THE DIFFERENCES
_France, April 25th._
The cottage door is open to the night. The soft air of a beautiful
evening following on a glorious day brushes past one into the room. As I
stand here the nightingale from a neighbouring garden is piping his
long, exquisite, repeated note till the air seems full of it. Far away
over the horizon is an incessant flicker like summer lightning, very
faint but quite continuous. Under the nightingale's note comes always a
dull grumble, throbbing and bumping occasionally, but seldom quite
ceasing. Someone is getting it heavily down there--it is not our
Australians; I think I know their direction.
It was just such a glorious day as this one has been, a year ago, when
this corps of untried soldiers suddenly rushed into the nightmare of a
desperate fight. At this moment of the night the rattle of rifle fire
was incessant all round the hills. Men were digging and firing and
digging in a dream which had continued since early dawn and had to
continue for two more days and nights before there was the first chance
of rest. They were old soldiers within twenty-four hours, as their
leader told them in an order which was circulated at the time. Only a
sprinkling of the men who were there are in the Anzac units to-day. But
they are the officers and the N.C.O.'s, and that means a great deal.
We have been here long enough now to discover the differences between
this front and the old fighting-line in Gallipoli. The rain has been
heavier in March than for thirty-five years, and April until yesterday
seemed almost as bad. The trenches are made passable by being floored
with a wooden pathway which runs on piles--underneath which is the
gutter of water and mud which is the real floor of the trench. Sometimes
the water rises in the communication trenches so that the boards float
or disappear, and if you happen to step into an interval between them
you may quite well sink to your waist in thin clay mud. The actual
firing trenches and the dug-outs there are mostly dry by comparison,
except where the accumulated task of draining them has been gaining on
some regiment which garrisons them, and the rear of the line is a morass
of foul-smelling clay.
This difficulty never really reached us in Gallipoli, though we might
possibly have found the trenches falling in upon us in the rains of
winter if we had stayed. The trenches in France are full of traces of
old dug-outs and mouldering sandbags, collapsed through rain in the dim
past before the timbering of all works was looked on as a necessity. In
Anzac we never had the timber for this, and one doubts if we ever could
have had it had we stayed. The soil there was dry and held well, and the
trenches were deep and very elaborate to a degree which one has not seen
approached in France. There may be some parts here where such trenches
are possible, and where they exist; but I have not seen them. It must be
remembered that in many places in France there are stretches of line
where it is impossible to dig a trench at all in winter, because you
meet water as soon as you scratch the surface; and therefore both our
line and the German are a breastwork built up instead of a trench dug
down. The curious thing is that in the trenches themselves you scarcely
realise the difference. Your outlook there is bounded in either case by
two muddy walls over which you cannot wisely put your head in the
daylight. The place may be a glorious green field, with flowers and
birds and little reedy pools, if you are two feet over the parapet.
But you see nothing from week-end to week-end except two muddy walls and
the damp, dark interior of a small dug-out. You see no more of the
country than you would in a city street. Trench life is always a city
life.
[Illustration: THE TRENCHES HERE HAVE TO BE BUILT ABOVE THE GROUND IN
BREASTWORK AND NOT DUG BELOW IT]
The trench routine is much the same as it was in Gallipoli, except that
in no part which I have seen is the tension anything like so great. At
Anzac you were hanging on to the edge of a valley by your finger-nails,
and had to steal every yard that you could in order to have room to
build up a second line, and if possible a third line beyond that. Here
both you and the enemy have scores of miles behind you, and two or three
hundred yards more or less makes no difference worth mentioning.
For this reason you would almost say that the German line in this
country was asleep compared with the line we used to know. A hundred and
fifty yards of green grass, with the skeleton that was once some old hay
wagon up-ended in the middle of it, and sky-blue water showing through
the grass blades in the depressions; a brown mud wall straggling along
the other side of the green--more or less parallel to your breastwork,
with white sandbags crowning it like an irregular coping; the
inevitable stumpy stakes and masses of rusted barbed wire in front. You
might watch it for an hour and the only sign of life you would see would
be a blue whiff of smoke from some black tin chimney stuck up behind it.
If you fire at the chimney probably it will be taken down. The other
day, chancing to look into a periscope, I happened for a moment to see
the top of a dark object moving along half hidden by the opposing
parapet. Some earth was being thrown up over the breastwork just there,
and probably the man had to step round the work which was going on. It
was the first and only time I have seen a German in his own lines.
The German here really snipes much more with his field gun than with his
rifle. He does use his rifle, too, and is a good shot, but slow. A spout
of dust on the parapet--and a periscope has been shattered in the
observer's hand within a few yards of us. But it is generally the German
field gun that does his real sniping for him, shooting at any small body
of men behind the lines. Half a dozen are quite enough to make a target,
if he sees them.
The Turks used to snipe us at times with their field guns and mountain
guns, but generally at certain fixed places--down near the mouth of the
Aghyl Dere, for example. The German snipes with them more generally.
There is no place that I have visited which can compare for perpetual
"unhealthiness" to Anzac Beach, but it is quite possible that such
places do exist.
The German gives you the impression of being a keener observer than the
Turk. The hills and trees behind his lines are really within view of you
over miles of your own country, though you scarcely realise it at first,
and they are full of eyes. Also every fine day brings out his balloons
like a crop of fat grubs--and also our own. In Gallipoli our ships had
the only balloons--the Turks had all the hill-tops.
The aeroplane here affords so big a part of the hourly spectacle of
warfare, and makes so great a difference in the obvious conditions of
the fight, that he deserves a letter to himself. But of all the
differences, by far the greatest is that our troops here have a
beautiful country and a civilised, enlightened population at the back of
them, which they are defending against the invading enemy whom they have
always hoped to meet. They are amongst a people like their own, living
in villages and cottages and paddocks not so different from those of
their own childhood. Right up into the very zone of the trenches there
are houses still inhabited by their owners. As we were entering a
communication trench a few days ago we noticed four or five British
soldiers walking across the open from a cottage. The officer with me
asked them what they were doing. "We've just been to the inn there,"
they said.
The people of that house were still living in it, with our trenches
wandering through their orchard.
In Gallipoli there were brigade headquarters in the actual fire
trenches. From the headquarters of the division or the corps you could
reach the line by ten minutes' hard walking, any time. It is a Sabbath
day's journey here--indeed, the only possible way of covering the longer
distances regularly is by motor-car or motor-cycle, and no one dreams of
using any other means. Nearly the whole army, except the troops in the
actual firing-line, lives in a country which is populated by its normal
inhabitants.
And--wherein lies the greatest change of all--the troops in the trenches
themselves can be brought back every few days into more or less normal
country, and have always the prospect before them at the end of a few
months of a stay in surroundings that are completely free from shell or
rifle fire, and within reach of village shops and the normal comforts
of civilisation. And throwing the weather and wet trenches and the rest
all in, that difference more than makes up for all of them.
"You see, a fellow must look after himself a bit," one of them said to
me the other day. "A man didn't take any care how he looked in
Gallipoli; but here with these young ladies about, you can't go around
like what we used to there."
Through one's mind there flashed well-remembered figures, mostly old
slouch hat and sunburnt muscle--the lightest uniform I can recollect was
an arrangement of a shirt secured by safety pins. Here they go more
carefully dressed than if they were on leave in Melbourne or Sydney.
Yesterday the country was _en fête_, the roads swarming with young and
old, and the fields with children picking flowers. The guns were bumping
a few miles away--mostly at aeroplanes. I went to the trenches with a
friend. Our last sight, as we came away from the region of them, was of
a group of French boys and girls and a few elders around a haystack; and
half a dozen big Australians, with rolled shirtsleeves, up on the
farming machinery helping them to do the work of the year.
That is _the_ difference.