FROM THE TRENCHES
FROM THE TRENCHES
LOUVAIN TO THE AISNE, THE FIRST
RECORD OF AN EYE-WITNESS
BY
GEOFFREY WINTHROP YOUNG
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
1 ADELPHI TERRACE W.C.
_I wish to express my obligation to the Proprietors of the "Daily News"
for permission to use material contributed to their columns._
_First Published October, 1914._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE OUTBREAK. IN AND OUT OF PARIS 7
II. THE FIRST DAYS IN BRUSSELS 23
III. THE BELGIAN ENGAGEMENTS. EGHEZEE, HAELEN 34
IV. NAMUR AND THE FRENCH LINES 59
V. LOUVAIN AND WATERLOO 83
VI. THE LAST OF BRUSSELS. THE FLIGHT AND THE FLOOD 95
VII. ANTWERP AND MALINES 132
VIII. PARIS AND THE TRENCHES 151
IX. THE MOVEMENTS IN THE NORTH 174
X. THE BATTLES ON THE MARNE 193
XI. ON THE OISE AND THE SOMME 226
XII. ON THE AISNE 255
XIII. THE SHADOW OF THE WAR 293
XIV. ARMS AND THE MAN 302
FROM THE TRENCHES
CHAPTER I
The Outbreak. In and out of Paris
On Tuesday, 28th of July, I returned from the Alps; the weather
conditions had been arctic and the climbing more than usually exciting.
During a bathe in the Lake of Geneva, which has become the customary
end of the climbing season, I remember saying to my companion, "Well,
this is the end of all sensation for the year. Now for the usual dull
winter's work."
On Thursday I volunteered to go with the Servian Army as War
Correspondent for the _Daily News_, but the European conflagration was
already too imminent. On Sunday, it was arranged that I should go to
Paris to join the French Army.
The journey started normally. But at Newhaven it was startling to see
three English travellers turn and rush off the boat at the last minute.
It was the first and unforgettable sign of the break-up in our order
of life. To take a ticket and start a journey no longer meant the
inevitable procession to its end. We were beginning the life of the
unexpected; when event and interruption was to take the place of the
decent ordering of hours by convention and system.
On the boat were only men; older men called up to the colours. Most of
them were fathers of families. One man sat in tears over a photograph
of his five children spread out before him. Some had lived all their
lives in England. "Well, you're an Englishman, at any rate," said the
steward to an obvious cockney. But he was French, though he could
scarcely speak it. A very old priest was returning, after twenty years,
to "die among his soldier children" in a French frontier village--"or
perhaps my grand-children," he corrected, with a faint smile.
As we neared Calais the cloud began to pass. The men clustered and
spoke together: a few started singing. When I had crossed a few days
before, the quay had been lined with the usual cheering children, and
a few condescending tourists had waved back. Now there was a line of
soldiers in the same place. Our passengers rushed to the side and
cheered them. A number of French cruisers guarded the entrance. It
was the first real proof that we were passing into the facts of war.
The odd nightmare feeling of those few first days, that witnessed the
collapse of the structure of civilisation upon which our lives had
hitherto rested, intensified. The war was true after all; not merely
a terrible darkness of sensation into which we kept waking up, with a
shrinking discomfort, whenever our attention came back from reading
some book or following some ordinary chain of thought.
At Calais there had been no regular train traffic for three days. A
number of travellers who had got as far as Calais on previous days
decided to return by our boat to England. The porters stood round
vaguely, with the distracted strained look that we learned to
associate later with the presence of the war atmosphere. I discovered
to my surprise a train waiting in the station with steam up:--it was
"Lord Kitchener's Special," prepared to carry him on his way to Egypt.
But Lord Kitchener at the last moment had not come, for reasons that
have since proved amply sufficient. By various persuasive arguments we
at last convinced the undecided station-master that as the line had
been cleared the express might run through; and we reached Paris in
four hours; the "last" unofficial express during the war.
The Gare du Nord was empty of porters; but the long lines of platform
were piled ten feet high down the centre with enormous trunks--the
abandoned luggage of escaping tourists.
Outside the station the approaches were barred by barriers, where
dragoons demanded passes from every foot passenger. Troops poured past,
starting for their different centres of concentration. The suburban
traffic had ceased. The streets were full of people kept in the town
against their will by the demands of the mobilisation.
Paris had not yet settled down. It was seething in those first three
days of panic that seemed throughout Europe to follow the declaration
of war. More an atmospheric feeling than a state with definite
symptoms. People, for these days, seemed to be moving and speaking
semi-consciously, with the nervous suggestion in their faces that they
expected something novel and shocking to happen at any second. The
supposed German shops and houses were being wrecked and looted. Every
now and then there was a hurried rush of feet through the street, as
some suspect was hunted or maltreated. The spy-hunting mania seems
to have been a universal infection during this time. The disorderly
elements in the big towns got the upper hand for the moment and the
cold-blooded brutality of these silent man-hunts was to me infinitely
more shocking than the sight and sound of the more terrible destruction
on the battlefields. It was the first growl of the beast that we had
let loose, the savage animal in man waking for our purposes of war.
Under my window was a great courtyard, in which hundreds of German and
Austrian men, women and children were confined for their protection.
They had to sleep on the stones in the open air; and it was a pitiable
thing, while the crowds outside the gate were execrating and hustling
those who were thrust in to join them, to hear them singing French
songs and cheering for France. Most of them were French by education
and sympathy, and only German by extraction.
The apache element, which had been encouraged by the thinning out of
the Gendarmerie for military service to make patriotism the cover for
convenient looting and brutality, was soon brought into order. Cavalry
pickets patrolled the streets in the evening; a curious sight, their
horses trampling on the pavement of the Rue de la Paix. The worst
haunts were raided; many hundreds were arrested, and the police in
large motor wagons ran through deserted quarters, stopping and pouncing
in batches upon suspected passers-by. The civil hand had released its
hold, and it was a day or two before the new military administration
could get a firm grip. Government offices were in a not unnatural
state of confusion--they had been weakened by the withdrawal of a
large proportion of their effective staff, at the same moment that they
became responsible for an enormous mass of novel duty. The civilian,
under military government, found himself of a sudden unable to move or
exist without official permits. The whole social structure had to be
reorganised, and the offices were crowded with jostling individuals
asking for permissions and explanations which the over-worked officials
were unable to supply. One of the most painful memories of the war was
the sight of refined-looking Austrians and Germans, men and women,
artists and writers, with the puzzled hunted expression of people in a
nightmare, forced to appeal in public to hurrying footmen and office
boys for some indulgence that might allow them to continue to earn
their living.
The guiding principle of most public offices at this time, not only in
Paris, seemed to be that of sending people backward and forward until
their endurance should wear out. With what should happen to them in
case they did not comply with all the new regulations the military
outlook was not concerned. Every effort was to be concentrated on
the preparation for war. The civilian in such an atmosphere has no
further rights. If we permit, as nations, the whole civilised order of
existence to be pitched into a whirlpool of primitive passions, we must
expect to have to scuffle personally for our life-belts.
On the third day of my stay in Paris the situation was indescribably
relieved by the declaration of war between England and Germany. The
rush on the banks stopped. Prices fell. Money became easier, and the
crowd of British and other tourists, sitting on their boxes in nervous
lines before the Consulates, diminished. The growing hostility of the
Parisians to ourselves disappeared. The organization in the responsible
offices, in so far as the public was concerned, began to assume some
order.
Night and day the regiments passed through and round the city. The
mobilisation was rapid and extremely orderly. There was no apparent
hitch. We became confident that the prophecies that France would
be found unprepared would be proved totally wrong. Gradually the
requisitioned cabs and trams began to reappear in the streets. The
women quietly stepped into the men's places as ticket-collectors, etc.
With reduced numbers and closed shops, a graver population took up its
ordinary life.
It was very soon apparent that no official correspondents were to
be allowed with the French or British forces. A large proportion of
the remaining officials, not to say ourselves, could have been saved
infinite bother if the intention had been declared from the first.
After a week spent without profit in ante-chambers and bureaus, I
decided to get through to Belgium, where there seemed to be better
possibility of approaching actual events. Chance helped me to secure a
more picturesque fashion of return than I could have hoped for.
Saturday, August 10th.
I am just back from the first, and "probably the last," visit that
a civilian will be able to pay to the French frontier until the
situation has considerably developed.
To have to wait a day in a queue to obtain a permit to leave, another
to secure a ticket, and even a third to confirm it by getting a
definite seat on a numbered train, can discourage the most patient.
The miracle of deliverance, however, took place; and it was brought
about by the agency of a chance meeting with a genial chauffeur. There
followed an introduction to his employers, a party of Belgian officers
returning to their own army, and an amiable invitation to evade some of
the weariness of the irregular train journey by taking a lift.
That this was extended beyond all limits contemplated by military
regulations must be attributed to a reluctance to turn out on a dark,
wet night, in unknown districts, one of a nation whose intervention,
as I was assured, has contributed much to the magnificent spirit
with which the Belgian troops have supported the first rush of the
"invincible machine."
We left Paris with the Boulevards almost as crowded as ever, but with
half the colour and light gone, and a note of unusual gravity in the
aspect and talk of the moving stream.
Out through the long, dark suburbs, with the last signal, the flare of
the searchlight from the Eiffel Tower, blinking its messages across
the clouds high above our heads in front. In the first two miles we
were stopped half-a-dozen times; business-like question and answer in
quick, suppressed voices. Then the checks decreased as we ran out into
the dark fields, though the flash of light upon arms, the challenge
and halt came still at bridge and corner. The 'word of the day' passed
us at only reduced pace through the larger pickets, but the less
well-informed solitary sentry had to be more fully satisfied; and the
more, the further from Paris.
Then longer and longer intervals of tremendous racing, unchecked;
for the car drove at full speed, and there is no peace traffic! The
light of the Eiffel Tower disappeared behind, but there was still
the consciousness, in the most remote darkness, that above us darted
ceaselessly the continuous stream of wireless messages linking the
brain of the army in the little room in unseen Paris with every
movement of the vast protecting arms that already lie outstretched to
guard France. Through Senlis, Compiègne, St. Quentin, and, at last,
Cambrai. It was only possible to calculate the probable towns by the
intervals of time, for in each case we were turned off on to side
circuits.
When I had passed south to Paris a few days before, on a more westerly
line, the country had still seemed inhabited, though by a mixed race:
crowds of little red and blue soldiers resting, marching, crammed in
troop trains, and knots of men and women at the village corners, or
staring at the gates of the huge deserted factories.
Now it seemed an empty land. All the life had passed east into the
great war cloud. Only now and again the flash of the lamp on a cluster
of boys and older men, sitting or lying by the road; the non-combatants
of the villages from the war region tramping west, with blue check
bundles tied on the handles of their reaping hooks, to earn what they
could, for the later repair of their losses, by helping to harvest.
Need for it, too, as the sight of the immense fields of grain, unreaped
or half reaped, yellowing the lonely fields of the uninhabited country,
suggest ruin to the traveller passing in the train.
Before Cambrai we passed under a thicker darkness of cloud, and met
a torrent of rain that for the rest of the night and morning hid
everything but the glint of the lamps on falling drops or the more
vivid gleam of fixed bayonets.
As we neared the frontier the country seemed to become populous again.
The cottages had lights; lights in the fields and through the trees.
Only, as we passed, the strangeness increased, for the population had
come from a different planet. Quiet cottages, with the glow of uniforms
through the wet panes, fields with a few tireless peasant women, helped
by good-humoured soldiers, using even the darkness for a desperate
effort to get in the forsaken crops. The sight of arms and wagons
seemed all the less fitting in the quiet villages because there was no
suggestion of war.
One picture stands out vividly; the glare of the lights through the
rain on a sentry motionless on guard, while a dozen peasant women,
tired doubtless from the day's reaping, slept in his charge, lying
under the ridge of the field where they had been working.
Beyond Cambrai I was not at liberty to note our direction or record any
details--a natural condition.
In fact, there would be little to record; for the night was a
continuance of sounds, of lights, of moving unseen men and horses; and
of sudden challenges, coming out of the darkness through the rush of
rain. Only I may add that in one village our welcome was marked by a
different French intonation as the men gathered round us, and a Belgian
advance patrol exchanged jokes with my companions.
Our route from Cambrai, as a matter of fact, took us to Valenciennes,
where the Belgian officers left me, hurrying to Maubeuge, while I
returned by car to Douai.
In the grey of the morning I emerged, passing north of Douai, and now
without my companions. As we raced west, still through rain, we passed
again into deserted countries. The great machine had done its work.
The mobilisation was complete. The dotted sentries, gradually changing
from the smart field soldier to the paternal reservist squeezed into
a uniform--or partial uniform, seemed the only jetsam of the coloured
turmoil of the early week.
The crawling railway, the American ladies complaining of the slow
trains and closed buffets, brought us back to ordinary life. Officials,
struggling to make us take their passports and their war-regulations
seriously, failed to revive any reality of impression.
The war frontier, in rain and darkness, was drifting back into the
vague excitement of newspaper reports.
The separation by nationalities was in full progress. France was being
cleared of all strangers. The consuls, for reasons not clear, were
advising all British residents to return to England at once. The chief
sufferers were the children, boys at school in France, children left
for visits or cures with French families or in boarding houses. Before
I reached Folkestone there must have been at least fifteen such small
strays who had had to be adopted and looked after during the succeeding
stages of the journey.