“Do?” he echoed. “I’m going to do what any sane man of my age would do.
I’m going straight back to it—back to work. This is just marking time
in one’s life, like having to go to a wedding on one’s busiest mail
day. I’m not going to exploit the war as a means of getting a living,
or emigrate, or do any fool thing like that. I’m going straight back
to my office, I am. I know exactly where I turned down the page of my
sales book when I came out—it was page seventy-nine—and I’m going to
start again on page eighty.”
With the younger men it is different. It has struck a new spark in them
and fired a spirit of adventure. There are those who even enjoy the
war, and to whom one day, when peace comes, life will seem very tame.
The writer cites this case:
He is quite a young man, and what this adventurous fellow was before he
took his commission and went to the war I do not pretend to know. But
he displayed most conspicuous bravery and usefulness from the hour he
fetched up at the British front.
One day he was very badly wounded in the back, and as soon as he neared
convalescence he became restive and wished to return to his men, and
he did return before he should have done. The doctor knew he would
finish a deal quicker when he got back to the lines than he would in a
hospital.
There are some rare creatures who are built that way. Shortly afterward
he was wounded again, and while walking to the dressing station was
wounded a third time, on this occasion very badly.
He stuck it at the hospital as long as he could—then one day he
disappeared. No one saw him go. He had got out, borrowed a horse, and
ridden back to his lines.
The absence of the fighting men from the view of an observer of a
modern battle strongly impressed the writer, who says:
Most men who come upon a modern battle for the first time would confess
to finding it not what they expected. For the old accepted idea of
battle is hard to eliminate. One has become accustomed to looking for
great arrays of fighters ready for the bout, with squadrons of cavalry
waiting somewhere beyond a screen of trees, and guns—artfully hidden
guns—bellying smoke from all points of the compass. The battle pictures
in our galleries, the lead soldiers we played with as children and
engaged in visible conflict, have kept up the illusion.
You know before you come to it that it is not so in this war, but this
battle of hidden men pulls you up with a jolt as not being quite what
you expected to see. You feel almost as if you had been robbed of
something.
The first battle I saw on the western front I watched for two and a
half hours, and during that time (with the exception of five men who
debouched from a distant wood like five ants scuttling out of a nest of
moss, to be promptly shot down) I did not see a man at all. The battle
might have been going on in an enormous house and I standing on the
roof trying to see it.
But if there is little or nothing to be seen of the human agents that
direct the devastating machines of war during a battle, the scene of
the field after the fight has been waged discloses all the horror
that has not been visible to the eye of an observer. Mr. Flower thus
describes one section of the theater of war in France:
Our car rushes down a long descending road, and is driven at breakneck
speed by one of those drivers with which the front is strewn, who are
so accustomed to danger that to dance on the edge of it all the time is
the breath of life. To slow down to a rational thirty miles an hour is
to them positive pain; to leap shell holes at fifty or plow across a
newly made road of broken brick at the same velocity is their ecstasy.
And one of the greatest miracles of the war is the cars that stand it
without giving up the unequal contest by flying into half a hundred
fragments.
But this road is tolerable even for a war road, and it runs parallel
with a long down which has been scrabbled out here and there into
patches of white by the hands of men. It is Notre Dame de Lorette, no
higher than an average Sussex down, mark you, and lower than most.
Yet I was told that on this patch of down over a hundred thousand men
have died since the war began. Running at right angles at its foot is
a lower hill, no higher than the foothill to a Derbyshire height, but
known to the world now as Vimy Ridge. And this road leads you into a
small section of France, a section of four square miles or so, every
yard of which is literally soaked with the blood of men.
On the right is Souchez, and the wood of Souchez all bare stumps and
brokenness; here the sugar refinery, which changed hands eight times,
and is now no more than a couple of shot-riddled boilers, tilted at odd
angles with some steel girders twirled like sprung wire rearing over
them; and around this conglomeration a pile of brick powder. You wonder
what there was here worth dying for, since a rat would fight shy of the
place for want of a square inch of shelter. And where is Souchez River?
you ask, for Souchez River is now as famous as the Amazon. Here it is,
a sluggish sort of brook, crawling in and out of broken tree-trunks
that have been blasted down athwart it, running past banks a foot
high or so, a river you could almost step across, and which would be
well-nigh too small to name in Devonshire.
We leave our cars under a bank and come on down through the dead jetsam
of the village of Ablain St. Nazaire. The old church is still here
on the left, the only remnant of a respectable rate-paying hamlet.
The remaining portion of its square tower is clear and white, for the
stonework has been literally skinned by flying fragments of steel, till
it is about as clean as when it was built.
We reach the foot of Vimy Ridge and climb up. Here, some one told me,
corn once grew, but now it is sodden chalk, pasted and mixed as if by
some giant mixing machine with the shattered weapons of war.
Broken trenches—the German front line—in places remain and extend a few
yards, only to disappear into the rubble where the tide swept over them.
As we climb, the earth beneath my foot suddenly gives way, letting
me down with a jerk to the hip, and opening up a hole through which
I peer and see a dead _Boche_ coiled up, his face—or so I suspect it
was—resting upon his arm to protect it from some oncoming horror.
We climb on up. We drop into pits and grope out of them again, pasted
with the whiteness of chalk. From somewhere behind us a howitzer is
throwing shells over our heads, shells that come on and pass with the
rush of a train pitching itself recklessly out of control. We listen to
the clamor as it goes on—a couple of miles or so—separating itself from
the ill assortment of snarling and smashing and breaking and grunting
that rises from the battlefield.
As they climbed the ridge the guns seemed to be muffled until they got
beyond the shelter of Notre Dame de Lorette. Then, says the writer:
We suddenly appeared to tumble into a welter of sound. And the higher
we climbed Vimy, the louder the tumult became. “Aunty,” throwing over
heavy stuff, had but a few moments before been the only near thing in
the battle. Now the contrast was such as if we had been suddenly pushed
into the middle of the battle. The air was full of strange, harsh
noises and crackings and cries. And the earth before us was alive with
subdued flame flashes and growing bushes of smoke.
Five miles away, Lens, its church spires adrift in eddies of smoke,
appeared very unconscious of it all. Just showing on the horizon was
Douai, and I wondered what forests of death lay waiting between those
Lens churches and the Douai outlines where the ground was sunken and
mysterious under the haze.
Here, then, was the panorama of battle. Never a man in sight, but
the entire earth goaded by some vast invisible force. Clots of smoke
of varying colors arrived from nowhere, died away, or were smudged
out by other clots. A big black pall hung over Givenchy like the
sounding-board over a cathedral pulpit. A little farther on the village
of Angres seemed palisaded with points of flame. Away to the right the
long, straight road from Lens to Arras showed clear and strong without
a speck of life upon it.
No life anywhere, no human thing moving. And yet one believed that
under a thin crust of earth the whole forces of Europe were struggling
and throwing up sound.
Among all the combatants there is a desire for peace, says Mr. Flower,
who found a striking example of the sentiment of the _Boche_ in what
had been the crypt of the Bapaume cathedral. He writes:
I saw scores of skulls of those who were dead many decades before the
war rolled over Europe, and on the skull of one I saw scribbled in
indelible pencil:
“_Dass der Friede kommen mag_”
(“Hurry up, Peace.”)—_Otto Trübner._
Now, Otto Trübner may be a very average representative of his type. And
maybe Otto Trübner’s head now bears a passing likeness to the skull he
scribbled on in vandal fashion before he evacuated Bapaume. But whether
or no, he is, metaphorically speaking, a straw which shows the play of
the wind.