ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY
I
THE MAKING OF NO MAN'S LAND
MARCH 21
For several days now I have been going with our advancing troops into
towns, villages, and country abandoned by the enemy in his retreat. It
has been a strange adventure, fantastic as a dream, yet with the tragedy
of reality. The fantasy is in crossing over No Man's Land into the
German lines, getting through his wire, and passing through trenches
inhabited by his soldiers until a day or two ago, travelling over roads
and fields down which his guns and transport went, and going into
streets and houses in which there are signs of his recent occupation. He
has ruined all his roads, opening vast craters in them, and broken all
his bridges, but our men have been wonderfully quick in making a way
over these gaps, and this morning I motored over the German trenches at
Roye, zigzagging over this maze of ditches and dug-outs by bridges of
planks before getting to the roads behind his line.
After passing the area of shell-fire on our side and his, the field of
shell-craters, the smashed barns and houses and churches, the tattered
tree-trunks, the wide belts of barbed wire, one comes to country where
grass grows again, and where the fields are smooth and rolling, and
where the woods will be clothed with foliage when spring comes to the
world again--country strange and beautiful to a man like myself, who has
been wandering through all the filth and frightfulness of the Somme
battlefields. German sentry-boxes still stand at the cross-roads. German
notice-boards stare at one from cottage walls, or where the villages
begin. Thousands of coils of barbed wire lie about in heaps, for the
enemy relied a great deal upon this means of defence, and in many places
are piles of shells which he has not removed. Gun-pits and machine-gun
emplacements, screens to hide his roads from view, observation-posts
built in tall trees, remain as signs of his military life a mile or two
back from his front lines, but behind the trenches are the towns and
villages in which he had his rest billets, and it is in these places
that one sees the spirit and temper of the men whom we are fighting. The
enemy has spared nothing on the way of his retreat. He has destroyed
every village in his abandonment with a systematic and detailed
destruction. Not only in Bapaume and in Peronne has he blown up, or
burnt, all the houses which were untouched by shell-fire, but in scores
of villages he has laid waste the cottages of the peasants, and all
their farms and all their orchards. At Rethonvillers this morning, to
name only one village out of many, I saw how each house was marked with
a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was
used to mark the work of the Devil.
In Bapaume and Peronne, in Roye and Nesle and Liancourt, and all these
places over a wide area, German soldiers not only blew out the fronts of
houses, but with picks and axes smashed mirrors and furniture and
picture-frames. As a friend of mine said, a cheap-jack would not give
fourpence for anything left in Peronne, and that is true, also, of
Bapaume. There is nothing but filth in those two towns; family portraits
have been kicked into the gutters. I saw a picture of three children in
Bapaume, and it was smeared with filth in the writing of a dirty word.
The black bonnets of old women who once lived in those houses lie about
the rubbish-heaps, and by some strange, pitiful freak are almost the
only signs left of the inhabitants who lived here before the Germans
wrecked their houses. The enemy has left nothing that would be good for
dwelling or for food. Into the wells he has pitched filth so that the
people may not drink.
But that is not the greatest tragedy I have seen. The ruins of houses
are bad to see when done deliberately, even when shell-fire has spared
them in the war zone. But worse than that is the ruin of women and
children and living flesh. I saw that ruin to-day in Roye and Nesle. I
was at first rejoiced to see how the first inhabitants were liberated
after being so long in hostile lines. I approached them with a queer
sense of excitement, eager to speak with them, but instantly when I saw
those women and children in the streets, and staring at me out of
windows, I was struck with a chill of horror. The women's faces were
dead faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory of great
agonies. The children were white and thin--so thin that their
cheek-bones protruded. Hunger and fear had been with them too long.
The Mayor of Nesle told me that after the first entry of the Germans on
August 29, 1914, and after the first brutalities, the soldiers had
behaved well, generally speaking. They were well disciplined, and lived
on good terms with the people, as far as possible. Probably he tells the
truth fairly, and I believe him. But the women with whom I spoke were
passionate and hysterical, and told me other stories. I believe them
too. Because these women, who are French, had to live with the men who
were killing their husbands and brothers, and that is a great horror.
They had to submit to the daily moods of men who were sometimes sulky
and sometimes drunk. The officers were often drunk. They had to see
their children go hungry, for though the Germans gave them potatoes,
sometimes they took away the hens, so that there were no eggs, and the
cows, so that there was no milk, and the children suffered and were
thin. On October 5, 1914, the Kaiser came to Nesle with an escort of
five motor-cars, and the soldiers lined the square and cheered him; but
the women and children stared and were silent, and hated those
white-haired men with the spiked hats. During the battles of the Somme
many wounded passed through the town, and others came with awful stories
of slaughter and fierce words against the English. Once twenty men of
the 173rd Regiment came in. They were half mad, weeping and cursing, and
said they were the sole survivors of their regiment.
Then, quite recently, there came the rumour of a German retreat. On
Thursday, March 15, the German commandant sent for the Mayor and
announced the news. He gave orders for all the inhabitants to leave
their houses at 6.30, and to assemble in the streets, while certain
houses and streets indicated were to be destroyed. The German
commandant, whose name was Herwaardt, said he greatly regretted this
necessity. The work was to be carried out by his Oberleutnant Baarth.
The people wept at the destruction of their homes, though the houses in
the centre of Nesle were spared. But they were comforted by the promise
of liberation. For a week previously the enemy had been withdrawing his
stores. The garrison consisted of about 800 to 1000 men of the 38th
Regiment of Chasseurs and Cyclists. The gunners were the last to leave,
and went away at midnight with the rear-guard of infantry. By half-past
seven in the morning there was not a German soldier left in Nesle, and
at half-past nine a British patrol entered, and the women and children
surrounded our men, laughing and weeping. To-day they were being fed by
British soldiers, and were waiting round the field-kitchens with wistful
eyes.
II
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
MARCH 23
On both sides cavalry patrols are scouting in the woods and villages,
and for a few days at least the situation has been extraordinarily like
those early days of the war in October of 1914, when our cavalry was
operating in Flanders, feeling forward cautiously to test the enemy's
strength. For the first time since those days German Uhlans have again
been seen on the Western Front. They have been seen moving about the
woods and on the skyline.
Little parties of them are in hiding behind the broken walls of villages
destroyed in the German retreat. Now and again they bump into our
advanced posts and then bolt away, not seeking a fight. These are the
manoeuvres of open warfare not seen on our Front since the trenches
closed us in. Our cavalry patrols are working in the same way. Yesterday
one of them encountered some of the enemy on the road to St.-Quentin and
very close to that town, where fires are still burning. Our mounted men
were suddenly called to a halt by a sharp fusillade of rifle and
machine-gun bullets. The enemy this time was unmounted and entrenched,
and after reconnoitring this position our patrol galloped back.
It is difficult to know always the exact whereabouts of the enemy's
advanced posts, as they were scattered about the countryside without any
definite trench line, so that officers of corps and divisional staffs
who are going out to examine the lie of the land, with a secret hope of
finding an adventure on the way, are taking out revolvers, which have
long been idle. I found a young staff officer to-day fastening his
holster to his belt before starting out on his morning's expedition, and
he slapped it and laughed, and said, "I haven't done this for over two
years. It is quite like old times." It brings back reminiscences to me
also of old days, when with two comrades I moved about the roads of war
ignorant of the enemy's position and narrowly escaping his
advance-guards. But, after all, it is no joke, and I should hate to get
into the middle of an enemy patrol somewhere in this country of burnt
and abandoned villages, through which I have been wandering with tired
eyes in the sight of all this destruction, so wanton, so brutal, and so
ruthless.
For the enemy has adopted the letter of the law in that code of cruelty
which governs war, and I can think of nothing more damnable than the
horror which came to some hundreds of poor souls, mostly women and
children and old stricken men in the village of Rouy-le-Petit above the
Somme.
Many of them had been driven into this hamlet from neighbouring
villages, which the Germans set on fire. Huddled in the streets of Rouy,
they saw the smoke and flames rising from their homesteads, and they
were terrorized and crushed. Presently the last German rear-guard went
out from Rouy, not cheering and singing as they came in August of 1914,
but silent and grim, conscience-stricken also, it seemed, so the French
people have told me, because of the law which made them do the things
they had done. They had been friendly with the villagers before they
smashed their houses, and had been good to the children before breaking
their bedsteads and making them homeless. They said again and again in
self-excuse, "It is war; it is the order of our high officers! We are
bound to do it."
The German guns rumbled through the street of Rouy, and went away with
gunners and cyclists and infantry. Night came, and all the noise of
distant artillery died down, and there was hardly the sound of a shot
over all the country where for nearly three years there has been the
ceaseless fire of artillery. Early next morning a British patrol entered
the village, and the people crowded round, clasping the soldiers' hands
and thanking God for deliverance, and telling of their hunger, which was
near starving-point. Then the worst happened. Suddenly shells began to
fall over the village, crashing through the roofs and flinging up the
ground in the roadway. They were German shells fired by the German
gunners who had left only a few hours before. They were not meant to
kill the civilians who had been gathered at Rouy, all the women and
children and old, weak men. They were meant to kill the British patrols,
and so were lawful as an act of war. But one could not be done without
the other, and there were civilians who were wounded in Rouy-le-Petit
that day. Weeping and wailing, they rushed down into the cellars and
took refuge there, while flights of shells followed and tore holes in
rooms and walls, and filled the village with smoke and splinters. And
that is the lawfulness of war and the horror of war.
When the enemy left he blew up all the cross-roads and made many
mine-craters along the way of his retreat. They have scarcely checked us
at all, and a tribute of praise is due to our infantry and our labour
battalions, who have been repairing those roads with quick, untiring
industry. To-day I have met with much traffic of war, French as well as
British traffic, the men in blue marching by the men in brown through
country where both armies meet. The French soldiers were marching with
their bands and colours through the ruined villages, and I never saw
more splendid men even in the early days of the war, when the great
armies of France went forward with a kind of religious passion and flung
back the Germans from the Marne. Our own men had no bands and no
colours. There was not the same sense of drama as they passed, but these
clean-shaven boys of ours, hardened by foul weather, by frost, and
rain-storms, and blizzard, go forward into the great waste, which the
enemy had left behind him, in their usual matter-of-fact way, whistling
a tune or two, passing a whimsical word along the line, settling down to
any old job that comes in a day's work, and finding as much comfort as
they can at the end of a long day's march on the lee side of a
shell-broken wall.
III
THE ABANDONED COUNTRY
MARCH 24
After long days of tiring adventure in the wake of the German
rear-guards, following through places only just evacuated, and tramping
through the great ruin they have left behind them, I have tried to give
some idea of the tragic drama of it all, the uncanny quietude of the
abandoned country, the frightful wreckage of towns and villages
destroyed, not by shell-fire, but by picks and axes and firebrands, the
deep mine-craters blown under roads, the broken bridges across the
Somme, the crowds of starved civilians surrounding our patrols in market
squares where they had been herded while their homes were in flames
around them, the little bodies of British troops advancing through
barbed-wire entanglements into fortress positions like Bapaume and
Peronne, and our cavalry patrols feeling their way forward into unknown
country where the enemy's rear-guards are in hiding.
That, in a few lines, is the historical picture of this strange new
phase of warfare in which we have been pushing forward during the past
two weeks. But through it all, to me, an onlooker of these things, there
has been one special theme of interest. It is the revelation of the
German way of life behind his lines--these abundant lines--his military
methods of defence and observation and organization, and the domestic
arrangements by which he has tried to make himself comfortable in the
field of war. Along every step of the way by which he has retreated
there are relics which show us exactly how our enemies lived and fought
when they were hidden from us across No Man's Land, and their philosophy
of life in war. All that is worth a little study.
Everywhere--outside Bapaume and Peronne and Chaulnes, and all those
deserted places near the front lines--one ugly thing stares one in the
face: German barbed wire. It is heavier, stronger stuff than ours or the
French, with great cross-pieces of iron, and he has used amazing
quantities of it in deep wide belts in three lines of defence before his
trench systems, and in all sorts of odd places, by bridges and roads and
villages even far behind the trenches, to prevent any sudden rush of
hostile infantry or to tear our cavalry to pieces should we break his
lines and get through. His trenches were deeply dug, and along the whole
line from which he has now retreated they are provided with great
concreted and timbered dug-outs leading into an elaborate system of
tunnelled galleries perfectly proof from shell-fire, and similar to
those which I have described often enough in the Somme battlefields. As
a builder of dug-outs the German soldier has no equal. But in addition
to these trench systems he made behind his lines a series of strong
posts cunningly concealed and commanding a wide field of fire with
dominating observation over our side of the country.
I found such a place quite by accident yesterday. My car broke down by a
little wood near Roye looking across to Damery and Bouchoir, and the
woody, wired fields which till a week ago were No Man's Land. When I
strolled into the wood I suddenly looked down an enormous sand-pit
covering an acre or so, and saw that it was a concealed fortress of
extraordinary strength and organization--an underground citadel for a
garrison of at least 3000 men perfectly screened by the wood above. Into
the sand-banks on every side of the vast pit were built hundreds of
chambers leading deeper down into a maze of tunnels which ran right
round the central arena. Before leaving the enemy had busied himself
with an elaborate packing up, and had taken away most of his movable
property, but the "fixtures" still remained, and a litter of mattresses
stuffed with shavings, empty wine-bottles, candles which had burnt down
on the last night in the old home, old socks and old boots and old
clothes no longer good for active service, and just the usual relics
which people leave behind when they change houses.
The officers' quarters were all timbered and panelled and papered, with
glass windows and fancy curtains. They were furnished with bedsteads
looted from French houses, and with mirrors, cabinets, washhand-stands,
marble-top tables, and easy chairs. The cross-beams of the roofs were
painted with allegorical devices and with legends such as "Gott mitt
uns," "Furchtlos und treu," "In Treue fest."
Each room had an enamelled or iron stove, so that the place must have
been snug and warm, and I noticed in several of them empty cages from
which singing birds had flown when German officers opened the doors
before their own flitting.
The men's quarters were hardly less comfortable, and the whole place was
organized as a self-contained garrison, with carpenters' shops and
blacksmiths' sheds, and a quartermaster's stores still crowded with
bombs and aerial torpedoes--thousands of them, which the enemy had left
behind in his hurry--and kitchens with great stoves and boilers, and a
Red Cross establishment for first aid, and concrete bath-houses with
shower-baths and cigar-racks for officers, who smoke before and after
bathing. Outside the artillery officers' headquarters was a board
painted in white letters, with the following couplet:
Schnell und gut ist unser Schuss
Deutscher Artilleristen Gruss.
(Quick and good is our shooting
Of the German gunners' greeting.)
Shell-craters in the open arena showed the French gunners had returned
the greeting, and that the garrison of this citadel had done well to
arrange their life mainly as a subterranean existence. But at times when
the French guns were quiet and when the French sun was shining they had
built alfresco corners with garden seats and tables, round which
enormous stacks of wine-bottles were littered, showing, as I have seen
in all these abandoned places, the enormous quantity of drink consumed
by German officers in their lighter moments.
This citadel in the wood is only one out of similar strong points all
along the lines now abandoned by the enemy. Peronne, with
Mont-St.-Quentin on its flank, and with the Somme winding around it, and
with forests of barbed wire in the marshes below it, could be called
impregnable if any place may defy great armies. It was wonderfully
fortified with great industry and great skill for over two years, and
walking into these places now, marvelling at their strength, I can only
ask one question, which certainly the enemy will find it hard to answer.
Why has he abandoned such formidable strongholds? It seems to me that
there is only one answer. It is because they had to go and not because
they wanted to go. It was because they have no longer the strength to
hold their old line against the growing gun-power and the growing
man-power of the British Armies, and have been compelled to attempt a
new strategy which will save their reserves and shorten their line.
Behind the lines the German officers and men lived comfortably in French
billets, and organized amusements for battalions in rest. At Bapaume
they had a little theatre with painted scenery. Two of the wings were
among the few things left in the rubbish-heaps of that poor destroyed
town, burnt and sacked by the Germans before they left, and when I went
in there with our troops some Australian soldiers propped them up
against the walls of a gutted house and inscribed upon them in white
chalk the name "Maison de la Co-ee," inviting their comrades to walk up
and see the finest show on earth. In Nesle the Germans turned the Cafe
de Commerce into their casino, and played military bands, whose music
did not cheer the hearts of wan women whose children were starving.
Strange fellows! Who knows what to make of them? The French people just
liberated from their rule, which was a reign of terror in the severity
of its official regulations, contradict themselves in expressing their
white-hot hatred of the German character and their liking for the
individual soldiers who were quartered on them.
"They were kind to the children ... but they burnt our
houses."--"Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away.... But
he helped to smash up the neighbours' furniture with an axe."--"The
lieutenant was a good fellow ... but he carried out the orders of
destruction."
A woman told me, with a quivering rage in her voice, that a German
officer rode his horse into her room one day. Another woman showed me
the cut down her hand and arm which she had received from a German
soldier who tried to force his way into her house at night. Other
stories have been told me by women white with passion.... Yet it is
clear that, on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined
way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and
all that was in them.
IV
THE CURE OF VOYENNES
MARCH 25
In the village of Voyennes, not far from Ham, and one of the few hamlets
not utterly destroyed, because the people of the district were herded
here while their own houses were being burnt, I went into the ruins of
the church. It was easy to see how the flames had licked about its old
stones, scorching them red, and how the high oak roof had come blazing
down before the walls and pillars had given way. Everything had been
licked down by flame except one figure on an encalcined fragment of
wall. Only one hand of the Christ there had been burned, and the body
hanging on the Cross was unscathed, like so many of those Calvaries
which I have seen in shell-fired places.
But this place had not been touched by shell-fire, for it had been far
beyond the range of French or British guns; it had been destroyed
wilfully. The village around had been spared because of the large number
of people driven into it from the neighbouring countryside, and when I
called upon the priest who lives opposite the ruin of the church, where
he served God and the people of his little parish, I heard the story of
its burning.
It was a queer thing to me to sit to-day in that room of the French
presbytery talking to the old Cure. Just a week before, on Sunday, at
the very hour of my visit, which was at midday, that old church outside
the window had become a blazing torch, and this priest, who loved it,
had wept tears as hot as its flames, and in his heart was the fire of a
great agony. He sat before me, a tall old man of the aristocratic type,
with a finely chiselled face, but thin and gaunt, and as sallow as
though he had been raised from the dead. If I could put down his words
as he spoke them to me with passion in his clear, vivid French, with
gestures of those transparent hands which gave a deeper meaning to his
words, it would be a great story, revealing the agony of the French
people behind the German lines. For the story of this village of
Voyennes is just that of all the villages on the enemy's side of the
barbed wire.
Here in a few little streets about an old church were the bodily
suffering, the spiritual torture, the patient courage, the fight against
despair, the brooding but hidden fears, which have been the life over a
great tract of France since August 1914. "For a year," said M. le Cure
Caron, "my people here have had not a morsel of meat and not a drop of
wine, and only bad water in which the Germans put their filth. They gave
us bread which was disgusting, and bad haricots and potatoes, and
potatoes and haricots, and not enough even, so that the children became
wan and the women weak. The American people sent us some food-stuffs,
but the Germans took the best of them, and in any case we were always
hungry. But those things do not matter, those physical things. It was
the suffering of the spirit that mattered, and, monsieur, we suffered
mentally so much that it almost destroyed our intelligence, it almost
made us silly, so that even now we can hardly think or reason, for you
will understand what it meant to us French people. We were slaves after
the Germans came in and settled down upon us, and said, 'We are at home;
all here is ours.' They ordered our men to work, and punished them with
prison for any slight fault. They were the masters of our women, they
put our young girls among their soldiers, they set themselves out
deliberately at first to crush our spirit, to beat us by terror, to
subdue us to their will by an iron rule. They failed, and they were
astonished. 'We cannot understand you people,' they said; 'you are so
proud, your women are so proud.' And that was true, sir. Some women, not
worthy of the name of French women, were weak--it was inevitable,
alas!--but for the most part they raised their heads and said, 'We are
French, we will never give in to you, not after one year, nor two years,
nor three years, nor four years.'
"The Germans asked constantly, 'When do you think the war will
end?' We answered, 'Perhaps in five years, but in the end we will
smash you,' and this made them very angry, so our people went about
with their heads up, scornful, refusing to complain against any
severity or any hardship.
"Secretly among ourselves it was different. We could get no news
for months except lies. We knew nothing of what was happening.
Starvation crept closer upon us. We were surrounded by the fires of
hell. As you see, we are in the outer section of the great Somme
battle line, and very close to it. For fifty hours at a time the
roar of guns swept round us week after week, and month after month,
and the sky blazed around us. We were afraid of the temper of the
German officers after the defeat on the Marne, and after the
battles of the Somme Germany was like a wounded tiger, fierce,
desperate, cruel. Secretly, though our people kept brave faces,
they feared what would happen if the Germans were forced to
retreat. At last that happened, and after all we had endured the
days of terror were hard to bear. From all the villages around, one
by one, people were driven out, young women and men as old as sixty
were taken away to work for Germany, and an orderly destruction
began, which ended with the cutting down of our orchards and ruin
everywhere. The Commandant before that was a good man and a
gentleman, afraid of God and his conscience. He said, 'I do not
approve of these things. The world will have a right to call us
barbarians.' He asked for forgiveness because he had to obey
orders, and I gave it him. An order came to take away all the bells
of the churches and all the metalwork. I had already put my church
bells in a loft, and I showed them to him, and said, 'There they
are.' He was very sorry. This man was the only good German officer
I have met, and it was because he had been fifteen years in America
and had married an American wife and escaped from the spell of his
country's philosophy. Then he went away. Last Sunday, a week ago,
at this very hour when the people were all in their houses under
strict orders, and already the country was on fire with burning
villages, a group of soldiers came outside there with cans of
petroleum, which they put into the church. Then they set fire to
it, and watched my church burn in a great bonfire. At this very
hour a week ago I watched it burn.... That night the Germans went
away through Voyennes, and early in the morning, up in my attic,
looking through a pair of glasses I saw four horsemen ride in. They
were English soldiers, and our people rushed out to them. Soon
afterwards came some Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the Colonel gave me
the news of the outer world to which we now belong after our years
of isolation and misery. Our agony had ended.... The Germans know
they were beaten, monsieur; a Commandant of Ham said, 'We are
lost.' After the battles of the Somme the men groaned and wept when
they were sent off to the Front. 'God,' they cried, 'the horror of
the French and English gun-fire; O Christ, save us!' During the
battles of the Somme the wounded poured back, a thousand or more a
day, and Ham was one great hospital of bleeding flesh. The German
soldiers have bad food and not enough of it, and their people are
starving as we starved. The German officers behaved to their men
with their usual brutality. I have seen them beat the soldiers
about the head while those men stood at attention, not daring to
say a word, but as soon as the officers are out of the way, the men
say, 'We will cut those fellows' throats after the war. We have
been deceived! After the war we will make them pay.'"
So the Cure talked to me, and I have only given a few of his words, but
what I have given is enough.
V
THE CHATEAU OF LIANCOURT
MARCH 28
Day by day our soldiers push farther forward across the country which
the Germans have laid waste, so that even when peace comes there will be
no dwelling-places where there were once fine chateaux of France, and
thriving little towns and hamlets clustering about old farmsteads, and
great barns; nor any orchards, where for miles there was white blossom
in the Aprils of many centuries, and ruddy fruit in all the autumns of
the past.
These men of ours take all this desolation in a matter-of-fact way, as
they take everything in this war, and pass almost without thought scenes
more than usually fantastic in piled ruins, and it is only by some such
phrase or two as "Did you ever see the like?" or "They've made a pretty
mess of that!" that they express their astonishment in this wide belt of
death which the enemy has left along his tracks. Secretly I think some
of them are stirred with a sense of the sinister drama of it all, and
are a little staggered by a ruthlessness of war beyond even their own
earlier experience, which covers the battle of the Somme. All this is
something new, something which seems unnecessary, something more
devilish, and our men go poking about among the burnt houses and into
the German underground defences searching among the rubbish and
examining the relics of the old life there, as though to discover the
secret of the men who have gone away, the secret of "Old Fritz" their
enemy.
Sometimes they find messages written to them by the enemy in good
English, but with dark meanings. In one German dug-out the other day an
officer of ours found a note scribbled on the table.
"We are going away, Tommy dear, and leave some empty bottles of
Rhein wine. It is the best wine in the world. Take care it is not
the best for you."
"When are they coming?" was another note. "Enlist at once, Tommy my
boy."
But those things do not explain. It is difficult to find any clue to the
character of these German soldiers, who have left behind them proofs of
wonderful labour and skill, and proofs of great sentiment and religious
piety, and proofs of an ordered cruelty worse than anything seen in
France since barbarous days. How can one explain?
Yesterday I went to a village called Liancourt. There is a big chateau
there. Even now at a little distance it seems a place of old romance,
with a strong, round tower and high peaked roofs, and great wings of
dark old brick. In such a place Henri IV lived. It was centuries old
when the Revolution made its heraldic shields meaningless, but until a
year or two ago its walls were still hung with tapestries, and its halls
were filled with Empire furniture, and its great vaulted cellars with
wine. When the Germans came they made it a hospital for their
wounded--their Red Cross is still painted on one of the sloping
roofs--and though it was far behind their lines, surrounded it with
barbed wire which is now red with rust, and built enormous dug-outs in
its grounds in case French guns should ever come near. When the Germans
went a few days ago they left but an empty shell. They stripped the
walls of panelling and tapestry, they took all the clocks and pictures
and furniture and carpets, and I wandered yesterday through scores of
rooms empty of everything so that my footsteps echoed in them. The
Chateau of Liancourt had been looted from attic to cellar. But quite
close to the chateau the Germans have left the bodies of many of their
soldiers, as all over this country, by roadsides and in fields, there
are the graves of German dead. Here there was one of their cemeteries,
strongly walled with heavy blocks of stone, each grave with its big
wooden headpiece, with a stone chapel built for the burial service, and
with a "Denkmal," or monument, in the centre of all these dead. It was a
memorial put up by Hessian troops in July 1915 to the honour of men
taken on the field of honour.
In this graveyard one sees the deep respect paid by the Germans to the
dead--French dead as well as German dead.... But just a hundred yards
away is another graveyard. It is the cemetery of the little church in
the grounds of the chateau, and is full of vaults and tombs where lay
the dust of French citizens, men, women, and children, who died before
the horror of this war.
The vaults had been opened by pickaxes. The tombstones were split across
and graves exposed. Into these little houses of the dead--a young girl
had lain in one of them--rubbish had been flung. From one vault the
coffin had been taken away.... The church had been a little gem, with a
tall, pointed spire. Not by shell-fire, but by an explosive charge
placed there the day before the Germans went away the spire had been
flung down and one end of the church blown clean away. The face of its
clock lay upon the rubbish-heap. The sanctuary had been opened and the
reliquaries smashed. The statues of the saints had been overturned, and
the vestments of the priest trampled and torn.
* * * * *
I went into the village of Cremery not far away. Here also the graves
had been opened in the churchyard, and in the church the relics of
saints had been looted--a queer kind of loot for German homes--and in
the sacristy fine old books of prayer and music lay tattered on the
floor.
* * * * *
I went again yesterday to the great area of destroyed villages which the
enemy left behind him on his retreat to St.-Quentin, and from Holnon
Wood, which our cavalry were the first to enter a few weeks ago, looked
across the open country between our outposts and that old city whose
cathedral rises as a grey mass above the last ridge, so near and so
clear when the sunlight falls upon it that our men can see the tracery
of the windows. It still stands unbroken and beautiful, though houses
have been destroyed around it to clear the enemy's field of fire.
German officers use its towers as observation-posts, and can see every
movement of our men in the fields below.
"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young officer,
smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall in a heap of
ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off-chance of hitting some
one, and you never can tell where they are likely to drop."
Some of them came whirring across to the Holnon Wood and down into the
village of Francilly as I stood looking across to Savy Wood, but not
close enough to hurt any one. It is the queerest thing to be in this
part of our Front. Go a little too far down a road, mistake one village
for another--and it is quite easy, for they all look alike in ruin--and
if you are an absent-minded man you can get into the enemy's lines
without realizing your danger. Yesterday only occasional shell-bursts
and short spasms of machine-gun fire from the edge of Savy Wood came to
prove that here masses of men are watching out to kill each other.
Pigeons cooed in the woods. The ground at my feet was spangled with
anemones, and the sunlight chased shadows across the fields of spring
below the city, where soon the streets may be noisy with battle. Our
men, living amidst ruin this side of St.-Quentin, have settled down to
this life of open warfare as though they had known nothing else. Whether
the tragedy of it all sinks into them I do not know, but they whistle
music-hall tunes in the vast rubbish-heaps which were once old chateaux
of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient crypts among the
coffins of French aristocrats who died before, or just a little after,
the French Revolution, and find shelter from wind and rain in poor
little sacristies filled with statues of saints adjoining churches
wrecked by explosive charges before the German soldiers went their way.
One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all this
countryside, as when yesterday I came across a Highlander playing his
pipes in a wild and merry way on an avalanche of old red bricks which
once formed part of the mansion of Caulaincourt, with many terraces
lined with white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and
mutilated among the great rubbish-heaps.
By the roadside on my way I saw some English soldiers resting, and close
to them was a marble tablet stuck up in a heap of earth. I read the
words carved on the stone, and it told me that here was the heart of
Anne-Josephine Barandier, Marquise de Caulaincourt, who died in Paris on
January 17, 1830.
Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In a vault near by all the
tablets of her family had been smashed, and the coffins laid bare, but
there was no little niche to show where the lady's heart had been.
Outside in the churchyard there was a great tomb to the memory of the
French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next to them the graves of German
soldiers killed in this war, and a wooden cross to Second Lieutenant
Nixon, of the Royal Flying Corps, killed here behind the German lines on
July 19, 1915.
VI
THE OLD WOMEN OF TINCOURT
MARCH 29
One scene on the roadside of war will remain sharp in my memory among
all these scenes in the wilderness which the Germans have made behind
them, through which I have been passing. It is because of the courage of
old women who sat there on the way.
It was beyond Peronne, and through the open country where our cavalry
patrols are working, and in the village of Tincourt. Up beyond
Lagnicourt the guns yesterday were firing heavily, and sharp gusts of
wind blew forward the noise of a greater and farther bombardment, deep
and low. Quite close, the village of Roisel, taken by our troops the day
before, was still smouldering, and all around for miles was the long
black trail of war with hundreds of villages and farmsteads laid low by
fire and dynamite before the Germans left them in retreat. But in
Tincourt only the outer streets and the neighbouring, separate buildings
had been destroyed. The main part of the village was still standing,
though the enemy had shelled it a little the day before. When I came
into it I saw that it was one of the few places left by the Germans,
because it was a concentration camp of civilians driven in from other
villages while they were being smashed.
The people were gathered about the roadway, about two hundred of them,
sitting or standing among piles of bundles, like refugees in the old
days of the war. There were many old, old women among them in black
dresses and bonnets, and a group of young girls, of fifteen or so, and
small boys and children in arms. They were looking down the road
anxiously, and I found that they were waiting for British lorries and
ambulances to take them away to safer country, beyond the reach of
German shell-fire. They were people who had just been liberated from
hostile rule. The grey tide of the German army had swept back from them,
and they found themselves once again free people of France, with news of
France, and of the world on the other side of the trenches and the wire
which for two years and a half had shut them in with the enemy.
I spoke with the old women, these brave old grandmothers who were
sitting homeless and houseless on their bundles in the midst of a ruined
countryside, within reach of the guns. They were not weeping but
smiling. They were not afraid but scornful of the perils through which
they had passed.
They were thin because they had stinted for their grandchildren, and
they had suffered great misery, but they held their old grey heads high,
and said, "For our sons' sake we endured all things."
They are the grandmothers of the babes who know nothing of all this war,
and one day will be told, and the mothers of men who have fought and
died, and who fight and die with supreme self-sacrifice in the shambles
of this war. They are women worthy of hero sons, themselves heroic. They
were not passionate against the enemy, only contemptuous of him, and of
his rule of them. They liked some of the German soldiers and made no
accusations of individual brutality, but cursed the spirit which had
laid waste their villages, and destroyed their houses and orchards, and
taken away their young girls and all men to the age of fifty. They spoke
with the dispassionate eloquence of people who have been in earthquakes
and shipwrecks and tornadoes. German cruelty was natural, inevitable,
and unarguable, and the soldiers who had done these things were the
slaves of the fate which ordained their acts.
"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther back," said one
old lady. "They burnt my house and my neighbours' houses and drove
us forward. Roisel was all in flames when we passed through. The
fires came out of the houses, and the heat of them scorched us.
Then we came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The little
ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and full of terror.
"You will understand that it is hard to see one's village
destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to know
what is to happen next. For us old women it was not so bad. We are
too old to weep, having wept too much. We thought of our sons who
have died for France. We showed our scorn for the enemy by hiding
our fear."
"They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They ask always
for peace. They are afraid of the punishment which God holds in
store for them for all this wickedness."
"Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be punished. What we
have suffered they will suffer. All this"--she thrust up a skinny
hand towards the ruined land behind her--"must be paid for."
"It is William who will pay," said another old woman, "with his
head."
It was like the talk of the Greek Fates, the three old women who held
the thread and spun the thread and snipped the thread--this talk of the
old women of Tincourt, so passionless, so hard, so fair, so certain. But
I marvelled at their courage, sitting there on their bundles, after
tramping away from their blazing homesteads, waiting for British lorries
to take them away from a place which, even then, was registered by
German guns, with the young girls, and the babies who were born under
hostile rule.
VII
THE AGONY OF WAR
MARCH 31
I am moved to write again of the old men and women and of the young
women and children who have been liberated by our advance, because I
have just been among these people again, seeing their tears, hearing
their pitiful tales, touched by hands which plucked my sleeve so that I
should listen to another story of outrage and misery.
All they told me, and all I have seen, builds up into a great tragedy.
These young girls, who wept before me, shaken by the terror of their
remembrance, these old brave men, who cried like children, these old
women who did not weep but spoke with strange, smiling eyes as to life's
great ironies, revealed to me in a fuller way the enormous agony of life
behind the German lines now shifted back a little so that these people
have escaped. It is an agony which includes the German soldiers,
themselves enslaved, wretched, disillusionized men, under the great doom
which has killed so many of their brothers, ordered to do the things
many of them loathe to do, brutal by order even when they have gentle
instincts, doing kind things by stealth, afraid of punishment for
charity, stricken both by fear and hunger.
"Why do you go?" they were asked by one of the women who have been
speaking to me.
"Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," they answered.
"The English gun-fire smashed us to death on the Somme. The
officers know we cannot stand that horror a second time."
They spoke as men horribly afraid.
"I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulaincourt," said an
elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me a coronet on the
badge. "When the Germans came first to our village they seized all
the tools, and all the farm-carts, and all the harvesting, and then
they forced us all to work for them, the men at three sous an hour,
the women at two sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to
work. From the chateau they sent back the tapestries, the pictures,
and anything which pleased this Commandant or that, until there was
nothing left. Then in the last days they burnt the chateau to the
ground and all the village and all the orchards."
"It was the same always," said a woman. "There were processions of
carts covered with linen, and underneath the linen was the
furniture stolen from good houses."
"Fourteen days ago," said an old man who had tears in his eyes as
he spoke, "I passed the night in the cemetery of Vraignes. There
were one thousand and fifteen of us people from neighbouring
villages, some in the church and some in the cemetery. They
searched us there and took all our money. Some of the women were
stripped and searched. In the cemetery it was a cold night and
dark, but all around the sky was flaming with the fire of our
villages--Poeuilly, Bouvincourt, Marteville, Trefcon, Monchy,
Bernes, Hancourt, and many more. The people with me wept and cried
out loud to see their dear places burning and all this hell.
Terrible explosions came to our ears. There were mines everywhere
under the roads. Then Vraignes was set on fire and burnt around us,
and we were stricken with a great terror. Next day the English came
when the last Uhlans had left. 'The English!' we shouted, and ran
forward to meet them, stumbling, with outstretched hands. Soon
shells began to fall in Vraignes. The enemy was firing upon us, and
some of the shells fell very close to a barn quite full of women
and children. 'Come away,' said your English soldiers, and we fled
farther."
Russian prisoners were brought to work behind the lines, and some French
prisoners. They were so badly fed that they were too weak to work.
"Poor devils!" said a young Frenchwoman. "It made my heart ache to see
them."
She watched a French prisoner one day through her window. He was so
faint that he staggered and dropped his pick. A German sentry knocked
him down with a violent blow on the ear. The young Frenchwoman opened
the window, and the blood rushed to her head.
"Sale bete!" she cried to the German sentry.
He spoke French and understood, and came under the window.
"'Sale bete'? ... For those words you shall go to prison, madame."
She repeated the words, and called him a monster, and at last the man
spoke in a shamed way and said:
"Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre. C'est cruelle, la guerre!"
This man had kinder comrades. Pitying the Russian prisoners, they gave
them stealthily a little brandy and cigarettes, and some who were caught
did two hours' extra drill each day for a fortnight.
"My three sisters were taken away when the Germans left," said a young
girl. She spoke her sisters' names, Yvonne, Juliette, and Madeleine,
and said they were eighteen and twenty-two and twenty-seven, and then,
turning away from me, wept very bitterly.
"They are my daughters," said a middle-aged woman. "When they were taken
away I went a little mad. My pretty girls! And all our neighbours'
daughters have gone, up from sixteen years of age, and all the men-folk
up to fifty. They have gone to slavery, and for the girls it is a great
peril. How can they escape?"
How can one write of these things? For the women it was always worst.
Many of them had surpassing courage, but some were weak and some were
bad. The bad women preyed on the others in a way so vile that it seems
incredible. There was no distinction of class or sex in the forced
labour of the harvest-fields, and delicate women of good families were
forced to labour on the soil with girls strong and used to this toil.
There were many who died of weakness and pneumonia and under-feeding.
"Are you not afraid of being called barbarians for ever?" asked a woman
of a German officer who had not been brutal, but, like others, had tried
to soften the hardships of the people.
"Madame," he said very gravely, "we act under the orders of people
greater than ourselves, and we are bound to obey, because otherwise we
should be shot. But we hate the cruelty of war, and we hate those who
have made it. One day we will make them pay for the vile things we have
had to do."
What strange little dramas, what tragic stories I have heard in these
recent days! I have told the tale of one old priest. Here is the tale of
another, as he told it to me in the midst of ruin.
He is the Abbe Barbe, of Muille, near Ham. In the neighbourhood was an
enemy, too, a Frenchman, who was once a Christian brother, and now,
unfrocked, a drunkard and a debauchee. He accused the abbe of having a
telephone in his cellar from which he sent messages to Paris about
German military secrets. One night there came a bang at the door of the
abbe's study. Five soldiers entered with fixed bayonets and arrested the
old priest. He was taken to the fortress of Ham and put into a dark cell
with one small iron grating and a plank bed. Here he was interrogated by
a German officer, who told him of the grave accusation against him.
"Search my cellars," said the abbe. "If there is a telephone there,
shoot me as a spy. If not, set me free, after your court martial."
There was no court martial. After four days in the darkness the abbe was
taken away by German soldiers and set down, not at Muille, but at
Voyennes, ten kilometres or so away, and forbidden to go back to his
village or his church. He went back a few days ago, when the Germans
left. When he went into his house he found that it had been sacked. All
the rare old books in his library had been burnt. There was nothing left
to him.
"Sir," said a sister of charity, "these people whom you see here were
brave but tortured in spirit and in body. Beyond the German lines they
have lived in continual fear and servitude. The tales which they have
told us must make the good God weep at the wickedness of his creatures.
There will be a special place in hell, perhaps, for the Emperor William
and his gang of bandits."
She spoke the words as a pious aspiration, this little pale woman with
meek and kindly eyes, in her nun's dress.
VIII
CAVALRY IN ACTION
APRIL 2
Our troops have advanced since yesterday on to a line of high ground
overlooking St.-Quentin and sweeping in a curve round the wood of
Holnon, which is the last strong point between us and the trenches
immediately before the cathedral city. This morning our outposts were in
Bihucourt and Villecholles, and advancing to Maissemy, thereby holding
all the roads except one on the western side of the Hindenburg-Siegfried
line between Peronne and St.-Quentin. Our enemy is shelling the villages
from which he has lately retired with long-range guns, and we are now
drawing very close to his new line of trenches and fixed positions.
Northwards of Peronne and east of Bapaume our troops have taken
Doignies, above the forest of Havrincourt, and hold Neuville and
Ruyaulcourt to the south of it, so that this great wood is encircled
like that of Holnon; and the enemy must escape quickly from the shelter
of the trees or be trapped there.
Northwards again, above Bapaume, we have made to-day a heavy and
successful attack south-east of Croisilles, where a few days ago there
was sharp fighting and several German counter-attacks, because the
position threatens that sector of the Hindenburg line which is
immediately behind the village striking down at an angle south-eastwards
in front of Queant, from which we are three miles distant. Two small
villages below Croisilles, named Longatte and Ecoust-St.-Mien, have also
fallen to us.
Our attack to-day was preceded by great gun-fire, and the enemy has
defended himself with desperate courage, acting upon Hindenburg's orders
that the position must be held at all costs. We have brought back over a
hundred prisoners, and have inflicted great losses upon the garrison.
One of the most interesting and extraordinary features in all the
fighting east of Bapaume has been the work of our cavalry squadrons in
reconnaissance and attack. I confess that, after two and a half years of
trench warfare, I was utterly sceptical of the value of mounted troops,
in spite of the little stunt (as they called it) south of High Wood,
after we took the Bazentins and Longueval in July of last year, when the
Royal Dragoons and Deccan Horse rode out and brought back prisoners.
Conditions have changed since then by a great transformation scene,
owing to the enemy's abandonment of his old fortress positions on the
Somme under our frightful onslaught of gun-fire. The country into which
we have now gone is beyond the great wide belt of shell-craters, which
made the battlefields of the Somme a wild quagmire of deep pits and
ponds. The roads between the ruined villages are wonderfully smooth and
good where they have not been mined, and the fields are as nature and
French husbandry left them after last year's harvest. Then there has
been a glorious absence of heavy shell-fire while the enemy has been
drawing back his guns to emplacements behind the Hindenburg line; and
this to cavalry, as well as to infantry, makes all the difference
between heaven and hell. So the cavalry has had its chance again after
the old far-off days when they rode up the Mont des Cats and chased
Uhlans through Meteren, and scouted along the Messines Ridge in the
autumn of 1914.
There have been no great sensational episodes, no shock of lance against
lance in dense masses, no cutting up of rear-guards nor slashing into a
routed army, but there has been a great deal of good scouting work
during the past three weeks. Eight villages have been taken by the
Canadian cavalry under General Seely, and they have captured a number of
prisoners and machine-guns. They have liked their hunting. I have seen
the Indian cavalry riding across the fields with their lances high, and
it was a great sight, and as strange as an Arabian Nights tale in this
land of France, to see those streams of brown-bearded men, as handsome
as fairy-book princes, with the wind blowing their khaki turbans.
Night after night our cavalry have gone out in patrols, the leader ahead
and alone; two men following; behind them a small body keeping in touch.
They ride silently like shadows, with no clatter of stirrup or chink of
bit. They find the gaps in the enemy's wire, creep close to his infantry
outposts, ride very deftly into the charred ruins of abandoned villages,
and come back with their news of the enemy's whereabouts. A week ago one
of their patrols went into the Forest of Holnon, which is still held by
the enemy, and listened to Germans talking. Our men were undiscovered.
They took the villages by sweeping round on both sides in a great
gallop, with their lances down, and the enemy fled at the first sight of
them.
When the cavalry charged at Equancourt, a body of British infantry, who
had come on to the ground six hours earlier than they need have done, in
order (as they said) not to miss the show, cheered them on with the
wildest enthusiasm.
"Look at those beggars," shouted one man as the cavalry swept past;
"that's the way to take a village. No blighted bombs for them, and hell
for leather all the way!"
It was a difficult operation, this taking of Equancourt, and was carried
out in the best cavalry style according to the old traditions. The
village and a little wood in the front of it were held by Germans with
machine-guns, and another village to the right named Sorel was defended
in the same way, and commanded the field of fire before Equancourt. The
cavalry had two spurs of ground in front of them divided by two narrow
gullies, or re-entrants. One gully ran straight to the village of
Equancourt, but was directly in front of the German machine-gun
emplacements. The other gully was to the right, and it was through this
that the cavalry rode, sweeping round in a curve to Equancourt. Before
their charge of two parties, a third party was posted on the left on
rising ground, and swept the wood below Equancourt with machine-gun
fire, and a smaller body of cavalry to the right occupied the attention
of the enemy in Sorel in the same way. Then the two attacking parties
were launched, and rode hard at a pace of twenty-three miles an hour.
The enemy did not stand. After a few bursts of machine-gun fire, which
only hit a few of our mounted men, they fled behind the shelter of a
railway embankment beyond the village, and most of them escaped.
All this is an interlude between greater and grimmer things. We have not
yet come to the period of real open warfare, but have only passed over a
wide belt of No Man's Land: and the fantasy of cavalry skirmishes and
wandering Germans and civilians greeting us with outstretched hands from
ruined villages will soon be closed by the wire and walls of the
Hindenburg line, where once again the old fortress and siege warfare
will begin, unless we have the luck to turn it or break through before
the Siegfried divisions have finished their fortifications.