All night we had slept on straw in a high barn. The wood of its beams
was very old, and the tiles upon the roof were green with age; but
there hung from beam to beam, fantastically, a wire caught by nails,
and here and there from this wire hung an electric-light bulb. It was a
symbol of the time, and the place, and the people. There was no local
by-law to forbid such a thing, or if there was, no one dreamt of
obeying it.
Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion
and I, at guesswork to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which
is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely
ravines of Picardy which travellers never know (for they only see the
plains), and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the
steep bank from the valley on to the bare plateau above, but it was all
at random and all guesswork, only we wisely thought that we were
nearing the beginning of things, and that on the bare fields of the
high flat we should have a greater horizon and a better chance of
catching any indications of men or arms.
When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet
gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all
about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly
blue.
It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that
vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel
ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see
up to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups
of trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay
concealed a _corps d’armée_—and not to see or hear a soul. The only
human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very slowly
up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot dead
across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As we
went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men indeed,
and many houses, all in movement with the early morning; and the
chalked numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of
polishing-paste or an order scrawled on paper and tacked to a wall
betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army there was nothing at
all. Scouting on foot (for that was what it was) is a desperate
business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell you whether
you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles.
It was nine o’clock before a clatter of horse-hoofs came up the road
behind us. At first my companion and I wondered whether it were the
first riders of the Dragoons or Cuirassiers. In that case the advance
was from behind us. But very soon, as the sound grew clearer, we heard
how few they were, and then there came into view, trotting rapidly, a
small escort and two officers with the umpires’ badges, so there was
nothing doing; but when, half a mile ahead of us on the road, they
turned off to the left over plough, we knew that that was the way we
must follow too. Before we came to the turning-place, before we left
the road to take the fields on the left, there came from far off and on
our right the sound of a gun.
It was my companion who heard it first. We strained to hear it again;
twice we thought we had caught it, and then again twice we doubted. It
is not so easily recognizable a sound as you might think in those great
plains cut by islands of high trees and steading walls. The little “75”
gun lying low makes a different sound altogether at a distance from the
old piece of “90.” At any rate there was here no doubt that there were
guns to the right and in front of us, and the umpire had gone to the
left. We were getting towards the thick, and we had only to go straight
on to find out where the front was.
Just as we had so decided and were still pursuing the high road, there
came, not half a mile away and again to our right, in a valley below
us, that curious sound which is like nothing at all unless it be
dumping of flints out of a cart: rifle fire. It cracked and tore in
stretches. Then there were little gaps of silence like the gaps in
signalling, and then it cracked and tore in stretches again; and then,
fitfully, one individual shot and then another would be heard; and,
much further off, with little sounds like snaps, the replies began from
the hillside beyond the stream. So far so good. Here was contact in the
valley below us, and the guns, some way behind and far off northwards,
had opened. So we got the hang of it instantly—the front was a sort of
a crescent lying roughly north and south, and roughly parallel to the
great road, and the real or feigned mass of the advance was on the
extreme left of that front. We were in it now, and that anxious and
wearing business in all hunting, finding, was over; but we had been on
foot six mortal hours before coming across our luck, and more than half
the soldiers’ day was over. These men had been afoot since three, and
certain units on the left had already marched over twenty miles.
After that coming in touch with our business, not only did everything
become plain, but the numbers we met, and what I have called “the thick
of things,” fed us with interest. We passed half the 38th, going down
the road singing, to extend the line, and in a large village we came to
the other half, slouching about in the traditional fashion of the
Service; they had been waiting for an hour. With them, and lined up all
along the village street, was one battery, with the drivers dismounted,
and all that body were at ease. There were men sitting on the doorsteps
of the houses and men trotting to the canteen-wagon or to the village
shops to buy food; and there were men reading papers which a pedlar had
brought round. Mud and dust had splashed them all; upon some there was
a look of great fatigue; they were of all shapes and sizes, and
altogether it was the sort of sight you would not see in any other
service in the world. It was the sort of sight which so disgusted the
Emperor Joseph when he made his little tour to spy out the land before
the Revolutionary Wars. It was the sort of sight which made Massenbach
before Grandpré marvel whether the French forces were soldiers at all,
and the sort of sight which made Valmy inexplicable to the King of
Prussia and his staff. It was the sort of sight which eighteen months
later still convinced Mack in Tournai that the Duke of York’s plan was
a plan “of annihilation.” It is a trap for judgment is the French
service.
So they lounged about and bought bread, and shifted their packs, and so
the drivers stood by their horses, and so they all waited and slouched;
until there came, not a man with a bugle nor anything with the
slightest savour of drama but a little fellow running along thumping in
his loose leather leggings, who went up to a Major of Artillery and
saluted, and immediately afterwards the Major put his hand up, and then
down a village street, from a point which we could not see came a
whistle, and the whole of that mass of men began to swarm. The
grey-blue coats of the line swung round the corner of the village
street; they had yet a few miles before them. Anything more rapid or
less in step it would be difficult to conceive. The guns were off at a
right angle down the main road, making a prodigious clatter, and at the
same time appeared two parties, one of which it was easy to understand,
the other not. They were both parties of sappers. The one party had a
great roll of wire on a drum, and as quick as you could think they were
unreeling it, and as they unreeled it fastening it to eaves,
overhanging branches, and to corners of walls, stretching it out
forward. It was the field-telephone. The other party came along
carrying great beams upon their shoulders, but what they were to do
with these beams we did not know.
We followed the tail of the line down into the valley, and all that
morning long and past the food time at midday, and so till the sun
declined in the afternoon, we went with the 38th in its gradual success
from crest to crest. And still the 38th slouched by companies, and mile
after mile with checks and halts, and it never seemed to get either
less or more tired. The men had had twelve hours of it when they came
at last, and we after them, on to the critical position. They had
carried (together with all the line to left and to the right of them) a
string of villages which crowned the crest of a further plateau, and
over this further plateau they were advancing against the main body of
the resistance—the other army corps which was set up against ours, to
simulate an enemy.
A railway line ran here across the rolling hedgeless fields, and just
at the point where my companion and I struck it there was a dip in the
land and a high embankment which hid the plain beyond; but from that
plain beyond one heard the separate fire of the advancing line in its
scattered order. We climbed the embankment, and from its ridge we saw
over two miles or more of stubble, the little creeping bunches of the
attack. What was resisting, or where it lay, one could only guess. Some
hundreds of yards before us to the east, with the sloping sun full on
it, a line of thicket, one scattered wood and then another, an
imperceptible lifting of the earth here and there marked the opposing
firing line. Two pompoms could be spotted exactly, for the flashes were
clear through the underwood. And still the tide of the advance
continued to flow, and the little groups came up and fed it, one after
another and another, in the centre where we were, and far away to the
north and right away to the south the countryside was alive with it.
The action was beginning to take on something of that final movement
and decision which makes the climax of manoeuvres look so great a game.
But in a little while that general creeping forward was checked: there
were orders coming from the umpires, and a sort of lull fell over each
position held. My companion said to me:
“Let us go forward now over the intervening zone and in among
Picquart’s men, and get well behind their line, and see whether there
is a rally or whether before the end of this day they begin to fall
back again.”
So we did, walking a mile or so until we had long passed their outposts
and were behind their forward lines. And standing there, upon a little
eminence near a wood, we turned and looked over what we had come,
westward towards the sun which was now not far from its setting. Then
it was that we saw the last of the Great Sight.
The level light, mellow and already reddening, illumined all that plain
strangely, and with the absolute stillness of the air contrasted the
opening of the guns which had been brought up to support the renewal of
the attack. We saw the isolated woods standing up like islands with low
steep cliffs, dotted in a sea of stubble for miles and miles, and first
from the cover of one and then from another the advance perpetually,
piercing and deploying. As we so watched there buzzed high above us,
like a great hornet, a biplane, circling well within our lines, beyond
attack from the advance, but overlooking all they concealed behind it.
In a few minutes a great Bleriot monoplane like a hawk followed, yet
further inwards. The two great birds shot round in an arc, parallel to
the firing line, and well behind it, and in a few minutes, that seemed
seconds, they were dots to the south and then lost in the air. And
perpetually, as the sun declined, Picquart’s men were falling back
north and south of us and before us, and the advance continued. Group
by group we saw it piercing this hedge, that woodland, now occupying a
nearer and a nearer roll of land. It was the greatest thing imaginable:
this enormous sweep of men, the dead silence of the air, and the
comparatively slight contrast of the ceaseless pattering rifle fire and
the slight intermittent accompaniment of the advancing batteries; until
the sun set and all this human business slackened. Then for the first
time one heard bugles, which were a command to cease the game.
I would not have missed that day nor lose the memories of it for
anything in the world.