The Turn Of The Tide
1
The Germans were baulked of Paris. Even now, looking back on
those days, I sometimes wonder why they made that sudden swerve
to the south-east, missing their great objective. It was for Paris that
they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an
incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and
Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiègne, flinging away human life
as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris--
Paris the great and beautiful--seemed to be within their grasp, and
the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the
French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a
dread proof of German power.
As I have said, all the north-west corner of France was denuded of
troops, with the exception of some poor Territorials, ill-trained and ill-
equipped, and never meant to withstand the crush of Imperial troops
advancing in hordes with masses of artillery, so that they fled like
panic-stricken sheep. The forts of Paris on the western side would not
have held out for half a day against the German guns. All that
feverish activity of trench work was but a pitiable exhibition of an
unprepared defence. The enemy would have swept over them like
a rolling tide. The little British army was still holding together, but it
had lost heavily and was winded after its rapid retreat. The army of
Paris was waiting to fight and would have fought to the death, but
without support from other army corps still a day's journey distant,
its peril would have been great, and if the enemy's right wing had
been hurled with full force against it at the critical moment it might
have been crushed and annihilated. Von Kluck had twenty-four hours
in his favour. If he had been swift to use them before Joffre could
have hurried up his regiments to the rescue, German boots might
have tramped down through the Place de la République to the Place
de la Concorde, and German horses might have been stabled in the
Palais des Beaux-Arts. I am sure of that, because I saw the beginning
of demoralization, the first signs of an enormous tragedy, creeping
closer to an expectant city.
In spite of the optimism of French officers and men, an optimism as
strong as religious faith, I believe now, searching back to facts, that it
was not justified by the military situation. It was justified only by the
miracle that followed faith. Von Kluck does not seem to have known
that the French army was in desperate need of those twenty-four
hours which he gave them by his hesitation. If he had come straight
on for Paris with the same rapidity as his men had marched in earlier
stages and with the same resolve to smash through regardless of
cost, the city would have been his and France would have reeled
under the blow. The psychological effect of the capital being in the
enemy's hands would have been worth more to them at this stage of
the war than the annihilation of an army corps. It would have been a
moral debacle for the French people, who had been buoyed up with
false news and false hopes until their Government had fled to
Bordeaux, realizing the gravity of the peril. The Terrible Year would
have seemed no worse than this swift invasion of Paris, and the
temperament of the nation, in spite of the renewal of its youth, had
not changed enough to resist this calamity with utter stoicism. I know
the arguments of the strategists, who point out that Von Kluck could
not afford to undertake the risk of entering Paris while an undefeated
army remained on his flank. They are obvious arguments, thoroughly
sound to men who play for safety, but all records of great captains of
war prove that at a decisive moment they abandon the safe and
obvious game for a master-stroke of audacity, counting the risks and
taking them, and striking terror into the hearts of their enemy by the
very shock of their contempt for caution. Von Kluck could have
entered and held Paris with twenty thousand men. That seems to me
beyond dispute by anyone who knows the facts. With the mass of
men at his disposal he could have driven a wedge between Paris and
the French armies of the left and centre, and any attempt on their part
to pierce his line and cut his communications would have been
hampered by the deadly peril of finding themselves outflanked by the
German centre swinging down from the north in a western curve, with
its point directed also upon Paris. The whole aspect of the war would
have been changed, and there would have been great strategical
movements perilous to both sides, instead of the siege war of the
trenches in which both sides played for safety and established for
many months a position bordering upon stalemate.
The psychological effect upon the German army if Paris had been
taken would have been great in moral value to them as in moral loss
to the French. Their spirits would have been exalted as much as the
French spirits would have drooped, and even in modern war victory is
secured as much by temperamental qualities as by shell-fire and big
guns.
The Headquarters Staff of the German army decided otherwise.
Scared by the possibility of having their left wing smashed back to the
west between Paris and the sea, with their communications cut, they
swung round steadily to the south-east and drove their famous
wedge-like formation southwards, with the purpose of dividing the
allied forces of the West from the French centre. The exact position
then was this: Their own right struck down to the south-east of Paris,
through Château Thierry to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre and beyond; and
another strong column forced the French to evacuate Rheims and fall
back in a south-westerly direction. It was not without skill, this sudden
change of plan, and it is clear that the German Staff believed it
possible to defeat the French centre and left centre and then to come
back with a smashing blow against the army of Paris and the
"contemptible" British. But two great factors in the case were
overlooked. One was the value of time, and the other was the sudden
revival in the spirit of the French army now that Paris might still be
saved. They gave time--no more than that precious twenty-four
hours--to General Joffre and his advisers to repair by one supreme
and splendid effort all the grievous errors of the war's first chapter.
While they were hesitating and changing their line of front, a new and
tremendous activity was taking place on the French side, and Joffre,
by a real stroke of genius which proves him to be a great general in
spite of the first mistakes, for which he was perhaps not responsible,
prepared a blow which was to strike his enemy shrewdly.
2
I had the great fortune of seeing something of that rush to the rescue
which gave hope that perhaps, after all, the tragedy which had
seemed so inevitable--the capture of the world's finest city--might not
be fulfilled.
This great movement was directed from the west, the south, and the
east, and continued without pause by day and night.
In stations about Paris I saw regiment after regiment entraining--men
from the southern provinces speaking the patois of the south, men
from the eastern departments whom I had seen a month before, at
the beginning of the war, at Chalons, and Epernay and Nancy, and
men from the southwest and centre of France in the garrisons along
the Loire.
They were all in splendid spirits, strangely undaunted by the rapidity
of the German advance. "Fear nothing, my little one," said a dirty
unshaven gentleman with the laughing eyes of d'Artagnan, "we shall
bite their heads off. These brutal 'Boches' are going to put
themselves in a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last."
The railway carriages were garlanded with flowers of the fields. The
men wore posies in their képis. In white chalk they had scrawled
legends upon the cattle-trucks in which they travelled. "À mort
Guillaume!" "Vive la Gloire!" "Les Français ne se rendent jamais!"
Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the
Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards. Their blue coats
with the turned-back flaps were war-worn and flaked with the dust of
long marches. Their red trousers were sloppy and stained.
But they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their
spirits was good to see. A friend of mine was not ashamed to say that
he had tears at least as high as his throat when he stood among
them and clasped some of those brown hands. There was a thrill not
to be recaptured in the emotion of those early days of war. Afterwards
the monotony of it all sat heavily upon one's soul.
They were very proud, those French soldiers, of fighting side by side
with their old foes the British, now after long centuries of strife, from
Edward the Black Prince to Wellington, their brothers-in-arms upon
the battlefields; and because I am English they offered me their
cigarettes and made me one of them.
In modern war it is only masses of men that matter, moved by a
common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and
I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move, rapidly, in
vast numbers, and in the right direction--to support the French lines
which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town,
whom I had followed in their retirement back and back, with the British
always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the
outskirts of Paris itself.
Only this could save Paris--the rapid strengthening of the Allied front
by enormous reserves strong enough to hold back the arrow-shaped
battering-ram of the enemy's right.
All our British reserves had been rushed up to the front from Havre
and Rouen. There was only one deduction to be drawn from this
great swift movement. The French and British lines had been
supported by every available battalion to save Paris from its menace
of destruction, to meet the weight of the enemy's metal by a force
strong enough to resist its mass.
3
One of the most dramatic incidents of the war was the transport of the
army of Paris to the fighting line--in taxi-cabs. There were 2000 of
these cabs in Paris, and on this day of September 1 they
disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them, just as the
earth had swallowed one of them not long before when the floods had
sapped the streets. A sudden order from General Gallièni, the Military
Governor of Paris, had been issued to each driver, who immediately
ignored the upraised hands of would-be passengers and the shouts
of people desperate to get to one of the railway stations with
household goods and a hope of escape. At the depots the drivers
knew that upon the strength of their tyres and the power of their
engines depended the safety of Paris and perhaps the life of France.
It was an extraordinary incident in the history of modern war. Five
soldiers were loaded into each cab, four inside and one next to the
driver, with their rifles and kit crammed in between them. In one
journey twenty thousand men were taken on the road to Meaux. It
was a triumph of mobility, and when in future the Parisian is tempted
to curse those red vehicles which dash about the streets to the
danger of all pedestrians who forget that death has to be dodged by
never-failing vigilance, his righteous wrath will be softened, perhaps,
by the remembrance that these were the chariots of General
Manoury's army before the battle of Meaux, which turned the tide of
war and flung back the enemy in retreat..
4
It will be to the lasting credit of General Joffre and the French Staff
that after six weeks of disorder owing to the unreadiness of their army
and their grievous errors in the disposition of the available troops,
they recovered themselves in a supreme effort and by a brilliant
stroke of strategy took the enemy completely by surprise and dealt
him a staggering blow. The German Headquarters Staff--the brains of
the greatest military machine in Europe--sublimely arrogant in their
belief that they had an exclusive knowledge of the whole science of
war and that the allied armies were poor blunderers without
intelligence and without organization, utterly incapable of resisting the
military genius of the German race, found themselves foiled and out-
manuvred at the very moment when the prize of victory seemed to
be within their grasp.
For the first time since the beginning of their advance into French
territory they were confronted with something like equal numbers, and
they were brought to a halt at once. This arrest, shocking to their self-
confidence, was found to be more than a mere check easily
overpowered by bringing up more battalions. General von Kluck
realized that the French had gathered together a formidable mass of
men ready to be flung upon his right flank. Their guns were already
beginning to open fire with frightful effect upon his advanced
columns. The pressure of French regiments marching steadily and
swiftly from the south-east and south-west after weeks of retirement,
was forcing in his outposts, chasing back his cavalry and revealing a
strong and resolute offensive. On September 4 and 5 there was
heavy fighting on the German left and centre, to the south of the
Marne and the west of the Ourcq. While General von Kluck was
endeavouring to resist the thrust of the French and British troops who
were massing their guns with great strength on his right, General von
Bulow's left wing, with the Saxon army and the Prince of
Wurtemberg's army, made desperate attempts to break the French
centre by violent attacks to the north of Sezanne and Vitry-le-
François. For two days the Germans tested the full measure of the
strength opposed to them, but failed in smashing through any part of
the French line, so that the Allies, successful in holding their ground
against the full weight of the enemy, gained time for the supports to
reach them and then developed a complete and general attack.
Von Kluck found that his troops were yielding. The French mordant
was too much for Prussians as well as Saxons, who in many villages
of France and in the hollows of the downs were heavily punished by
the Anglo-French artillery, and routed by bayonet charges thrust
home with incredible ferocity. The German Headquarters Staff,
receiving these reports from all parts of the line, must have had many
moral shocks, undermining their pride and racking their nerves.
Perhaps one day we shall read the history of those councils of war
between the German generals, when men who had been confident of
victory began to be haunted by doubt, hiding their fears even from
themselves until they were forced to a gloomy recognition of grave
perils. Some of these men must have wept and others cursed, while
Von Kluck decided to play again for safety, and issued an order for
retreat. Retreat! What would the Emperor say in Berlin where he
waited for the prize of Paris and heard that it had slipped from his
grasp? How could they explain the meaning of that retreat to the
people at home, expecting loot from the Louvre and souvenirs from
Paris shops?
Some of the officers thought these things--I have read their letters--
but General von Kluck must have had only one dominating and
absorbing thought, more important even than an Emperor's anger.
"Gott im Himmel, shall I get this army back to a stronger line or shall I
risk all on a fight in the open, against those French and British guns
and almost equal odds?" The failure of the German centre was the
gravest disaster, and threatened von Kluck with the menace of an
enveloping movement by the Allied troops which might lead to his
destruction, with the flower of the Imperial troops. Away back there on
the Aisne were impregnable positions tempting to hard-pressed men.
Leaving nothing to chance, the Germans had prepared them already
in case of retreat, though it had not been dreamed of then as more
than a fantastic possibility. The fortune of war itself as well as
cautious judgment pointed back to the Aisne for safety. The allied
armies were closing up, increasing in strength of men and guns as
the hours passed. In a day or two it might be too late to reach the
strongholds of the hills.
5
So the retreat of the German right wing which had cut like a knife
through northern France until its edge was blunted by a wall of steel,
began on September 5 and increased in momentum as the allied
troops followed hard upon the enemy's heels. The great mass of the
German left swung backwards in a steady and orderly way, not losing
many men and not demoralized by this amazing turn in Fortune's
wheel. "It is frightfully disappointing," wrote a German officer whose
letter was found afterwards on his dead body. "We believed that we
should enter Paris in triumph and to turn away from it is a bitter thing
for the men. But I trust our chiefs and I know that it is only a
strategical retirement. Paris will still be ours."
Truly it was a strategical retirement and not a "rout," as it was called
by the English Press Bureau. But all retirements are costly when the
enemy follows close, and the rearguard of Von Kluck's army was in a
terrible plight and suffered heavy losses. The French light artillery
opened fire in a running pursuit, advancing their guns from position to
position with very brief halts, during which the famous soixante-quinze
flung out shells upon bodies of troops at close range--so that they fell
like wheat cut to pieces in a hailstorm. The British gunners were
pushing forward, less impetuously but with a steady persistence, to
the west of the River Ourcq, and after all their hardships; losses, and
fatigues, the men who had been tired of retreating were heartened
now that their turn had come to give chase.
Episodes that seem as incredible as a boy's romance of war took
place in those first days of September when the German right rolled
back in a retreating tide. On one of those days an English regiment
marched along a dusty road for miles with another body of men
tramping at the same pace on a parallel road, in the same white dust
which cloaked their uniforms--not of English khaki, but made in
Germany. Hundreds of German soldiers, exhausted by this forced
march in the heat, without food or water, fell out, took to the cover of
woods, and remained there for weeks, in parties of six or eight,
making their way to lonely farmhouses where they demanded food
with rifles levelled at frightened peasants, taking pot-shots at English
soldiers who had fallen out in the same way, and hiding in thickets
until they were hunted out by battues of soldiers long after the first
great battle of the Marne. It was the time for strange adventures when
even civilians wandering in the wake of battle found themselves
covered by the weapons of men who cared nothing for human life,
whether it was their own or another's, and when small battalions of
French or English, led by daring officers, fought separate battles in
isolated villages, held by small bodies of the enemy, cut off from the
main army but savagely determined to fight to the death.
Out of the experiences of those few days many curious chapters of
history will be written by regimental officers and men. I have heard
scores of stories of that kind, told while the thrill of them still
flushed the cheeks of the narrators, and when the wounds they
had gained in these fields of France were still stabbed with
red-hot needles of pain, so that a man's laughter would be checked
by a quivering sigh and his lips parched by a great thirst.
6
Because of its vivid interest and its fine candour, I will give one such
story. It was told to me by a young officer of Zouaves who had been
in the thickest of the fighting to the east of Paris. He had come out of
action with a piece of shell in his left arm, and his uniform was
splashed with the blood of his wound. I wish I could write it in his
soldierly French words;--so simple and direct, yet emotional at times
with the eloquence of a man who speaks of the horrors which have
scorched his eyes and of the fear that for a little while robbed him of
all courage and of the great tragedy of this beastly business of war
which puts truth upon the lips of men.
I wish also I could convey to my readers' minds the portrait of that
young man with his candid brown eyes, his little black moustache, his
black stubble of beard, as I saw him in the rags and tatters of his
Zouave dress, concealed a little beneath his long grey-blue cape of a
German Uhlan, whom he had killed with his sword.
When he described his experience he puffed at a long German pipe
which he had found in the pocket of the cape, and laughed now and
then at this trophy, of which he was immensely proud.
"For four days previous to Monday, September 7," he said, "we were
engaged in clearing out the German 'boches' from all the villages on
the left bank of the Ourcq, which they had occupied in order to protect
the flank of their right wing."
"Unfortunately for us the English heavy artillery, which would have
smashed the beggars to bits, had not yet come up to help us,
although we expected them with some anxiety, as the big business
events began as soon as we drove the outposts back to their main
lines."
"However, we were quite equal to the preliminary task, and heartened
by the news of the ammunition convoy which had been turned into a
very pretty firework display by 'Soixante-dix Pau.' My Zouaves--as
you see I belong to the First Division, which has a reputation to keep
up--n'est-ce pas?--were in splendid form."
"They were just like athletes who want to be first off the mark, or
rather perhaps I should say like bloodhounds on the scent."
"Still, just to encourage them a little, don't you know, I pulled out my
revolver, showed it to my little ones, and said very gently that the first
man who hesitated to advance under the fire of the German guns
would be a dead man before he took a step to the rear. (In every
regiment there are one or two men who want encouraging in this
way.) Of course, they all laughed at me. They wanted to get near
those German guns, and nearer still to the gunners. That was before
they knew the exact meaning of shell-fire. Well, they did good things,
those Zouaves of mine. But it wasn't pleasant work. We fought from
village to village, very close fighting, so that sometimes we could look
into our enemy's eyes. The Moroccans were with us, the native
troops, unlike my boys who are Frenchmen, and they were like
demons with their bayonet work."
"Several of the villages were set on fire by the Germans before they
retired from them, and soon great columns of smoke with pillars of
flame and clouds of flying sparks rose up into the blue sky, and made
a picture of hell there. For really it was hell on earth.
"Our gunners were shelling the Germans from pillar to post, as it
were, and strewing the ground with their dead. It was across and
among these dead bodies that we infantry had to charge. They lay
about in heaps, masses of bleeding flesh. It made me sick, even in
the excitement of it all."
"The enemy's quickfirers were marvellous. I am bound to say we did
not get it all our own way. They always manuvre them in the same
style, and very clever it is. First of all they mask them with infantry.
Then when the French charge they reveal them and put us to the test
under the most withering fire. It is almost impossible to stand against
it, and in this case we had to retire after each rush for about 250
metres."
"Then quick as lightning the Germans got their mitrailleuses across
the ground which we had yielded to them, and waited for us to come
on again; when they repeated the same operation."
"I can tell you it was pretty trying to the nerves, but my Zouaves were
very steady in spite of fairly heavy losses."
"In a village named Penchard there was some very sharp fighting,
and some of our artillery were posted hereabouts. Presently a
German aeroplane came overhead circling round in reconnaissance.
But it was out for more than that. Suddenly it began to drop bombs,
and whether by design or otherwise--they have no manners, these
fellows--they exploded in the middle of a field hospital. One of my
friends, a young doctor, was wounded in the left arm by a bullet from
one of these bombs, though I don't know what other casualties there
were. But the inevitable happened. Shortly after the disappearance of
the aeroplane the German shells searched the position, and found it
with unpleasant accuracy. It is always the same. The German
aeroplanes are really wonderful in the way they search out the
positions of our guns. We always know that within half an hour of a-n
observation by aeroplane the shells will begin to fall above the
gunners unless they have altered their position. It was so in this
fighting round Meaux yesterday.
"For some days this rat-hunting among the villages on the left bank of
the Ourcq went on all the time, and we were not very happy. The truth
was that we had no water for ourselves, and were four days thirsty. It
was really terrible, for the heat was terrific during the day, and some
of us were almost mad with thirst. Our tongues were blistered and
swollen, our eyes had a silly kind of look in them, and at night we had
horrid dreams. It was, I assure you, an intolerable agony."
"But we did our best for the horses. I have said we were four days
without drink. That was because we used our last water for the poor
beasts. A gentleman has to do that--you will agree?--and the French
soldier is not a barbarian. Even then the horses had to go without a
drop of water for two days, and I'm not ashamed to say that I wept
salt tears to see the sufferings of those poor innocent creatures, who
did not understand the meaning of all this bloody business and who
wondered at our cruelty."
"The nights were dreadful. All around us were burning villages, the
dear hamlets of France, and at every faint puff of wind the sparks
floated about them like falling stars. But other fires were burning.
Under the cover of the darkness the Germans had collected their
dead and had piled them into great heaps and had covered them with
straw and paraffin. Then they had set a torch to these funeral pyres."
"Carrion crows were about in the dawn that followed. Not many of
them, but they came flopping about the dead bodies, and the living,
with hungry beaks. One of my own comrades lay very badly
wounded, and when he wakened out of his unconsciousness one of
these beastly birds was sitting on his chest waiting for him to die. That
is war!"
"Yet there are other things in war. Fine and splendid things. It was
magnificent to see your English gunners come up. They were rather
late in the field. They did not appear until midday on September 7,
when the big battle was going on, and when we were doing our best
to push back the German right wing. They came up just as if they
were on the parade ground, marvellously cool, very chic fellows,
superb in their manner of handling their guns. It was heavy artillery,
and we badly wanted it. And nothing could budge your men, though
the German shell-fire was very hot."
"That is the way with your British gunners. They are different from the
French, who are always best when they are moving forward, but do
not like to stay in one position. But when your men have taken up
their ground, nothing can move them. Nothing on earth!"
"And yet the German shells were terrifying. I confess to you that there
were times when my nerves were absolutely gone. I crouched down
with my men--we were in open formation--and ducked my head at the
sound of the bursting 'obus' and trembled in every limb as though I
had a fit of ague. God rebuked me for the bombast with which I had
spoken to my men."
"One hears the zip-zip of the bullets, the boom of the great guns, the
tang of our sharp French artillery, and in all this infernal experience of
noise and stench, the screams of dying horses and men joined with
the fury of the gun-fire, and rose shrill above it. No man may boast of
his courage. Dear God, there were moments when I was a coward
with all of them!"
"But one gets used to it, as to all things. My ague did not last long.
Soon I was cheering and shouting again. We cleared the enemy out
of the village of Bregy, and that was where I fell wounded in the arm
pretty badly, by a bit of shell. I bled like a stuck pig, as you can see,
but when I came to myself again a brother officer told me that things
were going on well, and that we had rolled back the German right.
That was better than a bandage to me. I felt very well again, in spite
of my weakness."
"It is the beginning of the end. The Germans are on the run. They are
exhausted and demoralized. Their pride has been broken. They are
short of ammunition. They know that their plans have failed. Now that
we have them on the move nothing will save them. This war is going
to finish quicker than people thought. I believe that in a few days the
enemy will be broken, and that we shall have nothing more to do than
kill them as they fight back in retreat."
That is the story without any re-touching of my own, of the young
lieutenant of Zouaves whom I met after the battle of Meaux, with the
blood still splashed upon his uniform.
It is a human story, giving the experience of only one individual in a
great battle, but clearly enough there emerges from it the truth of that
great operation which did irreparable damage to the German right
wing in its plan of campaign. The optimism with which this officer
ended his tale makes one smile a little now, though in a pitiful way.
The words in which he prophesied a quick finish to the war were
spoken in September 1914, before the agony of the winter campaign,
the awful monotony of that siege warfare, and the tides of blood that
came in the spring of another year.
7
The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of
men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads
down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony
fields strewn already with the débris of fighting, on through villages
where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and
blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part
of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of
beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on grass
nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight.
Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver. No horrors lurked in
the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming
undertone of nature's organists. Little French towns stood white on
the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch
roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest,
peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys
and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and
women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old
familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church
clocks, without any terror in their hearts. War had been declared, but
it seemed remote in its actual cruelty. There was only the faint thrill of
unaccustomed drama in the scenes which passed through these
village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a
squadron of light blue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who
grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy. It is
true that in some of these villages mothers of France had clasped
their sons to their bosoms and wept a little over their nestling heads
and wept still more in loneliness when the boys had gone away. The
shadow of the war had crept into all these villages of France, but
outwardly they were still at peace and untroubled by the far-off peril.
Nature was indifferent to the stupid ways of men. Her beauty had the
ripeness of the full-blown summer and the somnolence of golden
days when the woods are very still in the shimmering heat and not a
grass-blade moves except when a cricket stirs it with its chirruping.
Now, along the line of the retreat, nature itself was fouled and the old
dwelling-places of peace were wrecked. Fighting their way back the
enemy had burned many villages, or had defended them against a
withering fire from the pursuing troops, so that their blackened
stumps of timber, and charred, broken walls, with heaps of ashes
which were once farmhouses and barns, remained as witnesses of
the horror that had passed. Along the roadways were the bodies of
dead horses. Swarms of flies were black upon them, browsing on
their putrefying flesh, from which a stench came poisoning the air and
rising above the scent of flowers and the sweet smell of hay in
eddying waves of abominable odour. In villages where there had
been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers
and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramée and Chevreville, the whitewashed
cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the
German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet
charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house
had escaped. It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage. A café
restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other
aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact. Here and
there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a
street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled
over by the hand of a petulant child. In other villages it was difficult
to believe that war had passed that way. It was rather as though a
plague had driven their inhabitants to flight. The houses were still
shuttered as when the bourgeoisie and peasant had fled at the first
news of the German advance. It was only by the intense solitude and
silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation,
only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark mass of
unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts
and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.
Spent cartridges lay about, and fragments of shell, and here and
there shells which had failed to burst until they buried their nozzles in
the earth.
French peasants prowled about for these trophies, though legally
they had no right to them, as they came under the penalties attached
to loot. In many of the cottages which were used by the German
officers there were signs of a hasty evacuation. Capes and leather
pouches still lay about on chairs and bedsteads. Half finished letters,
written to women in the Fatherland who will never read those words,
had been trampled under heel by hurrying boots.
I saw similar scenes in Turkey when the victorious Bulgarians
marched after the retreating Turks. I never dreamed then that such
scenes would happen in France in the wake of a German retreat. It is
a little thing, like one of those unfinished letters from a soldier to his
wife, which overwhelms one with pity for all the tragedy of war.
"Meine liebe Frau." Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for
the scrap of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I
picked up in the Forest of Compiègne She would wait week after
week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those
weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word
which would make her say, "Gott sei dank!" as she knelt by the
bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had
gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last. I
found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down
that I could only read a word or two in German script. They fluttered
about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British
soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields.
Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer
into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could
only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded,
by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned
villages. Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the
effects of shell-fire on living men. I was still groping towards the heart
of the business and wandering in its backyards.
I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September.
By that time the enemy's retreat had finished and the German army
under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in
the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were
vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against
entrenched positions.
All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields
still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines,
stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon
and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the
greatest battles in history had continued.
As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crépy-en-Valois,
which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on
through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and
stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and
British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the
north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked
the air with thunderous reverberations.
Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In
those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature--the spirit of
these woods and hills--listened with strained ears and a frightened
hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the
firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills
were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague,
distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the
enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they
could not find the range of our own artillery.
Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along
rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the
deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a
percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void
spaces. These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy
pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the
marshlands of the Aisne--the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged
all pieces in the French or British lines. With that marvellous foresight
which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been
embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while
their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris. The
Germans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for
themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops
had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which
was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way
back.
I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange
companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such
a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the
guns. My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.
His ordinary profession is that of a garde champêtre, or village
policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with
the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side. With
other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the
line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near
Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to
burn the German corpses.
His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting
in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield,
as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then
pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left
upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could
my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those
brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.
I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly
piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy's dead who
were awaiting their funeral pyres.
My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond
the abandoned village of Levignen.
"See there," he said; "they take some time to burn."
He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a gardener pointing to a bonfire
of autumn leaves.
But there in line with his forefinger rose a heavy rolling smoke,
sluggish in the rain under a leaden sky, and I knew that those leaves
yonder had fallen from the great tree of human life, and this bonfire
was made from an unnatural harvesting.
The French and British dead were laid in the same graves--"Are they
not brothers?" asked the man with the spade--and as soon as the
peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods
they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth
among which I wandered, as heroes' wreaths. But no such honour
was paid to the enemy, and with a little petrol and straw they were put
to the flames until only their charred ashes, windswept and wet with
heavy rain, marked the place of their death.
It is the justice of men. It makes no difference. But as I stood and
watched these smoky fires, between the beauty of great woods
stretching away to the far hills, and close to a village which seemed a
picture of human peace, with its old church-tower and red-brown
roofs, I was filled with pity at all this misery and needless death which
has flung its horror across the fair fields of France.
What was the sense of it? Why, in God's name, or the devil's, were
men killing each other like this on the fields of France, so that human
life was of no more value than that of vermin slaughtered ruthlessly?
Each one of the German corpses whose flesh was roasting under
those oily clouds of smoke had been a young man with bright hopes,
and a gift of laughter, and some instincts of love in his heart. At least
he had two eyes and a nose, and other features common to the
brotherhood of man. Was there really the mark of the beast upon him
so that he should be killed at sight, without pity? I wondered if in that
roasting mass of human flesh were any of the men who had been
kind to me in Germany--the young poet whose wife had plucked
roses for me in her garden, and touched them with her lips and said,
"Take them to England with my love"; or the big Bavarian professor
who had shared his food with me in the hills above Adrianople; or any
of the Leipzig students who had clinked glasses with me in the beer-
halls.
It was Germany's guilt--this war. Well, I could not read all the secrets
of our Foreign Office for twenty years or more to know with what tact
or tactlessness, with what honesty or charity, or with what arrogance
or indifference our statesmen had dealt with Germany's claims or
Germany's aspirations. But at least I knew, as I watched those
smouldering death-fires, that no individual corpse among them could
be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and that
not a soul hovering above that mass of meat could be made
responsible at the judgment seat of God. They had obeyed orders,
they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed, as
we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies
of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had
been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen,
playing one race against another as we play with pawns in a game of
chess. The old witchcraft was better than this new witchcraft, and not
so fraudulent in its power of duping the ignorant masses.
My guide had no such sentiment. As he led me through a fringe of
forest land he told me his own adventures, and heaped curses upon
the enemy.
He had killed one of them with his own hand. As he was walking on
the edge of a wood a Solitary Uhlan came riding over the fields,
below the crest of a little hill. He was one of the outposts of the strong
force in Crépy-en-Valois, and had lost his way to that town. He
demanded guidance, and to point his remarks pricked his lance at the
chest of the garde champêtre.
But the peasant had been a soldier, and he held a revolver in the side
pocket of his jacket. He answered civilly, but shot through his pocket
and killed the man at the end of the lance. The Uhlan fell from his
horse, and the peasant seized his lance and carbine as souvenirs of
a happy moment.
But the moment was brief. A second later and the peasant was sick
with fear for what he had done. If it should be discovered that he, a
civilian, had killed a German soldier, every living thing in his village
would be put to the sword--and among those living things were his
wife and little ones.
He dragged his trophies into the forest, and lay in hiding there for two
days until the enemy had passed.
Afterwards I saw the lance--it reached from the floor to the ceiling of
his cottage--and for years to come in the village of Rouville it will be
the centre-piece of a thrilling tale.
Other peasants joined my friendly gravedigger, and one of them--the
giant of his village--told me of his own escape from death. He was
acting as the guide of four British officers through a part of the forest.
Presently they stopped to study their maps; and it was only the guide
who saw at the other end of the glade a patrol of German cavalry.
Before he could call out a warning they had unslung their carbines
and fired. The British officers fell dead without a cry, and the peasant
fell like a dead man also, rolling into a ditch, unwounded but
paralysed with fear. They did not bother about him--that little German
patrol. They rode off laughing, as though amused with this jest of
death.
There have been many jests like that--though I see no mirth in them--
and I could fill this chapter with the stories I have heard of this kind
of death coming quite quickly in woods and fields where peasants
raised their heads for a moment to find that the enemy was near. It is
these isolated episodes among the homesteads of France, and in
quiet villages girdled by silent woods, which seemed to reveal the
spirit of war more even than the ceaseless fighting on the battle front
with its long lists of casualties.
On that Sunday I saw the trail of this great spirit of evil down many
roads.
I walked not only among the dead, but, what affected me with a more
curious emotion, through villages where a few living people wrung
their hands amidst the ruins of their homes.
Even in Crépy-en-Valois, which had suffered less than other towns
through which the enemy had passed, I saw a wilful, wanton, stupid
destruction of men--no worse I think than other men, but with their
passions let loose and unrestrained. They had entered all the
abandoned houses, and had found some evil pleasure in smashing
chairs and tables and lampshades and babies' perambulators, and
the cheap but precious ornaments of little homes. They had made a
pigsty of many a neat little cottage, and it seemed as though an
earthquake had heaped everything together into a shapeless,
senseless litter. They entered a musical instrument shop, and
diverted themselves, naturally enough, with gramophones and
mouth-organs and trumpets and violins. But, unnaturally, with just a
devilish mirth, they had then smashed all these things into twisted
metal and broken strings. In one cottage an old man and woman,
among the few inhabitants who remained, told me their story.
They are Alsatians, and speak German, and with the craftiness which
accompanies the simplicity of the French peasant, made the most of
this lucky chance. Nine German soldiers were quartered upon them,
and each man demanded and obtained nine eggs for the meal, which
he washed down with the peasant's wine. Afterwards, they stole
everything they could find, and with their comrades swept the shops
clean of shirts, boots, groceries, and everything they could lay their
hands on. They even took the hearses out of an undertaker's yard
and filled them with loot. Before they left Crépy-en-Valois, they fired
deliberately, I was told, upon Red Cross ambulances containing
French wounded.
Yet it was curious that the old Alsatian husband who told me some of
these things had amusement rather than hatred in his voice when he
described the German visit before their quick retreat from the
advancing British. He cackled with laughter at the remembrance of a
moment of craftiness when he crept out of his back door and wrote a
German sentence on his front door in white chalk. It was to the effect
that the inhabitants of his house were honest folk--gute leute--who
were to be left in peace... He laughed in a high old man's treble at this
wily trick. He laughed again, until the tears came into his eyes, when
he took me to a field where the French and British had blown up 3000
German shells abandoned by the enemy at the time of their retreat.
The field was strewn with great jagged pieces of metal, and to the old
Alsatian it seemed a huge joke that the Germans had had to leave
behind so much "food for the guns." After all it was not a bad joke as
far as we are concerned.
On that Sunday in September I saw many things which helped me to
understand the meaning of war, and yet afterwards became vague
memories of blurred impressions, half obliterated by later pictures. I
remember that I saw the movements of regiments moving up to
support the lines of the Allies, and the carrying up of heavy guns for
the great battle which had now reached its sixth day, and the passing,
passing, of Red Cross trains bringing back the wounded from that
terrible front between Vic and Noyon, where the trenches were being
filled and refilled with dead and wounded, and regiments of tired men
struggled forward with heroic endurance to take their place under the
fire of those shells which had already put their souls to the test of
courage beyond anything that might be demanded, in reason, from
the strongest heart.
And through the mud and the water-pools, through the wet bracken
and undergrowth, in a countryside swept by heavy rainstorms, I went
tramping with the gravedigger, along the way of the German retreat,
seeing almost in its nakedness the black ravage of war and its foul
litter.
Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted
telegraph wires. At various places great water-tanks and reservoirs
had been toppled over and smashed as though some diabolical
power had made cockshies of them. I peered down upon the broken
bridge of a railway line, and stumbled across uprooted rails torn from
their sleepers and hurled about the track.
My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had
buried a French cuirassier who had been shot as he kept a lonely
guard at the edge of a wood.
He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and
British. The graves were everywhere--mile after mile, on the slopes of
the hills and in the fields and the valleys, though still on the
battleground my friend had work to do.
I picked up bullets from shrapnels. They are scattered like peas for
fifteen miles between Betz and Mortefontaine, and thicker still along
the road to Vic. The jagged pieces of shell cut my boots. I carried one
of the German helmets for which the peasants were searching
among cabbages and turnips. And always in my ears was the deep
rumble of the guns, those great booming thunder-blows, speaking
from afar and with awful significance of the great battle, which
seemed to be deciding the destiny of our civilization and the new life
of nations which was to come perhaps out of all this death.