The transient episode was very detrimental to literary talk.
Negotiations for a private visit to the front languished. The thing was
arranged right enough, but it seemed impossible to fix a day actually
starting. So I went to Meaux. Meaux had stuck in my ears. Meaux
was in history and in romances; it is in Dumas. It was burnt by the
Normans in the tenth century, and terrific massacres occurred
outside its walls in the fourteenth century, massacres in which the
English aristocracy took their full share of the killing. Also, in the
seventeenth century, Bossuet was Bishop of Meaux. Finally, in the
twentieth century, the Germans just got to Meaux, and they got no
further. It was, so far as I can make out, the nearest point to Paris
which they soiled.
I could not go even to Meaux without formalities, but the formalities
were simple. The dilatory train took seventy minutes, dawdling along
the banks of the notorious Marne. In an automobile one could have
done the journey in half the time. An automobile, however, would
have seriously complicated the formalities. Meaux contains about
fourteen thousand inhabitants. Yet it seems, when you are in it, to'
consist chiefly of cathedral. When you are at a little distance away
from it, it seems to consist of nothing but cathedral. In this it
resembles Chartres, and many another city in France.
We obtained a respectable carriage, with a melancholy, resigned
old driver, who said:
"For fifteen francs, plus always the pourboire, I will take you to
Barcy, which was bombarded and burnt. I will show you all the
battlefield."
With those few words he thrilled me.
The road rose slowly from the canal of the Ourcq; it was lined with
the most beautiful acacia trees, and through the screen of the
acacias one had glimpses of the town, diminishing, and of the
cathedral, growing larger and larger. The driver talked to us in faint
murmurs over his shoulder, indicating the positions of various
villages such as Penchard, Poincy, Crecy, Monthyon, Chambry,
Varreddes, all of which will be found, in the future detailed histories
of the great locust-advance.
"Did you yourself see any Germans?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"At Meaux."
"How many?"
He smiled. "About a dozen." He underestimated the number, and
the length of the stay, but no matter. "They were scouts. They came
into the town for a few hours--and left it. The Germans were
deceived. They might have got to Paris if they had liked. But they
were deceived."
"How were they deceived?"
"They thought there were more English in front of them than actually
there were. The head-quarters of the English were over there, at La
Ferte-sous-Jouarre. The English blew up our bridge, as a measure
of precaution."
We drove on.
"The first tomb," said the driver, nonchalantly, in his weak voice,
lifting an elbow.
There it was, close by the roadside, and a little higher than
ourselves. The grave was marked by four short, rough posts on
which was strung barbed wire; a white flag; a white cross of painted
wood, very simply but neatly made; a faded wreath. We could
distinguish a few words of an inscription. "Comrades, 66th
Territorials..." Soldiers were buried where they fell, and this was the
tomb of him who fell nearest to Paris. It marked the last homicidal
effort of the Germans before their advance in this region curved
eastwards into a retreat. This tomb was a very impressive thing. The
driver had thrilled me again.
We drove on. We were now in a large rolling plain that sloped
gradually behind us southwards towards the Marne. It had many
little woods and spinneys, and no watercourses. To the civilian it ap-
peared an ideal theatre for a glorious sanguinary battle in which
thousands of fathers, sons, and brothers should die violently
because some hierarchy in a distant capital was suffering from an
acute attack of swelled head. A few trenches here and there could
still be descried, but the whole land was in an advanced state of
cultivation. Wheat and oats and flaming poppies had now
conquered the land, had overrun and possessed it as no Germans
could ever do. The raw earth of the trenches struggled vainly
against the tide of germination. The harvest was going to be good.
This plain, with its little woods and little villages, glittered with a
careless and vast satisfaction in the sheets of sunshine that fell out
of a blue too intense for the gaze.
We saw a few more tombs, and a great general monument or
cenotaph to the dead, constructed at cross-roads by military
engineers. The driver pointed to the village of Penchard, which had
been pillaged and burnt by the enemy. It was only about a mile off,
but in the strong, dazzling light we could distinguish not the least
sign of damage. Then we came to a farm-house by the roadside. It
was empty; it was a shell, and its roof was damaged. The Germans
had gutted it. They had taken away its furniture as booty. (What they
intended to do with furniture out of a perfectly mediocre farm-house,
hundreds of miles from home, it is difficult to imagine.) Articles which
it did not suit them to carry off they destroyed. Wine-casks of which
they could not drink the wine, they stove in. ... And then they
retreated.
This farm-house was somebody's house, just as your home is
yours, and mine mine. To some woman or other every object in it
was familiar. She glanced at the canister on the mantelpiece and
said to herself: "I really must clean that canister to-morrow." There
the house stood, with holes in its roof, empty. And if there are half a
million similarly tragic houses in Europe to-day, as probably there
are, such frequency does not in the slightest degree diminish the
forlorn tragedy of that particular house which I have beheld.
At last Barcy came into view--the pierced remains of its church
tower over the brow of a rise in the plain. Barcy is our driver's show-
place. Barcy was in the middle of things. The fighting round Barcy
lasted a night and a day, and Barcy was taken and retaken twice.
"You see the new red roofs," said the driver as we approached. "By
those new red roofs you are in a state to judge a little what the
damage was."
Some of the newly made roofs, however, were of tarred paper.
The street by which we entered had a small-pox of shrapnel and
bullet-marks. The post office had particularly suffered: its bones
were laid bare. It had not been restored, but it was ready to do any
business that fell to be done, though closed on that afternoon. We
turned a corner, and came upon the church. The work on the
church was well up to the reported Teutonic average. Of its roof only
the rafters were left. The windows were all smashed, and their lead
fantastically twisted. The west door was entirely gone; a rough grille
of strips of wood served in its stead. Through this grille one could
see the nave and altar, in a miraculous and horrible confusion. It
was as if house-breakers had spent days in doing their best to
produce a professional effect. The oak pews were almost
unharmed. Immediately behind the grille lay a great bronze bell,
about three feet high, covered with beautifully incised inscriptions; it
was unhurt.
Apparently nothing had been accomplished, in ten months, towards
the restoration of the church. But something was contemplated,
perhaps already started. A polished steel saw lay on one of the
pews, but there was no workman attached to it.
While I was writing some notes in the porch three little boys came
up and diligently stared at me.
"What dost thou want?" I said sharply to the tallest.
"Nothing," he replied.
Then three widows came up, one young, one young and beautiful,
one middle-aged.
We got back into the carriage.
"The village seems very deserted," I said to the driver.
"What would you?" he answered. "Many went. They had no home.
Few have returned."
All around were houses of which nothing remained but the stone
walls.
The Germans had shown great prowess here, and the French still
greater. It was a village upon which rival commanders could gaze
with pride. It will remember the fourth and the fifth of September
1914.
We made towards Chambry. Chambry is a village which, like
Meaux, lies below the plain. Chambry escaped glory; but between it
and Barcy, on the intervening slope through which a good road
runs, a battle was fought. You know what kind of a battle it was by
the tombs. These tombs were very like the others--an oblong of
barbed wire, a white flag, a white cross, sometimes a name, more
often only a number, rarely a wreath. You see first one, then
another, then two, then a sprinkling; and gradually you perceive that
the whole plain is dotted with gleams of white flags and white
crosses, so that graves seem to extend right away to the horizon
marked by lines of trees. Then you see a huge general grave. Much
glory about that spot!
And then a tomb with a black cross. Very disconcerting, that black
cross! It is different not only in colour, but in shape, from the other
crosses. Sinister! You need not to be told that the body of a German
lies beneath it. The whole devilishness of the Prussian ideal is
expressed in that black cross. Then, as the road curves, you see
more black crosses, many black crosses, very many. No flags, no
names, no wreaths on these tombs. Just a white stencilled number
in the centre of each cross. Women in Germany are still lying awake
at nights and wondering what those tombs look like.
Watching over all the tombs, white and black without distinction, are
notices: "Respect the Tombs." But the wheat and the oats are not
respecting the tombs. Everywhere the crops have encroached on
them, half-hiding them, smothering them, climbing right over them.
In one place wheat is ripening out of the very body of a German
soldier.
Such is the nearest battlefield to Paris. Corporate excursions to it
are forbidden, and wisely. For the attraction of the place, were it
given play, would completely demoralise Meaux and the entire
district.
In half an hour we were back at an utterly matter-of-fact railway
station, in whose cafe an utterly matter-of-fact and capable
Frenchwoman gave us tea. And when we reached Paris we had the
news that a Staff Captain of the French Army had been detailed to
escort us to the front and to show us all that could safely be seen.
Nevertheless, whatever I may experience, I shall not experience
again the thrill which I had when the weak and melancholy old driver
pointed out the first tomb. That which we had just seen was the front
once.