The Shadow of the War
There could be no object in making further visits to the deadlock along
the Aisne. The German advance, which I had followed across Belgium
in the beginning of the war, and met again where it shattered upon
the Allied position east of Paris, had failed. Their rapid consequent
retreat on to the heights of the Aisne, and the reassembling of their
armies, had been successfully accomplished. Both sides had been unable
to convert the end of the first great move into decisive victory or
defeat, and had dug themselves, after desperate initial efforts, into
impregnable entrenched positions. The serpents of war were dragging
their slow coils west and north, seeking more open ground for a fresh
grapple.
The new development had to be looked for in the north. Time must elapse
before it could take definite shape. The first phase of the war was
ended.
In the interval, before the next began, like a foiled snake drawing in
its head and thickening its coils, back in Belgium the huge length of
the German army was beginning slowly to swell itself out, forcing the
last of the unhappy population out of town and village, to the coast,
and to the sea itself. For "military reasons," doubtless. No difficulty
in assigning them. Only, if there has been one happening more than any
other which has revealed to those outside the war atmosphere, the utter
negation of personal life and moral law that is covered by our easy
talk of "strategy," "tactics," and "moves," it has been this further
persecution of the Belgian people. We may discuss it, as critics, as an
excusable part of a defensive campaign. We feel in our hearts, that it
is no other than the instinctive ferocity of the beast of prey, headed
off its next kill, and recoiling to savage its last victim.
War, the war of Ilium, of Agincourt, of Waterloo, used to be a
brilliant affair. Death harnessed to a glittering car of Juggernaut.
Men went under the wheels in the rush and flame of colours, and to the
sound of bands and the applause of multitudes. The car is now hidden in
a dull, deadly rolling cloud. We can only hear the rumour of the hidden
wheels. Our sons and friends move into the darkness. Of many of them,
all we shall ever know is that they have not returned. The greater
heroes, that they go as gladly as ever did a chosen knight into crowded
lists. The finer men, that they fight as stoutly with no record of
their gallantry, no mark even of their death-place.
But we must make no confusion. It is the men who are to be praised:
for their sacrifice of all they know to be better in life, for their
acceptance of the fantastic chance which is forced upon them by their
devotion to an ideal. War itself, fighting, is a mad anachronism. We
can judge of its folly the better, because we are now allowed to know
so little of its secret noise and flame. We are not dazzled by its
incidents; but its shadow falls on us all.
But then, afterwards, there must be no sentimentalising over the
glitter of a splendour we have not seen; no wilful blindness when, the
cloud cleared away, the light of sanity falls again upon the nakedness
of its inhuman mechanism, the hideous squalor and vulgarity of its
monstrous destructiveness.
A few days ago I was waiting with a crowd outside a Bureau in Paris.
Anxious, resigned faces passed me going in or out. No tragedy, no
moving emotion. The families of the soldiers in the front were making
their weekly inquiry for the little numbered disc each soldier wears
for identification. The best they could hope for was to receive
nothing, to have to come and ask again, and again, till the end of the
war. The only break would come when the little disc at last might
be handed them, and they would know that son or husband, somewhere,
somehow, had vanished in the shadow of war for all time.
In Wavre, where I used to pass continually on the way to the Belgian
lines, was a small welcome restaurant, kept by a cheerful pretty girl,
her young husband, and a baby. There was laugh and joke as to "what
would happen if the Prussians came!" On the morning of the day of
evacuation I passed again. Still only quiet anxiety and less ready
smiles. Three hours later I returned. The Uhlans were entering the
edges of the town. A peasant rushed into the swarming square, waving
a Uhlan helmet. There was a savage rush; and a woman shrieked: "It's
the head of the devil who wore it I want!" It was the young wife. A
fury, raging at her husband; for the men had been told to disarm. "Take
it," she screamed furiously, thrusting his rifle at him, "never see
me again, if our house is entered without one brute shot." Blanched,
shaking with passion, and speechless, the young man walked out. I saw
her again on the road to Brussels, aged, scarcely sane. The man had not
come back. She had lost her child.
In west Flanders, on the day that the Prussian columns were pouring
across Belgium, I passed in the morning a remote, picturesque little
crossing. A very old peasant, in a smock, deaf and almost blind, acting
as a Civil Guard, gave me great difficulty. He had blocked the road
with harrows, and threatened viciously with an old muzzle-loader and
rusty bayonet of the time of Waterloo. In the evening, carrying some
wounded soldiers, we passed again. He was still hugging the bayonet.
We persuaded him to let us bury it, his useless death-warrant, for the
Uhlans were flooding behind us. With that, realisation at last came to
him. He walked deliberately back towards the cottage. "All that I had
left, for my son is dead. But I will destroy this too. The Prussians
shall not shelter there."
The same night I was driving on the long dark roads back to the
coast. Occasionally the lights flashed on lines of women, in widows'
black, returning in silence from the shrines. Now and again a blaze
of light startled us from the roadside. The shrines of saints, bright
with votive candles all this night of terror. And remote from their
homesteads, and from the war, the heads of crowds of small children
showed black on the steps against the altar lights; while in a
semicircle on the road outside knelt the shadows of women, enclosing
their children, the last possession left to them. I stopped the car
before one shrine, and a high woman's voice, in which all emotion was
dead, called out from the darkness: "Is that death?"
South of Peronne, hardly a week ago, we gave a lift to four refugee
peasant-women, trudging heavily back to their homes. Two weeks before
some German cavalry had swept suddenly into their small village. Ten
men had been ordered to go with them, the husbands of two of the women,
the sons of two others. They had disappeared in the shadow, and not
one had returned. We reached the outlying cottage of the first. Some
small skirmish had raged there. The house was half destroyed, and three
or four dead horses lay grotesquely rotting on the field. The woman
stood for a moment unmoved, and then turned to a neighbour: "War has
taken my sons, and has left me these."
Four days ago a French soldier of the line stopped me just south of
Vic-sur-Aisnes. He was hobbling back from the trenches, wounded in the
knee. He was clearly half stupid with fatigue and the detonation of the
days of firing. He kept repeating to himself, over and over again: "I
cannot remember: there were five, all killed near me; and three said to
tell somebody a message, before they died. I cannot remember what it
was, or who they were. I cannot remember: there were five----" and so
over again. These were the last messages out of the edge of the shadow,
and they were lost. But there would always be the discs. Better that
the details should not come. There would then be still the chance of
imagining some heroic setting of death.
We may well remember that such death is heroic, whatever its loneliness
or its revolting circumstances. But let us borrow no false colour from
an imaginary pomp and circumstance in war itself. It is dissolution and
the end of hope that is hidden in the cloud. In England we are happily
still free to interpret the obscurity according to our fancy, to
picture death in battle as somehow not death. For those who have moved
by the edge of the shadow there is no illusion left. The cloud shifts
from village to village, from week to week, only to let us see in its
track nature outraged, emotion degraded, humanity defaced.
We have chosen war, and must follow it to its undiscriminating end. Let
us see to it that it is for the last time.