Transcriber’s Notes
The original book did not have a Table of Contents or a List of
Illustrations. Those have been added by Transcriber, using the
content of the original book, and placed in the Public Domain.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; ambiguous hyphens at the
ends of lines were retained.
CONTENTS
THE WESTERN FRONT
THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD
TRENCH SCENERY
THE UPPER HAND
THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT
ILLUSTRATIONS
I GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
II GRAND’PLACE AND RUINS OF THE CLOTH HALL, YPRES
III A STREET IN YPRES
IV DISTANT VIEW OF YPRES
V A VILLAGE CHURCH IN FLANDERS
VI THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
VII “TANKS”
VIII RUINED GERMAN TRENCHES, NEAR CONTALMAISON
IX THE NIGHT PICKET
X DUG-OUTS
XI GORDON HIGHLANDERS: OFFICERS’ MESS
XII WAITING FOR THE WOUNDED
XIII THE HAPPY WARRIOR
XV AT A BASE STATION
XVI ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
XVII DISEMBARKED TROOPS WAITING TO MARCH OFF
XVIII SOLDIERS’ BILLETS--MOONLIGHT
XIX A GUN HOSPITAL
XX AN OBSERVATION POST
THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD
XXI AMIENS CATHEDRAL
XXII THE VIRGIN OF MONTAUBAN
XXIII A SKETCH IN ALBERT
XXIV TAKING THE WOUNDED ON BOARD
XXV “WALKING WOUNDED” SLEEPING ON DECK
XXVI (a and b)
“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
XXVII (a and b)
A MAIN APPROACH TO THE BRITISH FRONT
“ROAD LIABLE TO BE SHELLED”
XXVIII TROUBLE ON THE ROAD
XXIX BRITISH TROOPS ON THE MARCH TO THE SOMME
XXX A SKETCH AT CONTALMAISON
XXXI ON THE SOMME: SAUSAGE BALLOONS
XXXII A WRECKED AEROPLANE NEAR ALBERT
XXXIII A MESS OF THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS
XXXIV WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE ON TRONES WOOD FROM MONTAUBAN
XXXV (a and b)
IN THE REGAINED TERRITORY
XXXVI A V.A.D. REST STATION
XXXVII A GATEWAY AT ARRAS
XXXVIII OUTSIDE ARRAS, NEAR THE GERMAN LINES
XXXIX WATCHING GERMAN PRISONERS
XL ON THE SOMME: “MUD”
TRENCH SCENERY
XLI CASSEL
XLII A LINE OF TANKS
XLIII A KITCHEN IN THE FIELD
XLIV THE GUN PIT: HARDENING THE STEEL
XLV THE GUN PIT: A GUN JACKET ENTERING THE OIL TANK
XLVI THE GUN PIT: THE GREAT CLUTCHES OF THE CRANE
XLVII MOUNTING A GREAT GUN
XLVIII “THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS”
XLIX THE RUINED TOWER OF BÉCORDEL-BÉCOURT
L EMBARKING THE WOUNDED
LI (a and b)
MONT ST. ELOI
RUINS OF MAMETZ
LII RUINED TRENCHES IN MAMETZ WOOD
LIII “THAWING OUT”
LIV DISEMBARKING
LV SLEEPING WOUNDED FROM THE SOMME
LVI DISTANT AMIENS
LVII SCOTTISH SOLDIERS IN A FRENCH BARN
LVIII WELSH SOLDIERS
LIX A BRITISH RED CROSS DEPOT AT BOULOGNE
LX INDIAN CAVALRY
THE UPPER HAND
LXI MOUNTING A GREAT GUN
LXII ERECTING AEROPLANES
LXIII AN AEROPLANE ON THE STOCKS
LXIV THE GIANT SLOTTERS
LXV NIGHT WORK ON THE BREECH OF A GREAT GUN
LXVI THE HOWITZER SHOP
LXVII THE NIGHT SHIFT WORKING ON A BIG GUN
LXVIII SOME GREAT GUNS
LXIX MOVING HEAVY GUN TUBES
LXX A CORING MACHINE AT WORK ON A BIG GUN TUBE
LXXI RUINS NEAR ARRAS
LXXII ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND
LXXIII (a and b)
A ROAD NEAR THE FRONT
A TRAIN OF LORRIES
LXXIV ON THE SOMME. R.F.C. MEN BUILDING THEIR WINTER HUT
LXXV MARICOURT: THE RUINS OF THE VILLAGE
LXXVI ON THE SOMME, NEAR MAMETZ
LXXVII A MARKET PLACE. TRANSPORT RESTING
LXXVIII (a and b)
THE “BLIGHTY BOAT” AND A HOSPITAL SHIP
SCOTTISH TROOPS ON A TROOPSHIP
LXXIX TROOPS RETURNING FROM THE ANCRE
LXXX A HOSPITAL SHIP AT A BASE
THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT
LXXXI “OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA
LXXXII ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”)
LXXXIII H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK
LXXXIV ON A BATTLESHIP: LOWERING A BOAT FROM THE MAIN DERRICK
LXXXV APPROACHING A BATTLESHIP AT NIGHT
LXXXVI A LINE OF DESTROYERS
LXXXVII ON A BATTLESHIP: A GUN TURRET
LXXXVIII ON A BATTLESHIP IN THE FORTH
XXXIX (a and b)
A FLEET SEASCAPE
THE CREW AT A SMALL GUN ON A BATTLESHIP
XC THE FO’C’SLE OF A BATTLESHIP
XCI ON A BATTLESHIP: THE AFTER DECK
XCII INSIDE THE TURRET
XCIII A BOILER ROOM ON A BATTLESHIP
XCIV (a and b)
PRACTICE FIRING: BIG GUNS ON A BATTLESHIP
ON A BATTLESHIP: SUNSET AFTER A WET DAY
XCV ON A BATTLESHIP: AIRING BLANKETS
XCVI CAPTAIN CYRIL FULLER
XCVII THE FLEET’S POST OFFICE
XCVIII IN THE SUBMERGED TORPEDO FLAT OF A BATTLESHIP
XCIX SAILORS ON A BATTLESHIP MAKING MUNITIONS FOR THE ARMY
C THE CINEMA ON A BATTLESHIP
THE WESTERN FRONT
DRAWINGS BY
MUIRHEAD BONE
[Illustration]
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E., A.D.C.
PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF THE WAR OFFICE
FROM THE OFFICES OF “COUNTRY LIFE,” LTD.,
20, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON
MCMXVII
I have been asked to write a foreword to Mr. Muirhead Bone’s drawings.
This I am glad to do, as they illustrate admirably the daily life of
the troops under my command.
The conditions under which we live in France are so different from
those to which people at home are accustomed, that no pen, however
skilful, can explain them without the aid of the pencil.
The destruction caused by war, the wide areas of devastation, the
vast mechanical agencies essential in war, both for transport and
the offensive, the masses of supplies required, and the wonderful
cheerfulness and indomitable courage of the soldiers under varying
climatic conditions, are worthy subjects for the artist who aims at
recording for all time the spirit of the age in which he has lived.
It has been said that the portrait and the picture are invaluable aids
to the right reading of history. From this point of view I welcome,
on behalf of the Army that I have the honour to command, this series
of drawings, as a permanent record in pencil of the duties which our
soldiers have been called upon to perform, and the quality and manner
of its performance.
[Illustration: D. Haig, Genl. (Signature)]
GENERAL HEADQUARTERS,
_November, 1916_
THE WESTERN FRONT
The British line in France and Belgium runs through country of three
kinds, and each kind is like a part of England. Between the Somme
and Arras a British soldier often feels that he has not quite left
the place of his training on Salisbury Plain. The main roads may be
different, with their endless rows of sentinel trees, and the farms
are mostly clustered into villages, where they turn their backs to the
streets. More of the land, too, is tilled. But the ground has the same
large and gentle undulation; and these great rollers are made, as in
Wiltshire, of pure chalk coated with only a little brown clay. There
are the same wide prospects, the same lack of streams and ponds, the
same ledges and curious carvings of the soil; and journeys on foot seem
long, as they do on our downs, because so much of the road before you
is visible while you march.
A little north of Arras there begins, almost at a turn of the road,
a black country, where men of the South Lancashires feel at home and
grant that the landscape has some of the points of Wigan. It is the
region of Loos and Vermelles and Bully Grenay, most of it level ground
on which the only eminences are the refuse-heaps of coal mines. Across
this level the eye feels its way from one well-known stack of pit-head
buildings and winding machinery to another. They are, to an English
eye, strangely lofty and stand out like lighthouses over a sea. The
villages near their feet are commonly “model” or “garden,” with all
the houses built well, as parts of one plan. As in Lancashire, farming
and mining go on side by side, and in August the corn is grey with a
mixture of blown dusts from collieries and from the road.
The next change is not abrupt, like the first; but it is as great. Near
Ypres you are on the sands, though yet twenty miles from the sea. Here
you have a sense of being in a place still alive but pensioned off by
nature after its work was done. You feel it at Rye and Winchelsea, at
Ravenna, and at any place which the sea has once made great and then
abandoned. The wide Ypres landscape drawn by Mr. Bone was all mellow on
sunny days at the end of July with the warm brown and yellow of many
good crops. Almost up to the British front it was farmed minutely and
intensely; in spring I had seen a man ploughing a field where a German
shell, on the average, dropped every day. But all this countryside has
the brooding quietude of a sort of honourable old age, dignity and
pensiveness and comfort behind its natural rampart of sand dunes, but
not the stir of life at full pressure.
Into this vari-coloured belt of landscape, some ninety miles long, and
into its cities and villages, the war has brought strange violences of
effort and several different degrees of desolation. Some villages are
dead and buried, like Pozières, where you must dig to find where a
house stood. There are cities dead, but with their bones still above
ground: Ypres is one--many walls stand where they did, but grass is
growing among the broken stones and bits of stained glass on the floor
of the Cloth Hall, and at noon a visitor’s footsteps ring and echo in
the empty streets like those of a belated wayfarer in midnight Oxford.
“How doth the city sit desolate that once was full of people!” Again,
there are towns like Arras, whose flesh, though torn, has life in it
still, and seems to feel a new wound from each shell, though there
be no man there to be hit. These are the broader differences between
one part of the front and another. In any one place there are minor
caprices of destruction or survival. Mr. Bone has drawn the top of
the Albert Church tower, a building that was ugly when it was whole,
but now is famous for its impending figure of the Virgin, knocked by
artillery fire into a singular diving attitude, with the Child in her
outstretched hands. Of the two or three buildings unharmed in Arras
one is the oldest house in the town and another was Robespierre’s
birthplace.
In the fields, as you near the front line, you note an ascending scale
of desolation. It is most clear on the battlefield of the Somme. First
you pass across two or three miles of land on which so many shells
fall, or used to fall, that it has not been tilled for two years. It
is a waste, but a green waste, where not trodden brown by horses and
men. It is gay in summer with poppies, convolvolus and cornflowers.
Among the thistles and coarse grass you see self-sown shoots of the
old crops, of beet, mustard and corn. Beyond this zone of land merely
thrown idle you reach the ultimate desert where nothing but men and
rats can live. Here even the weeds have been rooted up and buried by
shells, the houses are ground down to brick-dust and lime and mixed
with the earth, which is constantly turned up and turned up again
by more shells and kept loose and soft. The trees, broken half-way
up their trunks and stripped of leaves and branches, look curiously
haggard and sinister.
It is hoped that Mr. Bone’s drawings will give a new insight into the
spirit in which the battle of freedom is being fought. An artist does
not merely draw ruined churches and houses, guards and lorries, doctors
and wounded men. It is for him to make us see something more than we do
even when we see all these with our own eyes--to make visible by his
art the staunchness and patience, the faithful absorption in the next
duty, the humour and human decency and good nature--all the strains of
character and emotion that go to make up the temper of Britain at war.
G.H.Q., FRANCE,
_November, 1916_
I
GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E., A.D.C.
[Illustration]
II
GRAND’PLACE AND RUINS OF THE CLOTH HALL, YPRES
The gaunt emptiness of Ypres is expressed in this drawing, done from
the doorway of a ruined church in a neighbouring square. The grass has
grown long this summer on the Grand’Place and is creeping up over the
heaps of ruins. The only continuous sound in Ypres is that of birds,
which sing in it as if it were country.
[Illustration]
III
A STREET IN YPRES
In the distance is seen what remains of the Cloth Hall. On the right a
wall long left unsupported is bending to its fall. The crash of such
a fall is one of the few sounds that now break the silence of Ypres,
where the visitor starts at the noise of a distant footfall in the
grass-grown streets.
[Illustration]
IV
DISTANT VIEW OF YPRES
The Ypres salient is here seen from a knoll some six miles south-west
of the city, which is marked, near the centre of the drawing, by the
dominant ruin of the cathedral. The German front line is on the heights
beyond, Hooge being a little to the spectator’s right of the city and
Zillebeke slightly more to the right again. Dickebusch lies about half
way between the eye and Ypres. The fields in sight are covered with
crops, varied by good woodland. To a visitor coming from the Somme
battlefield the landscape looks rich and almost peaceful.
[Illustration]
V
A VILLAGE CHURCH IN FLANDERS
All round this church there is the quiet of a desert. The drawing
was made from within a house opposite; the fall of its entire front
provided an extensive window view.
[Illustration]
VI
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
An exciting moment in the fighting for the summit ridge of the
battlefield in August, 1916. All the British guns have just burst into
action and our infantry are advancing unseen in the cloud of smoke on
the sky-line. The puffs of smoke high in the air are from bursting
shrapnel. The battle is seen from King George’s Hill, near the old
German front line, taken on July 1st, 1916. Below, among the ravaged
trees, are the ruins of Mametz; beyond them, Mametz Wood; beyond it,
again, the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit.
[Illustration]
VII
“TANKS”
In this fine drawing Mr. Bone has seen the “Tank” in its major aspect,
as a grim and daunting engine of war.
[Illustration]
VIII
RUINED GERMAN TRENCHES, NEAR CONTALMAISON
The drawing shows a former German front-line trench reduced by our
artillery fire, before an advance, to a mass of capricious looking
irregularities in the ground. The German barbed wire entanglements are
seen destroyed by our shell fire to open the way for our attacking
troops.
[Illustration]
IX
THE NIGHT PICKET
The hour is Retreat and a Sergeant-Major is inspecting the three men
for duty at a one-man post during the coming night. Each man in turn
will do two hours’ duty, followed by four hours’ rest. The fine austere
drawing of the sunset, the wide waste spaces, the intent men mounting
picket and the men off duty strolling at ease, is imbued with the
spirit of the region just behind our front.
[Illustration]
X
DUG-OUTS
A small hamlet of sand-bagged dug-outs a little behind the front line,
seen during a passing lift of the clouds at the end of a wet day.
Many dug-outs, like the one on the left, bear such names as “The Rat
Hole,” “It,” “Some Dug-out, believe ma,” “The Old Curiosity Shop” and
“The Ritz.” On the right, a shelf in the outer wall of sand-bags is
decorated with flowers in pots.
[Illustration]
XI
GORDON HIGHLANDERS: OFFICERS’ MESS
In the bare dancing hall of a village inn behind the Somme Front. The
artist has found means to interpret with the utmost sympathy and power
the extraordinary romantic quality that there often is about a Highland
mess in France, created by the rude setting, the primitive half light
amidst cavernous gloom, and the spectator’s sense of an enveloping
world of strange dangers and adventures.
[Illustration]
XII
WAITING FOR THE WOUNDED
A British advance has just begun, and the surgeons of a Divisional
Collecting Station near the Somme are awaiting the arrival of the first
laden stretcher-bearers. In a few minutes the three officers will be at
work, perhaps for twenty-four hours on end. At one Casualty Clearing
Station a distinguished surgeon performed, without resting, nineteen
difficult operations, each lasting more than an hour, in cases of
severe abdominal wounds, where delay would have meant the loss of life.
In almost every case the man was saved. Another surgeon operated for
thirty-six hours without relief. Such devotion is not exceptional in
the R.A.M.C.
[Illustration]
XIII
THE HAPPY WARRIOR
The place is a field dressing station. The wounded Grenadier Guardsman
in the foreground on the left, wearing a German helmet and eating bread
and jam, had brought in as prisoner the German who is sitting on the
right with his hand to his face. The Guardsman indicated the German to
the artist, and said, “Won’t you draw my pal here, too, Sir? He and me
had a turn-up this morning when we took their trench, and he jabbed me
in the arm and I jabbed him in the eye, and we’re the best of friends.”
Other Germans are sitting in attitudes characteristic of newly-made
prisoners.
[Illustration]
XIV (a and b)
RED CROSS BARGES ON THE SOMME
Many wounded or sick soldiers, British and French, are brought by
river or canal from near the front to near a base hospital or the sea.
The motion is easy, the men have good air and quiet; any who are well
enough to be on deck have pleasant and changeful surroundings to look
at. The English have fitted up for this purpose many of the large,
square-built and bluff-bowed--almost box-like--French canal boats. They
are towed, in pairs, by small tugs. The French Red Cross uses barges
driven by engines placed aft.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XV
AT A BASE STATION
A midnight scene at a base railway station. Train-loads of “walking
wounded” on their way to England are met at any hour of the day or
night by V.A.D. workers who offer the men hot tea or cocoa, and bread
and butter. The quality of the food, and the manner of the gift, give
extraordinary pleasure to the tired men.
[Illustration]
XVI
ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
The boat here is an old one; in newer boats the accommodation is
finer, but the drawing shows the ordinary mode of bedding the patients
in double tiers of continuous bunks. At some point in the passage
an R.A.M.C. orderly asks every patient to what part of “Blighty” he
belongs, and an effort is made to send him to a hospital near his home.
The orderly’s approach, as he makes his rounds, is always eagerly
awaited throughout the ship by the wounded men.
[Illustration]
XVII
DISEMBARKED TROOPS WAITING TO MARCH OFF
An every-day scene at the French ports where our men land. Whatever
may come after, there are few moments so thrilling to an untravelled
soldier of the New Army as those in which he awaits the order to march
off into the unknown, with all the strange events of war before him.
[Illustration]
XVIII
SOLDIERS’ BILLETS--MOONLIGHT
The unusually comfortable quarters of a Company in reserve while other
Companies of its Battalion are in the firing and support trenches, two
or three miles further up. Reserve billets are more often under ground,
sometimes in the cellars of ruined houses. A thick covering of ruins
above gives complete security against shell fire.
[Illustration]
XIX
A GUN HOSPITAL
Many wounded or worn guns, of all calibres, are brought back for
treatment to “hospitals” which do not fly the Red Cross. Here are a
few invalided “heavies.” The gun on the extreme right is the first
British 9.2 that came to France. Like most of our heavy guns she has
been christened by her crew and bears the punning inscription, “Lizzie,
Somme Strafer.”
[Illustration]
XX
AN OBSERVATION POST
The lower part of the first of the ladders leading up to an artillery
observation post in the top of a tall tree. It commanded a large part
of the Somme battlefield until the summit ridge was won; every detail
of several successful British advances could be watched from the
tree-top. The battle has now left it far in the rear, and it is disused.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD.
The main Anglo-German battlefield of 1916 is a little range of chalk
down or blunt hill. It is ten miles long and seven miles wide, and
its watershed runs from north-west to south-east--from near Thiepval,
above the small river Ancre, to Combles, four miles to the north of the
canalised Somme. This summit ridge is not quite 500 feet high--about as
high as the Hog’s Back in Surrey. The south-western slope of the range
is rather steeper and more broken up into terraces and lateral ridges
and defiles than the north-eastern slope. There is no real escarpment,
but enough difference to make the south-western slope the harder to
attack.
Small as this ridge is, it is the highest ground, in these parts,
between the Belgian plain and the main plain of Northern France. It
is crossed at right angles by one great road, the famous French Route
Nationale that runs nearly dead straight from Rouen, through Amiens, to
Valenciennes, and so leads on to Brussels by Mons. On the battlefield,
between Albert and Bapaume, it reaches the highest point above the
sea in all its long course, at a spot where a heap of powdered brick
and masonry, forty yards off to the north, marks the site of the
Windmill of Pozières, one of those solitary buildings to which, like
Falfemont Farm and the Abbey at Eaucourt, the war has brought death and
immortality.
From this road, at one point or another, you can see most of the places
that were made famous in 1916. A mile and a half from Albert, as you go
out north-eastward, you spy in a hollow below you a whitish sprinkling
of mixed mud, brick-dust and lime, the remains of La Boisselle, on
the right of the road. On its left a second grey patch is the site
of Ovillers. Beyond La Boisselle Contalmaison is just out of sight
behind a shoulder of hill. Nearly all the most hard-fought woods are
in sight--High Wood on the sky-line, and Delville Wood larger on its
right, and then in succession, with sharp intervals of bareness between
them, the woods of Bazentin, Mametz and Fricourt. Above them and more
distant are the dense trees that have Maricourt and the French troops
at their feet, and, high on their right, the thin file of trees shading
the road that runs from Albert, past Carnoy and Cléry, to Peronne.
You walk on for three miles and may not observe that you have passed
through Pozières, so similar are raw chalk and builder’s lime, raw clay
and powdered brick, when weeds grow thick over both. But the great
road--strangely declined into a rough field track--begins to fall away
before you, and new prospects to open--Courcelette and Martinpuich
almost at your feet, and straight beyond them the church and town hall
of Bapaume at the end of the long avenue of roadside trees. Looking
left you see, two miles away, the western end of the summit ridge,
the last point upon it from which the Germans were driven; so that,
even after the fall of Thiepval, a shell would sometimes come from the
Schwaben Redoubt to remind unwary walkers at Pozières Windmill that
enemy eyes still watched the lost ground.
Among the wreckage of the countryside you can detect the traces of old
standing comfort and rustic wealth. The many wayside windmills show
you how much corn was grown. In size and plan they are curiously like
the mighty stone dovecotes of Fifeshire. Almost as frequent as ruined
windmills are ruined sugar refineries, standing a little detached in
the fields, like the one at Courcelette, for which armies fought as
they fought for the neighbouring windmill. Beet was the next crop to
grain. There were little industries, too, like the making of buttons
for shirts at Fricourt, where you see by the road small refuse heaps
of old oyster shells with many round holes where the little discs have
been cut cleanly out of the mother-of-pearl, though all other trace of
the factories has vanished. Each village commune had its wood, with
certain rights for the members of the commune to take timber; Fricourt
Wood at the doors of Fricourt, Mametz Wood rather far from Mametz, as
there was no good wood nearer. All these woods were well fenced and
kept up, like patches of hedged cover dotted over a park. It was a good
country to live in, and good men came from it. The French Army Corps
that drew on these villages for recruits has won honour beyond all
other French Corps in the battle of the Somme.
Many skilled writers have tried to describe the aghast look of these
fields where the battle had passed over them. But every new visitor
says the same thing--that they had not succeeded; no eloquence has yet
conveyed the disquieting strangeness of the portent. You can enumerate
many ugly and queer freaks of the destroying powers--the villages not
only planed off the face of the earth but rooted out of it, house by
house, like bits of old teeth; the thin brakes of black stumps that
used to be woods, the old graveyards wrecked like kicked ant-heaps,
the tilth so disembowelled by shells that most of the good upper mould
created by centuries of the work of worms and men is buried out of
sight and the unwrought primeval subsoil lies on the top; the sowing of
the whole ground with a new kind of dragon’s teeth--unexploded shells
that the plough may yet detonate, and bombs that may let themselves off
if their safety pins rust away sooner than the springs within. But no
piling up of sinister detail can express the sombre and malign quality
of the battlefield landscape as a whole. “It makes a goblin of the
sun”--or it might if it were not peopled in every part with beings so
reassuringly and engagingly human, sane and reconstructive as British
soldiers.
G. H. Q., France.
_January, 1917._
XXI
AMIENS CATHEDRAL
The “Parthenon of Gothic Architecture” is seen in this exquisitely
delicate and sensitive drawing from the south-east, with the lovely
rose window of the south transept partly in view on the left. The
wooden spire, which Ruskin called “the pretty caprice of a village
carpenter,” looks finer in the drawing than in the original, the
relative flimsiness of the material being less apparent. Nothing is
lost by the intervention of the foreground houses, as the façade of
the south transept, like the famous west front and the choir stalls,
is sheathed with sand-bags to a height of thirty or forty feet for
protection against German bombs. Patrolling French aeroplanes are seen
in the sky.
[Illustration]
XXII
THE VIRGIN OF MONTAUBAN
An image which strangely escaped destruction during the time when
the village of Montauban, now utterly erased, was being shelled
successively by British and German guns. By a similar caprice of fate
the Virgin of Carency, now enshrined in a little chapel in the French
military cemetery at Villers-aux-Bois, received only some shot wounds
when the village was destroyed during the French advance towards Lens
in 1915.
[Illustration]
XXIII
A SKETCH IN ALBERT
Albert, as a whole, is wrecked to the degree shown in this drawing.
The building in the middle distance, on the right of the road, with
its roof timbers exposed, is a wrecked factory, and many hundreds
of bicycles and sewing machines now make an extraordinary tangle of
twisted and broken metal in its basement.
[Illustration]
XXIV
TAKING THE WOUNDED ON BOARD
Wounded men from the Somme, ordered to England by the Medical Officer
commanding the General or Stationary Hospital in which each man has
been a patient, are being put on board a hospital ship at the base. In
the centre of the foreground is seen the timber framework of the ship’s
large red cross of electric lights. With this, and a tier of some sixty
green lights running from stem to stern, a hospital ship at night is a
beautiful as well as unmistakeable object at sea.
[Illustration]
XXV
“WALKING WOUNDED” SLEEPING ON DECK
The best place to sleep, on a summer night in a full hospital ship,
for a man whose wound is not grave enough to cause serious “shock” and
consequent need of much artificial warming.
[Illustration]
XXVI (a and b)
“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
This drawing was done in the warm early autumn of 1916. All “walking
wounded” wear lifebelts, if their injuries permit, during the Channel
crossing, and each “stretcher case” has a lifebelt under his pillow, if
not on. The necessity for this, in a war with Germany, has been proved
by the fate of too many of our hospital ships.
[Illustration]
“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
The deck of a British hospital ship is one of the most cheerful places
in the world. Every man is at rest after toil, is about to see friends
after separation, can smoke when he likes, and has in every other man
on board a companion with whom endless reminiscences can be exchanged,
and perhaps the merits and demerits of the Ypres salient, or the most
advantageous use of “tanks,” warmly debated, as is the custom of
privates of the New Army. Silent or vocal, a great beatitude fills the
vessel.
[Illustration]
XXVII (a and b)
A MAIN APPROACH TO THE BRITISH FRONT
The canvas screen on the left marks a place where the road had been
under enemy observation. A “sausage,” or stationary observation
balloon, is seen above the road. “Sausages” are not pretty. They
exhibit, at various stages of inflation, the various shapes taken by
a maggot partly uncurled. But the work done from them, besides being
always disagreeable and often risky, is extremely valuable.
[Illustration]
“ROAD LIABLE TO BE SHELLED”
A stretch of high-road which was under enemy observation when drawn.
Such roads are, of course, only used with due caution. The whole
drawing is remarkably instinct with the artist’s sense of a malign
invisible presence--a “terror that walketh by noonday”--infesting the
sunny vacant length of the forbidden road.
[Illustration]
XXVIII
TROUBLE ON THE ROAD
War has its tyre troubles, as peace has. In this case the lack of a
spare wheel, and the consequent necessity for changing an inner tube,
had the compensation of giving the artist time to make the drawing.
[Illustration]
XXIX
BRITISH TROOPS ON THE MARCH TO THE SOMME
A typical Picardy landscape behind the frontal zone of destruction. The
crescent-shaped line of troops and transport on the road is a small
fraction of a Division moving up to take its place in the front line.
[Illustration]
XXX
A SKETCH AT CONTALMAISON
The place is Contalmaison, but the drawing has caught the spirit of the
whole of the shattered country-side recaptured this year.
[Illustration]
XXXI
ON THE SOMME: SAUSAGE BALLOONS
A typical winter scene on the Somme battlefield. The nearer “sausage,”
or captive observation balloon, is being run out to its proper height
for work, by unwinding its cable from a reel on the ground. The further
balloon is already moored high enough and its observer, alone in the
small hanging cage, is at work with his map, telescope and telephone.
[Illustration]
XXXII
A WRECKED AEROPLANE NEAR ALBERT
A casualty in the R.F.C. The smashed biplane and the retreating
stretcher party on the right explain themselves. On the left, Albert
church, to the right of a tall factory chimney, is seen in the distance.
[Illustration]
XXXIII
A MESS OF THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS
The Officers’ mess at the most advanced station of the Royal Flying
Corps on the Somme front. The great tent was designed as an aeroplane
hangar. An R.F.C. mess usually has an atmosphere of its own. There is
more variety of apparel than at other messes; there are more dogs;
personal mascots abound, and in many ways there is more expression
of individual choice or peculiarity than elsewhere--corresponding,
perhaps, to the more individual character of a flying officer’s work
and responsibilities and to the temperament which leads to success in
flying. The officers are drawn from all sorts of regiments, and each
continues to wear his regimental badge. It is winter, and the second
figure from the left is wearing a fur jacket.
[Illustration]
XXXIV
WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE ON TRONES WOOD FROM MONTAUBAN
The drawing expresses well the singular aspect of the parts of the
battlefield where artillery fire was heavy and where the conical holes
made in the ground by high explosive shells were consequently close
together. At a later stage these separate pock-marks overlap, like
the pits in confluent small-pox, and the whole of the shelled ground
becomes soft and loose, as though raked deeply but unevenly. In the
distance the detached higher puffs of smoke from bursting shrapnel are
distinguishable from the rising clouds of smoke from high-explosive
shells.
[Illustration]
XXXV (a and b)
IN THE REGAINED TERRITORY
Both the places drawn were in German hands until July. The first
drawing is of a cemetery found behind the old German front line near
Fricourt. There were many imperfectly marked German graves near these.
They have since been marked, as many thousands of hurriedly made
British graves have been, with wooden crosses and metal inscriptions by
our Graves’ Registration and Inquiries Units.
The second drawing, with a helmeted sentry at the sand-bagged entrance
to a dug-out, conveys the sinister air of a village destroyed, but not
quite effaced, by shell-fire.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XXXVI
A V.A.D. REST STATION
At a base railway station in France. Between the arrivals of hospital
trains from the front the V.A.D. workers occupy themselves in the
“dispensary” in rolling bandages or preparing hot cocoa and other food
for the wounded or sick men who will pass through the station.
[Illustration]
XXXVII
A GATEWAY AT ARRAS
A few hundred yards from this gate the Anglo-French treaty of peace was
signed after Agincourt. Part of the city’s later history is written in
the curious and beautiful Spanish architecture of its chief squares.
It is now in the middle stage of destruction: almost every building is
shattered or injured, but enough is standing to make the empty city
seem still sensitive, in its very stones, under the enemy’s random
shellfire.
[Illustration]
XXXVIII
OUTSIDE ARRAS, NEAR THE GERMAN LINES
At Arras the Germans always seem very near you. In fact they are. No
other famous town in the Allies’ hands has a German front trench in its
suburbs; nowhere do the two front trenches come so close to each other.
The result is a subtle quality of apprehensiveness in the atmosphere
of the silent empty city. It seems like someone standing on tiptoe,
peering and listening, in a solitary place, for some vague unseen
danger, or like a horse nervously pricking its ears, you cannot tell
why. This tingle of uncanny dread has been conveyed with remarkable
success in this figureless but haunted landscape.
[Illustration]
XXXIX
WATCHING GERMAN PRISONERS
British soldiers watching recently captured Germans on their way down
from the front to an Army Corps “cage.” Until removed to the base our
prisoners are well housed in huts or tents in a kind of compound fenced
with barbed wire and placed well outside the range of their friends’
artillery. There are no attempts at escape. Our men, behind the front
line, always watch the arrival of new prisoners with silent curiosity.
Those of our soldiers who have themselves fought with the Germans, and
captured them, usually befriend them with cigarettes and drinks from
water-bottles.
[Illustration]
XL
ON THE SOMME: “MUD”
At a camp, near Albert, whose Church, with the image knocked awry, is
seen to the right. With the permission of the officer on the left some
soldiers are fishing in the mud for such fragments of old timber, boxes
and tins as may be of use to them in their field housekeeping, though
they are not worth collecting for deposit at the official Salvage Dumps.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
TRENCH SCENERY.
In one of these drawings Mr. Bone gives a rousing glimpse of trench
life at a moment of action. These are its moments of transfiguration,
when all the glow of courage, that has been banked down and husbanded
through months of waiting and guarding, bursts, at a word of
command, into flame. The rest of trench life is work, contrivance
and observation. It has been called monotonous. But, for any man who
has not lost the heart of a boy, it has the relish of an endlessly
changeful outdoor adventure, a game with the earth and the weather, as
well as with the more official enemy.
No two points in an Allied front trench are wholly alike. Certain
general patterns there are, but no facsimiles. Each traverse or bay
has a look of its own; it is personal and expresses, as Robinson
Crusoe’s stockade might have done, the nature of some man or men making
shift, each after his kind, to put up what they could, in the shortest
time, between their bodies and danger. A German firing trench is less
various. In it you seem to see the minds of a few large and able
contractors; in ours the minds of thousands of good campers-out. To put
it in another way, the German trench has, in some measure, the quality
of a long street built, well enough, to a single design; ours possesses
the charm of a strip of coast or a long country lane, where nature or
man has made every indentation and turn a surprise, and each farmer has
made gates and hedges to his own mind.
The line goes through wonderful places and charges them with singular
thrills of romance. It has made windmills famous as forts, and brought
herons into the suburbs of cities. In one place it runs across water
and land so intermixed that the sentries of both armies are upon little
islands crowned with breast-works like grouse butts; you see them,
when the winter evening falls, standing immobile, waist-deep in mist,
each man about forty yards from his enemy. Men have stood there, turn
by turn, for two years and a half, moving softly and whispering as
if in a church, till the shyest of wildfowl have learnt to treat the
surrounding marsh as their own, and the only sound is of wild duck and
snipe astir between the muzzles of two nations’ loaded rifles, snipe
safe among the snipers. At more than one place the two front lines
converge until each sentry knows that he is within a gentle bomb’s
throw of the enemy. Out of the firing trench, at one of these places,
you walk on tiptoe along a short sap that halves this short distance,
and from its end you look up at a small heap of rubble--a couple of
cart-loads--and know that some German is cautiously listening, like
you, on its further side.
Those are the cramped and contorted parts of the front. A few miles
away it will straighten and loose itself out; you see it run free, in
great, easy curves, up the slopes of wide moorlands, the two front
lines drawn apart almost three hundred yards. Each is a double band of
colour; the white ribbon of its dug chalk and the broader rust-brown
ribbon of its tangled wire stand out clear against the shabby velveteen
grey of the heath. Here there is less of thrill and more of ease in
trench life; by day the sentries peer, hour by hour, into the baffling
mist that is woven across their sight by our own and the enemy’s
wire; it is like trying to see through low and leafless, but thick,
undergrowth. By night the wire makes, to the sentry’s eye, a middle
stratum of opaque dark grey, between the full blackness of the earth
below it and the more penetrable obscurity of the night air above.
But the darkness is never trusted for long. All night each army is
sending up rocket-like lights to burst and hang like arc lamps in
the air over the firing trench of the other. From a commanding point
you can see, at any moment of any night, scores of these ascending
rockets, each like a line drawn on the dark with a pencil of flame,
arching over to intersect each other near the zenith of their flight,
incessantly tracing and re-tracing the lines of a Gothic nave over all
No Man’s Land, from the Alps to the sea. All night, too, there is a
kind of pulse of light in the sky, along the whole front, from the
flash of guns. From the trenches the flash itself can seldom be seen,
but the sky winks and winks from moment to moment with the spread and
contraction of a trembling radiance like summer lightning.
At most parts of the line a man in the front trench is cut off from
landscape. To look at a tree behind the enemy’s lines may be to give a
mark to a sniper hidden in its boughs. By day you see the upper half of
the dome of the sky, and, through loopholes, a few yards of rough earth
or chalk, then the nebulous wire and, through its thin places, perhaps
a few uniforms, blue, grey or brown, lying beyond, among the coarse
grass and weeds. At night you see all the stars well, and on moonlight
nights, if you walk the trench softly, you can watch strange friezes
sharply silhouetted on the sky line of the parapet, the wars and loves
of capering rats, “flouting the ivory moon.” Whole choirs of larks may
be heard: neither cannon nor small arms seem to alarm them; and most of
the ground has its own hawk to quarter it daily.
To men put on this short allowance of natural sights and sounds it
is an extraordinary pleasure to find in the rear of their trench a
clean rivulet, such as often occurs in chalk land, where the surface
water filters rapidly in and comes out at the bases of slopes like so
many crystal springs. But the greatest of all trench delights is the
re-discovery, every year, of the sun. Some day in March it is suddenly
found to have a miraculous warmth, and everybody off duty comes out
like the bees and stands about in the trench, sunning his head and
shoulders in the tepid rays and adoring--quite inarticulately--and
feeling that all’s well with the world. A winter in trenches revives,
in us children of civilisation, a pre-Promethean rapture of love for
the sun; and the dark nights, in which not a match must be struck,
makes us, at any rate, think more highly than ever we did of the moon,
which halves the strain of the soldier on guard, and of the stars
which guide him back overland to his billet, at a relief, to sleep in
Elysium. So, for a man who has all his senses alive and unjaded, the
hard and bare life has its compensations. It makes him do without many
things; but it also quickens delight in the things which are at the
base of all the rest, and without which there could not have been the
incomparable adventure and spectacle of life on the earth.
G. H. Q., France.
_February, 1917._
XLI
CASSEL
Cassel has no great part in this war. But it has endured ancient
sieges; three notable battles have taken its name since 1070; the last
of them led to the annexation of Cassel to France in 1678 and gave
her a town finely set on a hill amidst lowlands, and equally good to
look at and look from. The many windmills about it give Cassel an air
of liveliness as you approach, and this cheerful effect is maintained
on reaching the main square, drawn by Mr. Bone, with its lightsome
spaciousness and comfortable, well-proportioned houses. The eyes of
passing Scottish soldiers find a familiar look in the “step” gables of
many of Cassel’s roofs. One is seen on the right.
[Illustration]
XLII
A LINE OF TANKS
Thanks to the imaginative power of the artist, the “Tank” is here seen
not as the British soldier sees it--a friendly giant with lovably droll
tricks of gait and gesture--but as it must look to a threatened enemy,
the very embodiment of momentum irresistibly grinding its way towards
its prey. In the presence of “tanks” as here drawn--though there is no
trace of exaggeration in the drawing--the spectator is as a crushed
worm and, in fact, finds there is more force in that phrase than he
knew.
[Illustration]
XLIII
A KITCHEN IN THE FIELD
One of the improvements in our field organisation since the early part
of the war is the more general provision of hot meals for the men in
the front trenches. From cookhouses like the one shown in the drawing,
or from travelling field kitchens, the hot stew and tea are brought up
the communication trench in dixies, two to a platoon, each dixie being
slung from a pole carried on two men’s shoulders. The cooks work under
shell fire and many have been killed.
[Illustration]
XLIV
THE GUN PIT: HARDENING THE STEEL
The drawing shows one of the most thrilling moments in the making of a
great gun. The doors of the furnace have just been thrown back and the
heated gun tube is about to be lifted by the giant pincers of the crane.
[Illustration]
XLV
THE GUN PIT: A GUN JACKET ENTERING THE OIL TANK
The gun jacket shown here has just been heated in the furnace and is
about to plunge into its oil bath. The spectacle is always striking,
especially at dusk, when the fierce glow of the huge mass of metal
seems more brilliant than ever. The passage is made in a few seconds.
[Illustration]
XLVI
THE GUN PIT: THE GREAT CLUTCHES OF THE CRANE
The figures in the foreground give a scale by which to judge the size
and power of the crane that handles the heavier guns in the gun pit.
The tube has now been lifted from the oil tank and waits to be carried
back to the gun shop lathes.
[Illustration]
XLVII
MOUNTING A GREAT GUN
This is one of the largest guns. At such a scene as its mounting one is
always struck by the contrast between the restless stir of the minute
figures busy about it and the massive impassivity--for the present--of
the thing they have created. “A great gun,” it has been said, “is so
_sheer_.” In a gun shop it dwarfs everything round it and seems the
embodiment, at the same time, of immobility and of menace.
[Illustration]
XLVIII
“THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS”
A store containing loaded shells of every calibre. All the plant has
been made since 1914, in answer to the challenge of German militarism.
The railway trucks in the foreground are incessantly filled and
refilled from the supplies pouring into the store for dispatch to the
front. Women drive the cranes that gather up bunches of shells from any
part of the building and lower them, with absolute precision, to their
appointed places in the trucks. All handling of shells must be cautious
and deliberate, but the work proceeds, without haste and without rest,
at a remarkable speed.
[Illustration]
XLIX
THE RUINED TOWER OF BÉCORDEL-BÉCOURT
The village of Bécordel-Bécourt is just on the Allies’ side of the
front line as it was before the Battle of the Somme. It has, therefore,
sustained only the German artillery fire, not that of both armies in
turn. Hence the survival of this comparatively large fragment of the
village church.
[Illustration]
L
EMBARKING THE WOUNDED
_Sketched at night at a Port of embarkation of the wounded._
Owing to the low tide the “stretcher cases” or “lying wounded” had all
to be carried underneath the pier to the level of the hospital ship.
This meant very hard work for the stretcher bearers, and one is here
seen resting a moment while the previous stretcher is being carefully
taken aboard to be lowered by the lift from the deck to the large wards
below.
[Illustration]
LI (a and b)
MONT ST. ELOI
In the left centre are the tall ruins of the large church of the
monastery at Mont St. Eloi, a little hill about five miles north-west
of Arras. The hill is a splendid viewpoint, commanding the Vimy Ridge,
the German lines between Neuville St. Vaast and Thelus, the city of
Arras itself, the wood of Souchez and the slopes of Notre Dame de
Lorette. On the ground for many miles north and north-east of it the
French fought with heroic determination in the advances which gained
them Carency, Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette in 1915.
[Illustration]
RUINS OF MAMETZ
Mametz must have been one of the pleasantest of the villages on the
Somme battlefield. It was built on a gentle slope, facing south, a
little way off the dusty main road from Albert to Peronne, and large,
shady trees were intermingled with the houses. The drawing shows what
was left of the village after its capture in the beginning of July. The
tall fragment of the parish church stands in the centre of the drawing.
[Illustration]
LII
RUINED TRENCHES IN MAMETZ WOOD
In this one drawing may be seen the face of all the hard-fought woods
of the Somme battlefield--Mametz, Fricourt, Bazentin, Delville,
Thiepval, Foureaux and St. Pierre Vaast. Everywhere in them all there
is the same close network of half-filled trenches, the same bristle
of ruined tree trunks, the same litter of the leavings of prolonged
fighting at close quarters--bits of broken rifles and bayonets,
perforated helmets, unexploded hand grenades, fragments of shell,
displaced sand-bags, broken stretchers, boots not quite empty, and
shreds of uniform and equipment.
[Illustration]
LIII
“THAWING OUT”
It is always cold in an aeroplane in flight, but in winter the cold
endured by airmen is often atrocious, however perfect their equipment.
A pilot, who has just come down from his three hours of duty in the
air, is here seen “thawing out” over a spirit stove in his tent. Like
the thawing of meat taken from cold storage, the process requires some
patience.
[Illustration]
LIV
DISEMBARKING