THROUGH THE MINE AREA.
In Picardy, November.
A nobleman, with blue eyes and the haughty carriage that tells of
ancient blood, presented us to that diabolical young creature who is
making such a stir in the world to-day, and will make a good deal more
before she is done: Mademoiselle Crème de Menthe. Observe the "de." She
is a noble of the 1916 creation. Nothing less than a Peer and a Staff
Officer might fittingly act as Master of Ceremonies to a young person
of such quality.
We made our bow with a civility which bordered upon that terror which
nightmare alone can inspire. Consider how it would be, some mild,
foggy morning, to come plump upon a Diplodocus. The scene of this
presentation was an old mansion, with courtyard and park, whose gates
were made illustrious by the arms of the La Rochefoucaulds.
This was our first experience as war correspondents with the British
Army.
Our account of to-day's adventures will be no less fantastic.
Programme: A Journey to the Land of Mines.
We have had rain. Moving in opposite directions, the two streams of the
traffic plough up the road. Commissariat lorries, motor ambulances,
artillery ammunition wagons, despatch riders, the motor-cars of the
Staff, and then, in the middle of this mad torrent of traffic, some
country gig, creeping along at a jog-trot. The roads are a river of
mud. We wallow in it frantically; we drown in unsuspected lakes. We
suffer the modern equivalent of the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah.
At once we find ourselves being changed into clumsy statues of clay.
It is not more cars that are needed to get forward, but those Venetian
boats that glide along the canals before the strokes of a curved oar.
One does get on, however. And here we are at Albert already.
Ah! these little towns of Picardy! The German shells have no
surprises left for them. Their houses gutted from roof to cellar,
their churches that the guns have chiselled to new shapes, their farms
that have neither roof nor wall, and seem, with their bare beams, like
huge empty cages--these sorrows no longer count. Yesterday Albert was
once again bombarded. What of it? The fronts of a few more houses have
crumbled into dust. The great golden Virgin, who, 100 feet in the air,
leans with crossed arms from her belfry over the ruined town, has
fallen forwards at a rather dizzier angle!
[Illustration: 12. A MINE CRATER.]
As in London or Paris, the police direct the traffic at the cross-ways
and the corners of the lanes. The streets have been re-christened of
late. One reads: "Oxford Street," "Cannon Street." We are here in the
heart of the war zone. And in this strange country our little old
French towns rub their eyes in wonder to find themselves, heretofore
so insignificant, now in the very moment of their utter destruction,
wakened to share the dignity of _capitals_.
Still more miles of mud. We leave the road and, with the heavy gait of
sewer-men, move through the fields.
Far ahead, on the winding ridges, we see great white marks, like the
letter "Y." They are the German trenches, dug in the solid chalk at
the beginning of the offensive. It is as if someone had made chalk
drawings on those slopes to amuse the aeroplanes. In front, following
their lines, are walls of sand-bags, so high and so deep that they
appear to be a citadel: the English trenches. It is a stiff climb.
We hop from puddle to puddle like sparrows. Everywhere the earth is
in heaps. Holes filled with water--shell-holes, you understand--have
turned the whole place into a chessboard of sunken squares. Here, there
and everywhere, sole lords of this "No Man's Land," stand the shells of
the two-hundred-and-tens or the two-hundred-and-forties, like terminal
gods, red painted. But the real surprise still awaits us.
Here may I ask you to recall to your most particular remembrance the
landscapes of the Moon as Wells and Jules Verne have pictured them for
us. Or if chance has offered you the privilege of leaning over the
lip of Etna or Vesuvius, summon now your best recollections of the
experience. We are on the threshold of a chaos for whose description
the tongue of man is poorly equipped.
A plateau, according to the geographers, is a dome, flattened or
rounded, in the direction of Heaven; these plateaux, as war constructs
them, are gulfs that lead down towards hell. Over hundreds of yards
between the opposing trenches surges a sea of vast funnels. One stands
amazed before them as before those abysses which open at one's feet
among the Alps. Here the destructive genius of man has nothing to learn
from the dreadful wrath of Nature.
It is raining. Bogs, where the grass is already sprouting between the
yellow pools, lie in the low places, like those cold lakes that fill
the tall craters of Auvergne. Here yawns an opening, propped with
beams, and three-quarters covered with the continually sliding earth. A
sap. There again stands a notice, posted too late: "Poison!--Danger!"
Wreckage of every kind--rusty tins, heaps of cases bursting with rotten
bags of powder and saltpetre, litter these strange craters. And what an
amazing efflorescence of old iron, grenades and bits of shell!
In this Land of Mines we find a symbol of the savage splendour of
this war. All these carefully prepared horrors, all these apocalyptic
monstrosities, for the conquest of an acre or two! One can understand
why King George came here, as a wooden tablet records, to the edge of
this fabulous, petrified tide race, to salute the victorious courage of
the Empire's soldiers.
Beast-like around us roar the guns. Lightnings flicker through the
haze. A line of skeleton trees jags the horizon--Delville Wood. To the
West vague clouds of smoke from camp fires, vague heaps of bricks. This
is all that we can call Mametz and Montauban. A sausage balloon rises
jerkily--over there, towards Maricourt. One cannot speak these names
with a steady voice. They are the foretaste of Freedom. And it is here,
in the Land of Mines, that the foundations of Victory have been laid.