THE ROAD TO LILLE
_France, April._
There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big
white letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township
for a hundred miles has that same signpost, showing you the way to the
great city of Northern France. But Rockefeller himself with all his
motor-cars could not follow its direction to-day. For the city to which
it points is six miles behind the German lines. You can get from our
lines the edge of some outlying suburb overlapping a distant hill-top.
And that is all that the French people can see of the second city of
their State. The distant roofs, the smoke rising from some great centre
of human activity nestled in a depression into which you cannot look;
you can peer at them all day long through a telescope and wonder why it
is they are stoking their chimneys, or what it is that causes the haze
to hang deeply on such and such a day over this or that corner--you can
study the place as an astronomer studies the faint markings upon the
surface of Mars. But to all intents and purposes that country is as much
cut off from you as is the farthest star.
For the war in which we are engaged means this--that you may travel from
any part of the world with the freedom of this twentieth century and all
its conveniences, until you come to the place where we are to-day. But,
when you come thus far, there is a line in front of you which no power
that has yet been produced in this world, from its creation to the
present day--not all the money nor all the invention--not all the
parliamentarians nor the philosophers--not all the socialism nor the
autocracy, the capital, nor the labour, the brain, nor the physical
power in the whole world has yet been able to pass. The German nation,
for reasons of its own, has put this line across another people's
country and made a fool of all the progress and civilisation on which we
relied so confidently up to a couple of years ago. I suppose it will all
grow unbelievable again some day--two hundred years hence they will
smile at such talk just as we did two years ago. But it will be as true
then as it is to-day--that a nation of officials and philosophers gone
mad has been able to place across the world a line which no man can at
present move.
I have seen that line at a fair number of places--since writing these
words, many miles away in my billet, working in the brick-floored
cottage bedroom by the light of an oil lamp, I have stepped to the door,
and there I can see it now, always flickering and flashing like faint
summer lightning under the clouds on the horizon. When you come to the
very limit--to the farthest point which you or any man on earth can
possibly reach by yourself--it is just a strip of green grass from
twenty to four hundred yards wide, straggling across France and Belgium
from the sea to the Swiss border. I suppose that French and English men
have sanctified every part of that narrow ribbon by dying there. But the
grass of those old paddocks grows unkempt like a shock head of hair. And
it has covered with a kindly mantle most of the terrible relics of the
past. A tuft, perhaps thicker than the rest, is all that marks where
last year lay a British soldier whose death represented the latest
effort of the world to cross the line the Germans laid.
You cannot even know what is going on in the country beyond that line.
You have to build up a science for deducing it from little signs, as a
naturalist might study the habits of a nest of ants. The Germans are
probably much more successful at that than we are.
It is strange to us that there are towns and cities over there only a
few miles away from us, and for a hundred miles back from that, of whose
life we know nothing except that they have been ravished and ruined by
the heavy hand of Prussian militarism. But, for the people who live
around us here, it is a tragedy of which I had not the least conception
until I actually saw it.
We had a cup of coffee the other day in the house of an old lady whose
husband had been called out two years ago, a few days after the war
began.
"All my own people are over there, monsieur," she said, nodding her head
towards the lines. "They were all living in the invaded country, and I
have not heard of them for eighteen months. I do not know whether they
are alive or dead. I only know that they are all ruined. They were
farmers, monsieur, comfortably off on a big farm. But consider the fines
that the Boches have put upon the country.
"The only thing we know, monsieur, it was from a cousin who was taken
prisoner by the Boches. You know we are allowed to write to the
prisoners, and they have the privilege to write to people in the invaded
country. So my family wrote to my cousin to ask news of my mother, who
was a very old woman. And after weeks and weeks the answer came
back--'Mother dead.'
"It was not so terrible that, monsieur, because my mother was old. But
then--he who was my dear friend," she always referred to her husband by
this term, "my dear friend used to write to us every day in those times.
He was fighting in Alsace, monsieur, and for his bravery he had been
promoted upon the field of battle to be an officer. He wrote every
single day to me and the children. We were always so united--never a
harsh word between us during all the years we were married--he was
always gentle and tender and affectionate--a good husband and father,
monsieur, and he sent the letter every day to my brother-in-law, who is
a soldier in Paris, and my brother-in-law sent it on to us.
"There came one day when he wrote to us saying that he was out behind
the trenches waiting for an attack which they were to make in two hours'
time. He had had his breakfast, and was smoking his pipe quite content.
There the letter ended, and for three days no letter came from my dear
friend. And then my brother-in-law wrote to his officer, and the answer
arrived--this, monsieur," she said, fumbling with shaking fingers in a
drawer where all her treasures were, and trying to hide her tears; and
handed me a folded piece of paper written on the battlefield.
It was from his captain, and it spoke of the death of as loyal and brave
a soldier as ever breathed. He was killed, the letter said, ten yards
from the enemy's trenches.
And it is so in every house that you go into in these villages. When the
billeting officer goes round to ask what rooms they have, it is
continually the same story. "Room, monsieur--yes, there is the room of
my son who was killed in Argonne--of my husband who was killed at
Verdun. He is killed, and my father and mother they are in the invaded
country, and I know nothing of them since the war."
[Illustration: ALONG THE ROAD TO LILLE]
But the road to the invaded country will be opened some day. These
people have not a doubt of it. If one thing has struck us more than any
other since we came to France, it is the spirit of the French. We came
here when the battle at Verdun was at its height; and yet from the
hour of landing I have not heard a single French man or woman that was
not utterly confident. There is a quiet resolution over this people at
present which makes a most impressive contrast to the jabber of the
world outside. Whatever may be the case with Paris, these country people
of France are one of the freshest and strongest nations on earth.
They are living their ordinary lives right up under the burst of the
German shells. Three of them were killed here the other day--three
children, playing about one minute at a street corner in front of their
own homes before Australian eyes, were lying dead there the next. Yet
the people are still there--it is their home, and why should they leave
it? An autocracy has no chance against a convinced, united, determined
democracy like this. More than anything I have seen it is this
surprising quiet resolution of the French which has made one confident
beyond a doubt that Frenchmen will pass some day again, by no man's
leave except their own, along the road to Lille.