
we were the best of friends.) Thomas was first out of the room, with
short, quick little steps in spite of his long legs. His door banged.
Phillips was first at his typewriter, working it like a machine-gun, in
short, furious spasms of word-fire. I sat down to my typewriter--a
new instrument of torture to me--and coaxed its evil genius with
conciliatory prayers.

“For dear God's sake,” I said, “don't go twisting that blasted ribbon of
yours to-day. I must write this despatch, and I've just an hour when I
want five.”

Sometimes that Corona was a mechanism of singular sweetness, and I
blessed it with a benediction. But often there was a devil in it which
mocked at me. After the first sentence or two it twisted the ribbon; at
the end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry snake, writhing
and coiling hideously.

I shouted for Mackenzie, the American, a master of these things.

He came in and saw my blanched face, my sweat of anguish, my crise de
nerfs. I could see by his eyes that he understood my stress and had pity
on me.

“That's all right,” he said. “A little patience--”

By a touch or two he exorcised the devil, laughed, and said: “Go easy.
You've just about reached breaking--point.”

I wrote, as we all wrote, fast and furiously, to get down something of
enormous history, word-pictures of things seen, heroic anecdotes, the
underlying meaning of this new slaughter. There was never time to think
out a sentence or a phrase, to touch up a clumsy paragraph, to go back
on a false start, to annihilate a vulgar adjective, to put a touch
of style into one's narrative. One wrote instinctively, blindly,
feverishly... And downstairs were the censors, sending up messages by
orderlies to say “half-time,” or “ten minutes more,” and cutting
out sometimes the things one wanted most to say, modifying a direct
statement of fact into a vague surmise, taking away the honor due to
the heroic men who had fought and died to-day... Who would be a war
correspondent, or a censor?

So it happened day by day, for five months at a stretch, when big
battles were in progress. It was not an easy life. There were times when
I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I could hardly rouse
myself to a new day's effort. There were times when I was faint and sick
and weak; and my colleagues were like me. But we struggled on to tell
the daily history of the war and the public cursed us because we did not
tell more, or sneered at us because they thought we were “spoon-fed” by
G. H. Q.--who never gave us any news and who were far from our way of
life, except when they thwarted us, by petty restrictions and foolish
rules.




VIII


The Commander-in-Chief--Sir John French--received us when we were first
attached to the British armies in the field--a lifetime ago, as it seems
to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the chateau near St.-Omer, which
he used as his own headquarters, with his A. D. C.'s in attendance,
though the main general headquarters were in the town. Our first colonel
gathered us like a shepherd with his flock, counting us twice over
before we passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew afterward to be
Sir Philip Sassoon, received us and chatted pleasantly in a French
salon with folding-doors which shut off an inner room. There were a
few portraits of ladies and gentlemen of France in the days before the
Revolution, like those belonging to that old aristocracy which still
existed, in poverty and pride, in other chateaus in this French
Flanders. There was a bouquet of flowers on the table, giving a sweet
scent to the room, and sunlight streamed through the shutters... I
thought for a moment of the men living in ditches in the salient, under
harassing fire by day and night. Their actions and their encounters with
death were being arranged, without their knowledge, in this sunny little
chateau....

The folding-doors opened and Sir John French came in. He wore top-boots
and spurs, and after saying, “Good day, gentlemen,” stood with his legs
apart, a stocky, soldierly figure, with a square head and heavy jaw. I
wondered whether there were any light of genius in him--any inspiration,
any force which would break the awful strength of the enemy against us,
any cunning in modern warfare.

He coughed a little, and made us a speech. I forget his words, but
remember the gist of them. He was pleased to welcome us within his army,
and trusted to our honor and loyalty. He made an allusion to the power
of the press, and promised us facilities for seeing and writing,
within the bounds of censorship. I noticed that he pronounced St.-Omer,
St.-Omar, as though Omar Khayyam had been canonized. He said, “Good day,
gentlemen,” again, and coughed huskily again to clear his throat, and
then went back through the folding-doors.

I saw him later, during the battle of Loos, after its ghastly failure.
He was riding a white horse in the villages of Heuchin and Houdain,
through which lightly wounded Scots of the 1st and 15th Divisions were
making their way back. He leaned over his saddle, questioning the men
and thanking them for their gallantry. I thought he looked grayer and
older than when he had addressed us.

“Who mun that old geezer be, Jock?” asked a Highlander when he had
passed.

“I dinna ken,” said the other Scot. “An' I dinna care.”

“It's the Commander-in-Chief,” I said. “Sir John French.”

“Eh?” said the younger man, of the 8th Gordons. He did not seem thrilled
by the knowledge I had given him, but turned his head and stared after
the figure on the white horse. Then he said: “Well, he's made a mess o'
the battle. We could've held Hill 70 against all the di'els o' hell if
there had bin supports behind us.”

“Ay,” said his comrade, “an' there's few o' the laddies'll come back fra
Cite St.-Auguste.”




IX


It was another commander-in-chief who received us some months after the
battle of Loos, in a chateau near Montreuil, to which G. H. Q. had then
removed. Our only knowledge of Sir Douglas Haig before that day was of
a hostile influence against us in the First Army, which he commanded. He
had drawn a line through his area beyond which we might not pass. He did
not desire our presence among his troops nor in his neighborhood. That
line had been broken by the protests of our commandant, and now as
Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig had realized dimly that he might be
helped by our services.

It was in another French salon that we waited for the man who controlled
the British armies in the field--those armies which we now knew in some
intimacy, whom we had seen in the front-line trenches and rest-camps and
billets, hearing their point of view, knowing their suffering and their
patience, and their impatience--and their deadly hatred of G. H. Q.

He was very handsome as he sat behind a Louis XIV table, with General
Charteris--his Chief of Intelligence, who was our chief, too--behind him
at one side, for prompting and advice. He received us with fine courtesy
and said:

“Pray be seated, gentlemen.”

There had been many troubles over censorship, of which he knew but
vaguely through General Charteris, who looked upon us as his special
“cross.” We had fought hard for liberty in mentioning units, to give
the honor to the troops, and for other concessions which would free our
pens.

The Commander-in-Chief was sympathetic, but his sympathy was expressed
in words which revealed a complete misunderstanding of our purpose and
of our work, and was indeed no less than an insult, unconscious but very
hurtful.

“I think I understand fairly well what you gentlemen want,” he said.
“You want to get hold of little stories of heroism, and so forth, and to
write them up in a bright way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the
kitchen, and the Man in the Street.” The quiet passion with which those
words were resented by us, the quick repudiation of this slur upon our
purpose by a charming man perfectly ignorant at that time of the new
psychology of nations in a war which was no longer a professional
adventure, surprised him. We took occasion to point out to him that the
British Empire, which had sent its men into this war, yearned to know
what they were doing and how they were doing, and that their patience
and loyalty depended upon closer knowledge of what was happening than
was told them in the communiques issued by the Commander-in-Chief
himself. We urged him to let us mention more frequently the names of the
troops engaged--especially English troops--for the sake of the soldiers
themselves, who were discouraged by this lack of recognition, and for
the sake of the people behind them... It was to the pressure of the
war correspondents, very largely, that the troops owed the mention
and world-wide honor which came to them, more generously, in the later
phases of the war.

The Commander-in-Chief made a note of our grievances, turning now and
again to General Charteris, who was extremely nervous at our frankness
of speech, and telling him to relax the rules of censorship as far as
possible. That was done, and in later stages of the war I personally
had no great complaint against the censorship, and wrote all that was
possible to write of the actions day by day, though I had to leave out
something of the underlying horror of them all, in spite of my continual
emphasis, by temperament and by conviction, on the tragedy of all this
sacrifice of youth. The only alternative to what we wrote would have
been a passionate denunciation of all this ghastly slaughter and violent
attacks on British generalship. Even now I do not think that would have
been justified. As Bernard Shaw told me, “while the war lasts one must
put one's own soul under censorship.”

After many bloody battles had been fought we were received again by the
Commander-in-Chief, and this time his cordiality was not marred by any
slighting touch.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have played the game like men!”

When victory came at last--at last!--after the years of slaughter, it
was the little band of war correspondents on the British front, our
foreign comrades included, whom the Field-Marshal addressed on his first
visit to the Rhine. We stood on the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne,
watched by groups of Germans peering through the escort of Lancers. It
was a dank and foul day, but to us beautiful, because this was the end
of the long journey--four-and--a-half years long, which had been filled
with slaughter all the way, so that we were tired of its backwash
of agony, which had overwhelmed our souls--mine, certainly. The
Commander-in-Chief read out a speech to us, thanking us for our
services, which, he said, had helped him to victory, because we had
heartened the troops and the people by our work. It was a recognition
by the leader of our armies that, as chroniclers of war, we had been a
spiritual force behind his arms. It was a reward for many mournful days,
for much agony of spirit, for hours of danger--some of us had walked
often in the ways of death--and for exhausting labors which we did
so that the world might know what British soldiers had been doing and
suffering.




X


I came to know General Headquarters more closely when it removed, for
fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once within sight of
the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below its hill, but
now looking across a wide vista of richly cultivated fields where many
hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came to G. H. Q. from
journeys over the wild desert of the battlefields, where men lived in
ditches and “pill-boxes,” muddy, miserable in all things but spirit, as
to a place where the pageantry of war still maintained its old and dead
tradition. It was like one of those pageants which used to be played in
England before the war--picturesque, romantic, utterly unreal. It was as
though men were playing at war here, while others sixty miles away were
fighting and dying, in mud and gas-waves and explosive barrages.

An “open sesame,” by means of a special pass, was needed to enter this
City of Beautiful Nonsense. Below the gateway, up the steep hillside,
sentries stood at a white post across the road, which lifted up on
pulleys when the pass had been examined by a military policeman in a
red cap. Then the sentries slapped their hands on their rifles to the
occupants of any motor-car, sure that more staff-officers were going
in to perform those duties which no private soldier could attempt to
understand, believing they belonged to such mysteries as those of God.
Through the narrow streets walked elderly generals, middle-aged colonels
and majors, youthful subalterns all wearing red hat-bands, red tabs,
and the blue-and-red armlet of G. H. Q., so that color went with them on
their way.

Often one saw the Commander-in-Chief starting for an afternoon ride,
a fine figure, nobly mounted, with two A. D. C.'s and an escort of
Lancers. A pretty sight, with fluttering pennons on all their lances,
and horses groomed to the last hair. It was prettier than the real thing
up in the salient or beyond the Somme, where dead bodies lay in upheaved
earth among ruins and slaughtered trees. War at Montreuil was quite a
pleasant occupation for elderly generals who liked their little stroll
after lunch, and for young Regular officers, released from the painful
necessity of dying for their country, who were glad to get a game of
tennis, down below the walls there, after strenuous office-work in which
they had written “Passed to you” on many “minutes,” or had drawn the
most comical caricatures of their immediate chief, and of his immediate
chief, on blotting-pads and writing-blocks.

It seemed, at a mere glance, that all these military inhabitants of G.
H. Q. were great and glorious soldiers. Some of the youngest of them had
a row of decorations from Montenegro, Serbia, Italy, Rumania, and other
states, as recognition of gallant service in translating German letters
(found in dugouts by the fighting-men), or arranging for visits
of political personages to the back areas of war, or initialing
requisitions for pink, blue, green, and yellow forms, which in due
course would find their way to battalion adjutants for immediate
filling-up in the middle of an action. The oldest of them, those
white-haired, bronze-faced, gray-eyed generals in the administrative
side of war, had started their third row of ribbons well before the end
of the Somme battles, and had flower-borders on their breasts by the
time the massacres had been accomplished in the fields of Flanders. I
know an officer who was awarded the D. S. O. because he had hindered the
work of war correspondents with the zeal of a hedge-sparrow in search of
worms, and another who was the best-decorated man in the army because he
had presided over a visitors' chateau and entertained Royalties,
Members of Parliament, Mrs. Humphry Ward, miners, Japanese, Russian
revolutionaries, Portuguese ministers, Harry Lauder, Swedes, Danes,
Norwegians, clergymen, Montenegrins, and the Editor of John Bull, at the
government's expense--and I am bound to say he deserved them all, being
a man of infinite tact, many languages, and a devastating sense of
humor. There was always a Charlie Chaplin film between moving pictures
of the battles of the Somme. He brought the actualities of war to the
visitors' chateau by sentry-boxes outside the door, a toy “tank” in the
front garden, and a collection of war trophies in the hall. He spoke to
High Personages with less deference than he showed to miners from Durham
and Wales, and was master of them always, ordering them sternly to bed
at ten o'clock (when he sat down to bridge with his junior officers),
and with strict military discipline insisting upon their inspection of
the bakeries at Boulogne, and boot-mending factories at Calais, as part
of the glory of war which they had come out for to see.

So it was that there were brilliant colors in the streets of Montreuil,
and at every doorway a sentry slapped his hand to his rifle, with smart
and untiring iteration, as the “brains” of the army, under “brass hats”
 and red bands, went hither and thither in the town, looking stern, as
soldiers of grave responsibility, answering salutes absent--mindedly,
staring haughtily at young battalion officers who passed through
Montreuil and looked meekly for a chance of a lorry-ride to Boulogne, on
seven days' leave from the lines.

The smart society of G. H. Q. was best seen at the Officers' Club in
Montreuil, at dinner-time. It was as much like musical comedy as any
stage setting of war at the Gaiety. A band played ragtime and light
music while the warriors fed, and all these generals and staff officers,
with their decorations and arm-bands and polished buttons and crossed
swords, were waited upon by little W. A. A. C.'s with the G. H. Q.
colors tied up in bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under
their short skirts and fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts of
light-hearted laughter! Such whisperings of secrets and intrigues and
scandals in high places! Such careless--hearted courage when British
soldiers were being blown to bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and
shell-shocked in places that were far--so very far--from G. H. Q.!




XI


There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our
quarters--women's voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came
into the mess--we were at breakfast--and explained the meaning of
the clamor, which by some intuition and a quick ear for French he had
gathered from all this confusion of tongues.

“There's a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has been attacking a
girl. The villagers want an officer to arrest him.”

The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. “Tell three
orderlies to follow me.”

We went into the roadway, and twenty women crowded round us with a
story of attempted violence against an innocent girl. The man had been
drinking last night at the estaminet up there. Then he had followed
the girl, trying to make love to her. She had barricaded herself in the
room, when he tried to climb through the window.

“If you don't come out I'll get in and kill you,” he said, according to
the women.

But she had kept him out, though he prowled round all night. Now he was
hiding in an outhouse. The brute! The pig!

When we went up the road the man was standing in the center of it, with
a sullen look.

“What's the trouble?” he asked. “It looks as if all France were out to
grab me.”

He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning his chance of
escape. There was no chance.

The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched back between the
orderlies, with an old soldier of the Contemptibles behind him.

Later in the day he was lined up for identification by the girl, among a
crowd of other men.

The girl looked down the line, and we watched her curiously--a slim
creature with dark hair neatly coiled.

She stretched out her right hand with a pointing finger.

“Le voila!... c'est l'homme.”

There was no mistake about it, and the man looked sheepishly at her, not
denying. He was sent off under escort to the military prison in St. Omer
for court-martial.

“What's the punishment--if guilty?” I asked.

“Death,” said the colonel, resuming his egg.

He was a fine-looking fellow, the prisoner. He had answered the call for
king and country without delay. In the estaminet, after coming down from
the salient for a machine-gun course, he had drunk more beer than was
good for him, and the face of a pretty girl had bewitched him, stirring
up desire. He wanted to kiss her lips... There were no women in the
Ypres salient. Nothing pretty or soft. It was hell up there, and this
girl was a pretty witch, bringing back thoughts of the other side--for
life, womanhood, love, caresses which were good for the souls and bodies
of men. It was a starved life up there in the salient... Why shouldn't
she give him her lips? Wasn't he fighting for France? Wasn't he a
tall and proper lad? Curse the girl for being so sulky to an English
soldier!... And now, if those other women, those old hags, were to swear
against him things he had never said, things he had never done, unless
drink had made him forget--by God! supposing drink had made him forget?
He would be shot against a white wall. Shot dead, disgracefully,
shamefully, by his own comrades! O Christ! and the little mother in a
Sussex cottage!...




XII


Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion headquarters
for the officer I had gone to see. He was attending a court martial.
Presently he came into the wooden hut, with a flushed face.

“Sorry I had to keep you,” he said. “Tomorrow there will be one swine
less in the world.”

“A death sentence?”

He nodded.

“A damned coward. Said he didn't mind rifle-fire, but couldn't stand
shells. Admitted he left his post. He doesn't mind rifle-fire!... Well,
tomorrow morning.”

The officer laughed grimly, and then listened for a second.

There were some heavy crumps falling over Kemmel Hill, rather close, it
seemed, to our wooden hut.

“Damn those German gunners” said the officer. “Why can't they give us a
little peace?”

He turned to his papers, but several times while I talked with him he
jerked his head up and listened to a heavy crash.

On the way back I saw a man on foot, walking in front of a mounted man,
past the old hill of the Scherpenberg, toward the village of Locre.
There was something in the way he walked, in his attitude--the head
hunched forward a little, and his arms behind his back--which made me
turn to look at him. He was manacled, and tied by a rope to the mounted
man. I caught one glimpse of his face, and then turned away, cold and
sick. There was doom written on his face, and in his eyes a captured
look. He was walking to his wall.




XIII


There were other men who could not stand shell-fire. It filled them with
an animal terror and took all will-power out of them. One young officer
was like that man who “did not mind rifle-fire.” He, by some strange
freak of psychology, was brave under machine-gun fire. He had done
several gallant things, and was bright and cheerful in the trenches
until the enemy barraged them with high explosive. Then he was seen
wandering back to the support trenches in a dazed way. It happened three
times, and he was sentenced to death. Before going out at dawn to face
the firing-squad he was calm. There was a lighted candle on the table,
and he sorted out his personal belongings and made small packages of
them as keepsakes for his family and friends. His hand did not tremble.
When his time came he put out the candle, between thumb and finger,
raised his hand, and said, “Right O!”

Another man, shot for cowardice in face of the enemy, was sullen and
silent to one who hoped to comfort him in the last hour. The chaplain
asked him whether he had any message for his relatives. He said, “I have
no relatives.” He was asked whether he would like to say any prayers,
and he said, “I don't believe in them.” The chaplain talked to him, but
could get no answer--and time was creeping on. There were two guards in
the room, sitting motionless, with loaded rifles between their knees.
Outside it was silent in the courtyard, except for little noises of the
night and the wind. The chaplain suffered, and was torn with pity
for that sullen man whose life was almost at an end. He took out his
hymn--book and said: “I will sing to you. It will pass the time.” He
sang a hymn, and once or twice his voice broke a little, but he steadied
it. Then the man said, “I will sing with you.” He knew all the hymns,
words and music. It was an unusual, astonishing knowledge, and he went
on singing, hymn after hymn, with the chaplain by his side. It was
the chaplain who tired first. His voice cracked and his throat became
parched. Sweat broke out on his forehead, because of the nervous strain.
But the man who was going to die sang on in a clear, hard voice. A faint
glimmer of coming dawn lightened the cottage window. There were not many
minutes more. The two guards shifted their feet. “Now,” said the man,
“we'll sing 'God Save the King.'” The two guards rose and stood at
attention, and the chaplain sang the national anthem with the man who
was to be shot for cowardice. Then the tramp of the firing-party came
across the cobblestones in the courtyard. It was dawn.




XIV


Shell-shock was the worst thing to see. There were generals who said:
“There is no such thing as shell-shock. It is cowardice. I would
court-martial in every case.” Doctors said: “It is difficult to draw
the line between shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well as
mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues by concussion,
or actual physical damage to the brain; sometimes it is a shock of
horror unbalancing the mind, but that is more rare. It is not generally
the slight, nervous men who suffer worst from shell-shock. It is often
the stolid fellow, one of those we describe as being utterly without
nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him. He has no
resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in
nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man,
the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of
his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that
bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand
self-control in a 'nervy' man. That helps him in war; whereas the yokel,
or the sergeant--major type, is splendid until the shock comes. Then
he may crack. But there is no law. Imagination--apprehension--are the
devil, too, and they go with 'nerves.'”

It was a sergeant-major whom I saw stricken badly with shell-shock in
Aveluy Wood near Thiepval. He was convulsed with a dreadful rigor like
a man in epilepsy, and clawed at his mouth, moaning horribly, with livid
terror in his eyes. He had to be strapped to a stretcher before he
could be carried away. He had been a tall and splendid man, this poor,
terror-stricken lunatic.

Nearer to Thiepval, during the fighting there, other men were brought
down with shell-shock. I remember one of them now, though I saw many
others. He was a Wiltshire lad, very young, with an apple-cheeked face
and blue-gray eyes. He stood outside a dugout, shaking in every limb, in
a palsied way. His steel hat was at the back of his head and his mouth
slobbered, and two comrades could not hold him still.

These badly shell-shocked boys clawed their mouths ceaselessly. It was a
common, dreadful action. Others sat in the field hospitals in a state
of coma, dazed, as though deaf, and actually dumb. I hated to see them,
turned my eyes away from them, and yet wished that they might be seen
by bloody-minded men and women who, far behind the lines, still spoke of
war lightly, as a kind of sport, or heroic game, which brave boys liked
or ought to like, and said, “We'll fight on to the last man rather than
accept anything less than absolute victory,” and when victory came
said: “We stopped too soon. We ought to have gone on for another three
months.” It was for fighting-men to say those things, because they knew
the things they suffered and risked. That word “we” was not to be used
by gentlemen in government offices scared of air raids, nor by women
dancing in scanty frocks at war-bazaars for the “poor dear wounded,”
 nor even by generals at G. H. Q., enjoying the thrill of war without its
dirt and danger.

Seeing these shell-shock cases month after month, during years of
fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and were
callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting the
boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers
whose articles on war were always “cheery”; the bishops and clergy who
praised God as the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies, and had
never said a word before the war to make it less inevitable; the
schoolmasters who gloried in the lengthening “Roll of Honor” and said,
“We're doing very well,” when more boys died; the pretty woman-faces
ogling in the picture-papers, as “well--known war-workers”; the
munition-workers who were getting good wages out of the war; the
working-women who were buying gramophones and furs while their men were
in the stinking trenches; the dreadful, callous, cheerful spirit of
England at war.

Often I was unfair, bitter, unbalanced, wrong. The spirit of England,
taking it broad and large--with dreadful exceptions--was wonderful in
its courage and patience, and ached with sympathy for its fighting sons,
and was stricken with the tragedy of all this slaughter. There were many
tears in English homes; many sad and lonely women. But, as an onlooker,
I could not be just or fair, and hated the non-combatants who did not
reveal its wound in their souls, but were placid in their belief that we
should win, and pleased with themselves because of their easy optimism.
So easy for those who did not see!




XV


As war correspondents we were supposed to have honorary rank as
captains, by custom and tradition--but it amounted to nothing, here
or there. We were civilians in khaki, with green bands round our right
arms, and uncertain status. It was better so, because we were in the
peculiar and privileged position of being able to speak to Tommies and
sergeants as human beings, to be on terms of comradeship with junior
subalterns and battalion commanders, and to sit at the right hand of
generals without embarrassment to them or to ourselves.

Physically, many of our generals were curiously alike. They were men
turned fifty, with square jaws, tanned, ruddy faces, searching and
rather stern gray eyes, closely cropped hair growing white, with a
little white mustache, neatly trimmed, on the upper lip.

Mentally they had similar qualities. They had unfailing physical
courage--though courage is not put to the test much in modern
generalship, which, above the rank of brigadier, works far from the
actual line of battle, unless it “slips” in the wrong direction. They
were stern disciplinarians, and tested the quality of troops by their
smartness in saluting and on parade, which did not account for the
fighting merit of the Australians. Most of them were conservative by
political tradition and hereditary instinct, and conservative also in
military ideas and methods. They distrusted the “brilliant” fellow,
and were inclined to think him unsafe; and they were not quick to allow
young men to gain high command at the expense of their gray hair and
experience. They were industrious, able, conscientious men, never
sparing themselves long hours of work for a life of ease, and because
they were willing to sacrifice their own lives, if need be, for their
country's sake, they demanded equal willingness of sacrifice from every
officer and man under their authority, having no mercy whatever for the
slacker or the weakling.

Among them there was not one whose personality had that mysterious but
essential quality of great generalship--inspiring large bodies of men
with exalted enthusiasm, devotion, and faith. It did not matter to
the men whether an army commander, a corps commander, or a divisional
commander stood in the roadside to watch them march past on their way
to battle or on their way back. They saw one of these sturdy men in his
brass hat, with his ruddy face and white mustache, but no thrill passed
down their ranks, no hoarse cheers broke from them because he was there,
as when Wellington sat on his white horse in the Peninsular War, or as
when Napoleon saluted his Old Guard, or even as when Lord Roberts, “Our
Bob,” came perched like a little old falcon on his big charger.

Nine men out of ten in the ranks did not even know the name of their
army general or of the corps commander. It meant nothing to them. They
did not face death with more passionate courage to win the approval of a
military idol. That was due partly to the conditions of modern warfare,
which make it difficult for generals of high rank to get into direct
personal touch with their troops, and to the masses of men engaged. But
those difficulties could have been overcome by a general of impressive
personality, able to stir the imaginations of men by words of fire
spoken at the right time, by deep, human sympathy, and by the luck of
victory seized by daring adventure against great odds.

No such man appeared on the western front until Foch obtained the
supreme command. On the British front there was no general with the gift
of speech--a gift too much despised by our British men of action--or
with a character and prestige which could raise him to the highest rank
in popular imagination. During the retreat from Mona, Sir John French
had a touch of that personal power--his presence meant something to
the men because of his reputation in South Africa; but afterward, when
trench warfare began, and the daily routine of slaughter under German
gun-fire, when our artillery was weak, and when our infantry was ordered
to attack fixed positions of terrible strength without adequate support,
and not a dog's chance of luck against such odds, the prestige of the
Commander-in-Chief faded from men's minds and he lost place in their
admiration. It was washed out in blood and mud.

Sir Douglas Haig, who followed Sir John French, inherited the
disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was
to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign
of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his
general headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, near the
coast, had the affection and loyalty of the staff--officers. A man of
remarkably good looks, with fine, delicate features, strengthened by
the firm line of his jaw, and of singular sweetness, courtesy, and
simplicity in his manner toward all who approached him, he had qualities
which might have raised him to the supreme height of personal influence
among his armies but for lack of the magic touch and the tragic
condition of his command.

He was intensely shy and reserved, shrinking from publicity and holding
himself aloof from the human side of war. He was constitutionally unable
to make a dramatic gesture before a multitude, or to say easy, stirring
things to officers and men whom he reviewed. His shyness and reserve
prevented him also from knowing as much as he ought to have known about
the opinions of officers and men, and getting direct information from
them. He held the supreme command of the British armies on the western
front when, in the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders, of Picardy
and Artois, there was not much chance for daring strategy, but only
for hammer-strokes by the flesh and blood of men against fortress
positions--the German trench systems, twenty-five miles deep in tunneled
earthworks and machine-gun dugouts--when the immensity of casualties
among British troops was out of all proportion to their gains of ground,
so that our men's spirits revolted against these massacres of their
youth and they were embittered against the generalship and staff-work
which directed these sacrificial actions.

This sense of bitterness became intense, to the point of fury, so that
a young staff officer, in his red tabs, with a jaunty manner, was like a
red rag to a bull among battalion officers and men, and they desired
his death exceedingly, exalting his little personality, dressed in a
well-cut tunic and fawn-colored riding-breeches and highly polished
top-boots, into the supreme folly of “the Staff” which made men attack
impossible positions, send down conflicting orders, issued a litter
of documents--called by an ugly name--containing impracticable
instructions, to the torment of the adjutants and to the scorn of the
troops. This hatred of the Staff was stoked high by the fires of
passion and despair. Some of it was unjust, and even the jaunty young
staff-officer--a G. S. O. 3, with red tabs and polished boots--was often
not quite such a fool as he looked, but a fellow who had proved his
pluck in the early days of the war and was now doing his duty--about
equal to the work of a boy clerk--with real industry and an exaggerated
sense of its importance.

Personally I can pay high tribute to some of our staff--officers at
divisional, corps, and army headquarters, because of their industry,
efficiency, and devotion to duty. And during the progress of battle I
have seen them, hundreds of times, working desperately for long hours
without much rest or sleep, so that the fighting-men should get their
food and munitions, so that the artillery should support their actions,
and the troops in reserve move up to their relief at the proper time and
place.

Owing largely to new army brains the administrative side of our war
became efficient in its method and organization, and the armies were
worked like clockwork machines. The transport was good beyond all words
of praise, and there was one thing which seldom failed to reach poor
old Tommy Atkins, unless he was cut off by shell-fire, and that was his
food. The motor-supply columns and ammunition-dumps were organized to
the last item. Our map department was magnificent, and the admiration
of the French. Our Intelligence branch became valuable (apart from a
frequent insanity of optimism) and was sometimes uncanny in the accuracy
of its information about the enemy's disposition and plans. So that the
Staff was not altogether hopeless in its effect, as the young battalion
officers, with sharp tongues and a sense of injustice in their hearts,
made out, with pardonable blasphemy, in their dugouts.

Nevertheless the system was bad and British generalship made many
mistakes, some of them, no doubt, unavoidable, because it is human to
err, and some of them due to sheer, simple, impregnable stupidity.

In the early days the outstanding fault of our generals was their desire
to gain ground which was utterly worthless when gained. They organized
small attacks against strong positions, dreadfully costly to take,
and after the desperate valor of men had seized a few yards of mangled
earth, found that they had made another small salient, jutting out from
their front in a V-shaped wedge, so that it was a death-trap for the men
who had to hold it. This was done again and again, and I remember one
distinguished officer saying, with bitter irony, remembering how many of
his men had died, “Our generals must have their little V's at any price,
to justify themselves at G. H. Q.”

In the battles of the Somme they attacked isolated objectives on
narrow fronts, so that the enemy swept our men with fire by artillery
concentrated from all points, instead of having to disperse his fire
during a general attack on a wide front. In the days of trench warfare,
when the enemy artillery was much stronger than ours, and when his
infantry strength was enormously greater, our generals insisted upon
the British troops maintaining an “aggressive” attitude, with the result
that they were shot to pieces, instead of adopting, like the French, a
quiet and waiting attitude until the time came for a sharp and terrible
blow. The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertubert, and Loos, in 1915,
cost us thousands of dead and gave us no gain of any account; and both
generalship and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who
know anything of those battles, ghastly.

After all, our generals had to learn their lesson, like the private
soldier, and the young battalion officer, in conditions of warfare which
had never been seen before--and it was bad for the private soldier and
the young battalion officer, who died so they might learn. As time
went on staff-work improved, and British generalship was less rash in
optimism and less rigid in ideas.




XVI


General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents--he had been
something of the kind himself in earlier days--and we were welcomed at
his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward
when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought during the war, and
I think now, that he had more intellect and “quality” than many of
our other generals. A tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of
movement and gesture, not “stocky” or rigid, but nervous and restless,
he gave one a sense of power and intensity of purpose. There was a
kind of slow-burning fire in him--a hatred of the enemy which was not
weakened in him by any mercy, and a consuming rage, as it appeared to
me, against inefficiency in high places, injustice of which he may have
felt himself to be the victim, and restrictions upon his liberty of
command. A bitter irony was often in his laughter when discussing
politicians at home, and the wider strategy of war apart from that
on his own front. He was intolerant of stupidity, which he found
widespread, and there was no tenderness or emotion in his attitude
toward life. The officers and men under his command accused him of
ruthlessness. But they admitted that he took more personal risk than
he need have done as a divisional general, and was constantly in the
trenches examining his line. They also acknowledged that he was generous
in his praise of their good service, though merciless if he found
fault with them. He held himself aloof--too much, I am sure--from his
battalion officers, and had an extreme haughtiness of bearing which was
partly due to reserve and that shyness which is in many Englishmen and a
few Scots.

In the old salient warfare he often demanded service in the way of raids
and the holding of death-traps, and the execution of minor attacks which
caused many casualties, and filled men with rage and horror at what
they believed to be unnecessary waste of life--their life, and their
comrades'--that did not make for popularity in the ranks of the
battalion messes. Privately, in his own mess, he was gracious to
visitors, and revealed not only a wide range of knowledge outside as
well as inside his profession, but a curious, unexpected sympathy for
ideas, not belonging as a rule to generals of the old caste. I liked
him, though I was always conscious of that flame and steel in his nature
which made his psychology a world away from mine. He was hit hard--in
what I think was the softest spot in his heart--by the death of one of
his A. D. C.'s--young Congreve, who was the beau ideal of knighthood,
wonderfully handsome, elegant even when covered from head to foot in wet
mud (as I saw him one day), fearless, or at least scornful of danger,
to the verge of recklessness. General Haldane had marked him out as
the most promising young soldier in the whole army. A bit of shell, a
senseless bit of steel, spoiled that promise--as it spoiled the promise
of a million boys--and the general was saddened more than by the death
of other gallant officers.

I have one memory of General Haldane which shows him in a different
light. It was during the great German offensive in the north, when Arras
was hard beset and the enemy had come back over Monchy Hill and was
shelling villages on the western side of Arras, which until then
had been undamaged. It was in one of these villages--near
Avesnes-le-Compte--to which the general had come back with his corps
headquarters, established there for many months in earlier days, so that
the peasants and their children knew him well by sight and had talked
with him, because he liked to speak French with them. When I went to see
him one day during that bad time in April of '18, he was surrounded by
a group of children who were asking anxiously whether Arras would be
taken. He drew a map for them in the dust of the roadway, and showed
them where the enemy was attacking and the general strategy. He spoke
simply and gravely, as though to a group of staff-officers, and the
children followed his diagram in the dust and understood him perfectly.

“They will not take Arras if I can help it,” he said. “You will be all
right here.”




XVII


Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general in the days of Sir John
French, and I dined at his mess once or twice, and he came to ours on
return visits. The son of Macready, the actor, he had a subtlety of mind
not common among British generals, to whom “subtlety” in any form is
repulsive. His sense of humor was developed upon lines of irony and
he had a sly twinkle in his eyes before telling one of his innumerable
anecdotes. They were good stories, and I remember one of them, which had
to do with the retreat from Mons. It was not, to tell the truth, that
“orderly” retreat which is described in second-hand accounts. There were
times when it was a wild stampede from the tightening loop of a German
advance, with lorries and motor-cycles and transport wagons going
helter-skelter among civilian refugees and mixed battalions and
stragglers from every unit walking, footsore, in small groups. Even
General Headquarters was flurried at times, far in advance of this
procession backward. One night Sir Neville Macready, with the judge
advocate and an officer named Colonel Childs (a hot-headed fellow!),
took up their quarters in a French chateau somewhere, I think, in the
neighborhood of Creil. The Commander-in-Chief was in another chateau
some distance away. Other branches of G. H. Q. were billeted in private
houses, widely scattered about a straggling village.

Colonel Childs was writing opposite the adjutant-general, who was
working silently. Presently Childs looked up, listened, and said:

“It's rather quiet, sir, outside.”

“So much the better,” growled General Macready. “Get on with your job.”

A quarter of an hour passed. No rumble of traffic passed by the windows.
No gun-wagons were jolting over French pave.

Colonel Childs looked up again and listened.

“It's damned quiet outside, sir.”

“Well, don't go making a noise,” said the general, “Can't you see I'm
busy?”

“I think I'll just take a turn round,” said Colonel Childs.

He felt uneasy. Something in the silence of the village scared him. He
went out into the roadway and walked toward Sir John French's quarters.
There was no challenge from a sentry. The British Expeditionary Force
seemed to be sleeping. They needed sleep--poor beggars!--but the Germans
did not let them take much.

Colonel Childs went into the Commander-in-Chief's chateau and found a
soldier in the front hall, licking out a jam-pot.

“Where's the Commander-in-Chief?” asked the officer.

“Gone hours ago, sir,” said the soldier. “I was left behind for lack
of transport. From what I hear the Germans ought to be here by now. I
rather fancy I heard some shots pretty close awhile ago.”

Colonel Childs walked back to his own quarters quickly. He made no
apology for interrupting the work of the adjutant-general.

“General, the whole box of tricks has gone. We've been left behind.
Forgotten!”

“The dirty dogs!” said General Macready.

There was not much time for packing up, and only one motor-car, and only
one rifle. The general said he would look after the rifle, but Colonel
Childs said if that were so he would rather stay behind and take
his chance of being captured. It would be safer for him. So the
adjutant-general, the judge advocate, the deputy assistant judge
advocate (Colonel Childs), and an orderly or two packed into the car and
set out to find G.H.Q. Before they found it they had to run the gantlet
of Germans, and were sniped all the way through a wood, and took flying
shots at moving figures. Then, miles away, they found G.H.Q.

“And weren't they sorry to see me again!” said General Macready, who
told me the tale. “They thought they had lost me forever.”

The day's casualty list was brought into the adjutant--general one
evening when I was dining in his mess. The orderly put it down by the
side of his plate, and he interrupted a funny story to glance down the
columns of names.

“Du Maurier has been killed... I'm sorry.”

He put down the paper beside his plate again and continued his story,
and we all laughed heartily at the end of the anecdote. It was the only
way, and the soldier's way. There was no hugging of grief when our best
friend fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's life, and then, “Carry on!”




XVIII


Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme,
I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding
the Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there
and elsewhere. One of my first meetings with him was extraordinarily
embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While he was organizing his
army, which was to be called, with unconscious irony, “The Army
of Pursuit”--the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a
pursuit--he desired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the
war correspondents were then quartered. As we were paying for it
and liked it, we put up an opposition which was most annoying to his
A.D.C.'s, especially to one young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty
manners, and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who had
looked over our rooms without troubling to knock at the doors, and then
said, “This will suit us down to the ground.” On my way back from the
salient one evening I walked up the drive in the flickering light of
summer eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of whom I
thought I recognized as an old friend.

“Hullo!” I said, cheerily. “You here again?”

Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry Rawlinson. He must
have been surprised, but dug me in the ribs in a genial way, and said,
“Hullo, young feller!”

He made no further attempt to “pinch” our quarters, but my familiar
method of address could not have produced that result.

His headquarters at Querrieux were in another old chateau on the
Amiens-Albert road, surrounded by pleasant fields through which a stream
wound its way. Everywhere the sign-boards were red, and a military
policeman, authorized to secure obedience to the rules thereon, slowed
down every motor-car on its way through the village, as though Sir Henry
Rawlinson lay sick of a fever, so anxious were his gestures and his
expression of “Hush! do be careful!”

The army commander seemed to me to have a roguish eye. He seemed to be
thinking to himself, “This war is a rare old joke!” He spoke habitually
of the enemy as “the old Hun” or “old Fritz,” in an affectionate,
contemptuous way, as a fellow who was trying his best but getting the
worst of it every time. Before the battles of the Somme I had a talk
with him among his maps, and found that I had been to many places in his
line which he did not seem to know. He could not find there very quickly
on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that
this was “camouflage,” in case I might tell “old Fritz” that such
places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening
optimism. He had always got the enemy “nearly beat,” and he arranged
attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking
another blow which would lead this time to stupendous results. In the
early days, in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and he was
a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of decision and a quick
intelligence in open warfare. His trouble on the Somme was that
the enemy did not permit open warfare, but made a siege of it, with
defensive lines all the way back to Bapaume, and every hillock a
machine-gun fortress and every wood a death-trap. We were always
preparing for a “break-through” for cavalry pursuit, and the cavalry
were always being massed behind the lines and then turned back again,
after futile waiting, encumbering the roads. “The bloodbath of the
Somme,” as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores
of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those
dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks
through the woods of death--Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood,
Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette
and Martinpuich--I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux,
scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the
great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for
generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning
slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle. It
is their job to be cheerful, to harden their hearts against the casualty
lists, to keep out of the danger-zone unless their presence is strictly
necessary. But it is inevitable that the men who risk death daily, the
fighting-men who carry out the plans of the High Command and see no
sense in them, should be savage in their irony when they pass a peaceful
house where their doom is being planned, and green-eyed when they see
an army general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young
A.D.C. slashing the flowers with his cane and telling the latest joke
from London to his laughing chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of
us--I, for one--adopted the point of view of the men who were to die,
finding some reason in their hatred of the staffs, though they were
doing their job with a sense of duty, and with as much intelligence
as God had given them. Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson was one of our best
generals, as may be seen by the ribbons on his breast, and in the last
phase commanded a real “Army of Pursuit,” which had the enemy on the
run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that last phase of open
warfare that Rawlinson showed his qualities of generalship and once
again that driving purpose which was his in the Somme battles, but
achieved only by prodigious cost of life.




XIX


Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by
Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very
little except by hearsay. He went by the name of “The Bull,” because
of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that followed
the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis of the Scarpe did
not reveal high generalship. There were many young officers--and some
divisional generals who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without
sufficient forethought, and the stream of casualties which poured back,
day by day, with tales of tragic happenings did not inspire one with a
sense of some high purpose behind it all, or some presiding genius.

General Byng, “Bungo Byng,” as he was called by his troops, won the
admiration of the Canadian Corps which he commanded, and afterward, in
the Cambrai advance of November, '17, he showed daring of conception
and gained the first striking surprise in the war by novel methods of
attack--spoiled by the quick come-back of the enemy under Von Marwitz
and our withdrawal from Bourlon Wood, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and other
places, after desperate fighting.

His chief of staff, Gen. Louis Vaughan, was a charming, gentle-mannered
man, with a scientific outlook on the problems of war, and so kind in
his expression and character that it seemed impossible that he could
devise methods of killing Germans in a wholesale way. He was like an
Oxford professor of history discoursing on the Marlborough wars, though
when I saw him many times outside the Third Army headquarters, in
a railway carriage, somewhere near Villers Carbonnel on the Somme
battlefields, he was explaining his preparations and strategy for
actions to be fought next day which would be of bloody consequence to
our men and the enemy.

General Birdwood, commanding the Australian Corps, and afterward the
Fifth Army in succession to General Gough, was always known as “Birdie”
 by high and low, and this dapper man, so neat, so bright, so brisk, had
a human touch with him which won him the affection of all his troops.

Gen. Hunter Weston, of the 8th Corps, was another man of character in
high command. He spoke of himself in the House of Commons one day as
“a plain, blunt soldier,” and the army roared with laughter from end to
end. There was nothing plain or blunt about him. He was a man of airy
imagination and a wide range of knowledge, and theories on life and war
which he put forward with dramatic eloquence.

It was of Gen. Hunter Weston that the story was told about the drunken
soldier put onto a stretcher and covered with a blanket, to get him out
of the way when the army commander made a visit to the lines.

“What's this?” said the general.

“Casualty, sir,” said the quaking platoon commander.

“Not bad, I hope?”

“Dead, sir,” said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk.

The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic way, “The army
commander salutes the honored dead!”

And the drunken private put his head from under the blanket and asked,
“What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?”

That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, but it went
through the army affixed to the name of Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit
him.

The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the Somme, when
many of our divisions were cut to pieces in the attempt to break the
German line at Gommecourt. It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the
success on the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter Weston
was not degomme, as the French would say, and continued to air his
theories on life and warfare until the day of Victory, when once again
we had “muddled through,” not by great generalship, but by the courage
of common men.

Among the divisional generals with whom I came in contact--I met most
of them at one time or another--were General Hull of the 56th (London)
Division, General Hickey of the 16th (Irish) Division, General Harper
of the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th (Ulster)
Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Bantams) Division, afterward
of the 33d.

General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, straight-thinking man,
and I should say an able general. “Ruthless,” his men said, but this was
a war of ruthlessness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times,
because he had to order his men to do things which he knew were folly.
I remember sitting on the window-sill of his bedroom, in an old house of
Arras, while he gave me an account of “the battle in the dark,” in which
the Londoners and other English troops lost their direction and found
themselves at dawn with the enemy behind them. General Hull made no
secret of the tragedy or the stupidity... On another day I met him
somewhere on the other side of Peronne, before March 21st, when he was
commanding the 16th (Irish) Division in the absence of General Hickey,
who was ill. He talked a good deal about the belief in a great German
offensive, and gave many reasons for thinking it was all “bluff.” A
few days later the enemy had rolled over his lines... Out of thirteen
generals I met at that time, there were only three who believed that the
enemy would make his great assault in a final effort to gain decisive
victory, though our Intelligence had amassed innumerable proofs and were
utterly convinced of the approaching menace.

“They will never risk it!” said General Gorringe of the 47th (London)
Division. “Our lines are too strong. We should mow them down.”

I was standing with him on a wagon, watching the sports of the London
men. We could see the German lines, south of St.-Quentin, very quiet
over there, without any sign of coming trouble. A few days later the
place where we were standing was under waves of German storm-troops.

I liked the love of General Hickey for his Irish division. An Irishman
himself, with a touch of the old Irish soldier as drawn by Charles
Lever, gay-hearted, proud of his boys, he was always pleased to see me
because he knew I had a warm spot in my heart for the Irish troops. He
had a good story to tell every time, and passed me on to “the boys” to
get at the heart of them. It was long before he lost hope of keeping the
division together, though it was hard to get recruits and losses were
high at Guillemont and Ginchy. For the first time he lost heart and was
very sad when the division was cut to pieces in a Flanders battle.
It lost 2,000 men and 162 officers before the battle began--they were
shelled to death in the trenches--and 2,000 men and 170 officers more
during the progress of the battle. It was murderous and ghastly.

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division, afterward commanding the
4th Corps, had the respect of his troops, though they called him “Uncle”
 because of his shock of white hair. The Highland division, under his
command, fought many battles and gained great honor, even from the
enemy, who feared them and called the kilted men “the ladies from hell.”
 It was to them the Germans sent their message in a small balloon
during the retreat from the Somme: “Poor old 51st. Still sticking it!
Cheery-oh!”

“Uncle” Harper invited me to lunch in his mess, and was ironical
with war correspondents, and censors, and the British public, and new
theories of training, and many things in which he saw no sense. There
was a smoldering passion in him which glowed in his dark eyes.

He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire
for a time.

“No man in this war,” he said, with a sweeping assertion, “has ever been
killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first.” And, broadly
speaking, I think he was right, in spite of the Director of Training,
who was extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority.




XX


I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense
of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few
exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely limited in their
range of ideas and qualities of character.

“One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with generals,” said a
friend of mine, after lunching with an army commander.

That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles
in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature,
their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional
views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside
that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or wishy-washy
sentiment.

What mainly was wrong with our generalship was the system which put
the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the old
school of war, unable, by reason of their age and traditions, to get
away from rigid methods and to become elastic in face of new conditions.

Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its system of
training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from specimens
produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners of
Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the
Regular Army, so that they took the lion's share of staff appointments,
thus keeping out brilliant young men of the new armies, whose
brain-power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of
the Sandhurst standard. Here and there, where the unprofessional soldier
obtained a chance of high command or staff authority, he proved the
value of the business mind applied to war, and this was seen very
clearly--blindingly--in the able generalship of the Australian Corps, in
which most of the commanders, like Generals Hobbs, Monash, and others,
were men in civil life before the war. The same thing was observed in
the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the corps commander, having been
an estate agent, and many of his high officers having had no military
training of any scientific importance before they handled their own men
in France and Flanders.




XXI


As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be
modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second
Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the
General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir
Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost
a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy,
pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white
mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short
legs. He puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his
company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work
of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and
the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor
haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to
detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle
of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and
worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death
machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as
they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through
which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well organized by
the Second Army headquarters, compared with the abominable mismanagement
of other troops, the contrast being visible to every battalion officer
and even to the private soldier. How much share of this was due to Sir
Herbert Plumer it is impossible for me to tell, though it is fair to
give him credit for soundness of judgment in general ideas and in the
choice of men.

He had for his chief of staff Sir John Harington, and beyond all doubt
this general was the organizing brain of to Second Army, though with
punctilious chivalry he gave, always, the credit of all his work to
the army commander. A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with extreme
simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he impressed me as a
brain of the highest temper and quality in staff-work. His memory for
detail was like a card-index system, yet his mind was not clogged with
detail, but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad sweep
of the problem which confronted him. There was something fascinating as
well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For
the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all
there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always
a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as
I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and
staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a
scientific business, according to the methods of science--calculating
the weight and effect of gun-fire, the strength of the enemy's defenses
and man-power, the psychology of German generalship and of German
units, the pressure which could be put on British troops before the
breaking-point of courage, the relative or cumulative effects of
poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the disposition of
German guns and the probability of their movement in this direction or
that, the amount of their wastage under our counter-battery work, the
advantages of attacks in depth--one body of troops “leap-frogging,”
 another in an advance to further objectives--the time-table of
transport, the supply of food and water and ammunition, the comfort of
troops before action, and a thousand other factors of success.

Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and of the eve of it, Sir
John Harington sent for the war correspondents and devoted an hour or
more to a detailed explanation of his plans. He put down all his cards
on the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither minimizing nor
exaggerating the difficulties and dangers of the attack, pointing out
the tactical obstacles which must be overcome before any chance of
success, and exposing the general strategy in the simplest and clearest
speech.

I used to study him at those times, and marveled at him. After intense
and prolonged work at all this detail involving the lives of thousands
of men, he was highly wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain
at full tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never
depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. He was a
chemist explaining the factors of a great experiment of which the
result was still uncertain. He could only hope for certain results after
careful analysis and synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He laughed
sometimes at surprises he had caused the enemy, or was likely to cause
them--surprises which would lead to a massacre of their men. He warmed
to the glory of the courage of the troops who were carrying out his
plans.

“It depends on these fellows,” he would say. “I am setting them a
difficult job. If they can do it, as I hope and believe, it will be
a fine achievement. They have been very much tried, poor fellows, but
their spirit is still high, as I know from their commanding officers.”

One of his ambitions was to break down the prejudice between the
fighting units and the Staff. “We want them to know that we are all
working together, for the same purpose and with the same zeal. They
cannot do without us, as we cannot do without them, and I want them to
feel that the work done here is to help them to do theirs more easily,
with lighter losses, in better physical conditions, with organization
behind them at every stage.”

Many times the Second Army would not order an attack or decide the time
of it before consulting the divisional generals and brigadiers, and
obtaining their consensus of opinion. The officers and men in the Second
Army did actually come to acknowledge the value of the staff-work behind
them, and felt a confidence in its devotion to their interests which was
rare on the western front.

At the end of one of his expositions Sir John Harington would rise and
gather up his maps and papers, and say:

“Well, there you are, gentlemen. You know as much as I do about the
plans for to-morrow's battle. At the end of the day you will be able to
see the result of all our work and tell me things I do not know.”

Those conferences took place in the Second Army headquarters on Cassel
Hill, in a big building which was a casino before the war, with a
far-reaching view across Flanders, so that one could see in the distance
the whole sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country below
Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Hazebrouck in the foreground.
Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on
which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember
now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the
clammy touch of fog on the window-panes stealing through the cracks and
creeping into the room. The meteorologist of the Second Army was often
a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained on nights
when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting in their
trenches to attack in a murky dawn!... We said good night to General
Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama
of human life and death which we had heard in advance in that glass
house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood before many
hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my soul when I
stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in pitch darkness,
over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to break one's neck,
with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far away, watery lights
in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps afire, and the noise of
artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks. We were starting early
to see the opening of the battle and its backwash. There would be more
streams of bloody, muddy men, more crowds of miserable prisoners, more
dead bodies lying in the muck of captured ground, more shells plunging
into the wet earth and throwing up columns of smoke and mud, more dead
horses, disemboweled, and another victory at fearful cost, over one of
the Flanders ridges.

Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long was this to go
on--this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left
in the world that could settle the argument by other means than this?
When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take,
and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that we
could go on gaining ground at such a price? Was it to be extermination
on both sides? The end of civilization itself? General Harington had
said: “The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty of reserves on hand
and he is fighting hard. It won't be a walk-over to-morrow.”

As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic
drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I went
to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the darkness, my
window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-flashes, and
said, “O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help us to the
end.” Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early start before
the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the
duckboards... Or Montague--white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a
far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by
his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of
battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we came
to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult
of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells. I
hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years
that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men had
greater cause, though it was for their sake that I suffered most, as
an observer of their drama of death... As observers we saw most of the
grisly game.




PART TWO. THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE

EARLY DAYS WITH THE NEW ARMY




I


By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front
in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army
had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory
of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve
Chapelle. The “Old Contemptibles” were an army of ghosts whose dead
clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still
“carried on” as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into
those same fields, to the same fate. The only survivors were Regular
officers taken out of the fighting-lines to form the staffs of new
divisions and to train the army of volunteers now being raised at home,
and men who were recovering from wounds or serving behind the lines:
those, and non-commissioned officers who were the best schoolmasters of
the new boys, the best friends and guides of the new officers, stubborn
in their courage, hard and ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed
according to their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the
shambles. It was in March of 1915 that a lieutenant-colonel in the
trenches said to me: “I am one out of 150 Regular officers still serving
with their battalions. That is to say, there are 150 of us left in the
fighting-lines out of 1,500.”

That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride in a long
history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England and France by
its own death. Those boys of ours whom I had seen in the first August
of the war, landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a festival,
toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them and loading them with
fruit and flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit and training.
As riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a sudden check by
forces they had despised. They held their fire until the German ranks
were within eight hundred yards of them, and then mowed them down as
though by machine-gun fire--before we had machine-guns, except as rare
specimens, here and there. Our horse artillery was beyond any doubt the
best in the world at that time. Even before peace came German generals
paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing
down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies,
the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its
memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who,
through centuries of English history, took “the King's shilling” and
fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places
of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British
soldier universal fame as a terrible warrior. There will never be a
Regular Army like that. Modern warfare has opened the arena to the
multitude. They may no longer sit in the Coliseum watching the paid
gladiators. If there be war they must take their share of its sacrifice.
They must be victims as well as victors. They must pay for the luxury of
conquest, hatred, and revenge by their own bodies, and for their safety
against aggression by national service.

After the first quick phases of the war this need of national soldiers
to replace the professional forces became clear to the military leaders.
The Territorials who had been raised for home defense were sent out to
fill up the gaps, and their elementary training was shown to be good
enough, as a beginning, in the fighting-lines. The courage of those
Territorial divisions who came out first to France was quickly proved,
and soon put to the supreme test, in which they did not fail. From the
beginning to the end these men, who had made a game of soldiering in
days of peace, yet a serious game to which they had devoted much of
their spare time after working-hours, were splendid beyond all words of
praise, and from the beginning to the end the Territorial officers--men
of good standing in their counties, men of brain and business
training--were handicapped by lack of promotion and treated with
contempt by the High Command, who gave preference always to the Regular
officers in every staff appointment.

This was natural and inevitable in armies controlled by the old Regular
school of service and tradition. As a close corporation in command of
the machine, it was not within their nature or philosophy to make way
for the new type. The Staff College was jealous of its own. Sandhurst
and Woolwich were still the only schools of soldiering recognized
as giving the right “tone” to officers and gentlemen fit for high
appointment. The cavalry, above all, held the power of supreme command
in a war of machines and chemistry and national psychology....

I should hate to attack the Regular officer. His caste belonged to the
best of our blood. He was the heir to fine old traditions of courage and
leadership in battle. He was a gentleman whose touch of arrogance was
subject to a rigid code of honor which made him look to the comfort of
his men first, to the health of his horse second, to his own physical
needs last. He had the stern sense of justice of a Roman Centurian, and
his men knew that though he would not spare them punishment if guilty,
he would give them always a fair hearing, with a point in their favor,
if possible. It was in their code to take the greatest risk in time of
danger, to be scornful of death in the face of their men whatever secret
fear they had, and to be proud and jealous of the honor of the regiment.
In action men found them good to follow--better than some of the young
officers of the New Army, who had not the same traditional pride nor
the same instinct for command nor the same consideration for their men,
though more easy-going and human in sympathy.

So I salute in spirit those battalion officers of the Old Army who
fulfilled their heritage until it was overwhelmed by new forces, and
I find extenuating circumstances even in remembrance of the high
stupidities, the narrow imagination, the deep, impregnable, intolerant
ignorance of Staff College men who with their red tape and their general
orders were the inquisitors and torturers of the new armies. Tout
comprendre c'est tout pardonner. They were molded in an old system, and
could not change their cliche.




II


The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers,
who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish imagination
of the masses, so that every wall in London and great cities, every
fence in rural places, was placarded with picture-posters.

... “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”... “What will your best
girl say if you're not in khaki?”

Those were vulgar appeals which, no doubt, stirred many simple souls,
and so were good enough. It would have been better to let the people
know more of the truth of what was happening in France and Flanders--the
truth of tragedy, instead of carefully camouflaged communiques, hiding
the losses, ignoring the deeds of famous regiments, veiling all the
drama of that early fighting by a deliberate screen of mystery, though
all was known to the enemy. It was fear of their own people, not of the
enemy, which guided the rules of censorship then and later.

For some little time the British people did not understand what was
happening. How could they know? It appeared that all was going well.
Then why worry? Soon there would be the joy-bells of peace, and the boys
would come marching home again, as in earlier wars. It was only very
slowly--because of the conspiracy of silence--that there crept into the
consciousness of our people the dim realization of a desperate struggle
ahead, in which all their young manhood would be needed to save France
and Belgium, and--dear God!--England herself. It was as that thought
touched one mind and another that the recruiting offices were crowded
with young men. Some of them offered their bodies because of the promise
of a great adventure--and life had been rather dull in office and
factory and on the farm. Something stirred in their blood--an old call
to youth. Some instinct of a primitive, savage kind, for open-air life,
fighting, killing, the comradeship of hunters, violent emotions, the
chance of death, surged up into the brains of quiet boys, clerks,
mechanics, miners, factory hands. It was the call of the wild--the
hark-back of the mind to the old barbarities of the world's dawn, which
is in the embryo of modern man. The shock of anger at frightful tales
from Belgium--little children with their hands cut off (no evidence for
that one); women foully outraged; civilians shot in cold blood--sent
many men at a quick pace to the recruiting agents. Others were sent
there by the taunt of a girl, or the sneer of a comrade in khaki, or the
straight, steady look in the eyes of a father who said, “What about it,
Dick?... The old country is up against it.” It was that last thought
which worked in the brain of England's manhood. That was his real call,
which whispered to men at the plow--quiet, ruminating lads, the peasant
type, the yeoman--and excited undergraduates in their rooms at Oxford
and Cambridge, and the masters of public schools, and all manner of
young men, and some, as I know, old in years but young in heart. “The
old country is in danger!” The shadow of a menace was creeping over some
little patch of England--or of Scotland.

“I's best be going,” said the village boy.

“'Dulce et decorum est--'” said the undergraduate.

“I hate the idea, but it's got to be done,” said the city--bred man.

So they disappeared from their familiar haunts--more and more of them
as the months passed. They were put into training-camps, “pigged” it on
dirty straw in dirty barns, were ill-fed and ill-equipped, and trained
by hard--mouthed sergeants--tyrants and bullies in a good cause--until
they became automata at the word of command, lost their souls, as it
seemed, in that grinding-machine of military training, and cursed their
fate. Only comradeship helped them--not always jolly, if they happened
to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul-mouthed
slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if they were in
their own crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable lads. Eleven
months' training! Were they ever going to the front? The war would be
over before they landed in France... Then, at last, they came.




III


It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced
that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from the
secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gone from them,
but who could not get a word of their doings in France.

I saw the first of the “Kitchener men,” as we called them then. The
tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road of
France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings, and I
poked my head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching forward
to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts the imagination of our
people will strive to conjure up the vision of those boys who, in the
year of 1915, went out to Flanders, not as conscript soldiers, but as
volunteers, for the old country's sake, to take their risks and “do
their bit” in the world's bloodiest war. I saw those fellows day by day,
touched hands with them, went into the trenches with them, heard their
first tales, and strolled into their billets when they had shaken down
for a night or two within sound of the guns. History will envy me that,
this living touch with the men who, beyond any doubt, did in their
simple way act and suffer things before the war ended which revealed
new wonders of human courage and endurance. Some people envied me
then--those people at home to whom those boys belonged, and who in
country towns and villages and suburban houses would have given their
hearts to get one look at them there in Flanders and to see the way of
their life... How were they living? How did they like it? How were they
sleeping? What did the Regulars think of the New Army?

“Oh, a very cheerful lot,” said a sergeant-major of the old Regular
type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed
at the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres,
which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day
before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take it
into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already killed a
lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.)

“Not a bit of trouble with them,” said the sergeant-major, “and all
as keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, `I'm
going.' They're glad to be out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten
months we've been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were willing
enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, though some more
famous... Till we get our chance, you know.”

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn,
where a party of his men were resting.

“You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I'll bet
on that.”

The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or
squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a
whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me think
of hayfields in southern England.

They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, “Any one here from
Burpham?”

One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair,
and said, “Yes.”

I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I
should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a
Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he had
cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue eyes.

“P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham,” he said in a kind of whisper, so
that the other men should not hear.

The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages.
They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them
and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair,
freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad to be out in
France. Anything was better than training at home.

“I like Germans more'n sergeant-majors,” said one young yokel, and the
others shouted with laughter at his jest.

“Perhaps you haven't met the German sergeants,” I said.

“I've met our'n,” said the Sussex boy. “A man's a fool to be a soldier.
Eh, lads?”

They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers.

“Not that we're skeered,” said one of them. “We'll be glad when the
fighting begins.”

“Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don't forget the shells last
night.”

There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of the South Saxons
were full of spirit. In their yokel way they were disguising their real
thoughts--their fear of being afraid, their hatred of the thought of
death--very close to them now--and their sense of strangeness in this
scene on the edge of Armentieres, a world away from their old life.

The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a bronzed man with
a grizzled mustache and light-blue eyes, with a fine tenderness in his
smile.

“These boys of mine are all right,” he said. “They're dear fellows, and
ready for anything. Of course, it was anxious work at first, but my N.
C. O.'s are a first-class lot, and we're ready for business.”

He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the business eleven
months ago. It had not been easy, among all those scattered villages of
the southern county. He had gone hunting among the farms and cottages
for likely young fellows. They were of good class, and he had picked the
lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. They came from a
good stock--the yeoman breed. One could not ask for better stuff. The
officers were men of old county families, and they knew their men.
That was a great thing. So far they had been very lucky with regard to
casualties, though it was unfortunate that a company commander, a fine
fellow who had been a schoolmaster and a parson, should have been picked
off by a sniper on his first day out.

The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though nothing very
fierce as yet. They were led on in easy stages to the danger-zone. It
was not fair to plunge them straight away into the bad places. But the
test of steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the reserve
trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there was a bit of digging
to do in the open.

“Quiet there, boys,” said the sergeant-major. “And no larks.”

It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a light
drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's trenches were about a thousand yards
away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came
overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now
heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of
rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.

“And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!” said the heir to a
seaside lodging-house.

“Thirsty work, this grave-digging job,” said a lad who used to skate on
rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.

“Can't see much in those shells,” said a young man who once sold ladies'
blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. “How those newspaper
chaps do try to frighten us!”

He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.

“What's that? Wasps?”

A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise.
Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a
beast.

“What's that, Sergeant?”

“Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of
it... Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!”

The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was
probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys
suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.

“Get up, Charlie,” said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared
voice, “Oh, Sergeant!”

“That's all right,” said the sergeant-major. “We're getting off very
lightly. New remember what I've been telling you... Stretcher this way.”

They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New
Army.

“Like old soldiers, sir,” said the sergeant-major, when he stood
chatting with the colonel after breakfast.

It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all--which made the
Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army
were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen
what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet
streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which
the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that
unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and
great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside
themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood
very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the
other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and
plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of
red-brick walls.

“Funny business!” said one of the boys.

“Regular Drury Lane melodrama,” said another.

“Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch,” was another
comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.

They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in
some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride
is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when
this beastliness is being done.

“Not a single casualty,” said one of the officers when the storm of
shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks.
“Anything wrong with our luck?”

Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army
in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone.
No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their billets,
where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march.

“I woke up pretty quick,” said one of them, “and thought the house had
fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a
heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother
bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down for
breakfast now,' she said. But a shell is better--as a knocker-up. I
didn't stop to dress.”

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of
his escape.

“K.'s men” had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months
of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not
appeal humorously to sensitive men.

“Any room for us there?” asked one of these bronzed fellows as he
marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices
of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.

“Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German
trenches,” was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned
at their own wit.




IV


I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of
the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French
soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of
France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the
reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their
lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to “The Empire” left
them stone--cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall,
when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not because they hated
Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a
fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the
war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood)
like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would
have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so
in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G. H. Q. “What's
patriotism?” asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in
his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down in the roots of
their hearts, and, as with a boy who came from the village where I lived
for a time, the name of some such place held all the meaning of life to
many of them. The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went
back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents
sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws.
The smell of the fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees,
the heritage that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched
them with the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought.

The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of
expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under
a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city
and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was
the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the
embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept
his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he had watered his mother's
plants... London! Good old London!... His heart ached for it sometimes
when, as sentry, he stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No
Man's Land.

One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane
a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on
the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the
building, and listened. The men were singing “Auld Lang Syne” to the
accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts,
and the old tune--so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the
war zone--sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the
concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army sang “God Save
the King.” I heard it sung a thousand times or more on royal festivals
and tours, but listening to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders,
where a number of “K.'s men” lay on the straw a night or two away from
the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they had to take their turn, I
heard it with more emotion than ever before. In that anthem, chanted
by these boys in the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been
king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where
his men lay sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen
outside that barn and hear those words:

Send him victorious, Happy and glorious.

As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his
tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag
that meant to them some old village on the Sussex Downs, where a mother
and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls
were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old London,
where the 'buses went clanging down the Strand.

As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the
click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s men, standing sentry outside
the camp.

“Who goes there?”

It was a cockney voice.

“Friends.”

“Pass, friends. All's well.”

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of
a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and
destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New
Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young
soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hell-fires and killed
in great numbers, which made all things different in the philosophy of
modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the music of an
epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to
the future race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. Yet it
was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham Rye, who said,
like a voice of Fate, “All's well.”




V


When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches
in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in
every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master
all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large
numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll
in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few
rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could not “answer back.”
 In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open fire. We
called this monster “grandma,” and there was a little group of generals
on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the effect of the first shell.
Its target was on the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some
trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by our generals
and by God. Preliminary to the attack our field-guns opened fire with
shrapnel, which scattered over the German trenches--their formidable
earthworks with deep, shell-proof dugouts--like the glitter of confetti,
and had no more effect than that before the infantry made a rush for the
enemy's line and were mown down by machine-gun fire--the Germans were
very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak--in the usual way
of those early days. The first shell fired by our monster howitzer was
heralded by a low reverberation, as of thunder, from the field below
us. Then, several seconds later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a
tall, black column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze clawed
at it and tore it to tatters.

“Some shell!” said an officer. “Now we ought to win the war--I don't
think!”

Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two)--“aunty,” as we
called it.

Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, and gradually
our gun-power grew and grew, until we could “answer back,” and give more
than came to us; but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the racket,
as the Old Army had done, being strafed by harassing fire, having their
trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, and their bodies broken,
at all times and in all places within range of German guns.

Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had observation of our
position. From the Westhook Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge his observers
watched every movement of our men round Ypres, and along the main road
to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of them were visible.
From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and Messines
they could see for miles across our territory, not only the trenches,
but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind them and the
roads through the villages. They looked straight into Kemmel village
and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched among its ruins
and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and
vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch village and the gaunt
ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from Fleet Street who was
cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the
roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of
white dust which would tell them when men were marching by--more cannon
fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and
Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with
shells to spare ranged upon separate farm-houses and isolated barns
until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They
shelled the roads down which our transport wagons went at night, and the
communication trenches to which our men moved up to the front lines,
and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail
against their 5.9's, which in those early days we could only answer by
a few pip-squeaks. They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our
men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister
with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead
Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated
Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and
Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres.

All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places,
searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under
constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young
officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage
their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls.
They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the
climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty
feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken
chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, “It's quite cozy,
after all!”

And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street clubs, in the same
tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor--while they
listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be to-day or
to-morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking, that
bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and tear
them to bits and make a mess of things.

There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these
holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine
judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was
cruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses
of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries
of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink into the
squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk--silk
pajamas--and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of
gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew out the
back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He
crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language, and then lit
another gold--tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast.
His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old traditions of service
to an officer of the Guards, and he provided excellent little meals,
done to a turn, until something else happened, and he was buried alive
within a few yards of his master... Whenever I went to the canal-bank,
and I went there many times (when still and always hungry high
velocities came searching for a chance meal), I thought of my friend
in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had lived there in the worst
days, and some of whom had died there. They hated that canal-bank and
dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and there was the laughter
of men who hid the fear in their hearts and were “game” until some
bit of steel plugged them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to
tatters.




VI


Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low
ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer,
after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi
and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places.
The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the
cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage.

I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in
'15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and
the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads
learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I also
learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward, not
enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in civil
life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground beneath
them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to
eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette.

We were sitting in the garden of the general's headquarters, having a
picnic meal before going into the trenches. In spite of the wasps, which
attacked the sandwiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of war.
No shell same crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well within
range of the enemy's guns), and the loudest noise was the drop of an
over-ripe apple in the orchard. Later on a shrill whistle signaled a
hostile airplane overhead, but it passed without throwing a bomb.

“You will have a moist time in some of the trenches,” said the general
(whose boots were finely polished). “The rain has made them rather
damp... But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We're
expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our
trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It's an interesting
place.”

The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I uttered
a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly mine under
me. It makes such a mess of a man.

A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: “The sound of
picks has been heard close to our sap-head. The enemy will probably
explode their mine in a few hours.”

“That's the place I was telling you about,” said the general. “It's well
worth a visit... But you must make up your mind to get your feet wet.”

As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed to my shoulders, I
was ready to brave the perils of wet feet with any man.

It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that
in London--which seemed a long way off--people were going about under
umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing
omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their pretty
ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of peace.) But
in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something different, and
hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our soldiers,
who cursed the rain--as in the old days, “they swore terribly in
Flanders”--did not tuck their clothes up above their ankles. They took
off their trousers.

There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those hefty
men coming back through the communication trenches with the tails of
their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were plastered with a
yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they trudged on
grimly through two feet of water, and the boots which they wore without
socks squelched at every step with a loud, sucking noise--“like a German
drinking soup,” said an officer who preceded me.

“Why grouse?” he said, presently. “It's better than Brighton!”

It was a queer experience, this paddling through the long communication
trenches, which wound in and out like the Hampton Court maze toward the
front line, and the mine craters which made a salient to our right, by
a place called the “Tambour.” Shells came whining overhead and somewhere
behind us iron doors were slamming in the sky, with metallic bangs, as
though opening and shutting in a tempest. The sharp crack of rifle-shots
showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and once I stood in a
deep pool, with the water up to my knees, listening to what sounded like
the tap-tap-tap of invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil.

It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head,
which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer
in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his
top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip
in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow
growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose
puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his
elegant legs.

“Clever fellows!” said the officer, as two of us climbed on to the
fire-stand of the trench in order to avoid a specially deep water-hole,
and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were only two
hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for
at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was loud at the corner of
the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of
despond.

“And I hope they can swim!” said an ironical voice from a dugout, as the
officers passed. They were lying in wet mud in those square burrows, the
men who had been working all night under their platoon commanders, and
were now sleeping and resting in their trench dwellings. As I paddled
on I glanced at those men lying on straw which gave out a moist smell,
mixed with the pungent vapors of chloride of lime. They were not
interested in the German guns, which were giving their daily dose of
“hate” to the village of Becourt-Becordel. The noise did not interrupt
their heavy, slumbrous breathing. Some of those who were awake were
reading novelettes, forgetting war in the eternal plot of cheap romance.
Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their knees tucked up,
staring gloomily to the opposite wall of the trench in day-dreams of
some places betwixt Aberdeen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them,
and said, “How are you getting on?” He answered, “I'm not getting on...
I don't see the fun of this.”

“Can you keep dry?”

“Dry?... I'm soaked to the skin.”

“What's it like here?”

“It's hell... The devils blow up mines to make things worse.”

Another boy spoke.

“Don't you mind what he says, sir. He's always a gloomy bastard. Doesn't
believe in his luck.”

There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts--a woman's
face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait
of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers.

A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops
who were once in this section of trenches. It was an altar built
into the side of the trench, where mass was said each morning by a
soldier--priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and above
the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of which I
read the words Notre Dame des Tranchees (“Our Lady of the Trenches”). A
tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of those
who worshiped here:

“This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the
chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company
recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do not
touch the fragile statue in trench-clay.”

“Our Lady of the Trenches!” It was the first time I had heard of this
new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches of
death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of mankind
whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do.

From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young soldier
was playing the mandolin to two comrades. “All the latest ragtime,” said
one of them with a grin.

So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the parapets
at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a village in which
the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through
which we waded was alive with a multitude of swimming frogs. Red
slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with
dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the
dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them.

“Rats are the worst plague,” said a colonel, coming out of the battalion
headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table.
“There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and they're
audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night writhes
with them... I don't mind the mice so much. One of them comes to dinner
on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar who is very pally
with me.”

We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where
our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke
or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their
ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching
upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some
of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in
the churned-up soil... The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up
to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and I wondered
whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a foreknowledge of
death in his eyes.

One of the officers had spoken to me privately.

“I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that
thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it's the mining business that
wears one's nerve to shreds. One never knows.”

I hated to leave him there to his agony... The colonel himself was
all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the
mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the
dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern
was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing the glint
of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver ricocheted
from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for having fired.

The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the water-logged
trenches, the shell-fire which broke down the parapets and buried men in
wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers waiting for English
heads, and then the mines--oh, a cheery little school of courage for
the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war for the devil and General
Squeers!




VII


The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from
the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands,
whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a
memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of
those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the fields
beyond or to fall within its ramparts.

I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the
war that I think I could find my way about it blindfold, even now. I saw
it first in March of 1915, before the battle when the Germans first
used poison-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French and British
soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of masonry. On that first
visit I found it scarred by shell--fire, and its great Cloth Hall was
roofless and licked out by the flame of burning timbers, but most of the
buildings were still standing and the shops were busy with customers
in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small booths served by the
women and girls who sold picture post-cards and Flemish lace and fancy
cakes and soap to British soldiers sauntering about without a thought of
what might happen here in this city, so close to the enemy's lines, so
close to his guns. I had tea in a bun-shop, crowded with young officers,
who were served by two Flemish girls, buxom, smiling, glad of all the
English money they were making.

A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first sign of his work
was when a mass of French soldiers and colored troops, and English,
Irish, Scottish, and Canadian soldiers came staggering through the Lille
and Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell upon them.
They were gasping for breath, vomiting, falling into unconsciousness,
and, as they lay, their lungs were struggling desperately against some
stifling thing. A whitish cloud crept up to the gates of Ypres, with a
sweet smell of violets, and women and girls smelled it and then gasped
and lurched as they ran and fell. It was after that when shells came in
hurricane flights over Ypres, smashing the houses and setting them
on fire, until they toppled and fell inside themselves. Hundreds of
civilians hid in their cellars, and many were buried there. Others
crawled into a big drain-pipe--there were wounded women and children
among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who
tried to help them--and they stayed there three days and nights, in
their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres
was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall
and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of
masonry that had been their buttresses and towers.

When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the
years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of
its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were raked
into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never a day
for years in which Ypres was not shelled.

The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and passed
through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish Chateau...
For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men
and women could move freely without hiding from the pursuit of death;
and even there, from time to time, there were shells from long-range
guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about
Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons,
taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised clouds of dust
which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-horses with huge
fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and
gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy
clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers of Flemish
churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont Neir, whose sails have
turned through centuries of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as
I write--that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of the roads
and fields where the traffic of war went up, month after month, year
after year.

That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was strangely quiet,
I remember. There was “nothing doing,” as our men used to say. The
German gunners seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a charming
day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of war under every
old hedge.

“What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?” asked one of my
companions. There were three of us.

It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the village which then--they
were early days!--looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine
above its gray thatch and red-tiled roofs.

Suddenly one of us said, “Good God!”

An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the sky and the hamlet
into which we were just going was blotted out by black smoke, which came
up from its center as though its market-place had opened up and vomited
out infernal vapors.

“A big shell that!” said one man, a tall, lean-limbed officer, who later
in the war was sniper-in-chief of the British army. Something enraged
him at the sight of that shelled village.

“Damn them!” he said. “Damn the war! Damn all dirty dogs who smash up
life!”

Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there had been a minute
or so between us and Dickebusch. (In Dickebusch my young cobbler friend
from Fleet Street was crouching low, expecting death.) The peace of the
day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the way to Ypres. The
German gunners had wakened up again. They always did. They were getting
busy, those house-wreckers. The long rush of shells tore great holes
through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet in the ditch, we ate the
luncheon we had carried in our pockets.

“A silly idea!” said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad look in his eyes.
He was Norman-Irish, and a man of letters, and a crack shot, and all the
boys he knew were being killed.

“What's silly?” I asked, wondering what particular foolishness he was
thinking of, in a world of folly.

“Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one's mouth, just because
some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a
bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has no personal
acquaintance.”

“Damn silly,” I said.

“That's all there is to it in modern warfare,” said the lanky man. “It's
not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength against
your enemy's, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics and
chemistry. What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when
guns kill at fifteen miles?”

Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised tricks to make him
show his head, and shot each head that showed.

The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again.
It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past
the red-brick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls,
past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring, as
our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres. The
enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in the
morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again... I
remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after
the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred
ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living
figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above
many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some capital
of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and uncanny fear at
this burial-place of ancient splendor, with broken traces of peoples who
once had lived here in security. I looked up at the blue sky above those
white ruins, and had an idea that death hovered there like a hawk ready
to pounce. Even as one of us (not I) spoke the thought, the signal came.
It was a humming drone high up in the sky.

“Look out!” said the lanky man. “Germans!”

It was certain that two birds hovering over the Grande Place were
hostile things, because suddenly white puffballs burst all round them,
as the shrapnel of our own guns scattered about them. But they flew
round steadily in a half-circle until they were poised above our heads.

It was time to seek cover, which was not easy to find just there, where
masses of stonework were piled high. At any moment things might drop. I
ducked my head behind a curtain of bricks as I heard a shrill “coo-ee!”
 from a shell. It burst close with a scatter, and a tin cup was flung
against a bit of wall close to where the lanky man sat in a shell-hole.
He picked it up and said, “Queer!” and then smelled it, and said
“Queer!” again. It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some poisonous
liquid from a German chemist's shop. Other bombs were dropping round
as the two hostile airmen circled overhead, untouched still by the
following shell-bursts. Then they passed toward their own lines, and my
friend in the shell-hole called to me and said, “Let's be going.”

It was time to go.

When we reached the edge of the town our guns away back started
shelling, and we knew the Germans would answer. So we sat in a field
nearby to watch the bombardment. The air moved with the rushing waves
which tracked the carry of each shell from our batteries, and over Ypres
came the high singsong of the enemies' answering voice.

As the dusk fell there was a movement out from Vlamertinghe, a movement
of transport wagons and marching men. They were going up in the darkness
through Ypres--rations and reliefs. They were the New Army men of the
West Riding.

“Carry on there,” said a young officer at the head of his company.
Something in his eyes startled me. Was it fear, or an act of sacrifice?
I wondered if he would be killed that night. Men were killed most nights
on the way through Ypres, sometimes a few and sometimes many. One shell
killed thirty one night, and their bodies lay strewn, headless and
limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place. Transport wagons galloped
their way through, between bursts of shell-fire, hoping to dodge them,
and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the litter of their wheels and
shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and the raw flesh of the dead
horses that had not dodged them. Many men were buried alive in Ypres,
under masses of masonry when they had been sleeping in cellars, and were
wakened by the avalanche above them. Comrades tried to dig them out,
to pull away great stones, to get down to those vaults below from which
voices were calling; and while they worked other shells came and laid
dead bodies above the stones which had entombed their living comrades.
That happened, not once or twice, but many times in Ypres.

There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death
to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had had
eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with walls of
sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very long at
a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic according to
the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' book as a hobby, until it was buried
under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful soul, in spite of the
menace of death always about him.




VIII


My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It
was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had
the idea.

“It would be a great adventure,” he said, as we stood listening to the
gun-fire over there.

“It would be damn silly,” said a staff officer. “Only a stern sense of
duty would make me do it.”

It was Gullett who was the brave man.

We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any
battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for
ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living
soul.

Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the
broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of
shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves. There
was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry and
twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had been
once a fair city.

For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not
speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers of
the sinking sun and the first stars that glimmered in a pale sky, the
frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us.

The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken
arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from
end to end by a thunderbolt. A recent shell had torn out a slice so that
the top of the tower was supported only upon broken buttresses, and the
great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. The Cloth Hall was but
a skeleton in stone, with immense gaunt ribs about the dead carcass of
its former majesty. Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's was a stark ruin,
which gleamed white through the darkening twilight.

We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster
Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into
their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their
riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated
arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I
stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried life.

It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of
rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron
lamp-posts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken
way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and plants
still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed by the
daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been all
wrecked.

The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms, and
in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we stumbled
over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes. The silence was broken
now by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I jumped sideways
with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be the signal for our
batteries, and shell after shell went rushing through the night, with
that long, menacing hiss which ends in a dull blast.

The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells followed each
other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, echoed back by the ruins of
Ypres in hollow, reverberating thunder-strokes. The enemy was answering
back, not very fiercely yet, and from the center of the town, in or
about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses or of huge
blocks of stone splitting into fragments.

We groped along, scared with the sense of death around us. The first
flares of the night were being lighted by both sides above their
trenches on each side of the salient. The balls of light rose into the
velvety darkness and a moment later suffused the sky with a white glare
which faded away tremulously after half a minute.

Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the
roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields between
Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance. The whole
shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We could
see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We stared
across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge crater, and
those trenches which were battered to pieces but not abandoned in the
first battle of Ypres and the second battle.

That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British
soldiers--there were years to follow when many more would lie there--and
as between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a
great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on this
ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our loneliness
here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and made me see
unnatural things.

No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures approaching
him through a clump of trees. His words rang out like pistol-shots.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

“Friends!” we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a shaking bayonet.

“Come close to be recognized!” he said, and his voice was harsh.

We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sentries sometimes shot
too soon.

“Who are you?” he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we explained
he laughed gruffly. “I never saw two strangers pass this way before!”

He was an old soldier, “back to the army again,” with Kitchener's men.
He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa--“Little wars
compared to this,” as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a
bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right
word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more
“luminous” than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness,
except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the
illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the
roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another battalion
at Hooge, who were hard pressed. “They went along under a lot of
shrapnel and had many casualties.”

He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful way, with phrases
of almost biblical beauty in their simple truth, and the soul of the
man, the spirit of the whole army in which he was a private soldier, was
revealed when he flashed out a sentence with his one note of fire, “But
the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!”

We wandered away again into the darkness, with the din of the
bombardment all about us. There was not a square yard of ground unplowed
by shells and we did not nourish any false illusions as to finding a
safe spot for a bivouac.

There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where a man might say “No
shells will fall here.” But one place we found where there seemed some
reasonable odds of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we might
curl up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not be “crumped”
 before the dawn. There were several of these shelters there, but,
peering into them by the light of a match, I shuddered at the idea of
lying in one of them. They had been long out of use and there was a foul
look about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to rot there.
They were inhabited already by half-wild cats--the abandoned cats of
Ypres, which hunted mice through the ruins of their old houses--and
they spat at me and glared with green-eyed fear as I thrust a match into
their lairs.

There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on which we put our
cake and Cointreau, and here, through half a night, my friend and I
sat watching and listening to that weird scene upon which the old moon
looked down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked over all the
problems of life and death and the meaning of man's heritage.

Another sentry challenged us--all his nerves jangled at our apparition.
He was a young fellow, one of “Kitchener's crowd,” and told us frankly
that he had the “jimjams” in this solitude of Ypres and “saw Germans”
 every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us--“for company.

It was becoming chilly. The dew made our clothes damp. Cake and sweet
liquor were poor provisions for the night, and the thought of hot
tea was infinitely seductive. Perhaps somewhere one might find a few
soldiers round a kettle in some friendly dugout. We groped our way
along, holding our breath at times as a shell came sweeping overhead or
burst with a sputter of steel against the ramparts. It was profoundly
dark, so that only the glowworms glittered like jewels on black velvet.
The moon had gone down, and inside Ypres the light of the distant flares
only glimmered faintly above the broken walls. In a tunnel of darkness
voices were speaking and some one was whistling softly, and a gleam of
red light made a bar across the grass. We walked toward a group of black
figures, suddenly silent at our approach--obviously startled.

“Who's there?” said a voice.

We were just in time for tea--a stroke of luck--with a company of boys
(all Kitchener lads from the Civil Service) who were spending the night
here. They had made a fire behind a screen to give them a little comfort
and frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense of humor,
cynical and blasphemous, but even through their jokes there was a
yearning for the end of a business which was too close to death.

I remember the gist of their conversation, which was partly devised for
my benefit. One boy declared that he was sick of the whole business.

“I should like to cancel my contract,” he remarked.

“Yes, send in your resignation, old lad,” said another, with ironical
laughter.

“They'd consider it, wouldn't they? P'raps offer a rise in wages--I
don't think!”

Another boy said, “I am a citizen of no mean Empire, but what the hell
is the Empire going to do for me when the next shell blows off both my
bleeding legs?”

This remark was also received by a gust of subdued laughter, silenced
for a moment by a roar and upheaval of masonry somewhere by the ruins of
the Cloth Hall.

“Soldiers are prisoners,” said a boy without any trace of humor. “You're
lagged, and you can't escape. A 'blighty' is the best luck you can hope
for.”

“I don't want to kill Germans,” said a fellow with a superior accent.
“I've no personal quarrel against them; and, anyhow, I don't like
butcher's work.”

“Christian service, that's what the padre calls it. I wonder if Christ
would have stuck a bayonet into a German stomach--a German with his
hands up. That's what we're asked to do.”

“Oh, Christianity is out of business, my child. Why mention it? This is
war, and we're back to the primitive state--B.C. All the same, I say my
little prayers when I'm in a blue funk.

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child.”

This last remark was the prize joke of the evening, received with much
hilarity, not too loud, for fear of drawing fire--though really no
Germans could have heard any laughter in Ypres.

Nearby, their officer was spending the night. We called on him, and
found him sitting alone in a dugout furnished by odd bits from the
wrecked houses, with waxen flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and
an old cottage clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair
which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a Devonshire lad,
with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his loneliness,
with a roof over his head which would be no proof against a fair-sized
shell.

He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been
surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him.
He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his
green armchair.

The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a little
while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as the first
faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire burst
out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new spasms of
ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing them, had an
attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated
fireworks after a night of orgy.

In a distant field a cock crew.

The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the
ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed
again nakedly. Then the guns ceased for a while, and there was quietude
in the trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways, went two tired
figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swiftness to escape the early
morning “hate” which was sure to come as soon as a clock in Vlamertinghe
still working in a ruined tower chimed the hour of six.

I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles
of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and
pack-mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to
Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about,
and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and
their flashes were red through the Flanders mist. Always this capital of
the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about.

“Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert.”

So said the traffic man at the crossroads.

As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened the strap of one's
gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one's soul icily.




IX


The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early
days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground
and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for young
Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin
road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a time
there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with excellent
stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one
of our generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which broke up
their conference. Afterward there was no chateau, but only a rubble
of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with
stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying
pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green
metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the
surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that
way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a
few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags and burrowed in
the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in legions. Human flesh,
rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they
dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead
bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs,
blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy
trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.

I remember one young Irish officer who came down to bur quarters on a
brief respite from commanding the garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome
fellow, like young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a profound
melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile.

“Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you?” he asked.

He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a
strong, fetid smell came from him.

“Hooge,” he said, in a thoughtful way, “is not a health resort.”

He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a leper.
He told one or two stories about the things that happened at Hooge,
and I wondered if hell could be so bad. After a short stay he went back
again, and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before saying
good-by he touched some flowers on the mess-table, and for a moment or
two listened to birds twittering in the trees.

“Thanks very much,” he said. “I've enjoyed this visit a good deal.. .
Good-by.”

He went back through Ypres on the way to Hooge, and the mine-crater
where his Irish soldiers were lying in slime, in which vermin crawled.

Sometimes it was the enemy who mined under our position, blowing a few
men to bits and scattering the sand-bags. Sometimes it was our men
who upheaved the earth beyond them by mine charges and rushed the new
crater.

It was in July of '15 that the devils of Hooge became merry and bright
with increased activity. The Germans had taken possession of one of the
mine-craters which formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin road,
with trenches running down to it on either side, so that it was like the
spear-head of their position. They had fortified it with sand-bags and
crammed it with machine--guns which could sweep the ground on three
sides, so making a direct attack by infantry a suicidal enterprise. Our
trenches immediately faced this stronghold from the other side of a
road at right angles with the Menin road, and our men--the New Army
boys--were shelled day and night, so that many of them were torn to
pieces, and others buried alive, and others sent mad by shell-shock.
(They were learning their lessons in the school of courage.) It was
decided by a conference of generals, not at Hooge, to clear out this
hornets' nest, and the job was given to the sappers, who mined under
the roadway toward the redoubt, while our heavy artillery shelled the
enemy's position all around the neighborhood.

On July 22d the mine was exploded, while our men crouched low, horribly
afraid after hours of suspense. The earth was rent asunder by a gust of
flame, and vomited up a tumult of soil and stones and human limbs and
bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell upon them.

“I thought I had been blown to bits,” one of them told me. “I was a
quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, 'Christ!...
Christ!'”

When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the enemy's
redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had been a
crisscross of trenches and sand-bag shelters for their machine-guns and
a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater, hollowed
deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps which had
blocked up the enemy's trenches on either side of the position, so that
they could not rush into the cavern and take possession. It was our men
who “rushed” the crater and lay there panting in its smoking soil.

Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt,
and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the
mine-explosion and by the loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept up
a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in bursts of
gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and wounded many
men. Our line at Hooge at that time was held by the King's Royal
Rifles of the 14th Division, young fellows, not far advanced in
the training-school of war. They held on under the gunning of their
positions, and each man among them wondered whether it was the shell
screeching overhead or the next which would smash him into pulp like
those bodies lying nearby in dugouts and upheaved earthworks.

On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of silence after a
heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of the K. R. R. raised their heads
above broken parapets and crawled out of shell-holes and looked about.
There were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men were wailing.
The unwounded, startled by the silence, became aware of some moisture
falling on them; thick, oily drops of liquid.

“What in hell's name--?” said a subaltern.

One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something like paraffin.

Coming across from the German trenches were men hunched up under some
heavy weights. They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-pipes.
Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some
blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken ground
where the King's Royal Rifles lay.

Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making
them living torches, and in a second or two cinders.

It was a new horror of war--the Flammenwerfer.

Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at
the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were
true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught
in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long
bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were
smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they
fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay.

The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in
reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They moved
up at once to support their comrades and make a counter-attack. The
ground they had to cover was swept by machine-guns, and many fell, but
the others attacked again and again, regardless of their losses, and won
back part of the lost ground, leaving only a depth of five hundred yards
in the enemy's hands.

So the position remained until the morning of August 9th, when a new
attack was begun by the Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Midland
troops of the 6th Division, who had been long in the salient and had
proved the quality of northern “grit” in the foul places and the foul
weather of that region.

It was late on the night of August 8th that these battalions took up
their position, ready for the assault. These men, who came mostly from
mines and workshops, were hard and steady and did not show any outward
sign of nervousness, though they knew well enough that before the light
of another day came their numbers would have passed through the lottery
of this game of death. Each man's life depended on no more than a fluke
of luck by the throw of those dice which explode as they fall. They knew
what their job was. It was to cross five hundred yards of open ground
to capture and to hold a certain part of the German position near the
Chateau of Hooge.

They were at the apex of the triangle which made a German salient after
the ground was lost, on July 30th. On the left side of the triangle was
Zouave Wood, and Sanctuary Wood ran up the right side to a strong fort
held by the enemy and crammed with machine-guns and every kind of bomb.
The base of the upturned triangle was made by the Menin road, to the
north, beyond which lay the crater, the chateau, and the stables.

The way that lay between the regiment and their goal was not an easy one
to pass. It was cut and crosscut by our old trenches, now held by the
enemy, who had made tangles of barbed wire in front of their parapets,
and had placed machine-guns at various points. The ground was littered
with dead bodies belonging to the battle of July 30th, and pock-marked
by deep shell-holes. To cross five hundred yards of such ground in
the storm of the enemy's fire would be an ordeal greater than that of
rushing from one trench to another. It would have to be done in regular
attack formation, and with the best of luck would be a grim and costly
progress.

The night was pitch dark. The men drawn up could only see one another
as shadows blacker than the night. They were very quiet; each man was
fighting down his fear in his soul, trying to get a grip on nerves
hideously strained by the rack of this suspense. The words, “Steady,
lads.” were spoken down the ranks by young lieutenants and sergeants.
The sounds of men whispering, a cough here and there, a word of command,
the clink of bayonets, the cracking of twigs under heavy boots, the
shuffle of troops getting into line, would not carry with any loudness
to German ears.

The men deployed before dawn broke, waiting for the preliminary
bombardment which would smash a way for them. The officers struck
matches now and then to glance at their wrist-watches, set very
carefully to those of the gunners. Then our artillery burst forth with
an enormous violence of shell-fire, so that the night was shattered with
the tumult of it. Guns of every caliber mingled their explosions,
and the long screech of the shells rushed through the air as though
thousands of engines were chasing one another madly through a vast
junction in that black vault.

The men listened and waited. As soon as the guns lengthened their fuses
the infantry advance would begin. Their nerves were getting jangled. It
was just the torture of human animals. There was an indrawing of breath
when suddenly the enemy began to fire rockets, sending up flares which
made white waves of light. If they were seen! There would be a shambles.

But the smoke of all the bursting shells rolled up in a thick veil,
hiding those mining lads who stared toward the illuminations above the
black vapors and at the flashes which seemed to stab great rents in the
pall of smoke. “It was a jumpy moment,” said the colonel of the Durhams,
and the moment lengthened into minutes.

Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the second which had been
given for the assault to begin, and instantly, to the tick, the guns
lifted and made a curtain of fire round the Chateau of Hooge, beyond the
Menin road, six hundred yards away.

“Time!”

The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden clatter
from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men girdled with
hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and made their first
rush forward. The ground had been churned up by our shells, and the
trenches had been battered into shapelessness, strewn with broken wire
and heaps of loose stones and fragments of steel.

It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this
quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and
hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them,
and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches
German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by
the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.

Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and
swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a
slaughter-house.

The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now,
and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing quickly
from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting hoarsely, and
hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, and
scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling down again,
until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom of this pit of
hell.

While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the dugouts
already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge beyond and
with a final rush, al

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