IN THE MUD OF LE BARQUE
_France, December 20th._
By the muddy, shell-pitted roadside of the sunken road in Le Barque,
behind the German lines, were found three shapeless forms. The mud
dripped from them as they lay, but they were the forms of men. And the
German soldiers who saw them, and who buried them, took it that they
were men who had not lost their lives from any shell wound; that they
had not been killed by the fire of our machine-guns, or by stray
bullets. They put down the death of those men to the mud and the mud
alone. The sunken road at Le Barque had been mashed with shells and
trampled to slime with traffic; some runner from battalion headquarters
at night, slipping through the sleet, some couple of men straggling
after the tail of an incoming platoon on a wild night when the English
barrage suddenly startled them and caused them to miss the path by a few
yards in the blackness, had stumbled unnoticed into a shell-hole. All
their company officer knew was that they were missing--and no trace of
them was found until three bodies were dragged from a shell crater, when
men told stories of men missed there before.
Now, I do not know if it really was the mud which engulfed alive the
three Germans who lay beside the sunken road of Le Barque; but I know
that their comrades thought it was. And that is a simple proof that the
mud, of which the Germans talk so much, is not all on the British side
of the trenches.
Looking from our lines yesterday across a valley one noticed a German
trench running up the farther side, the grey mud parapet heaped out,
like the earth of one long, continuous grave, on both sides of the
trench. Behind that trench, along its whole length, as far as we could
see, ran a sinuous thread of light-coloured soil. It was the beaten
track by which the Germans had moved up and down their trench. They
could not move _in_ the trench, so when they wanted to move they had to
hop up and move outside of it. If we were sniping by day they could not
move at all; and the track had probably been made by Germans moving at
night. It hugged the trench in case we started shooting or
shelling--when the Germans could at once jump back into the mud again.
The Germans in some parts of the Somme battlefield have been going down
with frostbite in great numbers, so great as to put at least one
battalion out of action. This is through getting feet wet and frozen in
muddy trenches. To reach their front line, last month, in these valleys
in front of Bapaume and Le Transloy, has been quite impossible to the
Germans unless they went up over the open, or used such trenches as a
self-respecting man could scarcely enter. They came up, as would any
other soldiers under the same circumstances, across the open land. Even
then there were places which a man could scarcely pass. I know a man
who, in that same sunken road at Le Barque, pulled two of his comrades
by force out of the mud--an everyday matter. They left their boots and
socks in the mud behind them.
If a man is wounded in some of those German trenches it takes eight men
to get him to the dressing station and five hours to arrive there, and
very much longer if there is any fighting in progress. One would not say
that any of these difficulties have been more acute amongst the Germans
than with the British and Australians--in some ways our men have faced
and overcome greater hardships than the Germans. But there is this chief
difference--the German is now getting back the shells which for two
years he rained upon the British. And he is talking--like a
German--about the unfairness of it.
The German Staff claims that German infantry is the best in the world.
Certainly it is tough, and thoroughly convinced that it is better than
any of its friends. "The Turk is a pretty good fighter," said a German
to me a few days ago, "and the Bulgars fight well. The Austrians are
worth little. Every time the Russians drive the Austrians back they have
to call us in to repulse the Russians again for them."
The German infantryman is tough, but not tougher than ours, and without
the dash; his outstanding virtue is his great power of work. But I do
not believe from what I have seen that he works one scrap harder than
the Australian. He might be supposed to have his heart more in the war
than the soldier of any other nation, but he certainly has not. Many
German soldiers have told me that there was a universal longing for the
war to end--but they seem to wonder at your asking them what they
think, or what their people in Germany think--as though it mattered one
straw. They tell you, in a detached sort of way, that a great many of
their people in Germany are tired of the war. "But they have no
influence on these matters," they say, "nor have the soldiers. We do not
meet together--we have nothing to say with it. They would go on with the
war all next year even if a million more men are killed--they will bring
back all the wounded, and the sick, if necessary."
The German who used those words seemed to have no quarrel with those who
were driving his country, and no pride in them--he did not approve and
he did not disapprove. He seemed to accept them as part of the
unquestioned, unchangeable laws of his existence; they were there--and
what business was it of his to interfere with them?
One can scarcely see a gleam of hope for them in the attitude of their
prisoners--a people that cannot rebel. But perhaps it is unfair to
judge.
For these men, whom we now see, have been at long, long last through the
fire of guns heavier than their own; and through the mud of Le Barque.