THE MENACE OF THE GOLDEN VIRGIN.
I have now to tell of the reconquered ground, and I own that the
description, which I cannot claim to have invented, more nearly than
any other suggests the reality. Indeed, there are not in the French
language, nor can there be in any other, for the imagination cannot
conceive such things, any words that can give a just idea of so much
wretchedness and desolation.
So I have thought a score of times, while, during these last days, I
have been making my way over the plateau which lies between the Ancre
and the Somme, a quite narrow section of the battle front. What would
be my difficulty had I to describe the land that the French have
retaken!
We had set out on our pilgrimage from Albert.
"Albert! That's an old story--ancient history. Tell us about something
else," say those who look for new sensations.
Not so. We may not yet forget Albert, that ruined outpost of Picardy,
for her sufferings are not ended. Within the last few days the Boches
bombarded her from an immense distance. They only succeeded in knocking
over ruins, since all is ruin at Albert, but "if one can't get thrushes
one eats blackbirds," eh, friend Fritz?
"Well, Mother So-and-So," said an old fellow to an old dame the other
morning in a street in Amiens, "when do you think the folks will get
back into Albert?"
"Indeed, Father Such-and-Such, you know that as well as I do. When the
Golden Virgin falls."
For a superstition runs in this country that the war will be
near its end when the Golden Virgin, who hangs suspended--by what
miracle?--between Heaven and Earth, from the top of the belfry of
Albert, shall fall to break in pieces upon the ground. But the trouble
is that the Virgin "holds on."
From Albert to Fricourt, going via Bécordel-Bécourt, the road is hardly
1-1/2 miles long. By this way one skirts in an almost straight line the
South-western slopes of the plateau. A few steps beyond the German line
that was taken on the 1st July, and we are in Fricourt.
You will look a long time in the guide-books that were held in esteem
before the war ere you will find the smallest mention of Fricourt.
Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, Contalmaison and a dozen other villages
that now can never be forgotten, did not exist for the tourist. He got
on most happily without them.
Well, to-day all these villages can be found on their own soil no more
than in those guide-books. That, Fricourt! This grey blotch in front of
the wood of the same name! That, the Public Square, that rectangle of
tree-trunks!
That? Yes, that is very surely Fricourt. All the villages are like that.
Let us get on and you shall see for yourself. A short climb, but a
stiff one, and we are in Mametz.
You look about you and you see nothing at all. Believe me, I am not
joking. The number of mounds and wooden crosses of every size that
border the edges of the road tell us plainly enough at what a cost to
both sides these ruined hamlets were captured.
Another fight with the mud and we are in Montauban de Picardie.
Montauban looks over all this plateau that lies between the Ancre and
the Somme. In clear weather one can see everywhere around, and towards
the North-west the houses of Bapaume are visible. To-day the clouds are
too low and the rain too heavy for us to try to see anything at all.
One can, moreover, look at nothing but the earth, for it is here that
the story of recent events is most clearly to be read.
[Illustration: 13. THE MADONNA OF ALBERT.]
The first thing that one finds on entering Montauban is the little
cemetery on the left. To enter the village it was necessary first to
cross this cemetery; and to cross it, they had to "make jam" of it.
Will you be so good as to consider what a cemetery is like when it has
been made into jam? Grave-stones torn up and smashed, crosses thrown
down, Christs crucified again, iron railings twisted grotesquely,
vaults burst open, corpses.... Out of such a chaos, who shall ever
retrieve the dear graves of his dead?
And see these gaping holes where once were houses, these cellars laid
bare, the bellows of the blacksmith, bits of the trough where baker
Moulin kneaded his bread, splintered pieces of the chemist's bottles,
the whole stock of the draper's at the corner--ribbons, thread and
remnants--a fragment from the porch of the town hall, and on it the
word "_Égalité_."
Equality in suffering, one would say.
But perhaps we may find some sign of peace beyond the village in the
little wood of Bernafay, which in other days offered a calm retreat to
the weary and a shelter to lovers.
No! The wood of Bernafay is a wood no longer, and so it is with all the
pretty woods of this neighbourhood, Trônes, Belville and Foureaux. How
is one to describe this ghastly picture of roots, clayey soil freshly
ploughed up, shattered trunks of every size, and dismal stumps, among
which, none the less, the birds persist in their vain search for food
and cover?
These trees will bud again; Nature will clothe herself once more in
green; even the earth that lies about us will yield new fruits. But the
villages? What magical power shall call them back to life, unless it be
the marvellous vitality of France--France, who refuses to die?