“What in Heaven’s name are you doing in there?” I asked.
“We’re telephones.... Got any matches?”
“I heard sheep,” I informed him.
“And what if you did? Got them matches?”
I tossed him a box. He dived into darkness, and I heard him rejoicing
with his pals because he’d found some one who’d got a light. It meant
almost as much to them as being relieved.
So here was a British unit hidden where the worst Hun shell could never
find it, and, what was more, here was the food ready to kill when,
during some awkward days, the _Boche_ shells cut off supplies.
Then look on this picture of a war-desolated country where nature has
been stupidly scarred by Teuton ruthlessness, and rubble-heaps are
marked by boards bearing the name of the village that had stood there:
The desert was never more lonely than those vast tracts of land the
armies have surged over, and this loneliness and silence are more acute
because of the suggestions of life that have once been there. It is
impressive, awe-inspiring, this silence, like that which follows storm.
Clear away to the horizon no hedge or tree appears, all landmarks
have gone, hills have been planed level by the sheer blast of shells.
Here is a rubble-heap no higher than one’s shoulders where a church
has stood, and the graves have opened beneath pits of fire to make
new graves for the living. Patches of red powder, washed by many
rains, with a few broken bricks among them, mark the places where
houses, big and small, once rested. To these rubble-heaps, which
were once villages, the inhabitants will come back one day, and they
will scarcely know the north from the south. Indeed, if it were
not for the fact that each rubble-heap bears a board whereon the
name of the village is written, in order to preserve the site, they
would never find their way there at all, for the earth they knew has
become a strange country. Woods are mere patches of brown stumps
knee-high—stumps which, with nature’s life restricted, are trying to
break into leaf again at odd spots on the trunks where leaves never
grew before. Mametz Wood and Trone Wood appear from a short distance as
mere scrabblings in the earth.
The ground which but a few months ago was blasted paste and
pulverization has now under the suns of summer thrown up weed
growth that is creeping over the earth as if to hide its hurt. Wild
convolvulus trails cautiously across the remnants of riven trenches,
and levers itself up the corners of sand bags. In this tangle the shell
holes are so close that they merge into each other.
The loneliness of those Somme fields! No deserts of the world can show
such unspeakable solitude.
One comes from the Somme to the freed villages as one might emerge
from the desert to the first outposts of human life at a township on
the desert’s rim. Still there are no trees on the sky-line; they have
all been cut down carefully and laid at a certain angle beside the
stumps just as a platoon of soldiers might ground their arms. For the
German frightfulness is a methodical affair, not aroused by the heat of
battle, but coolly calculated and senseless. Of military importance it
has none.
In these towns evacuated by the Germans life is slowly beginning to
stir again and to pick up the threads of 1914. People who have lived
there all through the deluge seem but partially aware as yet that they
are free. And some others are returning hesitatingly.
Mr. Flower notes with interest the temperamental change that has been
wrought by the war in the man from twenty to thirty-five years old. To
the older ones it all is only a “beastly uncomfortable nuisance,” and
when it is over they will go back to their usual avocations. Here is
the general view of the middle-aged men in the battle line:
“What are you going to do after the war?” I asked one.