THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS
AMIENS, October, 1915.
In England it is "business as usual"; in France it is "war as usual."
The English tradesman can assure his customers that with such an
"old-established" firm as his not even war can interfere; but France,
with war actually on her soil, has gone further and has accepted war as
part of her daily life. She has not merely swallowed, but digested it.
It is like the line in Pinero's play, where one woman says she cannot go
to the opera because of her neuralgia. Her friend replies: "You can have
neuralgia in my box as well as anywhere else." In that spirit France has
accepted the war. The neuralgia may hurt, but she does not take to her
bed and groan. Instead, she smiles cheerfully and goes about her
duties--even sits in her box at the opera.
As we approached the front this was even more evident than in Paris,
where signs of war are all but invisible. Outside of Amiens we met a
regiment of Scots with the pipes playing and the cold rain splashing
their bare legs. To watch them we leaned from the car window. That
we should be interested seemed to surprise them; no one else was
interested. A year ago when they passed it was "Roses, roses, all the
way"--or at least cigarettes, chocolate, and red wine. Now, in spite of
the skirling bagpipes, no one turned his head; to the French they had
become a part of the landscape.
A year ago the roads at every two hundred yards were barricaded. It was
a continual hurdle-race. Now, except at distances of four or five miles,
the barricades have disappeared. One side of the road is reserved for
troops, the other for vehicles. The vehicles we met--for the most part
two-wheeled hooded carts--no longer contained peasants flying from
dismantled villages. Instead, they were on the way to market with
garden-truck, pigs, and calves. On the drivers' seat the peasant
whistled cheerily and cracked his whip. The long lines of London buses,
that last year advertised soap, mustard, milk, and music-halls, and
which now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; the great guns drawn by
motor-trucks with caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him.
The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, and in the towns and
villages of Artois is a "paying guest." It is for him the shop-windows
are dressed. The names of the towns are Flemish; the names of the
streets are Flemish; the names over the shops are Flemish; but the goods
for sale are marmalade, tinned kippers, _The Daily Mail_, and the _Pink
'Un_.
"Is it your people who are selling these things?" I asked an English
officer.
The question amused him.
"Our people won't think of it until the war is over," he said, "but the
French are different.
"They are capable, adaptable, and obliging. If one of our men asks these
shopkeepers for anything they haven't got they don't say, 'We don't keep
it'; they get him to write down what it is he wants, and send for it."
It is the better way. The Frenchman does not say, "War is ruining me";
he makes the war help to support him, and at the same time gives comfort
to his ally.
A year ago in the villages the old men stood in disconsolate groups
with their hands in their pockets. Now they are briskly at work. They
are working in the fields, in the vegetable-gardens, helping the
Territorials mend the roads. On every side of them were the evidences
of war--in the fields abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entanglements,
shelters for fodder and ammunition, hangars for repairing aeroplanes,
vast slaughter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the roads endless
lines of lorries, hooded ambulances, marching soldiers.
To us those were of vivid interest, but to the French peasant they are
in the routine of his existence. After a year of it war neither greatly
distresses nor greatly interests him. With one hand he fights; with the
other he ploughs.
We had made a bet as to which would see the first sign of real war, and
the sign of it that won and that gave general satisfaction, even to the
man who lost, was a group of German soldiers sweeping the streets of St.
Pol. They were guarded only by one of their own number, and they looked
fat, sleek, and contented. When, on our return from the trenches, we saw
them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing
waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it,
blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a
sinecure.
The next sign of war was more thrilling. It was a race between a French
aeroplane and German shrapnel. To us the bursting shells looked like
five little cotton balls. Since this war began shrapnel, when it bursts,
has invariably been compared to balls of cotton, and as that is exactly
what it looks like, it is again so described. The balls of cotton did
not seem to rise from the earth, but to pop suddenly out of the sky.
A moment later five more cotton balls popped out of the sky. They were
much nearer the aeroplane. Others followed, leaping after it like the
spray of succeeding waves. But the aeroplane steadily and swiftly
conveyed itself out of range and out of sight.
To say where the trenches began and where they ended is difficult. We
were passing through land that had been retrieved from the enemy. It has
been fought for inch by inch, foot by foot. To win it back thousands of
lives had been thrown like dice upon a table. There were vast stretches
of mud, of fields once cultivated, but now scarred with pits, trenches,
rusty barbed-wires. The roads were rivers of clay. They were lined with
dugouts, cellars, and caves. These burrows in the earth were supported
by beams, and suggested a shaft in a disused mine. They looked like the
tunnels to coal-pits. They were inhabited by a race of French unknown to
the boulevards--men, bearded, deeply tanned, and caked with clay. Their
uniforms were like those of football players on a rainy day at the end
of the first half. We were entering what had been the village of Ablain,
and before us rose the famous heights of Mont de Lorette. To scale these
heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling our Palisades or the
sheer cliff of Gibraltar. But they had been scaled, and the side
toward us was crawling with French soldiers, climbing to the trenches,
descending from the trenches, carrying to the trenches food, ammunition,
and fuel for the fires.
A cold rain was falling and had turned the streets of Ablain and all
the roads to it into swamps. In these were islands of bricks and lakes
of water of the solidity and color of melted chocolate. Whatever you
touched clung to you. It was a land of mud, clay, liquid earth. A cold
wind whipped the rain against your face and chilled you to the bone. All
you saw depressed and chilled your spirit.
To the "poilus," who, in the face of such desolation, joked and laughed
with the civilians, you felt you owed an apology, for your automobile
was waiting to whisk you back to a warm dinner, electric lights, red
wine, and a dry bed. The men we met were cavemen. When night came they
would sleep in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a muskrat.
They moved in streets of clay two feet across. They were as far removed
from civilization, as in the past they have known it, as though they had
been cast adrift upon an island of liquid mud. Wherever they looked was
desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jumbles of bricks, tunnels in mud,
caves in mud, graves in mud.
In other wars the "front" was something almost human. It advanced,
wavered, and withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was electrified. It
remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with
galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley. In comparison,
this trench work did not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of a
mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the
cavemen paid to them, the reports of their "seventy-fives" and the "Jack
Johnsons" of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come from
miners blasting rock.
What we saw of these cave-dwellers was only a few feet of a moat that
for three hundred miles like a miniature canal is cut across France.
Where we stood we could see of the three hundred miles only mud walls,
so close that we brushed one with each elbow. By looking up we could
see the black, leaden sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an arrow
pointed to a first-aid dressing-station. Behind us was the winding
entrance to a shelter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement and
corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.
From a trench that was all we could see of the war, and that is all
millions of fighting men see of it--wet walls of clay as narrow as a
grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, earthen steps leading to a
shelter from sudden death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky and perhaps
a great bird at which the enemy is shooting snowballs.
In northern France there are many buried towns and villages. They are
buried in their own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She is the
corpse of a city that waits for burial, and day by day the German shells
are trying to dig her grave. They were at it yesterday when we visited
Arras, and this morning they will be hammering her again.
Seven centuries before this war Arras was famous for her tapestries, so
famous that in England a piece of tapestry was called an arras. Now she
has given her name to a battle--to different battles--that began with
the great bombardment of October a year ago, and each day since then
have continued. On one single day, June 26, the Germans threw into the
city shells in all sizes, from three to sixteen inches, and to the
number of ten thousand. That was about one for each house.
This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants into exile, of whom 1,200 have
now returned. The army feeds them, and in response they have opened
shops that the shells have not already opened, and supply the soldiers
with tobacco, post-cards, and from those gardens not hidden under bricks
and cement, fruit and vegetables. In the deserted city these civilians
form an inconspicuous element. You can walk for great distances and see
none of them. When they do appear in the empty streets they are like
ghosts. Every day the shells change one or two of them into real ghosts.
But the others still stay on. With the dogs nosing among the fallen
bricks, and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathedral, they know no
other home.
As we entered Arras the silence fell like a sudden change of
temperature. It was actual and menacing. Every corner seemed to threaten
an ambush. Our voices echoed so loudly that unconsciously we spoke in
lower tones. The tap of the captain's walking-stick resounded like the
blow of a hammer. The emptiness and stillness was like that of a vast
cemetery, and the grass that had grown through the paving-stones
deadened the sound of our steps. This silence was broken only by the
barking of the French seventy-fives, in parts of the city hidden to
us, the boom of the German guns in answer, and from overhead by the
aeroplanes. In the absolute stillness the whirl of their engines came
to us with the steady vibrations of a loom.
In the streets were shell holes that had been recently filled and
covered over with bricks and fresh earth. It was like walking upon newly
made graves. On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the
houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls
prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite
intact. These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and
snow. Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the
front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles,
books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, and a reading-lamp.
In one house four stories had been torn away, leaving only the attic
sheltered by the peaked roof. To that height no one could climb, and
exposed to view were the collection of trunks and boxes familiar to all
attics. As a warning against rough handling, one of these, a woman's
hat-box, had been marked "Fragile." Secure and serene, it smiled down
sixty feet upon the mass of iron and bricks it had survived.
Of another house the roof only remained; from under it the rest of the
building had been shot away. It was as though after a soldier had been
blown to pieces, his helmet still hung suspended in mid-air.
In other streets it was the front that was intact, but when our captain
opened the street door we faced a cellar. Nothing beside remained. Or
else we stepped upon creaky floors that sagged, through rooms swept by
the iron brooms into vast dust heaps. From these protruded wounded
furniture--the leg of a table, the broken arm of a chair, a headless
statue.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._
"Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of
the building had been shot away."]
From the debris we picked the many little heirlooms, souvenirs,
possessions that make a home. Photographs with written inscriptions,
post-cards bearing good wishes, ornaments for the centre-table,
ornaments for the person, images of the church, all crushed, broken,
and stained. Many shop-windows were still dressed invitingly as they
were when the shell burst, but beyond the goods exposed for sale was
only a deep hole.
The pure deviltry of a shell no one can explain. Nor why it spares a
looking-glass and wrecks a wall that has been standing since the twelfth
century.
In the cathedral the stone roof weighing hundreds of tons had fallen,
and directly beneath where it had been hung an enormous glass chandelier
untouched. A shell loves a shining mark. To what is most beautiful it
is most cruel. The Hotel de Ville, which was counted among the most
presentable in the north of France, that once rose in seven arches in
the style of the Renaissance, the shells marked for their own.
And all the houses approaching it from the German side they destroyed.
Not even those who once lived in them could say where they stood. There
is left only a mess of bricks, tiles, and plaster. They suggest the
homes of human beings as little as does a brickyard.
We visited what had been the headquarters of General de Wignacourt.
They were in the garden of a house that opened upon one of the principal
thoroughfares, and the floor level was twelve feet under the level of
the flower-beds. To this subterranean office there are two entrances,
one through the cellar of the house, the other down steps from the
garden. The steps were beams the size of a railroad-tie. Had they not
been whitewashed they would look like the shaft leading to a coal-pit.
A soldier who was an artist in plaster had decorated the entrance to the
shaft with an ornamental facade worthy of any public building. Here,
secure from the falling walls and explosive shells, the general by
telephone directed his attack. The place was as dry, as clean, and as
compact as the admiral's quarters on a ship of war. The switchboard
connected with batteries buried from sight in every part of the unburied
city, and in an adjoining room a soldier cook was preparing a most
appetizing luncheon.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._
The stone roof over this glass chandelier in the Arras cathedral was
destroyed by shells, and the chandelier not touched.]
Above us was three yards of cement, rafters, and earth, and crowning
them grass and flowers. When the owner of the house returns he will find
this addition to his residence an excellent refuge from burglars or
creditors.
Personally we were glad to escape into the open street. Between being
hit by a shell and buried under twelve feet of cement the choice was
difficult.
We lunched in a charming house, where the table was spread in the front
hall. The bed of the officer temporarily occupying the house also was
spread in the hall, and we were curious to know, but too proud to ask,
why he limited himself to such narrow quarters. Our captain rewarded our
reticence. He threw back the heavy curtain that concealed the rest of
the house, and showed us that there was no house. It had been deftly
removed by a shell.
The owner of the house had run away, but before he fled, fearing the
Germans might enter Arras and take his money, he had withdrawn it and
hidden it in his garden. The money amounted to two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. He placed it in a lead box, soldered up the opening,
and buried the box under a tree. Then he went away and carelessly forgot
_which_ tree.
During a lull in the bombardment, he returned, and until two o'clock in
the morning dug frantically for his buried treasure. The soldier who
guarded the house told me the difference in the way the soldiers dig a
trench and the way our absent host dug for his lost money was greatly
marked. I found the leaden box cast aside in the dog-kennel. It was the
exact size of a suitcase. As none of us knows when he may not have to
bury a quarter of a million dollars hurriedly, it is a fact worth
remembering. Any ordinary suitcase will do. The soldier and I examined
the leaden box carefully. But the owner had not overlooked anything.
When we reached the ruins of the cathedral, we did not need darkness
and falling rain to depress us further, or to make the scene more
desolate. One lacking in all reverence would have been shocked. The
wanton waste, the senseless brutality in such destruction would have
moved a statue. Walls as thick as the ramparts of a fort had been blown
into powdered chalk. There were great breaches in them through which you
could drive an omnibus. In one place the stone roof and supporting
arches had fallen, and upon the floor, where for two hundred years the
people of Arras had knelt in prayer, was a mighty barricade of stone
blocks, twisted candelabra, broken praying-chairs, torn vestments,
shattered glass. Exposed to the elements, the chapels were open to the
sky. The rain fell on sacred emblems of the Holy Family, the saints, and
apostles. Upon the altars the dust of the crushed walls lay inches deep.
The destruction is too great for present repair. They can fill the
excavations in the streets and board up the shattered show-windows, but
the cathedral is too vast, the destruction of it too nearly complete.
The sacrilege must stand. Until the war is over, until Arras is free
from shells, the ruins must remain uncared for and uncovered. And the
cathedral, by those who once came to it for help and guidance, will be
deserted.
But not entirely deserted. The pigeons that built their nests under the
eaves have descended to the empty chapels, and in swift, graceful
circles sweep under the ruined arches. Above the dripping of the rain,
and the surly booming of the cannon, their contented cooing was the only
sound of comfort. It seemed to hold out a promise for the better days of
peace.