_Trenches La Panne_, May, 1916.
Seven o'clock in the morning and I had just returned from the trenches,
fairly well-behaved trenches, but real ones nevertheless, for several
German bullets had sought us as a target in the early morning mist. It
was all unreal, for I saw nothing. Yet I had to believe it, for I heard.
Thanks to the courtesy of a gallant staff captain and a charming
grey-haired general, I made this unique expedition. The captain and I
started before daylight in the cold of a grey morning and rode to the
trenches in a comfortable limousine. The fields about were desolate,
even the trees destroyed. Here and there a heap of stones, the remains
of a thrifty farm, sheltered a small company of soldiers. The roads
were unspeakable, so deep the holes and ruts. We passed through P----.
There were still a few walls standing, and there we picked up a piece
of marble to make me a paper weight. I knew the Germans were not far
off, for the cannonading was continuous about three miles down on our
right. But for all I could see I might as well have been on the western
prairies.
"What in the world is straw fixed up that way for?" I asked.
"That is a curtain of straw which stretches for miles along the road
behind the trenches to hide our motors from the enemy. A motor means an
officer, and if they could see us we would not be here long."
We stopped behind the straw screen and got out, crawling under it
into a communication trench. I had better call them ramparts, for
this district, you know, was the inundated land of the Yser. One
hundred yards in this winding alley of concrete and sandbag wall and
we reached the main trench, a solid substantial rampart of concrete,
sandbags and earth, with the grass growing on the side facing the
enemy. Here the soldiers on duty lived in their little cubby-holes in
the wall. They slept in groups of fours, stretched out on clean straw
with their guns beside them ready for sudden call. And, if you please,
do not suppose that these domiciles went unnamed or unadorned. By the
irony of fate the first wooden door we came to was thus inscribed, all
in French, of course:
_Villa "Ne T'en Fai pas"!
War with Notes!
Wilson-Bethman!
Hurry up, you Neutrals!_
How commonplace trench life has become after these two long years of
habit! Nowadays men do not go to the office and the shop. They go
up to the trenches for daily duties. These trenches we were in were
main-line, where the enemy was not supposed to penetrate unless rude
enough actually to break through. So the soldiers portioned off the
rough earth beside the board walk that ran parallel to the rampart, and
first they had a little vegetable garden, and next to it for beauty's
sake a little flower garden, and next to that a little graveyard, and
then the succession repeated. Five hundred yards beyond the main lines,
across the inundated fields streaked with barbed wire sticking up out
of the water, was the front line trench, a rougher rampart, mostly of
earth, and when it rained, oh mud! Under cover of darkness the boys
went out and returned, walking across a rickety board walk.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Those were sharp shots and sounded like business.
They might become more personal than the steady heavy roar of guns
sending up their smoke at D---- on our right. We dared not tarry, for
the sun was coming up.
The Major of the line was waiting to greet us and offered us early
morning refreshment in his dug-out. His dug-out was a cozy, comfy
little place, two boarded rooms in the rampart wall, high enough to
stand up in, and furnished with a cot and blankets and some chairs
and a stove and a mirror and some pictures, and, yes, a latch on the
door to enter by. If I had had no ears it would have been difficult
to persuade me that there were men not far off who, without personal
animosity, would gladly have landed a shell in our midst.
The war as I glimpsed it in the many phases I was able at last to touch
upon always gave me the impression of running up against a blank wall
of contradiction. To people who live week in and week out in the range
of shell fire, life and death take on a new relationship. Death may
come at any moment, and yet meantime life must be lived, and one can't
live all the time at high pressure. Perhaps no more vivid instance of
this came to me than when I was sitting in barracks near F---- as the
guest of that wonderful woman, Mrs. I---- T----. Up with the dawn,
she and her fellow worker slaved without intermission, caring for the
poor civilians of F----. They taught and fed the kiddies, dispensed
medical and even surgical help, going out across the fields through
the darkness at any call; gave out food and clothing to the women who
came daily to claim their portion. Then, the day's hard work over, came
dinner, at which an officer or two, French, Belgian, English, even
American, might drop in, and afterwards my hostess would sit at the
piano and sing Debussy with a voice of beauty and volume, while all
the time the guns would thunder, the aeros might be overhead, and men
were being killed on all sides. One's mind hardly grasped it, but one's
emotions ran high.