THE FIRST IMPRESSION--A COUNTRY WITH EYES
_France, April, 1916._
Rich green meadows. Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges.
Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their
thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row
of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under
the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets--great bunches of
them--in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow
cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see the
flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside gathering
them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a farm at the
cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to run as yet,
totters across the road to her, laughing.
Only this morning, as we passed that same house, there was the low
whine of a shell, and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented
kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it. Then another and
another and another. We could see the white smoke of the shells floating
past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away. It
drifted slowly through the trees and then came another salvo. There were
some red roofs near--those of a neighbouring farm--but we could not see
whether they were firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or
at a working party if there were any; and I do not know now. As we came
back that way in the afternoon there was more shelling farther along.
The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in its direction for a
moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her.
Then they turned to the baby again.
Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages farther
on had mostly been battered and broken. There was a road running at a
little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered. There
was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings
there, all shattered, burnt and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of
desolation on the morning after a great city fire. Farther still was
open country again, where long communication trenches began to run
through the fields--but you could see none of this from where we stood.
Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had
looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk--snapped off short or
broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire.
Those distant trees would be growing over our firing line--or the
German.
It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of
its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost
every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few
yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of
powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here
you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which on
a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away
from the lines. The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy's
trenches, or your own--the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as
completely as if they did not exist.
[Illustration: "AN OCCASIONAL BROKEN TREE-TRUNK--SNAPPED OFF SHORT, OR
BROKEN DOWN AT A SHARP ANGLE, BY SHELL FIRE"]
[Illustration: NO MAN'S LAND The barrier which stretches from Belgium to
the Swiss border and which not the millions of Rockefeller could enable
him to cross]
But you realise, when you have been in that country for a little while,
that you have eyes upon you all the time--you are being watched as
you have never been watched in your life before. You move along the
country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home,
until, sooner or later, things happen which make you think suddenly and
think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the
usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows
when there is a sharp whiz and a crash, and a shrapnel shell from a
German seventy-seven (their field gun) bursts ten yards behind you. You
are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that a working
party is passing the corner frequently on some duty or another. You were
barely aware that there was a house near you.
Twenty-four hours later you hear that that house was levelled to the
ground next morning--a shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the
range--a high explosive into it to burst it up--and an incendiary shell
to burn the rubbish; and one more French family is homeless.
It takes you some time to realise that it was _you_ who burnt that
house--you and that working party which moved past the cross-roads so
often. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burst alongside that
hedge. Somebody must have been watching you all the time when you were
loitering with your map at that corner. Somebody, at any rate, must have
been marking down from the distance everything that happened at those
cross-roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the
while. And then for the first time you recall that those grey trees in
the distance must be behind the German lines; that distant roof and
chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; the
pretty blue hill against which the willows in the plain show out like a
row of railway sleepers is cut off from you by a barrier deeper than the
Atlantic--the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which
moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk, eyes are watching
for you all day long; telescopes are glaring at you; brains behind the
telescopes are patiently reconstructing, from every movement in our
roads or on our fields, the method of our life, studying us as a
naturalist watches his ants under a glass case.
Long before you get near the lines, away over the horizon before you,
there is floating what looks most like a flat white garden grub--small
because of its distance. Look to the south and to the north and you will
see at wide intervals others, one after the other until they fade into
the distance. Every fine day brings them out as regularly as the worms
rise after rain; they sit there all day long in the sky, each one
apparently drowsing over his own stretch of country. But they are
anything but drowsy. Each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain,
his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out
on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of
modern warfare--two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a
white insect very, very high--now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing
again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all
like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking any day.
But it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't _you_ who run the risk.
The observer is not there to drop bombs, in most cases, but to watch,
watch, watch. A motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some
work, extra traffic along a road--and a red tick goes down on a map;
that is all. You go away. But next day, or sometimes much sooner, that
red tick comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of
some German battery.
So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war
correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he
would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field
pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted
earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging,
reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape
put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner.