I have before referred to the apparent vagueness and casualness
of war on its present scarcely conceivable scale. When you are with
a Staff officer, you see almost everything. I doubt not that certain
matters are hidden from you; but, broadly speaking, you do see all
that is to be seen. Into the mind of the General, which conceals the
strategy that is to make history, of course you cannot peer. The
General is full of interesting talk about the past and about the
present, but about the future he breathes no word. If he is near the
centre of the front he will tell you blandly, in answer to your question,
that a great movement may not improbably be expected at the
wings. If he is at either of the wings he will tell you blandly that a
great movement may not improbably be expected at the centre. You
are not disappointed at his attitude, because you feel when putting
them that such questions as yours deserve such answers as his.
But you are assuredly disappointed at not being able to
comprehend even the present--what is going on around you, under
your eyes, deafening your ears.
For example, I hear the sound of guns. I do not mean the general
sound of guns, which is practically continuous round the horizon, but
the particular sound of some specific group of guns. I ask about
them. Sometimes even Staff officers may hesitate before deciding
whether they are enemy guns or French guns. As a rule, the civilian
distinguishes an enemy shot by the sizzling, affrighting sound of the
projectile as it rushes through the air towards him; whereas the
French projectile, rushing away from him, is out of hearing before
the noise of the gun's explosion has left his ears. But I may be
almost equidistant between a group of German and a group of
French guns.
When I have learnt what the guns are and their calibre, and,
perhaps, even their approximate situation on the large-scale Staff
map, I am not much nearer the realisation of them. Actually to find
them might be half a day's work, and when I have found them I
have simply found several pieces of mechanism each hidden in a
kind of hut, functioning quite privately and disconnectedly by the aid
of a few perspiring men. The affair is not like shooting at anything. A
polished missile is shoved into the gun. A horrid bang--the missile
has disappeared, has simply gone. Where it has gone, what it has
done, nobody in the hut seems to care. There is a telephone close
by, but only numbers and formulae--and perhaps an occasional
rebuke--come out of the telephone, in response to which the
perspiring men make minute adjustments in the gun or in the next
missile.
Of the target I am absolutely ignorant, and so are the perspiring
men. I am free to go forth and look for the target. It is pointed out to
me. It may be a building or a group of buildings; it may be
something else. At best, it is nothing but a distant spot on a highly
complex countryside. I see a faint puff of smoke, seemingly as
harmless as a feather momentarily floating. And I think: Can any
reasonable person expect that those men with that noisy
contrivance in the enclosed hut away back shall plant a mass of
metal into that far-off tiny red patch of masonry lost in the vast
landscape? And, even if by chance they do, for what reason has
that particular patch been selected? What influence could its
destruction have on the mighty course of the struggle? . . . Thus it is
that war seems vague and casual, because a mere fragment of it
defeats the imagination, and the bits of even the fragment cannot
be fitted together. Why, I have stood in the first-line trench itself and
heard a fusillade all round me, and yet have seen nothing and
understood nothing of the action!
It is the same with the movements of troops. For example, I slept in
a town behind the front, IN and I was wakened up--not, as often, by
an aeroplane--but by a tremendous shaking and throbbing of the
hotel. This went on for a long time, from just after dawn till about six
o'clock, when it stopped, only to recommence after a few minutes. I
got up, and found that, in addition to the hotel, the whole town was
shaking and throbbing. A regiment was passing through it in auto-
buses. Each auto-bus held about thirty men, and the vehicles rattled
after one another at a distance of at most thirty yards. The auto-
buses were painted the colour of battleships, and were absolutely
uniform except that some had permanent and some only temporary
roofs, and some had mica windows and some only holes in the
sides. All carried the same number of soldiers, and in all the rifles
were stacked in precisely the same fashion. When one auto-bus
stopped, all stopped, and the soldiers waved and smiled to girls at
windows and in the street. The entire town had begun its day. No
matter how early you arise in these towns, the town has always
begun its day.
The soldiers in their pale-blue uniforms were young, lively, high-
spirited, and very dusty; their moustaches, hair, and ears were
noticeably coated with dust. Evidently they had been travelling for
hours. The auto-buses kept appearing out of the sun-shot dust-
cloud at the end of the town, and disappearing round the curve by
the Town Hall. Occasionally an officer's automobile, or a car with a
couple of nurses, would intervene momentarily; and then more and
more and more auto-buses, and still more. The impression given is
that the entire French Army is passing through the town. The rattle
and the throbbing and the shaking get on my nerves. At last come
two breakdown-vans, and the procession is finished. I cannot believe
that it is really finished, but it is; and the silence is incredible.
Well, I have seen only a couple of regiments go by. Out of the
hundreds of regiments in the French Army, just two! But whence
they had come, what they had done, whither they were travelling,
what they were intended to do--nobody could tell me. They had an
air as casual and vague and aimless as a flight of birds across a
landscape.
There were more picturesque pilgrimages than that. One of the
most picturesque and touching spectacles I saw at the front was the
march of a regiment of the line into another little country town on a
very fine summer morning. First came the regimental band. The
brass instruments were tarnished; the musicians had all sorts of
paper packages tied to their knapsacks. Besides being musicians
they were real soldiers, in war-stained uniforms. They marched with
an air of fatigue. But the tune they played was bright enough.
Followed some cyclists, keeping pace with the marchers. Then an
officer on a horse. Then companies of the regiment. The stocks of
many of the rifles were wrapped in dirty rags. Every man carried all
that was his in the campaign, including a pair of field-glasses. Every
man was piled up with impedimenta--broken, torn, soiled and
cobbled impedimenta. And every man was very, very tired.
A young officer on foot could scarcely walk. He moved in a kind of
trance, and each step was difficult. He may have been half asleep.
At intervals a triangular sign was borne aloft--red, blue, or some
other tint. These signs indicated the positions of the different
companies in the trenches. (Needless to say that the regiment had
come during the night from a long spell of the trenches--but what
trenches?) Then came the gorgeous regimental colours, and every
soldier in the street saluted them, and every civilian raised his hat.
I noticed more and more that the men were exhausted, were at the
limit of their endurance. Then passed a group which was quite fresh.
A Red Cross detachment! No doubt they had had very little to do.
After them a few horses, grey and white; and then field-kitchens
and equipment-carts. And then a machine-gun on a horse's back;
others in carts; pack-mules with ammunition-boxes; several more
machine-gun sections. And then more field-kitchens. In one of these
the next meal was actually preparing, and steam rose from under a
great iron lid. On every cart was a spare wheel for emergencies;
the hub of every wheel was plaited round with straw; the harness
was partly of leather and partly of rope ending in iron hooks. Later
came a long Red Cross van, and after it another field-kitchen
encumbered with bags and raw meat and strange oddments, and
through the interstices of the pile, creeping among bags and raw
meat, steam gently mounted, for a meal was maturing in that
perambulating kitchen also. Lastly, came a cart full of stretchers and
field-hospital apparatus. The regiment, its music still faintly audible,
had gone by--self-contained, self-supporting. There was no
showiness of a review, but the normal functioning, the actual
dailiness, of a line regiment as it lives strenuously in the midst of
war.
My desire was that the young officer in a trance should find a good
bed instantly. The whole thing was fine; it was pathetic; and, above
all, it was mysterious. What was the part of that regiment in the
gigantic tactics of Joffre?
However, after a short experience at the front one realises that
though the conduct of the campaign may be mysterious, it is neither
vague nor casual. I remember penetrating through a large factory
into a small village which constituted one of the latest French
conquests. An officer who had seen the spot just after it was taken,
and before it was "organised," described to me the appearance of
the men with their sunken eyes and blackened skins on the day of
victory. They were all very cheerful when I saw them; but how alert,
how apprehensive, how watchful! I felt that I was in a place where
anything might happen at any moment. The village and the factory
were a maze of trenches, redoubts, caves, stairs up and stairs
down, machine-guns, barbed wire, enfilading devices were all ready.
When we climbed to an attic-floor to look at the German positions,
which were not fifty yards away, the Commandant was in a fever till
we came down again, lest the Germans might spy us and shell his
soldiers. He did not so much mind them shelling us, but he objected
to them shelling his men. We came down the damaged stairs in
safety.
A way had been knocked longitudinally through a whole row of
cottages. We went along this--it was a lane of watchful figures--and
then it was whispered to us not to talk, for the Germans might
hear! And we peered into mines and burrowed and crawled. We
disappeared into long subterranean passages and emerged among
a lot of soldiers gaily eating as they stood. Close by were a group of
men practising with hand-grenades made harmless for the
occasion. I followed the Commandant round a corner, and we
gazed at I forget what. "Don't stay here," said the Commandant. I
moved away. A second after I had moved a bullet struck the wall
where I had been standing. The entire atmosphere of the place, with
its imminent sense of danger from an invisible enemy and fierce
expectation of damaging that enemy, brought home to me the
grand essential truth of the front, namely, that the antagonists are
continually at grips, like wrestlers, and straining every muscle to
obtain the slightest advantage. ''Casual'' would be the very last
adjective to apply to those activities.
Once, after a roundabout tour on foot, one of the Staff Captains
ordered an automobile to meet us at the end of a certain road. Part
of this road was exposed to German artillery four or five miles off.
No sooner had the car come down the road than we heard the
fearsome sizzling of an approaching shell. We saw the shell burst
before the sound of the sizzling had ceased. Then came the roar of
the explosion. The shell was a 77-mm. high-explosive. It fell out of
nowhere on the road. The German artillery methodically searched
the exposed portion of the road for about half an hour. The shells
dropped on it or close by it at intervals of two minutes, and they
were planted at even distances of about a hundred yards up and
down the slope. I watched the operation from a dug-out close by. It
was an exact and a rather terrifying operation. It showed that the
invisible Germans were letting nothing whatever go by; but it did
seem to me to be a fine waste of ammunition, and a very stupid
application of a scientific ideal; for while shelling it the Germans
must have noticed that there was nothing at all on the road. We
naturally decided not to go up that road in the car, but to skulk
through a wood and meet the car in a place of safety. The car had,
sooner or later, to go up the road, because there was not another
road. The Commandant who was with us was a very seasoned
officer, and he regarded all military duties as absolute duties. The
car must return along that road. Therefore, let it go. The fact that it
was a car serving solely for the convenience of civilians did not
influence him. It was a military car, driven by a soldier.
"You may as well go at once," he said to the chauffeur. "We will
assist at your agony. What do you say?" he laughingly questioned a
subordinate.
"Ah! My Commandant," said the junior officer cautiously, "when it is
a question of the service------"
We should naturally have protested against the chauffeur
adventuring upon the shell-swept road for our convenience; but he
was diplomatic enough to postpone the journey. After a time the
shelling ceased, and he passed in safety. He told us when we met
him later for the drive home that there were five large holes in the
road.
On another occasion, when we were tramping through interminable
communication-trenches on a slope, a single rash exposure of two
of our figures above the parapet of the trench drew down upon us a
bombardment of high-explosive. For myself, I was completely
exhausted by the excursion, which was nearing its end, and also I
was faint from hunger. But immediately the horrible sizzling sound
overhead and an explosion just in front made it plain to me that we
were to suffer for a moment's indiscretion, I felt neither fatigue nor
hunger. The searching shells fell nearer to us. We ran in couples,
with a fair distance between each couple, according to instructions,
along the rough, sinuous inequalities of the deep trench. After each
visitation we had to lie still and count five till all the fragments of
shell had come to rest. At last a shell seemed to drop right upon me.
The earth shook under me. My eyes and nose were affected by the
fumes of the explosion. But the shell had not dropped right upon
me. It had dropped a few yards to the left. A trench is a wonderful
contrivance. Immediately afterwards, a friend picked up in the trench
one of the warm shots of the charge. It was a many-facetted ball,
beautifully made, and calculated to produce the maximum wound.
This was the last shell to fall. We were safe. But we realised once
again, and more profoundly, that there is nothing casual in the
conduct of war.
At no place was the continuously intense character of the struggle--
like that of two leviathan wrestlers ever straining their hardest at
grips--more effectually brought home to me than in the region
known now familiarly to the whole world as Notre Dame de Lorette,
from the little chapel that stood on one part of it. An exceedingly ugly
little chapel it was, according to the picture postcards. There are
thousands of widows and orphans wearing black and regretting the
past and trembling about the future to-day simply because the
invaders had to be made to give up that religious edifice which they
had turned to other uses.
The high, thickly wooded land behind the front was very elaborately
organised for living either above ground or underground, according
to the circumstances of the day. To describe the organisation would
be impolitic. But it included every dodge. And the stores, entombed
in safety, comprised all things. I remember, for example, stacks of
hundreds of lamp-chimneys. Naught lacked to the completeness of
the scene of war. There were even prisoners. I saw two young
Germans under guard in a cabin. They said that they had got lost in
the labyrinth of trenches, and taken a wrong turning. And I believe
they had. One was a Red Cross man--probably a medical student
before, with wine and song and boastings, he joined his Gott, his
Kaiser, and his comrades in the great mission of civilisation across
Belgium. He was dusty and tired, and he looked gloomily at the
earthen floor of the cabin. Nevertheless, he had a good carriage
and a passably intelligent face, and he was rather handsome. I
sympathised with this youth, and I do not think that he was glad to
be a prisoner. Some people can go and stare at prisoners, and
wreak an idle curiosity upon them. I cannot. A glance, rather
surreptitious, and I must walk away. Their humiliation humiliates me,
even be they Prussians of the most offensive variety.
A little later we saw another prisoner being brought in--a miserable,
tuberculous youth with a nervous trick of the face, thin, very dirty,
enfeebled, worn out; his uniform torn, stained, bullet-pierced, and
threadbare. Somebody had given him a large hunk of bread, which
he had put within the lining of his tunic; it bulged out in front like a
paunch. An officer stopped to question him, and while the cross-
examination was proceeding a curio-hunting soldier came up behind
and cut a button off the tunic. We learnt that the lad was twenty-one
years of age, and that he had been called up in December 1914.
Before assisting in the conquest of France he was employed in a
paper factory. He tried to exhibit gloom, but it was impossible for him
quite to conceal his satisfaction in the fact that for him the fighting
was over. The wretched boy had had just about enough of world-
dominion, and he was ready to let the Hohenzollerns and Junkers
finish up the enterprise as best they could without his aid. No doubt,
some woman was his mother. It appeared to me that he could not
live long, and that the woman in question might never see him
again. But every ideal must have its victims; and bereavement,
which counts chief among the well-known advantageous moral
disciplines of war, is, of course, good for a woman's soul. Besides,
that woman would be convinced that her son died gloriously in
defence of an attacked Fatherland.
When we had got clear of prisoners and of the innumerable minor
tools of war, we came to something essential--namely, a map. This
map, which was shown to us rather casually in the middle of a
wood, was a very big map, and by means of different coloured
chalks it displayed the ground taken from the Germans month by
month. The yellow line showed the advance up to May; the blue line
showed the further advance up to June; and fresh marks in red
showed graphically a further wresting which had occurred only in the
previous night. The blue line was like the mark of a tide on a chart;
in certain places it had nearly surrounded a German position, and
shortly the Germans would have to retire from that position or be cut
off. Famous names abounded on that map--such as Souchez,
Ablain St. Nazaire, St. Eloi, Fonds de Buval. Being on a very large
scale, the map covered a comparatively small section of the front;
but, so far as it went, it was a map to be gazed upon with legitimate
pride.
The officers regarded it proudly. Eagerly they indicated where the
main pressures were, and where new pressures would come later.
Their very muscles seemed to be strained in the ardour of their
terrific intention to push out and destroy the invader. While
admitting, as all the officers I met admitted, the great military
qualities of the enemy, they held towards him a more definitely
contemptuous attitude than I could discover elsewhere. "When the
Boches attack us," said one of them, "we drive them back to their
trench, and we take that trench. Thus we advance." But, for them,
there was Boche and Boche. It was the Bavarians whom they most
respected. They deemed the Prussians markedly inferior as fighters
to the Bavarians. The Prussians would not hold firm when seriously
menaced. The Prussians, in a word, would not "stick it." Such was
the unanimous verdict here.
Out beyond the wood, on the hillside, in the communication-
trenches and other trenches, we were enabled to comprehend the
true significance of that phrase uttered so carelessly by newspaper-
readers--Notre Dame de Lorette. The whole of the ground was in
heaps. There was no spot, literally, on which a shell had not burst.
Vegetation was quite at an end. The shells seemed to have
sterilised the earth. There was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of
any sort, not a root. Even the rankest weeds refused to sprout in the
perfect desolation. And this was the incomparable soil of France.
The trenches meandered for miles through the pitted brown slopes,
and nothing could be seen from them but vast encumbrances of
barbed wire. Knotted metal heaped on the unyielding earth!
The solitude of the communication-trenches was appalling, and the
continuous roar of the French seventy-fives over our heads did not
alleviate it. In the other trenches, however, was much humanity,
some of it sleeping in deep, obscure retreats, but most of it acutely
alive and interested in everything. A Captain with a shabby uniform
and a strong Southern accent told us how on March 9th he and his
men defended their trench in water up to the waist and lumps of ice
in it knocking against their bodies.
"I was summoned to surrender," he laughed. "I did not surrender.
We had twenty killed and twenty-four with frostbitten feet as a result
of that affair. Yes--March 9th."
March 9th, 1915, obviously divided that officer's life into two parts,
and not unnaturally!
A little further on we might hear an officer speaking somewhat
ardently into a telephone:
"What are they doing with that gun? They are shooting all over the
shop. Tell them exactly------"
Still a little further on, and another officer would lead us to a spot
where we could get glimpses of the plain. What a plain! Pit-heads,
superb vegetation, and ruined villages--tragic villages illustrating the
glories and the transcendent common-sense of war and invasion.
That place over there is Souchez--familiar in all mouths from
Arkansas to Moscow for six months past. What an object! Look at
St. Eloi! Look at Angres! Look at Neuville St. Vaast! And look at
Ablain St. Nazaire, the nearest of all! The village of Ablain St.
Nazaire seems to consist now chiefly of exposed and blackened
rafters; what is left of the church sticks up precisely like a little
bleached bone. A vision horrible and incredible in the immense
luxuriance of the plain! The French have got Ablain St. Nazaire. We
may go to Ablain St. Nazaire ourselves if we will accept the risks of
shelling. Soldiers were seriously wounded there on that very day, for
we saw them being carried therefrom on stretchers towards the
motor-ambulance and the hospital.
After more walking of a very circuitous nature, I noticed a few bricks
in the monotonous expanse of dwarf earth-mounds made by shells.
"Hello!" I said. "Was there a cottage here?"
No! What I had discovered was the illustrious chapel of Notre Dame
de Lorette.
Then we were in a German trench which the French had taken and
transformed into one of their own trenches by turning its face. It had
a more massive air than the average French trench, and its
cellarage, if I may use this civilian word, was deeper than that of any
French trench. The officers said that often a German trench was
taken before the men resting in those profound sleeping-holes could
get to the surface, and that therefore they only emerged in order to
be killed or captured.
After more heavy trudging we came to trenches abandoned by the
Germans and not employed by the French, as the front had moved
far beyond them. The sides were dilapidated. Old shirts, bits of
uniform, ends of straps, damaged field-glass cases, broken rifles,
useless grenades lay all about. Here and there was a puddle of
greenish water. Millions of flies, many of a sinister bright burnished
green, were busily swarming. The forlornness of these trenches was
heartrending. It was the most dreadful thing that I saw at the front,
surpassing the forlornness of any destroyed village whatsoever.
And at intervals in the ghastly residue of war arose a smell unlike
any other smell. ... A leg could be seen sticking out of the side of the
trench. We smelt a number of these smells, and saw a number of
these legs. Each leg was a fine leg, well-clad, and superbly shod in
almost new boots with nail-protected soles. Each leg was a human
leg attached to a human body, and at the other end of the body was
presumably a face crushed in the earth. Two strokes with a pick,
and the corpses might have been excavated and decently interred.
But not one had been touched. Buried in frenzied haste by amateur,
imperilled grave-diggers with a military purpose, these dead men
decayed at leisure amid the scrap-heap, the cess-pit, the infernal
squalor which once had been a neat, clean, scientific German
earthwork, and which still earlier had been part of a fair countryside.
The French had more urgent jobs on hand than the sepulture of
these victims of a caste and an ambition. So they liquefied into
corruption in their everlasting boots, proving that there is nothing like
leather. They were a symbol. With alacrity we left them to get
forward to the alert, straining life of war.