I would speak first of a contrast--and yet I have come to recognize how
impossible it is to convey to the dweller in America the difference in
atmosphere between England and France on the one hand and our country on
the other. And when I use the word “atmosphere” I mean the mental state
of the peoples as well as the weather and the aspect of the skies. I
have referred in another article to the anxious, feverish prosperity one
beholds in London and Paris, to that apparent indifference, despite the
presence on the streets of crowds of soldiers to the existence of a war
of which one is ever aware. Yet, along with this, one is ever conscious
of pressure. The air is heavy; there is a corresponding lack of the
buoyancy of mind which is the normal American condition. Perhaps,
if German troops occupied New England and New York, our own mental
barometer might be lower. It is difficult to say. At any rate, after
an ocean voyage of nine days one's spirits rise perceptibly as the ship
nears Nantucket; and the icy-bright sunlight of New York harbour, the
sight of the buildings aspiring to blue skies restore the throbbing
optimism which with us is normal; and it was with an effort, when I
talked to the reporters on landing, that I was able to achieve and
express the pessimism and darkness out of which I had come. Pessimism
is perhaps too strong a word, and takes no account of the continued
unimpaired morale and determination of the greater part of the British
and French peoples. They expect much from us. Yet the impression was
instantaneous, when I set forth in the streets of New York, that we had
not fully measured the magnitude of our task--an impression that has
been amply confirmed as the weeks have passed.
The sense of relief I felt was not only the result of bright skies and
a high barometer, of the palpable self-confidence of the pedestrians, of
the white bread on the table and the knowledge that there was more,
but also of the ease of accomplishing things. I called for a telephone
number and got it cheerfully and instantly. I sent several telegrams,
and did not have to wait twenty minutes before a wicket while a
painstaking official multiplied and added and subtracted and paused to
talk with a friend; the speed of the express in which I flew down-town
seemed emblematic of America itself. I had been transported, in fact,
into another world--my world; and in order to realize again that from
which I had come I turned to a diary recording a London filled with the
sulphur fumes of fog, through which the lamps of the taxis and buses
shone as yellow blots reflected on glistening streets; or, for some
reason a still greater contrast, a blue, blue November Sunday afternoon
in parts, the Esplanade of the Invalides black with people--sad
people--and the Invalides itself all etched in blue as seen through the
wide vista from the Seine.
A few days later, with some children, I went to the Hippodrome. And it
remained for the Hippodrome, of all places, to give me the thrill I had
not achieved abroad, the thrill I had not experienced since the first
months of the war. Mr. George Cohan accomplished it. The transport with
steam up, is ready to leave the wharf, the khaki-clad regiment of erect
and vigorous young Americans marches across the great stage, and the
audience strains forward and begins to sing, under its breath, the words
that proclaim, as nothing else perhaps proclaims, how America feels.
“Send the word, send the word over there...
We'll be o-ver, we're coming o-ver,
And we won't come back till it's o-ver, over there!”
Is it the prelude of a tragedy? We have always been so successful, we
Americans. Are we to fail now? I am an American, and I do not believe we
are to fail. But I am soberer, somehow a different American than he who
sailed away in August. Shall we learn other things than those that have
hitherto been contained in our philosophy?
Of one thing I am convinced. It is the first war of the world that is
not a miltary war, although miltary genius is demanded, although it is
the bloodiest war in history. But other qualities are required; men and
women who are not professional soldiers are fighting in it and will aid
in victory. The pomp and circumstance of other wars are lacking in this,
the greatest of all. We had the thrills, even in America, three years
ago, when Britain and France and Canada went in. We tingled when we
read of the mobilizing of the huge armies, of the leave-takings of
the soldiers. We bought every extra for news of those first battles
on Belgian soil. And I remember my sensations when in the province
of Quebec in the autumn of 1914, looking out of the car-window at the
troops gathering on the platforms who were to go across the seas
to fight for the empire and liberty. They were singing “Tipperary!”
“Tipperary!” One seldoms hears it now, and the way has proved
long--longer than we reckoned. And we are singing “Over There!”
In those first months of the war there was, we were told, in England
and France a revival of “religion,” and indeed many of the books then
written gave evidence of having been composed in exalted, mystic moods.
I remember one in particular, called “En Campagne,” by a young French
officer. And then, somehow, the note of mystic exaltation died away,
to be succeeded by a period of realism. Read “Le Feu,” which is most
typical, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a picture
of that other aspect--the grimness, the monotony, and the frequent
bestiality of trench life, the horror of slaughtering millions of men
by highly specialized machinery. And yet, as an American, I strike
inevitably the note of optimism once more. Even now the truer spiritual
goal is glimpsed through the battle clouds, and has been hailed in
world-reverberating phrases by our American President. Day by day the
real issue is clearer, while the “religion” it implies embraces not
one nation, wills not one patriotism, but humanity itself. I heard a
Frenchwoman who had been deeply “religious” in the old sense exclaim: “I
no longer have any faith in God; he is on the side of the Germans.” When
the war began there were many evidences of a survival of that faith that
God fights for nations, interferes in behalf of the “righteous”
cause. When General Joffre was in America he was asked by one of our
countrywomen how the battle of the Marne was won. “Madame,” he is
reported to have said, “it was won by me, by my generals and soldiers.”
The tendency to regard this victory, which we hope saved France and the
Western humanitarian civilization we cherish, as a special interposition
of Providence, as a miracle, has given place to the realization that
the battle was won by the resourcefulness, science, and coolness of the
French commander-in-chief. Science preserves armies, since killing, if
it has to be done, is now wholly within that realm; science heals the
wounded, transports them rapidly to the hospitals, gives the shattered
something still to live for; and, if we are able to abandon the
sentimental view and look facts in the face--as many anointed chaplains
in Europe are doing--science not only eliminates typhoid but is able to
prevent those terrible diseases that devastate armies and nations. And
science is no longer confined to the physical but has invaded the
social kingdom, is able to weave a juster fabric into the government
of peoples. On all sides we are beginning to embrace the
religion of self-reliance, a faith that God is on the side of
intelligence--intelligence with a broader meaning than the Germans have
given it, for it includes charity.
II
It seems to me that I remember, somewhere in the realistic novel I have
mentioned “Le Feu”--reading of singing soldiers, and an assumption
on the part of their hearers that such songs are prompted only by a
devil-may-care lightness of heart which the soldier achieves. A shallow
psychology (as the author points out), especially in these days of
trench warfare! The soldier sings to hide his real feelings, perhaps to
give vent to them. I am reminded of all this in connection with my trip
to the British front. I left London after lunch on one of those dreary,
grey days to which I have referred; the rain had begun to splash angrily
against the panes of the car windows before we reached the coast. At
five o'clock the boat pushed off into a black channel, whipped by a gale
that drove the rain across the decks and into every passage and gangway.
The steamer was literally loaded with human beings, officers and men
returning from a brief glimpse of home. There was nothing of the glory
of war in the embarkation, and, to add to the sad and sinister effect of
it, each man as he came aboard mounted the ladder and chose, from a pile
on the hatch combing, a sodden life-preserver, which he flung around his
shoulders as he went in search of a shelter. The saloon below, where
we had our tea, was lighted indeed, but sealed so tight as to be
insupportable; and the cabin above, stifling too, was dark as a pocket.
One stumbled over unseen passengers on the lounges, or sitting on kits
on the floor. Even the steps up which I groped my way to the deck above
were filled, while on the deck there was standing-room only and not much
of that. Mal de mer added to the discomforts of many. At length I found
an uncertain refuge in a gangway amidships, hedged in between unseen
companions; but even here the rain stung our faces and the spray of
an occasional comber drenched our feet, while through the gloom of the
night only a few yards of white water were to be discerned. For three
hours I stood there, trying to imagine what was in the minds of these
men with whose bodies I was in such intimate contact. They were going
to a foreign land to fight, many of them to die, not in one of those
adventurous campaigns of times gone by, but in the wet trenches or the
hideous No Man's Land between. What were the images they summoned up in
the darkness? Visions of long-familiar homes and long-familiar friends?
And just how were they facing the future? Even as I wondered, voices
rose in a song, English voices, soldier voices. It was not “Tipperary,”
the song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch the words:
“I want to go home!
I don't want to go back to the trenches no more,
Where there are bullets and shrapnel galore,
I want to go home!”
It was sung boisterously, in a defiant tone of mockery of the desire it
expressed, and thus tremendously gained in pathos. They did want to go
home--naturally. It was sung with the same spirit our men sing “We won't
come back till it's over, over there!” The difference is that these
Britishers have been over there, have seen the horrors face to face,
have tasted the sweets of home, and in spite of heartsickness and
seasickness are resolved to see it through. Such is the morale of the
British army. I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale
of our own army also, but at present the British are holding the fort.
Tommy would never give up the war, but he has had a realistic taste of
it, and his songs reflect his experience. Other songs reached my ears
each night, above the hissing and pounding of the Channel seas, but
the unseen group returned always to this. One thought of Agincourt and
Crecy, of Waterloo, of the countless journeys across this same stormy
strip of water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, and one
wondered whether war were eternal and inevitable, after all.
And what does Tommy think about it--this war? My own limited
experience thoroughly indorses Mr. Galsworthy's splendid analysis of
British-soldier psychology that appeared in the December North American.
The average man, with native doggedness, is fighting for the defence of
England. The British Government itself, in its reconstruction department
for the political education of the wounded, has given partial denial
to the old maxim that it is the soldier's business not to think but to
obey; and the British army is leavened with men who read and reflect
in the long nights of watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas about
conditions in the past and resolutions concerning those of the future.
The very army itself has had a miracle happen to it: it has been
democratized--and with the cheerful consent of the class to which
formerly the possession of commissions was largely confined. Gradually,
to these soldier-thinkers, as well as to the mass of others at home,
is unfolding the vision of a new social order which is indeed worth
fighting for and dying for.
III
At last, our knees cramped and our feet soaked, we saw the lights of the
French port dancing across the veil of rain, like thistledowns of fire,
and presently we were at rest at a stone quay. As I stood waiting on the
deck to have my passport vised, I tried to reconstruct the features of
this little seaport as I had seen it, many years before, on a bright
summer's day when I had motored from Paris on my way to London. The gay
line of hotels facing the water was hidden in the darkness. Suddenly I
heard my name called, and I was rescued from the group of civilians by
a British officer who introduced himself as my host. It was after nine
o'clock, and he had been on the lookout for me since half past seven.
The effect of his welcome at that time and place was electrical, and
I was further immensely cheered by the news he gave me, as we hurried
along the street, that two friends of mine were here and quite hungry,
having delayed dinner for my arrival. One of them was a young member
of Congress who had been making exhaustive studies of the situation in
Italy, France and England, and the other one of our best-known writers,
both bound for London. We sat around the table until nearly eleven,
exchanging impressions and experiences. Then my officer declared that it
was time to go home.
“Home” proved to be the big chateau which the British Government has
leased for the kindly purpose of entertaining such American guests as
they choose to invite. It is known as the “American Chateau,” and in the
early morning hours we reached it after a long drive through the gale.
We crossed a bridge over a moat and traversed a huge stone hall to
the Gothic drawing-room. Here a fire was crackling on the hearth,
refreshments were laid out, and the major in command rose from his book
to greet me. Hospitality, with these people, has attained to art, and,
though I had come here at the invitation of his government, I had the
feeling of being his personal guest in his own house. Presently he led
the way up the stone stairs and showed me the room I was to occupy.
I awoke to the sound of the wind whistling through the open lattice, and
looking down on the ruffled blue waters of the moat I saw a great white
swan at his morning toilet, his feathers dazzling in the sun. It was one
of those rare crisp and sparkling days that remind one of our American
autumn. A green stretch of lawn made a vista through the woods.
Following the example of the swan, I plunged into the tin tub the
orderly had placed beside my bed and went down to porridge in a glow.
Porridge, for the major was Scotch, and had taught his French cook to
make it as the Scotch make it. Then, going out into the hall, from a
table on which lay a contour map of the battle region, the major picked
up a hideous mask that seemed to have been made for some barbaric
revelries.
“We may not strike any gas,” he said, “but it's as well to be on the
safe side,” whereupon he made me practise inserting the tube in my
mouth, pinching the nostrils instantly with the wire-covered nippers.
He also presented me with a steel helmet. Thus equipped for any untoward
occurrence, putting on sweaters and heavy overcoats, and wrapping
ourselves in the fur rugs of the waiting automobile, we started off,
with the gale on our quarter, for the front.
Picardy, on whose soil has been shed so much English blood, never was
more beautiful than on that October day. The trees were still in full
leaf, the fields green, though the crops had been gathered, and the
crystal air gave vivid value to every colour in the landscape. From time
to time we wound through the cobble-stoned streets of historic villages,
each having its stone church end the bodki-shaped steeple of blue slate
so characteristic of that country. And, as though we were still in
the pastoral times of peace, in the square of one of these villages a
horse-fair was in progress, blue-smocked peasants were trotting
chunky ponies over the stones. It was like a picture from one of De
Maupassant's tales. In other villages the shawled women sat knitting
behind piles of beets and cabbages and apples, their farm-carts atilt in
the sun. Again and again I tried to grasp the fact that the greatest of
world wars was being fought only a few miles away--and failed.
We had met, indeed, an occasional officer or orderly, huddled in a
greatcoat and head against the wind, exercising those wonderful animals
that are the pride of the British cavalry and which General Sir Douglas
Haig, himself a cavalryman, some day hopes to bring into service. We
had overtaken an artillery train rumbling along toward the east, the
men laughing and joking as they rode, as though they were going to
manoeuvres. Farther on, as the soldiers along the highroads and in the
towns grew more and more numerous, they seemed so harmoniously part of
the peaceful scene that war was as difficult to visualize as ever. Many
sat about smoking their pipes and playing with the village children,
others were in squads going to drill or exercise--something the Briton
never neglects. The amazing thing to a visitor who has seen the trenches
awash on a typical wet day, who knows that even billeting in cold farms
and barns behind the lines can scarcely be compared to the comforts of
home, is how these men keep well under the conditions. To say that they
are well is to understate the fact: the ruddy faces and clear eyes and
hard muscles--even of those who once were pale London clerks--proclaim a
triumph for the system of hygiene of their army.
Suddenly we came upon a house with a great round hole in its wall, and
then upon several in ruins beside the village street. Meanwhile, at work
under the windswept trees of the highway, were strange, dark men from
the uttermost parts of the earth, physiognomies as old as the tombs of
Pharaoh. It was, indeed, not so much the graven red profiles of priests
and soldiers that came tome at sight of these Egyptians, but the singing
fellaheen of the water-buckets of the Nile. And here, too, shovelling
the crushed rock, were East Indians oddly clad in European garb,
careless of the cold. That sense of the vastness of the British Empire,
which at times is so profound, was mingled now with a knowledge that it
was fighting for its life, marshalling all its resources for Armageddon.
Saint Eloi is named after the good bishop who ventured to advise King
Dagobert about his costume. And the church stands--what is left of
it--all alone on the greenest of terraces jutting out toward the east;
and the tower, ruggedly picturesque against the sky, resembles that
of some crumbled abbey. As a matter of fact, it has been a target for
German gunners. Dodging an army-truck and rounding one of those military
traffic policemen one meets at every important corner we climbed
the hill and left the motor among the great trees, which are still
fortunately preserved. And we stood for a few minutes, gazing over miles
and miles of devastation. Then, taking the motor once more, we passed
through wrecked and empty villages until we came to the foot of Vimy
Ridge. Notre Dame de Lorette rose against the sky-line to the north.
Vimy and Notre Dame de Lorette--sweet but terrible names! Only a summer
had passed since Vimy was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of
the war. From a distance the prevailing colour of the steep slope is
ochre; it gives the effect of having been scraped bare in preparation
for some gigantic enterprise. A nearer view reveals a flush of green;
nature is already striving to heal. From top to bottom it is pockmarked
by shells and scarred by trenches--trenches every few feet, and between
them tangled masses of barbed wire still clinging to the “knife
rests” and corkscrew stanchions to which it had been strung. The huge
shell-holes, revealing the chalk subsoil, were half-filled with water.
And even though the field had been cleaned by those East Indians I had
seen on the road, and the thousands who had died here buried, bits of
uniform, shoes, and accoutrements and shattered rifles were sticking
in the clay--and once we came across a portion of a bedstead, doubtless
taken by some officer from a ruined and now vanished village to his
dugout. Painfully, pausing frequently to ponder over these remnants, so
eloquent of the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every step
and despite our care getting tangled in the wire, we made our way up
the slope. Buttercups and daisies were blooming around the edges of the
craters.
As we drew near the crest the major warned me not to expose myself. “It
isn't because there is much chance of our being shot,” he explained,
“but a matter of drawing the German fire upon others.” And yet I found it
hard to believe--despite the evidence at my feet--that war existed here.
The brightness of the day, the emptiness of the place, the silence--save
for the humming of the gale--denied it. And then, when we had cautiously
rounded a hummock at the top, my steel helmet was blown off--not by a
shrapnel, but by the wind! I had neglected to tighten the chin-strap.
Immediately below us I could make out scars like earthquake cracks
running across the meadows--the front trenches. Both armies were buried
like moles in these furrows. The country was spread out before us,
like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal mound rising
against the green, or a deserted shaft-head. I was gazing at the famous
battlefield of Lens. Villages, woods, whose names came back to me as the
major repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny plain, and the
faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, was Lens itself. I marked
it by a single white tower. And suddenly another white tower, loftier
than the first, had risen up! But even as I stared its substance seemed
to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no longer to be seen. Not
until then did I realize that a monster shell had burst beside the
trenches in front of the city. Occasionally after that there came to my
ears the muffed report of some hidden gun, and a ball like a powder-puff
lay lightly on the plain, and vanished. But even the presence of these,
oddly enough, did not rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace.
We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a sheltered
cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained
at such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major
described to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had taken
part. I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the
Somme. Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier,
his true passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the rare
greens and silver-greys of the stones above us, steeped in sunlight--all
that remained of the little church of Notre Dame--more beautiful, more
significant, perhaps, as a ruin. It reminded the major of the Turners he
had admired in his youth. After lunch we lingered in the cemetery, where
the graves and vaults had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ran
right through them. And here, in this desecrated resting-place of the
village dead, where the shattered gravestones were mingled with barbed
wire, death-dealing fragments of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that had
failed to explode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written the
name of Hans Siebert. Mouldering at the foot of the cross was a grey
woollen German tunic from which the buttons had been cut.
We kept the road to the top, for Notre Dame de Lorette is as steep as
Vimy. There we looked upon the panorama of the Lens battle-field once
more, and started down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expanse
covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth of deep
ditches, dugouts, and pits; gruesome remnants of the battle lay
half-concealed under the grass. We walked slowly, making desperate
leaps over the trenches, sometimes perforce going through them, treading
gingerly on the “duck board” at the bottom. We stumbled over stick-bombs
and unexploded shells. No plough can be put here--the only solution for
the land for years to come is forest. Just before we gained the road
at the bottom, where the car was awaiting us, we were startled by the
sudden flight of a covey of partridges.
The skies were grey when we reached the banal outskirts of a town where
the bourgeoise houses were modern, commonplace, save those which had
been ennobled by ruin. It was Arras, one of those few magic names,
eloquent with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, intrigue and
chivalry; while upon their significance, since the war began, has been
superimposed still another, no less eloquent but charged with pathos.
We halted for a moment in the open space before the railroad station, a
comparatively new structure of steel and glass, designed on geometrical
curves, with an uninspiring, cheaply ornamented front. It had been,
undoubtedly, the pride of the little city. Yet finding it here had
at first something of the effect of the discovery of an
office-building--let us say--on the site of the Reims Cathedral.
Presently, however, its emptiness, its silence began to have their
effects--these and the rents one began to perceive in the roof. For
it was still the object of the intermittent yet persistent fire of
the German artillery. One began to realize that by these wounds it had
achieved a dignity that transcended the mediocre imagination of its
provincial designer. A fine rain had set in before we found the square,
and here indeed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction; despite the
wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poignantly haunted
it. Although the Hotel de Ville, which had expressed adequately the
longings and aspirations, the civic pride of those bygone burghers, was
razed to the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied yet
harmonious facades of Flemish houses made familiar by photographs. Of
some of these the plaster between the carved beams had been shot away,
the roofs blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters were bared to the sky.
The place was empty in the gathering gloom of the twilight. The gaiety
and warmth of the hut erected in the Public Gardens which houses the
British Officers' Club were a relief.
The experiences of the next day will remain for ever in my memory
etched, as it were, in sepia. My guide was a younger officer who had
seen heroic service, and I wondered constantly how his delicate frame
had survived in the trenches the constant hardship of such weather
as now, warmly wrapped and with the car-curtains drawn, we faced. The
inevitable, relentless rain of that region had set in again, the rain
in which our own soldiers will have to fight, and the skies were of a
darkness seldom known in America. The countryside was no longer smiling.
After some two hours of progress we came, in that devastated district
near the front, to an expanse where many monsters were clumsily
cavorting like dinosaurs in primeval slime. At some distance from the
road others stood apparently tethered in line, awaiting their turn for
exercise. These were the far-famed tanks. Their commander, or chief
mahout--as I was inclined to call him--was a cheerful young giant of
colonial origin, who has often driven them serenely across No Man's Land
and into the German trenches. He had been expecting us, and led me
along a duck board over the morass, to where one of these leviathans
was awaiting us. You crawl through a greasy hole in the bottom, and the
inside is as full of machinery as the turret of the Pennsylvania, and
you grope your way to the seat in front beside that of the captain and
conductor, looking out through a slot in the armour over a waste of
water and mud. From here you are supposed to operate a machine gun.
Behind you two mechanics have started the engines with a deafening roar,
above which are heard the hoarse commands of the captain as he grinds in
his gears. Then you realize that the thing is actually moving, that
the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime--and
presently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggerated
sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant steep banks on
the farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable. It is an old
German trench which the rains have worn and widened. You brace yourself,
you grip desperately a pair of brass handles in front of you, while
leviathan hesitates, seems to sit up on his haunches, and then gently
buries his nose in the pasty clay and paws his way upward into the field
beyond. It was like sitting in a huge rocking-chair. That we might have
had a bump, and a bone-breaking one, I was informed after I had left the
scene of the adventure. It all depends upon the skill of the driver. The
monsters are not as tractable as they seem.
That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is characteristic of the whole
of this district of levelled villages and vanished woods. Imagine a
continuous clay vacant lot in one of our Middle Western cities on the
rainiest day you can recall; and further imagine, on this limitless
lot, a network of narrow-gauge tracks and wagon roads, a scattering of
contractors' shanties, and you will have some idea of the daily life and
surroundings of one of oar American engineer regiments, which is running
a railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to see these men
and talk with them to be convinced of the truth that human happiness and
even human health thanks to modern science--are not dependent upon an
existence in a Garden of Eden. I do not mean exactly that these men
would choose to spend the rest of their existences in this waste, but
they are happy in the consciousness of a job well done. It was really
inspiring to encounter here the familiar conductors and brakemen,
engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily, and for an ideal, left their
homes in a remote and peaceful republic three thousand miles away, to
find contentment and a new vitality, a wider vision, in the difficult
and dangerous task they were performing. They were frequently under
fire--when they brought back the wounded or fetched car-loads of
munitions to the great guns on the ridiculous little trains of flat
cars with open-work wheels, which they named--with American humour--the
Federal Express and the Twentieth Century Limited. And their officers
were equally happy. Their colonel, of our regular Army Engineer Corps,
was one of those broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walk the
streets of Paris, compel pedestrians to turn admiringly and give one a
new pride in the manhood of our nation. Hospitably he drew us out of
the wind and rain into his little hut, and sat us down beside the stove,
cheerfully informing us that, only the night before, the gale had
blown his door in, and his roof had started for the German lines. In a
neighbouring hut, reached by a duck board, we had lunch with him and his
officers baked beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The American
food, the American jokes and voices in that environment seemed strange
indeed! But as we smoked and chatted about the friends we had in common,
about political events at home and the changes that were taking place
there, it seemed as if we were in America once more. The English officer
listened and smiled in sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctant
departure, that America was an extraordinary land.
He directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that wilderness which the
Germans had so wantonly made in their retreat to the Hindenburg line.
Nothing could have been more dismal than our slow progress in the steady
rain, through the deserted streets of this town. Home after home had
been blasted--their intimate yet harrowing interiors were revealed. The
shops and cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls
blown out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished and homeless
proprietors still hung above the doors. I wondered how we should feel in
New England if such an outrage had been done to Boston, for instance,
or little Concord! The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, the
bishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy ruins! It was
dismal, indeed, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed; for
at Bapaume we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. And I
chanced to remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed on
my consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I sat
looking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columns
of my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of
1916, of Thiepval and La Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois
des Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote significance; now I
was to see them, or what was left of them!
As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which had
happened here, the indigo afternoon could not have been better chosen.
Description fails to do justice to the abomination of desolation of
that vast battle-field in the rain, and the imagination, refuses to
reconstruct the scene of peace--the chateaux and happy villages, the
forests and pastures, that flourished here so brief a time ago. In my
fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were
for the moment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolled
here and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-red
soil betrayed the sites of powdered villages; and through it, in every
direction, trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was
torn and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing process, in its
moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. On the hummocks were graves,
graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the
ground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that
had cost priceless hours of skilled labour; and once we were confronted
by one of those monsters, wounded to the death, I had seen that morning.
The sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emotions I had
felt, as a child, when contemplating dead elephants in a battle picture
of the army of a Persian king.
Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we saw lifted out of
that rolling waste the “Butt” of Warlencourt--the burial-mound of this
modern Marathon. It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the Germans who
clung to it found their graves, while the victorious British army swept
around it toward Bapaume. Everywhere along that road, which runs like an
arrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves. Repetition seems
the only method of giving an adequate impression of their numbers; and
near what was once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all,
a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. Seven months the
British sappers had toiled far below in the chalk, digging the passage
and chamber; and one summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it had
burst directly under the German trench. Long we stood on the slippery
edge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire and litter of battle that
strewed the bottom, while the rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, said
my officer-guide, as had drenched this country through the long winter
months of preparation. “We never got dry,” he told me; and added with
a smile, in answer to my query: “Perhaps that was the reason we never
caught colds.”
When we entered Albert, the starting point of the British advance, there
was just light enough to see the statue of the Virgin leaning far above
us over the street. The church-tower on which it had once stood erect
had been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent and not
broken. Local superstition declares that when the Virgin of Albert falls
the war will be ended.
IV
I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has learned more from
this war than any other nation, and will probably gain more by that
knowledge. We are all wanting, of course, to know what we shall get out
of it, since it was forced upon us; and of course the only gain worth
considering--as many of those to whom its coming has brought home the
first glimmerings of social science are beginning to see--is precisely
a newly acquired vision of the art of self-government. It has been
unfortunately necessary--or perhaps fortunately necessary--for the
great democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive
ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed of
entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to
remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life is
appallingly unfortunate. But the necessity for national organization
socializes the nation capable of it; or, to put the matter more truly,
if the socializing process had anticipated the war--as it had in Great
Britain--the ability to complete it under stress is the test of
a democratic nation; and hence the test of democracy, since the
socializing process becomes international. Britain has stood the test,
even from the old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it is
apparent that no democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it is
socialized. After the war she will probably lead all other countries in
a sane and scientific liberalization. The encouraging fact is that not
in spite of her liberalism, but because of it, she has met military
Germany on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone her
one better. In 1914, as armies go today, the British Army was a mere
handful of men whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men
and brave officers, indeed! But at present it is a war organization
of an excellence which the Germans never surpassed. I have no space
to enter into a description of the amazing system, of the network of
arteries converging at the channel ports and spreading out until it
feeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him with
newspapers and tobacco, and gives him the greatest contentment
compatible with the conditions under which he has to live. The number of
shells flung at the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that
fire them. I should like to tell with what swiftness, under the stress
of battle, the wounded are hurried back to the coast and even to England
itself. I may not state the thousands carried on leave every day across
the channel and back again--in spite of submarines. But I went one day
through Saint Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau,
past the rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the
downs, formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an
ordered Babel. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English,
Irish, and Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth
mingle there with Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in
queer fur caps who work in the bakeries.
I went through one of these bakeries, almost as large as an automobile
factory, fragrant with the aroma of two hundred thousand loaves of
bread. This bakery alone sends every day to the trenches two hundred
thousand loaves made from the wheat of western Canada! Of all sights
to be seen in this place, however, the reclamation “plant” is the most
wonderful. It covers acres. Everything which is broken in war, from
a pair of officer's field-glasses to a nine-inch howitzer carriage is
mended here--if it can be mended. Here, when a battle-field is cleared,
every article that can possibly be used again is brought; and the
manager pointed with pride to the furnaces in his power-house, which
formerly burned coal and now are fed with refuse--broken wheels of
gun-carriages, sawdust, and even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls and
even German prisoners are resoling and patching shoes with the aid
of American machinery, and even the uppers of such as are otherwise
hopeless are cut in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoats
are mended by tailors; rusty camp cookers are retinned, and in the
foundries the precious scraps of cast iron are melted into braziers to
keep Tommy in the trenches warm. In the machine-shops the injured guns
and cannon are repaired. German prisoners are working there, too. At a
distance, in their homely grey tunics, with their bullet-shaped heads
close-cropped and the hairs standing out like the needles of a cylinder
of a music-box, they had the appearance of hard citizens who had become
rather sullen convicts. Some wore spectacles. A closer view revealed
that most of them were contented, and some actually cheerful. None,
indeed, seemed more cheerful than a recently captured group I saw later,
who were actually building the barbed-wire fence that was to confine
them.
My last visit in this town was to the tiny but on a “corner lot,” in
which the Duchess of Sutherland has lived now for some years. As we had
tea she told me she was going on a fortnight's leave to England; and no
Tommy in the trenches could have been more excited over the prospect.
Her own hospital, which occupies the rest of the lot, is one of those
marvels which individual initiative and a strong social sense such as
hers has produced in this war. Special enterprise was required to save
such desperate cases as are made a specialty of here, and all that
medical and surgical science can do has been concentrated, with
extraordinary success, on the shattered men who are brought to her
wards. That most of the horrible fractures I saw are healed, and
healed quickly--thanks largely to the drainage system of our own Doctor
Carrel--is not the least of the wonders of the remarkable times in which
we live.
The next day, Sunday, I left for Paris, bidding farewell regretfully
to the last of my British-officer hosts. He seemed like an old, old
friend--though I had known him but a few days. I can see him now as he
waved me a good-bye from the platform in his Glengarry cap and short
tunic and plaid trousers. He is the owner of a castle and some seventy
square miles of land in Scotland alone. For the comfort of his nation's
guests, he toils like a hired courier.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
American religion as set forth by William James
Be useful!
Privilege of making blunders
Rising every time you fall (Confucius on greatness)
Sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and cant
The English do not advertise their sorrows
End of Project Gutenberg's A Traveller in War-Time, by Winston Churchill