DIJON TO BELFORT
In Paris, when we passed through it, it was still possible for
inoffensive travellers to feel themselves free men. At Dijon we had
our first real taste of the restrictions on personal liberty imposed
by the war in the zone of the armies. Each time that we came to a new
place we had to get at least three separate signed and stamped permits
(from three or more officials) empowering us to leave the station, to
stay, even for an hour, in the town, and to go into the station again,
or anywhere outside the town, when our business was done. To all such
applications the attitude of officialdom, entrenched behind barriers
and supported by bayonets, and vindictive or regretful according to
the temperament of the individual representative of the law and the
degree of exasperation to which he had been brought by previous
encounters with the public, was, as a rule, one of uncompromising
refusal. At first that kind of thing, even when it has become a
commonplace of one’s existence, is rather trying. The shock to one’s
self-esteem and the sense of confinement are both extremely galling.
It is not pleasant day after day to put yourself in a position in
which you are liable to be treated like a naughty schoolboy, nor to
feel that you are as restricted in your walks abroad as a Dartmoor
convict. From the abominable feeling of being shut up in a cage there
was, with rare exceptions, no escape, any more than there is for the
lions at the Zoo. But we soon found that the chase after permits, if
we treated it as a kind of game, was tolerable and even exciting,
because each time we played it, though with _The Times_ as our trump
card we almost invariably won, we stood a good chance of losing. The
real skill consisted in knowing when it was wise and safe to play it.
Our opponents, destined in time to become our friends, were generals,
staff officers, gendarmes, station guards and their commandants,
military police commissaires, civil police “_agents_,” and other
officials of all sorts and sizes. Most of them started by being
suspicious of us and our mission, and generally speaking the more
humble their post the more they wanted humouring before they could be
brought to see that the rules of the game might perhaps be slightly
relaxed in our favour. But once they had reached that point, as soon,
that is to say, as they got to know us for what we said we were, they
were ready to do anything in their power, because we were allies and
representatives of _The Times_—which has not yet been burnt, and never
will be, on any Bourse in the east of France. With the exception of a
fierce-moustachioed warrior who had a holy horror of German spies (and
therefore, if you see the connexion, of English journalists) the only
French officials, high or low, who persistently refused anything
important for which we asked them, were a distinguished General
Officer and his Chief of Staff, who always dealt with us through their
subordinates. If only we could have seen and known the General himself
I firmly believe that he would have been as kind as all the rest. But
he had other things to do, or else he never got our cards and letters.
Having got into Dijon, and having received reluctant permission to stay
there, first for a night, and then for as much longer as we liked, the
next thing was to get out of it, using it, if it would allow itself so
to be used, as a stepping stone to higher things. It was occupied at
that time by the 20th (Reserve) Army Corps, which had its staff
headquarters at the hotel where we put up. Both before and after we
received the news of the Battle of the Marne all the officers whom we
met there were chafing to be at the front, and openly envious of our
poor little chance of getting there before them. They little knew how
slender it was. However, in General Brissaud, the Governor of the town,
we found after a time a real friend, and from him we got a personal
_visa_ as far as Besançon, which was the limit of his jurisdiction,
together with a verbal recommendation that we should be passed on to
Belfort. At Besançon we had a bad quarter of an hour, as the
station-commandant hesitated a long time before he agreed to let us go
on, and we only just escaped being sent back to Paris. Something,
however, turned the scale in our favour, and at last, though with rather
a wry face, he sent us on our way rejoicing, greatly relieved at our
escape, but careful not to show it till we were safe in our carriage.
It was long after dark when we got to Belfort. There was nowhere for us
to sleep in the station, and no return train. Otherwise I think the
little knot of officers who shook their heads doubtfully over our
passports on the dimly lit platform would certainly have packed us into
it straight away. There were some grounds for their hesitation. We had
reached one of the chief of the gates of France, and were getting near
the enemy. The Trouée de Belfort, the wide flat opening between the
foothills of the Vosges and the Jura mountains, had to be defended from
possible foes within as well as without. War, as the warrior with the
fierce moustachios remarked to me a month or two later, is a serious
matter, and nowhere were the French taking it more seriously than in the
war-worn outpost fortress that stands sentinel in front of the Belfort
gap, linked to the heart of the Republic by the long chain of lonely
sentries that guarded the railway night and day all the way to Paris.
Outside it very little was known at that time—in England nothing at
all—of its then condition. Even the Germans knew nothing, so they, or
their newspapers, invented lies about it, and said that it was closely
invested. But though no German soldier, except in an aeroplane, ever got
within miles of it, the state of siege proclaimed by the Governor was
enforced with rigid strictness, and the whole of the civil population,
except those who catered for the needs of the garrison, had been
evacuated some days before we got there. At the best, therefore, however
genuine our passports and however innocent our appearance, we were two
_bouches inutiles_ who would have to be fed; at the worst, as
journalists, the chances were that we should be indiscreet (that is the
normal view); and anyhow it was very doubtful if we had any right to be
there at all. But there, undeniably, we were, and so—well, perhaps after
all the best way out of the difficulty was to send us to the Governor’s
headquarters and leave him to deal with our case. So to the General’s
quarters, the heart of the fortress, which we were as anxious as any
German to reach, we set out, under the escort of Private Jouanard,
election agent and newspaper correspondent, a convinced socialist and
anti-militarist, but, like his idol Jaurès, a Frenchman first of all,
and therefore an ardent soldier of France, a warm admirer of England,
and a bitter enemy of the Boche and all his works.
I suppose that long before this book is published England will have at
last realized the truth of the creed of French soldiers like Private
Jouanard, and will have demanded as one man to be put, like France, on
the footing of national service. But I may be too sanguine; we may have
to grapple with the industrial revolution threatened by Mr. J. H.
Thomas, M.P. In any case I should like to quote once more a proclamation
written by Private Jouanard for _l’Humanité_, which, before our
acquaintance was twelve hours old, he gave me for publication in _The
Times_. It was addressed “Aux Camarades Socialistes,” and signed “L. J.
A mobilized comrade.”
“We are now at the parting of the ways. After having fought stubbornly
against that human scourge—war, the insatiable ambition of a despot
forces us to take up arms. Despite the immense sorrow that grips us at
the thought of being the involuntary murderers of those Germans and
Austrians who have the same communion of ideas, in their name and in our
own, for humanity, socialism, right against the arbitrary, civilization
against barbarism, in the name of all these sacred principles, our
brothers of England, of Belgium, of Russia, and ourselves have answered
‘Present’ with one voice to the call of our native land. Each one filled
with emotion and confident in the justice of our cause, we have flown to
arms at the cry of Liberty, like the great revolutionaries of ’93.
“Socialists of the allied armies, we have not to weep, but to avenge the
death of the martyr of the Idea, our great friend Jaurès, our guide and
our light in difficult moments. Humanity loses in him a great defender,
the indirect victim of the unmitigated Teuton aggression.
“The most competent among us are giving a manly example by entering the
Governments of the Allies, thus taking, in the eyes of their countries,
a position of responsibility for the Party which they represent. More
than others we socialists must prove the error of this monstrous
accusation of anti-patriotism. Let us prove, in defending ourselves,
that we are firmly resolved to fight to the end for our national
independence.
“Forward, comrades! Take heart, take courage, and the bar of red, which
mingles with the two other colours, forming a trinity symbolic of
liberty, peace, and labour, will not be defiled by the bloody hands of
the bandits who would make us slaves! May the furrows, sprinkled with
our blood, bring forth the ear of corn beneath the branch of olive,
symbolizing fruitful labour in eternal peace.”
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength,
because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the
avenger.” Out of the mouth of a French _simple soldat_ the Englishmen
who are still holding back as I write from the supreme sacrifice or
privilege of national service, the Britons who never, never, never will
be slaves, are condemned. A year of the war has passed, and hundreds of
thousands of their fellow subjects of all classes have given up their
professions and their positions, their pleasures and their ease, their
wives and their families, and have freely offered themselves on the
field of battle as part of the strength by which the enemy can be
stilled. But they themselves have done none of the things for which
their French socialist comrade unhesitatingly gave them credit. They
have not—up to October, 1915—realized that we are at the parting of the
ways, they have not with one voice answered “Present” to the call of
their native land, they have not flown to arms at the cry of liberty,
they have not proved by defending themselves that they mean to fight to
the end for their national independence. Instead, they sit at home and
strike—not for freedom, but for higher wages and less work—and prate of
Conscripts and a Capitalists’ War and a Capitalists’ Press, and all the
other labour shibboleths which have lost whatever sense they had before
the war and become mere nonsense, because the war is different from all
other wars and has changed everything in the world. It is a Capitalists’
War, of course. It was made by the Prussian Junkers and the business men
of Germany with no other object than that of increasing their capital
and destroying that of the Allies and particularly of England. It is a
war fought by “conscripts” (though I should like to hear Mr. J. H.
Thomas, M.P., use that term to Private Jouanard) in the case of every
country engaged in it except England. And it is also, because of these
two undeniable premises, the greatest strike against selfishness in high
places that has ever taken place, and the conscript brothers who are
fighting or working for it are the champions of freedom, and the men who
refuse to stand by their side are, without knowing it, the blackest
blacklegs in the history of the world. And no one knows better than they
and the newspapers and politicians who support them what blacklegs are.
They are the men who in the wars of labour refuse to submit to the
Compulsory Service of trade-unionism, which is sometimes the most
servile service and the most autocratic and deadening compulsion that
ever was enforced in a free country, and the badge and livery and alpha
and omega of the god with the feet of clay before which they bow down
and worship.
* * * * *
Though it was a clear starlight night when we walked up to General
Thévenet’s quarters, the moon had not risen and the town was wrapped in
silence and dense darkness. Not a lamp was lit in the streets, not a
chink of light escaped through the closely shuttered windows, not a
sound was to be heard but the steady tramp of a distant patrol and the
clatter of our feet on the cobbles. Afterwards, in Toul, and Epinal, and
Commercy, and Nancy, and Lunéville, and other towns near the front, we
got used to the conditions of a state of siege after _couvre feu_, when
people go to bed at eight or nine o’clock—the deathly night stillness,
broken only by the barking of dogs, the shrill despairing shrieks
peculiar to French engine whistles, and the dull boom of cannon, and, in
the empty streets, walled in by tall houses teeming with unseen human
life, the solid blackness of the grave. In time you get used to it and
forget to wonder whether the Germans too can hear the howling of that
far-off dog that is baying the moon. You even crack jokes with the
heavy-footed sentries and stealthy police “_agents_” who loom up
uncannily out of the darkness and may or may not request you to follow
them to the “_poste_.” But that first night in Belfort, before I had
seen the miles and miles of solid entrenchments that lie between it and
the frontier, the effect of it all, and the thought of the long line of
millions of men, stretching almost from our feet far away for five
hundred miles across France and Belgium to the Channel, thousands of
them watching and waiting and fighting and suffering under the wide
canopy of the quiet night, was curiously eerie. You seemed to hear
Europe sighing and groaning in her sleep.
Suddenly, out of the unseen came a sharp challenge—“Qui vive? Halte là!
Avancez à l’ordre! Le mot!”—and we stopped dead, as it is wise to do
when you meet a night patrol in a town in _état de siège_ if you are
anxious to go on living. Then, one by one, we walked forward, gave the
word, handed our papers to the corporal to be examined by the light of
his lantern, and finally, after a few more challenges, half blinded by
the dazzling glare of the lamps of a motor-car standing in the courtyard
in front, were ushered into General Thévenet’s business-like office. Our
reception was as different from what had gone before as the abrupt
change from darkness to light. At last we had struck a man of real
authority and decision. After a word or two of explanation—who we were
and what we had come for—we were welcomed as warmly as if we had been
the whole British army, horse, foot, guns, and aeroplanes, instead of
two troublesome journalists. We had come at a happy moment. England and
_The Times_ would in any case have been passports enough for the General
and his staff. But we shone also with the reflected glory of the common
endurance of the retreat from Mons and the common triumph of the Battle
of the Marne, which had brought our two countries closer together than
they had been since Balaclava and Inkermann. And when we had explained
the immediate purpose of our mission—to publish the truth and to
contradict the lying reports spread by the enemy about Belfort and
Verdun and Nancy—the General at once promised us all the help in his
power.