WHEN the last preceding chapter of mine ended I had reached a point
in the narrative where our little party of four, travelling in our own
little tin flivverette, were just leaving Blérincourt, being bound still
farther west and aiming, if our abiding luck held out, to reach the
front of the Front--which, I may add, we did.
To be exact we were leaving not one Blérincourt but three. First,
Blérincourt, the town, with its huddle of villagers' homes, housing
at this moment only French troopers and exhausted refugees; second,
Blérincourt, the castle, a mouldering relic of a great house, testifying
by its massive empty walls and its tottering ruin of a gateway to the
fury which laid hold on the peasants of these parts in the days of the
Terror; and, third, Blérincourt, the model colony of model cottages,
which for us held the most personal interest, since it was here the
American women of the American Fund for French Wounded had during
the previous nine months centred their activities relating to the
repopulating of districts in the Aisne country, now for the second time
evacuated and given over again to the savage malice of the boche.
Behind us as we swung into the main highway lay this grouped composition
of the wrecked château, the tiny old houses of weathered grey stone and
the little frame domiciles, smart and glistening with fresh paint and
fresh varnishing. Before us, within a space of time and distance to be
spanned by not more than half an hour of steady riding, was somewhere
the problematical doorway through which we hoped to pass into the
forward lines of that battle which the historians of the future, I dare
say, will call merely the Great Battle, knowing their readers require no
added phraseology to distinguish it from the lesser engagements of this
war--or in fact of any war.
We did not ask our way of any whom we met, either of those going ahead
of us or those coming back in counter streams. To begin with, we deemed
it inexpedient to halt long enough to give to any person in authority a
chance for questioning the validity of our present mission, since, as I
already have explained, we carried no passes qualifying us to traverse
this area; and besides there was no need to ask. The route was marked
for us by signs and sounds without number, plainer than any mileposts
could have been: By the columns of Frenchmen hurrying up to reenforce
the decimated British who until now, at odds of one to five, had borne
the buffets of the tremendous German onslaught; by the never-ending,
never-slackening roar of the heavy guns; by the cloud of dust and
powder, forming a wall against two sides of the horizon, which mounted
upward to mingle its hazes with the hazes of the soft spring afternoon;
by the thin trickling lines of light casualty cases, “walking wounded,”
in the vernacular of the Medical Corps--meaning by that men who, having
had first-aid bandages applied to their hurts at forward casualty
stations, were tramping rearward to find accommodations for themselves
at field hospitals miles away.
At once we were in a maze of traffic to be likened to the conditions
commonly prevalent on lower Fifth Avenue in the height of the
Christmas-shopping season, but with two distinctions: Here on this
chalk-white highroad the movement, nearly all of it, was in one
direction; and instead of omnibuses, delivery vans, carriages and
private automobiles, this vast caravansary was made up of soldiers
afoot, soldiers mounted and soldiers riding; of batteries, horse drawn
and motor drawn; of pontoon bridges in segments; of wagon trains,
baggage trains, provision trains and munition trains; of field
telephone, field telegraph and field wireless outfits upon wheels; of
all the transportable impedimenta and all the myriad items of movable
machinery pertaining to the largest army that has crossed a corner of
France since the days of the first great invasion more than three and a
half years before.
There were ambulances past counting; there were big covered camions in
numbers sufficient to fit out a thousand circuses; there were horses and
donkeys and mules of all the known sizes and colours; there were so many
human shapes in uniforms of horizon blue that the eye grew weary and
the brain rebelled at the task of trying, even approximately, to compute
estimates of the total strength of the man power here focussed.
Through all this, weaving in and out, our impudent little black bug of
a car scuttled along, with its puny horn honking a constant and insolent
demand for clear passage. At a faster gait than anything in sight except
the cruising aëroplanes above, we progressed upon our way, with none to
halt us and none to turn us back. Where the dust hung especially thick
at a crossroads set in the midst of the wide plain we almost struck
three pedestrians who seemingly did not heed our hooted warning or take
notice of it until we were right upon them. As they jumped nimbly
for the ditch we could see that all these had staff markings at their
throats, and that one, the eldest of the three, a stoutish gentleman
with a short grizzled beard, wore three stars in a triangle upon his
collar. Tin Lizzie had almost achieved the distinction for herself of
having run down a major general of France.
We did not stop, though, to offer apologies or explanations. With rare
sagacity our driver threw her wide open and darted into the fog, to take
temporary shelter behind a huge supply wagon, which vehicle we followed
for a while after the fashion of a new-foaled colt trailing its dam.
Proofs began to multiply that we were nearing the zone of live combat.
Until now the only British soldiers we had seen were slightly wounded
men bound afoot for the rear. All at once we found ourselves passing
half a company of khaki-clad Britishers who travelled across a field
over a course parallel to the one we were taking and who disappeared in
a hazel copse beyond. Rifle firing could be heard somewhere on the far
side of the thicket. At a barked command from an officer who clattered
up on horseback a battery of those doughty little seventy-fives, which
the French cherish so highly, and with such just cause, was leaving the
road and taking station in a green meadow where the timid little wild
flowers of a mild March showed purple and yellow in the rutted and
trampled grass.
With marvellous haste the thing was accomplished almost instantly. The
first gun of the five squatted in the field with its nozzle slanting
toward the northwest, and behind it its four companions stood, all with
their short noses pointing at precisely the same angle, like bird dogs
on a back stand. Suddenly they did what well-broken bird dogs never
do--they barked, one after the other. Almost before the whining whistle
of the shells had died away the gunners were moving their pieces to a
point closer up behind a screen of poplars and sending a second yelping
salvo of shots toward an unseen target.
We became aware that the component units of the army were now quitting
the roadway to take positions in the back lines. Indeed those back lines
formed themselves while we watched. One battery after another swung off
to the right or to the left and came into alignment, so that soon we
rode between double rows of halted guns. With our canes we could have
touched the artillerymen piling heaps of projectiles in convenient
hollows in the earth close up to the edges of the road. Big covered
wains discharged dusty infantrymen, who, pausing only long enough to
unbuckle their packs from their shoulders and throw them under the
hoods of the wagons, went at a shambling half-trot through the meadow.
Cavalrymen, not dismounted, as they had mainly been during these
dragging winter months of warfare that was stationary and static, but
with their booted feet once more in their stirrups, cantered off, bound
presumably for the thin woodlands which rimmed the plateau where the
terrain broke away to the banks of the River Oise.
Here again at last was war in the open, as different from battle in the
trenches as football is from trap shooting. The action of it was spread
out before one's eyes, not masked in mud ambuscades. Each instant our
eyes beheld some new and stirring picture, standing out by reason of its
swift vigour from the vaster panorama of which it was a part. What I had
seen of battle formations in the preceding three weeks had made me think
mainly of subway diggin's or of construction work for a new railroad or
of engineering operations in connection with a dam, say, or a dike. What
I saw now most vividly suggested old-time battle pictures by Meissonier
or Détaillé. War, for the moment at least, had gone back to the aspect
which marked it before both sides dug themselves in to play the game of
counterblasting with artillery and nibbling the foe's toes with raids
and small forays.
Of another thing we were likewise aware, and the realisation of the fact
cheered us mightily. Among the blue uniforms of the French the greenish
buff of the British showed in patches of contrasting colour that
steadily increased in size and frequency. By rare good luck we had
entered the advanced positions at the identical place for which,
blindly, we had been seeking--the place where the most westerly sector
of the French left wing touched the most easterly sector of the British
right wing; and better than that, the place where the French strength
hurrying up to reënforce and if need be replace decimated divisions of
their allies was joined on to and fused in with the retiring British
Army, which, during the preceding three days, had sustained the main
force of the German offensive. It was here if anywhere that we could
count with the best prospects of success upon boring straight through to
the Front, the reason being that the French might assume the British had
given us passage and the British might assume the French had let us by.
There were perhaps three more miles of brisk travelling for us, during
which I am sure that I saw more than ever I have seen in any three miles
that ever I traversed in my life; and at the end of that stretch we
could tell that we had well-nigh outrun the forward crest of the French
ground swell and had come into the narrower backwash of the British
retreat. A retreat of sorts it may have been, but a rout it most
assuredly was not. We saw companies reduced to the strength of ten
or twelve or twenty men under command of noncommissioned officers or
possibly of a single lieutenant. We saw individual privates and we
saw privates in squads of two or three or half a dozen men, who in the
terrific fighting had become separated from a command, which possibly
had been scattered but which it was more likely had been practically
wiped out. Such men were not stragglers, nor were they malingerers; they
were survivors, atoms flung backward out of the raging inferno which had
swallowed up whole regiments and whole brigades.
And we took note that every single man of these broken and decimated
detachments was in good humour, though dog tired; and that every single
one of them had kept his accoutrements and his rifle; and that every
single one of them, whether moving under orders or acting upon his own
initiative, was intent upon just two things and two things only--to get
back into the maelstrom from which temporarily he had been spewed forth,
and pump more lead into the living tidal wave of grey coats. Some that
we overtook were singing, and singing lustily too. Than this no man
could ask to see a finer spectacle of fortitude, of pluck and of
discipline, and I am sure that in his heart each one of us, while having
no doubt of the outcome of the fiery test, prayed that our own soldiers,
when their time of trial by battle came, might under reverses and under
punishment acquit themselves as well as had these British veterans,
Yorkshire and Bedfordshire and Canada, who came trudging along behind
us, swallowing our dust. What impressed us as most significant of all
was that only once that day did we see a scrap of personal equipment
that had been cast aside. This was a cartridge belt of English make,
with its pouches empty and its tough leather tom almost in two, lying
like a broken-backed brown snake in a ditch.
Already from wounded English soldiers and from exhausted English
hospital workers whom we had seen back in Soissons we comprehended a
measure of appreciation of what these battered fragments of the forces
had been called upon to endure during four days and five nights. We knew
as surely as though we had stopped to take down the story of each one
of the wearied, cheerful, resolute chaps, that they had their fill of
killing the enemy and of seeing their mates about them blown to bits
by high explosives or mowed down by rifle fire. I recalled what a
bedraggled young surgeon, a Highlander by his accent, had said the night
before:
“I crave never to pass through this experience again. I have seen so
much of death since this battle started that I have in me now contempt
not only for death but for life too. I thought last year on the Somme
I saw real fighting. Man, it was but child's play to what I saw the day
before yesterday!
“From the casualty dressing post where I was on duty I could see the
fighting spread out before me like a cinema show. For our shelter--we
were in a concrete dugout--was in the side of a hill with a wide sweep
of lowland below and beyond us, and it was here in this valley that the
Germans came at our people. Between jobs in the operating theatre--and
God knows we had enough of them--I would slip out for a breath of air,
and then I could watch through my glasses what went on.
“In wave after wave the Germans came on, marching close together in
numbers incredible. They were like ants; they were like flies; like
swarming grasshoppers. At first they tried a frontal attack against our
trenches, but even the Germans, driven on as they must have been like
cattle to the slaughter, couldn't stand what they got there. Within two
hours they charged three times! Each time they fell back again, and
each time they left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the
ground seemed as though it were covered with a grey carpet.
“That happened in the first day of their drive against our part of the
line, which was the third line back, the two front lines having already
been taken by them. So on the next day, which was the day before
yesterday, they worked their way round to the south a bit and tried a
flanking advance. Then it was I saw this, just as I'm telling it to you.
I saw them caught by our machine-gun fire and piled up, heap on heap,
until there was a windrow of them before the British trenches that must
have been six feet high.
“They went back, but they came again and again, and they kept on coming.
They climbed right over that wall of their own dead--I myself watched
them scrambling up among the bodies--and they slid down on the other
side and ran right into the wire entanglements, where those of them that
were killed hung in the wires like garments drying on a line. They died
there in such numbers that they fairly clogged the wires. And still they
kept on coming.
“When our line began to bend in, farther away to the west, we got orders
to evacuate the station; and the men in the trenches where I had seen
the fighting got orders--what were left of them--to fall back too.
They were Scotchmen, these laddies, and they were fairly mad with the
fighting. They didn't want to go, and they refused to go. I'm told by
reliable witnesses that their officers had almost to use force against
them--not to make them keep on fighting but to make them quit fighting.”
He looked into the coals of the wood fire and shivered.
“Man, it's not war any more; it's just plain slaughter. Mark my
word--there'll never be another war such as this one has been or another
battle such as the one that still goes on yonder. 'Tis not in flesh and
blood to endure its repetition once the hate has been cooled by a taste
of peace.”
The men about us for the most part must have taken part as actors in
scenes such as the young surgeon had described as an onlooker. But about
them there was no sign of reluctance or of surcease. We realised as
thoroughly as though we had been eyewitnesses to their conduct that they
had carried on like brave men; and without being told we realised, too,
that they were made of the stuff which keeps carrying on as long as
there is life left in it. They were of the breed of the bulldog, and
clean strain, at that.
Frenchmen grew fewer in number along the route we travelled; Britishers
became more and more numerous. Where byways crossed the highroad and in
wrecked villages the British already had posted military policemen to
guide the traffic and point out the proper directions to bodies of
men passing through. Those men stood in midroad giving their orders as
calmly and as crisply as though they had been bobbies on the Strand.
Even this emergency John Bull's military system did not disintegrate. As
long as the organism lasted the organisation would last too. Nowhere
was there any suggestion of confusion or conflict of will. I am prone
to think that in the years to come the chief outstanding fact about
the great spring offensive of 1918 will be not the way the Germans came
forward but the way in which the British fell back.
Until now we had seen only British foot soldiers, and once or twice
officers in motor cars or on horseback; but soon we came upon a battery
of British light artillery. It was jolting across muddy pasture among
the stumps of apple trees which the Germans with malignant thoroughness
had felled before their big retreat of twelve months before. The
place had been an orchard once. Now it was merely so much waste land,
dedicated to uselessness by efficiency and kultur. The trees, as we
could see, had not been blown down by shell fire or hewn down with axes.
They had been neatly and painstakingly sawed through, clear down to the
earth. Some of the butts measured a foot and a half across, and to have
bolls of this size, fruit trees in this country must have attained great
age.
The battery took position and went into immediate action behind a covert
of willows and scrub at the far side of the ruined orchard. At the
moment we did not know that the thicket was a screen along the southern
bank of the Oise. At the left of where the guns were speaking was a
group of empty and shattered cottages stretching along a single narrow
street that ran almost due north and south. Coming opposite the foot of
this street we glimpsed at the other end of it a glint of running water,
and in the same instant, perhaps two or three miles away farther on
across the river, we made out the twin spires of the cathedral of Noyon,
for which, as we know, the contending armies had striven for forty-eight
hours, and which the evening before had fallen into the enemy's hands.
Literally we were at the front of the Front.
East of the clustered houses of the city a green hill rose above the
tree tops. Across the flanks of this hill we saw grey-blue clumps
moving. At that distance the sight was suggestive of a crawling mass
of larvæ. Over it puffs of smoke, white for shrapnel and black for
explosives, were bursting. We were too far away to observe the effect
of this shelling, but knew that the crawling grey blanket meant Germans
advancing in force down into the valley of the river, and we knew, too,
that they were being punished by Allied guns as they came on to take up
their new position.