_Paysages de Guerre_
I went early one morning with one of our men, by invitation of an
engineer whose acquaintance we had made, up to the part of the
Bois-le-Prêtre known as the Quart-en-Réserve. We started at three,
marching up with a party going up to identify and bury the dead. The
sites of all the trenches, fought over during the winter, were passed
on the way, and we went through several encampments where soldiers were
still sleeping, made of little log houses and dug-outs, such as the
most primitive men lived in. It was a gray morning, with a nip in the
air; the fresh scents of the earth and the young green were stained
with the smoke of the wood fires and the mixed smells of a camp. After
a spell of dry weather, the rough tracks we followed in our course
through the wood were passable enough; the deep ruts remaining and here
and there a piece of soft ground gave us some idea of the mud through
which the soldiers must have labored a few weeks before. And it is
by such tracks that the wounded are brought down from the trenches!
Small wonder that when the stretcher is laid down its occupant is
occasionally found to be dead. In about half an hour, nearing the top
of the hill which the Bois-le-Prêtre covers, we noticed a change both
in the scene and in the air. The leafage was thinner, and there was a
look, not very definable yet, of blight. The path we were following
sank deeper, and became a trench. For some hundreds of yards we walked
in single file, seeing nothing but the narrow ditch winding before us,
and bushes and trees overhead. With every step our boots grew heavier
with thick, sticky mud. And a faint perception of unpleasant smells
which had been with us for some minutes became a thing which had to be
fought against. Suddenly the walls of our trench ended, and in front
of us was an amazing confusion of smashed trees, piles of earth and
rock--as though some giant had passed that way, idly kicking up the
ground for his amusement. We climbed out of the remains of our trench
and looked round. One had read, in official reports of the war, of
situations being "prepared" by artillery for attack. We saw before us
what that preparation means. An enlarged photograph of the mountains
on the moon gives some idea of the appearance of shell-holes. Little
wonder that attacks are usually successful: the wonder is that any of
the defenders are left alive. The difficulty is to hold the position
when captured, for the enemy can and does turn the tables. Here lies
the whole of the slow torture of this war since the open fighting of
last year--a war of exhaustion which must already have cost, counting
all sides, more than a million lives. The scene we looked round upon
might be fittingly described by the Biblical words "abomination of
desolation." Down in the woods we had come through, the trees were
lovely with spring, and early wild flowers peeped prettily from between
the rocks. Here it was still winter--a monstrous winter where the winds
were gunpowder and the rain bullets. Trees were stripped of their
smaller branches, of their bark: there was scarcely a leaf. And before
us lay the dead. One of the horrible features in this war, in which
there is no armistice, and the Red Cross is fired upon as a matter of
course, is that it is often impossible to bury the dead till long after
they are fallen. Only when a disputed piece of ground has at last been
captured, and the enemy is driven well back, can burial take place. It
is then that companies of men are sent out to pick up and identify. Of
all the tasks forced upon men by war, this must be the worst. Enough
to say that the bodies, which were laid in rows on the ground awaiting
their turn to rest in the sweetness of the earth, were those of men
who fought close on two months before. I pass over the details of this
awful spectacle, leaving only two things: one of a ghastly incongruity,
the other very moving. Out of a pocket of a _cadavre_ near to me I
saw protruding a common picture post-card, a thing of tinsel, strange
possession for one passed into the ages. And between two bodies, a
poppy startlingly vivid, making yet blacker the blackened shapes before
us....