You should imagine a large plain, but not an empty plain, nor a plain
entirely without hills. There are a few hills, including at least one very
fine eminence (an agreeable old town on the top), with excellent
views of the expanse. The expanse is considerably diversified. In
the first place it is very well wooded; in the second place it is very
well cultivated; and in the third place it is by no means uninhabited.
Villages abound in it; and small market towns are not far off each
other. These places are connected by plenty of roads (often paved)
and canals, and by quite an average mileage of railways. See the
plain from above, and the chief effect is one of trees. The rounded
tops of trees everywhere obscure the view, and out of them church-
towers stick up; other architecture is only glimpsed. The general
tints are green and grey, and the sky as a rule is grey to match.
Finally, the difference between Northern France and Southern
Belgium is marked only by the language of shop and cafe signs; in
most respects the two sections of the Front resemble each other
with extraordinary exactitude.
The British occupation--which is marked of course by high and
impressive cordiality--is at once superficially striking and subtly
profound.
"What do you call your dog?" I asked a ragamuffin who was playing
with a nice little terrier in a village street where we ate an at fresco
meal of jam-sandwiches with a motor-car for a buffet.
He answered shyly, but with pride:
"Tommy."
The whole countryside is criss-crossed with field telegraph and
telephone wires. Still more spectacular, everywhere there are traffic
directions. And these directions are very large and very curt. "Motor-
lorries dead slow," you see in immense characters in the midst of
the foreign scene. And at all the awkward street corners in the
towns a soldier directs the traffic. Not merely in the towns, but in
many and many a rural road you come across a rival of the Strand.
For the traffic is tremendous, and it is almost all mechanical
transport. You cannot go far without encountering, not one or two,
but dozens and scores of motor-lorries, which, after the leviathan
manner of motor-lorries, occupy as much of the road as they can.
When a string of these gets mixed up with motor-cars, a few
despatch-riders on motor-cycles, a peasant's cart, and a company
on the march, the result easily surpasses Piccadilly Circus just
before the curtains are rising in West End theatres. Blocks may and
do occur at any moment. Out of a peaceful rustic solitude you may
run round a curve straight into a block. The motor-lorries constitute
the difficulty, not always because they are a size too large for the
country, but sometimes because of the human nature of Tommies.
The rule is that on each motor-lorry two Tommies shall ride in front
and one behind. The solitary one behind is cut off from mankind,
and accordingly his gregarious instinct not infrequently makes him
nip on to the front seat in search of companionship. When he is
established there impatient traffic in the rear may screech and roar
in vain for a pathway; nothing is so deaf as a motor-lorry. The
situation has no disadvantage for the trio in front of the motor-lorry
until a Staff officer's car happens to be inconvenienced. Then, when
the Staff officer does get level, there is a short, sharp scene, a dead
silence, and the offender creeps back, a stricken sinner, to his
proper post.
The encumbered and busy roads, and the towns crammed with
vehicles and vibrating with military activity, produce upon you such
an overwhelming impression of a vast and complex organisation
that your thought rushes instantly to the supreme controller of that
organisation, the man ultimately responsible for all of it. He does not
make himself invisible. It becomes known that he will see you at a
certain hour. You arrive a few minutes before that hour. The building
is spacious, and its Gallic aspect is intensified by the pure Anglo-
Saxonism of its terrific inhabitants. In a large outer office you are
presented to the various brains of the Expeditionary Force, all
members of the General Staff--famous names among them, celebrities,
specialists, illustrious with long renown. They walk in and out,
and they sit smoking and chatting, as if none of them was anybody
in particular. And as a fact, you find it a little difficult to
appreciate them at their lawful worth, because you are aware that in
the next room, behind those double doors, is he at whose nod the
greatest among them tremble.
"The Commander-in-Chief will see you." You go forward, and I defy
you not to be daunted.
The inner chamber has been a drawing-room. It still is partially a
drawing-room. The silk panels on the walls have remained, and in
one corner a grand piano lingers. In the middle is a plain table
bearing a map on a huge scale. There he is, the legendary figure.
You at last have proof that he exists. He comes towards the door to
meet you. A thick-set man, not tall, with small hands and feet, and
finger-nails full of character. He has a short white moustache, and
very light-coloured eyes set in a ruddy complexion. His chin is
noticeable. He is not a bit dandiacal. He speaks quietly and grimly
and reflectively. He is a preoccupied man. He walks a little to and
fro, pausing between his short, sparse sentences. When he talks of
the Germans he has a way of settling his head and neck with a
slight defiant shake well between his shoulders. I have seen the
gesture in experienced boxers and in men of business when openly
or implicitly challenged. It is just as if he had said: "Wait a bit! I
shall get even with that lot--and let no one imagine the contrary!"
From the personality of the man there emanates all the time a
pugnacious and fierce doggedness. After he has formally welcomed
you into the meshes of his intimidating organisation, and made a
few general observations, he says, in a new tone: "Well------,"
and you depart. And as you pass out of the building the thought
in your mind is:
"I have seen him!" After the Commander-in-Chief there are two
other outstanding and separately existing notabilities in connection
with the General Staff. One is the Quartermaster-General, who
superintends the supply of all material; and the other is the Adjutant-
General, who superintends the supply of men. With the latter is that
formidable instrument of authority, the Grand Provost Marshal, who
superintends behaviour and has the power of life and death. Each
of these has his Staff, and each is housed similarly to the
Commander-in-Chief. Then each Army (for there is more than one
army functioning as a distinct entity)--each Army has its
Commander with his Staff. And each Corps of each Army has its
Commander with his Staff. And each Division of each Corps of each
Army has its Commander with his Staff. And each Brigade of each
Division of each Corps of each Army has its Commander with his
Staff; but though I met several Brigadier-Generals, I never saw one
at his head-quarters with his Staff. I somehow could not penetrate
lower than the entity of a Division. I lunched, had tea, and dined at
the headquarters of various of these Staffs, with a General as host.
They were all admirably housed, and their outward circumstances
showed a marked similarity. The most memorable thing about them
was their unending industry.
"You have a beautiful garden," I said to one General.
"Yes," he said. "I have never been into it."
He told me that he rose at six and went to bed at midnight.
As soon as coffee is over after dinner, and before cigars are over,
the General will say:
"I don't wish to seem inhospitable, but------"
And a few minutes later you may see a large lighted limousine
moving off into the night, bearing Staff officers to their offices
for the evening seance of work which ends at twelve o'clock or
thereabouts.
The complexity and volume of work which goes on at even a
Divisional Headquarters, having dominion over about twenty
thousand full-grown males, may be imagined; and that the bulk of
such work is of a business nature, including much tiresome routine,
is certain. Of the strictly military labours of Headquarters, that which
most agreeably strikes the civilian is the photography and the map-
work. I saw thousands of maps. I inspected thick files of maps all
showing the same square of country under different military
conditions at different dates. And I learnt that special maps are
regularly circulated among all field officers.
The fitting-out and repairing sheds of the Royal Flying Corps were
superb and complete constructions, at once practical and very
elegant. I visited them in the midst of a storm. The equipment was
prodigious; the output was prodigious; the organisation was
scientific; and the staff was both congenial and impressive. When
one sees these birdcages full of birds and comprehends the spirit of
flight, one is less surprised at the unimaginable feats which are daily
performed over there in the sky northwards and eastwards. I saw a
man who flew over Ghent twice a week with the regularity of a train.
He had never been seriously hit. These airmen have a curious
physical advantage. The noise of their own engine, it is said,
prevents them from hearing the explosions of the shrapnel aimed at
them.
The British soldier in France and Flanders is not a self-supporting
body.
He needs support, and a great deal of support. I once saw his day's
rations set forth on a tray, and it seemed to me that I could not have
consumed them in a week of good appetite. The round of meat is
flanked by plenteous bacon, jam, cheese, and bread. In addition
there are vegetables, tea, sugar, salt, and condiments, with
occasional butter; and once a week come two ounces of tobacco
and a box of matches for each ounce. But the formidable item is the
meat. And then the British soldier wants more than food; he wants,
for instance, fuel, letters, cleanliness; he wants clothing, and all the
innumerable instruments and implements of war. He wants
regularly, and all the time.
Hence you have to imagine wide steady streams of all manner of
things converging upon Northern France not only from Britain but
from round about the globe. The force of an imperative demand
draws them powerfully in, night and day, as a magnet might. It is
impossible to trace exactly either the direction or the separate
constituents of these great streams of necessaries. But it is possible
to catch them, or at any rate one of them, at the most interesting
point of its course: the point at which the stream, made up of many
converging streams, divides suddenly and becomes many streams
again.
That point is the rail-head.
Now, a military rail-head is merely an ordinary average little railway
station, with a spacious yard. There is nothing superficially romantic
about it. It does not even mark the end of a line of railway. I have in
mind one which served as the Head-quarters of a Divisional Supply
Column. The organism served just one division--out of the very
many divisions in France and Flanders. It was under the command
of a Major. This Major, though of course in khaki and employing the
same language and general code as a regimental Major, was not a
bit like a regimental Major. He was no more like a regimental Major
than I am myself. He had a different mentality, outlook,
preoccupation. He was a man in business. He received orders--I
use the word in the business sense--from the Brigades of the
Division; and those orders, ever varying, had to be executed and
delivered within thirty-six hours. Quite probably he had never seen a
trench; I should be neither surprised nor pained to learn that he
could only hit a haystack with a revolver by throwing the revolver at
the haystack. His subordinates resembled him. Strategy, artillery-
mathematics, the dash of infantry charges--these matters were not
a bit in their line. Nevertheless, when you read in a despatch that
during a prolonged action supplies went regularly up to the Front
under heavy fire, you may guess that fortitude and courage are
considerably in their line. These officers think about their arriving
trains, and about emptying them in the shortest space of time; and
they think about their motor-lorries and the condition thereof; and
they pass their lives in checking lists and in giving receipts for things
and taking receipts for things. Their honour may be in a receipt. And
all this is the very basis of war.
My Major handled everything required for his division except water
and ammunition. He would have a train full of multifarious
provender, and another train full of miscellanies--from field-guns to
field-kitchens--with letters from wives and sweethearts in between.
And all these things came to him up the line of railway out of the sea
simply because he asked for them and was ready to give a receipt
for them. He was not concerned with the magic underlying their
appearance at his little rail-head; he only cared about the train being
on time, and the lorries being in first-class running order. He
sprayed out in beneficent streams from his rail-head tons of stuff
every day. Every day he sent out two hundred and eighty bags of
postal matter to the men beyond. The polish on the metallic portions
of his numerous motor-lorries was uncanny. You might lift a bonnet
and see the bright parts of the engine glittering like the brass of a
yacht. Dandyism of the Army Service Corps!
An important part of the organism of the rail-head is the Railway
Construction Section Train. Lines may have to be doubled. The
Railway Construction Section Train doubles them; it will make new
railways at the rate of several miles a day; it is self-contained, being
simultaneously a depot, a workshop, and a barracks.
Driving along a road you are liable to see rough signs nailed to
trees, with such words on them as "Forage," "Groceries," "Meat,"
"Bread," etc. Wait a little, and you may watch the Divisional Supply
at a further stage. A stream of motor-lorries--one of the streams
sprayed out from the rail-head--will halt at those trees and unload,
and the stuff which they unload will disappear like a dream and an
illusion. One moment the meat and the bread and all the
succulences are there by the roadside, each by its proper tree, and
the next they are gone, spirited away to camps and billets and
trenches. Proceed further, and you may have the luck to see the
mutton which was frozen in New Zealand sizzling in an earth-oven
in a field christened by the soldiers with some such name as
Hampstead Heath. The roasted mutton is a very fine and a very
appetising sight. But what quantities of it! And what an antique way
of cooking!
As regards the non-edible supplies, the engineer's park will stir
your imagination. You can discern every device in connection with
warfare. (To describe them might be indiscreet--it would assuredly
be too lengthy.) . . . Telephones such as certainly you have never
seen! And helmets such as you have never seen! Indeed, everything
that a soldier in full work can require, except ammunition.
The ammunition-train in process of being unloaded is a fearsome
affair. You may see all conceivable ammunition, from rifle cartridges
to a shell whose weight is liable to break through the floors of lorries,
all on one train. And not merely ammunition, but a thousand
pyrotechnical and other devices; and varied bombs. An officer
unscrews a cap on a metal contraption, and throws it down, and it
begins to fizz away in the most disconcerting manner. And you feel
that all these shells, all these other devices, are simply straining to
go off. They are like things secretly and terribly alive, waiting the tiny
gesture which will set them free. Officers, handling destruction with
the nonchalance of a woman handling a hat, may say what they
like--the ammunition train is to my mind an unsafe neighbour. And
the thought of all the sheer brain-power which has gone to the
invention and perfecting of those propulsive and explosive
machines causes you to wonder whether you yourself possess a
brain at all.
You can find everything in the British lines except the British Army.
The same is to be said of the French lines; but the indiscoverability
of the British Army is relatively much more striking, by reason of the
greater richness and complexity of the British auxiliary services. You
see soldiers--you see soldiers everywhere; but the immense
majority of them are obviously engaged in attending to the material
needs of other soldiers, which other soldiers, the fighters, you do not
see--or see only in tiny detachments or in single units.
Thus I went for a very long walk, up such hills and down such dales
as the country can show, tramping with a General through
exhausting communication-trenches, in order to discover two
soldiers, an officer and his man; and even they were not actual
fighters. The officer lived in a dug-out with a very fine telescope for
sole companion. I was told that none but the General commanding
had the right to take me to that dug-out. It contained the officer's
bed, the day's newspapers, the telescope, a few oddments hung on
pegs pushed into the earthen walls, and, of equal importance with
the telescope, a telephone. Occasionally the telephone faintly
buzzed, and a very faint, indistinguishable murmur came out of it.
But the orderly ignored this symptom, explaining that it only meant
that somebody else was talking to somebody else. I had the
impression of a mysterious underground life going on all around me.
The officer's telescopic business was to keep an eye on a particular
section of the German front, and report everything. The section of
front comprised sundry features extremely well known by reputation
to British newspaper readers. I must say that the reality of them was
disappointing. The inevitable thought was: "Is it possible that so
much killing has been done for such trifling specks of earth?"
The officer made clear all details to us; he described minutely the
habits of the Germans as he knew them. But about his own habits
not a word was said. He was not a human being--he was an
observer, eternally spying through a small slit in the wall of the dug-
out. What he thought about when he was not observing, whether his
bed was hard, how he got his meals, whether he was bored,
whether his letters came regularly, what his moods were, what was
his real opinion of that dug-out as a regular home--these very
interesting matters were not even approached by us. He was a
short, mild officer, with a quiet voice. Still, after we had shaken
hands on parting, the General, who had gone first, turned his bent
head under the concealing leafage, and nodded and smiled with a
quite particular cordial friendliness. "Good-afternoon, Blank," said
the General to the officer, and the warm tone of his voice said: "You
know--don't you, Blank?--how much I appreciate you." It was a
transient revelation. As, swallowed up in trenches, I trudged away
from the lonely officer, the General, resuming his ordinary worldly
tone, began to talk about London music-halls and Wish Wynne and
other artistes.
Then on another occasion I actually saw at least twenty fighting
men! They were not fighting, but they were pretending, under
dangerous conditions, to fight. They had to practise the bombing of
a German trench--with real bombs. The young officer in charge
explained to us the different kinds of bombs. "It's all quite safe," he
said casually, "until I take this pin out." And he took the pin out. We
saw the little procession of men that were to do the bombing. We
saw the trench, with its traverses, and we were shown just how it
would be bombed, traverse by traverse. We saw also a "crater"
which was to be bombed and stormed. And that was about all we
did see. The rest was chiefly hearing, because we had to take
shelter behind such slight eminences as a piece of ordinary waste
ground can offer. Common wayfarers were kept out of harm by
sentries. We were instructed to duck. We ducked. Bang! Bang!
Bang! Bang! Bang!--Bang! Then the mosquito-like whine of bits of
projectile above our heads! Then we ventured to look over, and
amid wisps of smoke the bombers were rushing a traverse. Strange
to say, none of them was killed, or even wounded.
On still another occasion I saw a whole brigade, five or six thousand
men, with their first-line transport, and two Generals with implacable
eyes watching them for faults. It was a fine, very picturesque display
of Imperial militancy, but too marvellously spick-and-span to
produce any illusion of war. So far as I was concerned, its chief use
was to furnish a real conception of numbers. I calculated that if the
whole British Army passed before my eyes at the same brisk rate as
that solitary and splendid brigade, I should have to stare at it night
and day for about three weeks, without surcease for meals. This
calculation only increased my astonishment at the obstinate in-
discoverability of the Army.
Once I did get the sensation of fighting men existing in bulk. It was
at the baths of a new division--the New Army. I will mention in
passing that the real enthusiasm of Generals concerning the
qualities of the New Army was most moving--and enheartening.
The baths establishment was very British--much more British than
any of those operating it perhaps imagined. Such a phenomenon
could probably be seen on no other front. It had been contrived out
of a fairly large factory. It was in charge of a quite young subaltern,
no doubt anxious to go and fight, but condemned indefinitely to the
functions of baths-keeper. In addition to being a baths-keeper this
young subaltern was a laundry-manager; for when bathing the
soldiers left their underclothing and took fresh. The laundry was very
large; it employed numerous local women and girls at four francs a
day. It had huge hot drying-rooms where the women and girls
moved as though the temperature was sixty degrees instead of
being over a hundred. All these women and girls were beautiful, all
had charm, all were more or less ravishing--simply because for days
we had been living in a harsh masculine world--a world of motor-
lorries, razors, trousers, hob-nailed boots, maps, discipline, pure
reason, and excessively few mirrors. An interesting item of the
laundry was a glass-covered museum of lousy shirts, product of
prolonged trench-life in the earlier part of the war, and held by
experts to surpass all records of the kind!
The baths themselves were huge and simple--a series of gigantic
steaming vats in which possibly a dozen men lathered themselves
at once. Here was fighting humanity; you could see it in every
gesture. The bathers, indeed, appeared to be more numerous than
they in fact were. Two hundred and fifty could undress, bathe, and
re-clothe themselves in an hour, and twelve hundred in a morning.
Each man of course would be free to take as many unofficial baths,
in tin receptacles and so on, as he could privately arrange for and
as he felt inclined for. Companies of dirty men marching to the
baths, and companies of conceitedly clean men marching from the
baths, helped to strengthen the ever-growing suspicion that a great
Army must be hidden somewhere in the neighbourhood.
Nevertheless, I still saw not the ultimate destination of all those
streams of supply which I have described.
I had, however, noted a stream in the contrary direction--that is,
westwards and southwards towards the Channel and England. You
can first trace the beginnings of this stream under the sound of the
guns (which you never see). A stretcher brought to a temporary
shelter by men whose other profession is to play regimental music;
a group of men bending over a form in the shelter; a glimpse of
dressings and the appliances necessary for tying up an artery or
some other absolutely urgent job. That shelter is called the Aid Post.
From it the horizontal form goes to (2) the Advanced Dressing
Station, where more attention is given to it; and thence to (3) the
Field Ambulance proper, where the case is really diagnosed and
provisionally classed. By this time motor-ambulances have been
much used; and the stream, which was a trickle at the Aid Post,
has grown wider. The next point (4) is the Casualty Clearing Station.
Casualty Clearing Stations are imposing affairs. Not until the
horizontal form reaches them can an operation in the full sense of
the word be performed upon it. The Clearing Station that I saw could
accommodate seven hundred cases, and had held nearer eight
hundred. It was housed in an extensive public building. It employed
seven surgeons, and I forget how many dressers. It had an
abdominal ward, where cases were kept until they could take solid
food; and a head ward; and an officers' ward; immense stores; a
Church of England chapel; and a shoot down which mattresses with
patients thereon could be slid in case of fire.
Nearly seven hundred operations had been performed in it during
the war. Nevertheless, as the young Colonel in charge said to me:
"The function of a Clearing Station is to clear. We keep the majority
of the cases only a few hours." Thence the horizontal forms pass
into (5) Ambulance Trains. But besides Ambulance trains there are
Ambulance barges, grand vessels flying the Union Jack and the
Red Cross, with lifts, electric light, and an operating-table. They are
towed by a tug to the coast through convenient canals.
You may catch the stream once more, and at its fullest, in (6) the
splendid hospitals at Boulogne. At Boulogne the hospital laundry
work is such that it has overpowered the town and has to be sent to
England. But even at Boulogne, where the most solid architecture,
expensively transformed, gives an air of utter permanency to the
hospitals, the watchword is still to clear, to pass the cases on. The
next stage (7) is the Hospital Ship, specially fitted out, waiting in the
harbour for its complement. When the horizontal forms leave the
ship they are in England; they are among us, and the great stream
divides into many streams, just as at the rail-head at the other end
the great stream of supply divides into many streams, and is lost.
Nor are men the only beings cared for. One of the strangest things I
saw at Boulogne was a horse-hospital, consisting of a meadow of
many acres. Those who imagine that horses are not used in
modern war should see the thousands of horses tethered in that
meadow. Many if not most of them were suffering from shell
wounds, and the sufferers were rather human. I saw a horse
operated on under chloroform. He refused to come to after the
operation was over, and as I left he was being encouraged to do so
by movements of the limbs to induce respiration. Impossible, after
that, to think of him as a mere horse!
But before I left the British lines I did manage to glimpse the British
Army, the mysterious sea into which fell and were swallowed up,
and from which trickled the hundreds of small runlets of wounded
that converged into the mighty stream of pain at Boulogne. I passed
by a number of wooden causeways over water-logged ground, and
each causeway had the name of some London street, and at last I
was stopped by a complicated wall of sandbags with many curves
and involutions. To "dig in" on this particular landscape is
impracticable, and hence the "trenches" are above ground and
sandbags are their walls. I looked through a periscope and saw
barbed wire and the German positions. I was told not to stand in
such-and-such a place because it was exposed. A long line of men
moved about at various jobs behind the rampart of sandbags; they
were cheerfully ready to shoot, but very few of them were actually in
the posture of shooting. A little further behind gay young men
seemed to be preparing food. Here and there were little reposing
places.
A mere line, almost matching the sand-bags in colour! All the
tremendous organisation in the rear had been brought into being
solely for the material sustenance, the direction, and the protection
of this line! The guns roared solely in its aid. For this line existed the
clearing stations and hospitals in France and in Britain. I dare say I
saw about a quarter of a mile of it. The Major in command of what I
saw accompanied me some distance along the causeways into
comparative safety. As we were parting he said:
"Well, what do you think of our 'trenches'?"
In my preoccupied taciturnity I had failed to realise that, interesting
as his "trenches" were to me, they must be far more interesting to
him, and that they ought to have formed the subject of conversation.
"Fine!" I said.
And I hope my monosyllabic sincerity satisfied him.
We shook hands, and he turned silently away to the everlasting peril
of his post. His retreating figure was rather pathetic to me. Looking
at it, I understood for the first time what war in truth is. But I soon
began to wonder anxiously whether our automobile would get safely
past a certain exposed spot on the high road.