AS IN THE WORLD'S DAWN
_France, December 20th._
Yesterday morning we were looking across a bare, shallow valley at the
opposite knuckle of hill-side, around the foot of which the valley
doubled back out of sight. A solitary grey line of broken earth ran like
a mole burrow up the bare knuckle and vanished over the top. A line of
bare, dead willow stumps marked a few yards of the hollow below. On the
skyline, beyond the valley's end, stood out a distant line of ghostly
trees--so faint and blue as to be scarcely distinguishable from the sky.
There was nothing else in the landscape--absolutely nothing but the
bare, blank shape of the land; save for those old ghosts of departed
willows--no trees--no grass--no colour--no living or moving or singing
or sounding thing.
Only--that morning at dawn had found a number of men tumbling, jumping,
running, dodging in and out of the shell-holes across that slope,
making towards our lines. The peck of occasional rifles came from some
farther part of the grey, featureless hill-side--the report was the only
trace of the rifles or of the men firing them. But as the men who were
dodging back were Australians the rifles must have been the rifles of
Germans, in trenches or shell-holes, somewhere on the face of that
waste. Who these Australians were, the men who watched from where we
stood did not know. Apparently they were men who had lost their way in
the dark and wandered beyond our trenches; as the light grew they had
suddenly realised that they were in front of our front line, and not
behind it, as they thought, and had come tumbling back over the craters.
They all reached the trench safely.
For this battle has now reached such a formless, featureless landscape,
that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own
country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The
stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans
abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front of
our lines, and contenting themselves with fighting a sort of rearguard
action there, while they tunnel, bore, dig, burrow like moles into the
farther heights where their reserve line runs near Bapaume. The battle
has widened out generally over the landscape.
It is a very great difference from that boiling, bursting nightmare of
Pozières, where the whole struggle tightened down to little more than
one narrow hill-top. This battle is now being fought in a sort of
dreamland of brown mudholes, which the blue northern mist turns to a
dull purple grey. The shape of the land is there, the hills, valleys,
lines of willow stumps, ends of broken telegraph poles. But the colour
is all gone. It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as
though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills,
and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you
suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the grass had
yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in
the slime which covered it; an old, old age before anything moved on the
earth or sang in the air, and when the naked bones of the earth lay bare
under the naked sky century after century, with no change or movement
save when the cloud shadows chased across it, or the storms lashed it,
or the evening sunlight glinted from the water trapped in its
meaningless hollows. It is to that unremembered chaos that German ideas
of life have reduced the world.
Up the hill-side opposite there is running a strange purple-grey streak
between two purple-grey banks. There is something mysterious in this
flat ribbon, ruled, as if by the hand of man, across that primeval
colourless slope. The line of it can be traced distinctly over the hill
and out of sight. It takes a moment's thinking to realise that the grey
streak was once a road. It is a road which one has read of as the centre
of some desultory fighting. I dare say it will appear in its own small
way in history. "The battalion next attacked along the Bapaume-Cambrai
road"--to give it a name it does not own; and readers will picture the
troops in khaki dodging along a hedge, beneath green, leafy elm
trees....
Something moved. Yes, as I live, something is moving up that old
purple-grey scar across the hill-side. Two figures in pink, untanned
leather waistcoats are strolling up the old road, side by side. Their
hands are in their trousers pockets, and the only sign of war visible
about them is their copper-green hats. A sniper's rifle pecks somewhere
in the landscape thereabout, but the two figures do not even turn a
head. They are Bill and Jim from South Melbourne let loose upon the
antediluvian landscape, strolling up it, yawning. And they gave me much
the same shock as if some green and pink animal had suddenly issued from
its unsuspected burrow in a field of primeval grey slime and begun
crawling over its face to some haunt in the slime elsewhere. Two other
distant figures were moving on the far hill-side too. Perhaps it was at
them the rifle was pecking; for to our certain knowledge the crest of
that hill was German territory.
Men lose their bearings in that sort of country every day. Germans find
themselves behind our lines without knowing that they have even passed
over their own; and an Australian carrying party has been known to
deposit its hot food, in the warm food containers, all ready steaming to
be eaten, in German territory. To their great credit be it said that the
party got back safely to the Australian trenches--save for one who is
missing and three who lie out there, face upwards.... Brave men.
There is only one time when that unearthly landscape returns to itself
again. I suppose men and women lived in those valleys once; French
farmers' girls tugged home at dusk up that ghostly roadway slow-footed,
reluctant cows; I dare say they even made love--French lads and
sweethearts--down some long obliterated path beside those willow stumps
where the German patrol sneaks nightly from shell-hole to shell-hole.
There comes an afternoon when the sky turns dull yellow-white like an
old smoker's beard, and before dusk the snowflakes begin to fall. Far
back the cursing drivers are dragging their jibbing horses past
half-frozen shell-holes, which they can scarcely see. And out there,
where the freezing sentries keep watch over the fringe where
civilisation grinds against the German--out there under the tender white
mantle, flickering pink and orange under the gun flashes--out there for
a few short hours the land which Kultur has defaced comes by its own.