WHILE I am on the subject of unusual phases of modern warfare I should
like to include just one more thing in the list--and that thing is the
suddenness with which in France, and likewise in Belgium, one in
going forward passes out of an area of peacefulness into an area
of devastation and destruction. Almost invariably the transition is
accomplished with a startling abruptness. It is as though a mighty
finger had scored a line across the face of the land and said; “On this
side of the line life shall go on as it always has gone on. Here men
shall plough, and women shall weave, and children shall play, and the
ordinary affairs of mankind shall progress with the seasons. On that
side there shall be only death and the proofs of death and the promises
of yet more deaths. There the fields shall be given over to the raven
and the rat; the homes shall be blasted flat, the towns shall be razed
and the earth shall be made a charnelhouse and a lazar pit of all that is
foul and loathsome and abominable in the sight of God and man.”
For emphasis of this sharp contrast you have only to take a motor run up
out of a district as yet untouched by war into the scathed zone of past
or present combat. By preference I should elect for you that the trip
be made through a British sector, because the British have a way
of stamping their racial individuality upon an area that they
take over--they Anglicise it, so to speak. Besides, a tour through
British-held territory partakes of the nature of a flying visit to an
ethnological congress, seeing that nearly all the peoples who make up
the empire are likely to have representatives here present, engaged
in one capacity or another--and that adds interest and colour to the
picture.
Let us start, say, from a French market town on a market day. From far
away in the north, as we climb into our car with our soldier driver and
our officer escort, comes the faint hollow rumble of the great guns; but
that has been going on nearly four years now, and in the monotony of
it the people who live here have forgotten the threat that is in that
distant thundering. Pippin-cheeked women are driving in, perched upon
the high seats of two-wheeled hooded carts and bringing with them fowls
and garden truck. In the square before the church booths are being set
up for the sale of goods. Plump round-eyed children stand to watch us
go down the narrow street, which runs between close rows of wattled,
gable-ended stone or plaster cottages. Most of the little girls are
minding babies; practically all of the little boys wear black pinafores
belted in at their chubby waistlines, with soldier cap--always soldier
caps--on their heads, and they love to stiffen to attention and salute
the occupants of a military automobile.
There are but few men in sight, and these are old men or else they wear
uniforms. The houses are tidied and neat; the soil, every tillable inch
of it, is in a state of intensive and painstaking cultivation. On all
hands vineyards, orchards, pastures and grain fields are spread in
squares and parallelograms. The road is bordered on either side by tall
fine trees. Chickens, geese and turkeys scuttle away to safety from
before the onrushing car, and at the roadside goats and cattle and sheep
and sometimes swine are feeding. Each animal or each group of animals
has its attendant herder. Horses are tethered outside the hedges where
they may crop the free herbage. The landscape is fecund with life and
productivity.
It is a splendid road along which we course, wide and smooth and
well-kept, and for this the reason is presently made plain. Steam
rollers of British manufacture, with soldiers to steer them, constantly
roll back and forth over stretches where broken stone has been spread
by the repair gangs. These mending crews may be made up of
soldiers--French, British, Portuguese or Italians; and then again they
may be drafts of German prisoners or members of labour squads drawn from
far corners of the world where the British or the French flag flies.
Within an hour you will pass turbaned East Indians, Chinamen, Arabs,
Nubians, Ceylonese, Senegalese, Maoris, Afri-dis, Moroccans, Algerians.
Their head-dresses are likely to be their own; for the rest they wear
the uniforms of the nation that has enlisted or hired them.
Despite this polyglot commingling of types the British influence is upon
everything. Military guideposts bearing explicit directions in English
stand thick along the wayside, and in the windows of the shops are
cruder signs to show that the French proprietors make a specialty of
catering to the wants of Britishers. Here is one reading “Eggs and
Potato Chips”; there one advertising to whom it may concern, “Washing
Done Here.” “Post-cards and Souvenirs” is a common legend, and on the
fronts of old wine-shops a still commoner one is “Ale and Stout.” Rows
of beer bottles stand upon the window ledges, with platters of buns and
sandwiches flanking them. A “Wet and Dry Canteen” flies a diminutive
British flag from its peaky roof.
Evidences of British military activity multiply and re-multiply
themselves. Long trains of motor-trucks lumber by like great, grey
elephants each with a dusty Tommy for its mahout. A convoy of small, new
tanks go wallowing and bumping along bound frontward, and they suggest
a herd of behemoths on the move. Their drivers as likely as not
are Chinamen who presently will turn their unwieldy charges over to
soldier-crews. Officers clatter past on horse-back looking, all of them,
as though they had just escaped from the military outfitters; staff-cars
whiz through the slower traffic; troops bound for the baths or for the
trenches or for rest billets march stolidly up the road or down it as
the case may be. Omnibuses from London town, now converted to military
usage, are thick in the press. Military policemen are more numerous and
more set upon scrutinising your pass than they were a few miles back.
And civilians are fewer.
Alongside the highway, settlements of wooden or iron huts increase in
number and in proportions. Hospitals, headquarters of various units,
bath-houses, punishment compounds, motor stations, supply depots,
airdromes, ordnance repair plants, munition warehouses, Y. M. C. A.
huts, gas test stations, rest barracks, gasoline depots and all the rest
of it show themselves for what they are both by their shapes and by
the notice boards which mark them. Here is cluttered all the infinitely
complicated machinery of the war-making industry, with its accessories
and its adjuncts, its essentials and its incidentals, but so far there
is no actual evidence that the rude and disturbing hand of war has
actually been laid upon the land. Rather is it a spectacle to make you
think of a thousand circus days rolled into one, and mixed in with
all this, travelling caravans, gypsy encampments, Wild West shows,
horse-fairs, street carnivals and what not.
Of a sudden the picture changes. There are no civilians visible now,
no prisoners and no labour-battalions but only soldiers and not so many
soldiers either as you encountered just behind you in the intermediate
zone because as a general thing, the nearer you come to the actual
theatre of hostilities, the fewer soldiers in mass are you apt to see.
The soldiers may be near by but they are not to be found until you
search for them. They have taken cover in dug-outs and in trenches and
in remote billets hidden in handy, sheltered spots in the conformation
of the rolling landscape.
Now the vista stretching before you wears a bleak and untenanted look.
You notice that the shade trees have disappeared. Instead of living
trees there are only jagged stumps of trees or bare, shattered trunks
from which the limbs have been sheared away by shell-fire, and to which
the bark clings in scrofulous patches. Across the fields go winding,
brown bramble-patches of rusted barbed wire. The earth is depressed into
hollows and craters, or upthrown into ugly mounds and hillocks. In the
wasted and disfigured meadows rank weeds sprout upon the edges of the
ragged shellholes. The very earth seems to give off a sour and rancid
stink. There is a village ahead of you; it is a village without
roofs to its houses, or dwellers within its breached and tottering
walls. It is a jumbled nightmare of a ruin. It is as though a tornado
had blown a cluster of brick-kilns flat, and then an earthquake had
come along and jumbled the fragments into still greater and more utter
confusion.
Protruding from the flattened rubble about it, there uprears a crooked,
spindle-like pinnacle of tottering masonry. It may have been a corner
of the church wall or the town hall. Now it is like a beckoning finger
calling to heaven for vengeance. Upon it is set a notice-board to
advise you that you are now in the “Alert Zone,” which means your
gas-respirator must be snuggled up under your chin ready for use and
that your steel helmet must be worn upon your head and that you must
take such other precautions as may be required.
You ride on then at reduced speed along a camouflaged byway for
perhaps fifteen minutes. You come to where once upon a time, before
the jack-booted, spike-headed apostles of Kul-tur descended upon this
country, was another village standing. This village has been more
completely obliterated out of its former image--if such a thing is
possible--than its neighbour. It is little else than a red smear in the
greyish yellow desolation, where constant bombardment has reduced the
bricks of its houses to a powder and then has churned and pestled the
powder into the harried earth. There remains for proof of one-time
occupancy only the jagged lines of certain foundations and ugly mounds
of mingled soil and debris. Up from beneath one of these mess-heaps,
emerging like a troglodyte, from a hole which burrows downward to a
hidden cellar, there crawls forth a grimed soldier who warns you that
neither you nor your car may progress farther except at your dire risk,
since this is an outpost position and once you pass from your present
dubious shelter you will be in full view and easy target range of
Brother Boche. You have advanced to the very forward verge of the
battle-line and you didn't know it.
One rather dark night, travelling in an unlighted car, three of us were
trying to reach an American brigade headquarters where we expected to
sleep. Our particular destination was a hamlet in a forest just behind
and slightly east of the main defences of Verdun.
We must have taken the wrong turn at a crossroads, for after going some
distance along a rutted cart track through the woods we came to where
a deep ditch--at least it seemed to be a deep ditch--had been dug
right across the trail from side to side. By throwing on the brakes the
chauffeur succeeded in halting the car before its front wheels went
over and into the cut. We climbed out to investigate, and then we
became aware of an American sentry standing twenty feet beyond us in the
aforesaid ditch.
“We are correspondents,” said a spokesman among us, “and we are trying
to get to General So-and-So's headquarters. Can't we go any farther
along this road?”
Being an American this soldier had a sense of humour.
“Not unless you speak German, you can't,” he drawled. “The Heinies are
dead ahead of you, not two hundred yards from this here trench.”
Without once suspecting it we had ridden clear through a sector held by
us to the frontline defences alongside the beleaguered city of Verdun.
It's just one paradox after another, is the thing we call war.