They were great days--in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For
me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure,
pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory;
though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up
lorry columns through the mud of the old battlefields, far behind our
new front line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war,
they were days not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety,
or hope, but just like all the others that had gone before since first
they came to France.
I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they
pass through my mind like a film drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph
which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory in
their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable
things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of Peace.
One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of
Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3. Our guns
had spared the city, which was full of people, but the railway station
was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn
up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the
German retreat, had flung down bombs which had torn the fronts off the
booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds.
For German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and
the fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through
the ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but
one human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young
German soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of
blood. His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed
to me a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers
of monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square,
rough-hewn face of a young peasant.
There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun, somewhere on the
right of the square. As I walked forward, all my senses were alert to
the menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at
the end of the war--for surely the end was very near? And then I had a
sudden sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened.
Why should I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my
small part in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it
was finished but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end
with it, for all that came afterwards would be anti-climax. I remember
raising my head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering
of the German machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might
come my way. But I went on untouched into the town....
As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their
houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was
answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window,
and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it, with
two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine,
and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of
rage and grief.
“O my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they
not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses--we were
innkeepers--and last night they sent us to this part of the town and
burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she
said, “they made a devil’s _charivari_ and set many houses on fire.”
Her husband spoke to me over his wife’s shoulder.
“Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down
for four years. They are bandits and robbers.”
“We are hungry,” said the thin little girl.
By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint.
“We have eaten our bread, and I am hungry.”
They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with
them, but I could not wait.
The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.
“You will come back?” she asked.
“I will try,” I said.
Then she wept again, and said:
“We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us.”
That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those
last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German
machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered
many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people.
I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their
best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a
little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust
of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of
the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That
was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and
children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire
with Yellow Cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men,
and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through;
but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy
gas of the Yellow Cross shells filtered down to where the women and
their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and
gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our
American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue
of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,” he told me. “I am not weak in the
stomach--but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.
“It’s no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the
village they had a right to shell. That’s war. We should do the same.
War’s war. I’ve been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric
language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the
same I was wrong. It’s war we ought to curse. War which makes these
things possible among civilised peoples. It’s just devilry. Civilised
people must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have
heard of typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid
microbe who spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the
war-carriers, isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them.”
He waved his hand to me and went off in an ambulance filled with
suffocated women.
I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city,
when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners.
He came up to me and said, “Have you heard the news?” I saw by his
face that it was good news, and I felt my heart give a lurch when I
answered him.
“Tell me the best.”
“Germany is sending plenipotentiaries, under a white flag, to Foch.
They know it is unconditional surrender.... And the Kaiser has
abdicated.”
I drew a deep breath. Something seemed to lift from my soul. The sky
seemed to become brighter, as though a shadow had passed from the face
of the sun.
“Then it’s the end?... The last battle has been fought!”
Brand was staring at a column of troops--all young fellows of the 4th
Division. His eyes were glistening, with moisture in them.
“Reprieved!” he said. “The last of our youth is saved!”
He turned to me suddenly, and spoke in the deepest melancholy.
“You and I ought to be dead. So many kids were killed. We’ve no right
to be alive.”
“Perhaps there is other work to do,” I answered him, weakly, because I
had the same thought.
He did not seem sure of that.
“I wonder!... If we could help to save the next generation----”
In the Place d’Armes of Valenciennes there was a great crowd, and many
of our Generals and Staff officers on the steps and below the steps of
the Hôtel de Ville. Brand and I caught a glimpse of Colonel Lavington,
looking very gallant and debonair, as usual. Beside him was Charles
Fortune, with his air of a Staff-officer dreadfully overworked in the
arrangement of victory, modest in spite of his great achievements,
deprecating any public homage that might be paid him. This careful
mask of his was slightly disarranged for a moment when he winked
at me under the very nose of the great General whom he had set to
music--“Blear-eyed Bill, the Boche-Breaker,” who stood magnificent
with his great chest emblazoned with ribbons. The Prince of Wales was
there, shifting from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of
Staff-officers. A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets
and presented them to the Prince and his fellow-officers. The Prince
laughed and blushed, like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not
know what to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with
equal embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even
war could cure.
Some officers close to me were talking of the German plea for Armistice.
“It’s abject surrender!” said one of them.
“The end!” said another, very solemnly. “Thank God.”
“The end of a dirty business!” said a young machine-gun officer. I
noticed that he had three wound-stripes.
One of them, holding a big bouquet, began to dance, pointing his toes,
cutting abbreviated capers in a small space among his comrades.
“Not too quick for me, old dears! Back to peace again!... Back to life!
Hooray!”
The colours of many flags fluttered upon the gables of the Place
d’Armes, and the balconies were draped with the Tricolour, the Union
Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Old citizens wore tall hats saved
up for this day, and girls had taken their lace from hiding-places
where the Germans had not found it, and wore it round their necks
and wrists for the honour of this day. Old women in black bonnets
sat in the centre of window-places and clapped their hands--their
wrinkled, hard-working old hands--to every British soldier who passed,
and thousands were passing. Nobody heard a word of the speeches
spoken from the Town Hall steps, the tribute of the councillors of
Valenciennes to the glory of the troops who had rescued their people
from servitude under a ruthless enemy, nor the answer of Sir Henry
Horne, the Army Commander, expressing the pride of his soldiers in the
rescue of that fair old city, and their admiration for the courage of
its people. Every word was overwhelmed by cheering. Then the pipers of
a Highland division, whose fighting I had recorded through their years
of heroic endurance, played a march tune, and the music of those pipes
was loud in the square of Valenciennes and in the hearts of its people.
The troops marched past, and thousands of bayonets shone above their
steel helmets....