"This is the end of the line," said the Staff Officer, kindest
and most patient of chaperons. It buttressed itself on a
fortress among hills. Beyond that, the silence was more awful
than the mixed noise of business to the westward. In mileage
on the map the line must be between four and five hundred
miles; in actual trench-work many times that distance. It is
too much to see at full length; the mind does not readily
break away from the obsession of its entirety or the grip of
its detail. One visualizes the thing afterwards as a
white-hot gash, worming all across France between intolerable
sounds and lights, under ceaseless blasts of whirled dirt. Nor
is it any relief to lose oneself among wildernesses of piling,
stoning, timbering, concreting, and wire-work, or incalculable
quantities of soil thrown up raw to the light and cloaked by the
changing seasons--as the unburied dead are cloaked.
Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it.
It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely
as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that keeps us from the
Beast goes with it. One sees this at the front as clearly as
one sees the French villages behind the German lines.
Sometimes people steal away from them and bring word of what
they endure.
Where the rifle and the bayonet serve, men use those tools
along the front. Where the knife gives better results, they
go in behind the hand-grenades with the naked twelve-inch
knife. Each race is supposed to fight in its own way, but
this war has passed beyond all the known ways. They say that
the Belgians in the north settle accounts with a certain dry
passion which has varied very little since their agony began.
Some sections of the English line have produced a soft-voiced,
rather reserved type, which does its work with its mouth shut.
The French carry an edge to their fighting, a precision, and a
dreadful knowledge coupled with an insensibility to shock,
unlike anything one has imagined of mankind. To be sure,
there has never been like provocation, for never since the
Aesir went about to bind the Fenris Wolf has all the world
united to bind the Beast.
The last I saw of the front was Alan Breck speeding back to
his gun-positions among the mountains; and I wondered what
delight of what household the lad must have been in the old
days.