The Challenge of the Dead

The suns shines and a strong wind lifts the waves toward the land; the

blue sea, in happy commotion, throws armfuls of white spray across the

long stone breakwater which is called Zeebruges Mole. The white stone

way goes two miles out to sea, and is swept by a marine healthiness.

Upon it at intervals stand the German guns with the ends of their

barrels burst out like thistle-heads. They point o'er the sea; they have

their armoured shelter on the inner side of which on the level with the

gunner's eye stand inscribed in neat German _schrift_ the distances to

all places of importance within gunshot--greenish-yellow camouflaged

German guns with something of the tiger in their expression. On the lee

side of the Mole cling the giant sheds of hydroplanes--as it were,

hooked to the side of the great stone wall. In the quieter water on this

side of the Mole one sees jutting out of the fairway the tops of vessels

sunk there in 1918, and near by is a tablet marking the spot where the

landing-party of the _Vindictive_ made its daring raid upon the foe.

Zeebruges! A party of school-children in "croc" are being escorted along

the way by nuns; the Smiths of Surbiton have scrawled their names on the

guns. There is a half-way house on the Mole now where one drinks beer

and buys a picture postcard, or at the base of the Mole and looking

outward toward England, one may dine alfresco at a Grand Palace Hotel.

But what of that! The whole is sun-drowned and wind-swept and bare and

open with a spaciousness and grandeur which are ample for the soul. The

breeze which blows from England slackens nothing ere it reaches those

fields where the wild flowers and the rushes bloom.

The mind goes back to 1914 and that great October when Antwerp fell but

Ypres was held--when the last transports rolled alongside this glorious

Mole bearing the Seventh Division, soon to be called, in faith,

immortal, because half its number was destroyed before the war was very

old.

October fifth they sailed away

Upon the salt sea's raging spray

And landed safe in Bruges bay

Upon their way to Ypres.

They stepped up from the boats, new, ruddy, well equipped, intact--they

rolled forward, with drums beating, o'er the Belgian land. Now all who

ever will arrive in Zeebruges from o'er the sea will arrive after the

Seventh Division. The war-pilgrim, paying his due of honour to those

who came that day, cannot follow very far on their road unless he die

also. If he chooses to follow any one soldier, will he not very likely

come soon to the road's end and a grey wooden cross where his soldier's

destiny dipped into eternity?

Follow, then, the many who ran in the great torch race of the war, where

the spent runner handed the torch from his hand to another, who in turn

ran with it blazing till he fell, thus from Zeebruges to Ypres; from

Ypres, flaming, to Neuve Chapelle; from Neuve Chapelle, flaming, to

Loos; then aflame to the defence of the Salient; then a long blaze to

the sevenfold altar of the Somme ... man to man, unit to unit, period to

period, till the November when the race was won.

Was it not characteristic of the old war that the "Contemptibles" of the

Seventh, landing at Zeebruges, should at once be marched thirty miles in

the wrong direction and then brought back by train. Antwerp was the

beacon; Antwerp was not yet taken; the Naval Brigade was trying to save

it. It was to fall, Zeebruges was to fall, Ostende itself was to

fall--all very rapidly. When the boys got to Bruges it was rumoured that

the Germans had had a set-back; when they got to Ostende they heard that

Antwerp had been taken. When they got back to Bruges terror had seized

the city. When they got to Ghent they took the Antwerp road--and then

they came back, to Ypres.

The cobbled way to Bruges is not marked by destruction. The trees give

shade, the houses stand, the fields are ploughed. Alice in an estaminet

says she learned French from the French prisoners kept there--her bar

used to be crowded with them. The Belfry of Bruges stands against the

sky ahead--as if lifted out of the plain up to heaven itself.

You cross a canal which looks like a moat, and are in Bruges itself, a

perfectly whole, undamaged, serene and peaceful city. Trams, shops,

carts pulled by dogs, rows of estaminets, old gateways, old churches,

and then the Grande Place. The broad market-place is empty, but one sits

facing the great tower and listens to the ever-repeating chimes of the

bells--silver in the evening hour. It is--no, it is impossible--yes, it

is "The Rosary" which is being played by the bells. "_I ... strive ...

to kiss the Cross_," yells the steeple, and then goes plaintive and

trickles tunefully away.

* * * * *

"Well, here I am and here I remain," says an old man sitting behind me

with a coffee-glass which he has long since drained. "Till England

becomes sane, I stay here."

"The cost of living is just as high in Peebles as in London," says a

woman sitting opposite him.

"Mad everywhere," says the man. "What I'd like is a flat somewhere near

Lancaster Gate, so as I could go out into Kensington Gardens and sit

under the trees and smoke."

There was a pause.

Then the woman from Peebles ventured in a thin, small voice:

"I think that Peter Pan statue in Kensington is so sweet. It was put up

in the night, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was; and isn't Kensington a delightful place?" says the old

man.

They gloated in silence over Kensington. The bells of the Belfry began

selections from _Faust_. _Is there a war on?_ men used to ask

facetiously. "There never was any war," says Bruges. The sound of the

boots has long since died away, the _boots, boots, boots, boots,

marching up and down again_, away, away--this city was not delivered

unto the Angel of Death.

It's a shady highway that goes eastward to Ostende. At the village of

St. Andrews there is a first war memorial to Belgian soldiers who gave

their lives in the war; and then you come to the open ground at

Varssenaere where the 20th Brigade did outpost duty, the first

resting-ground for many a man, if rest he could, on his first night on

the terrain of war--Varssenaere, a mean red-brick village with

estaminets and small shops. Next day 'twas Steine and then Ostende.

October 9, 1914, they marched into Ostende station, crowded with wounded

men who had been rushed down from the stricken front. Antwerp had

fallen. The trains which brought the wounded down took the new army

back--back to Bruges, on to Ghent, and tumbled it out into that great

old city. The streets were full of refugees, but the khaki tide rolled

forward through the crowds, past the cathedral, out by the Lokeren road,

to meet the foe.

Ghent also is an undamaged city. Our airmen spared her; our cannon could

not reach her. She was not taken by assault, but fell into the enemy's

hands. It is prosperous, all its factory chimneys are a-smoke. Cheap

plenitude fills its shop windows. Its people are at work--or, rather,

they are at work when there is not a _groodefeest_.

It is calm on the Lokeren road. You cannot hear the battle-thunder of

that October now, the ominous and insistent and encroaching roaring of

the monster who was just spitting and flashing fire at Ghent in those

days. You can see with the mind's eye the new army with its new boots

and its sore feet and its loads of equipment. It did not carry bombs and

it did not carry gas-masks, but it carried everything else. One can see

the perplexed and anxious Staff looking at the _intelligence_ brought

in--the Germans held nowhere, the Germans in vast numbers, truly ready

and capable of sweeping the contemptibly little army into the sea, the

Germans advancing everywhere. The order comes to retire.

Retire--retreat--might not the retreat from Antwerp resemble the retreat

from Mons? It is retreat in any case. Back into Ghent; back, perhaps, to

Bruges and to Ostende. No one talks of Ypres. The army does not yet know

where Ypres is. However, they filed through Ghent, and it was once more

boots, boots, boots, boots over the cobbled roads. It was midnight, and

they traversed the whole broad metropolis--singing a song which has not

been forgotten in all the intervening years.

But now it is midnight again, the night of the 1920 National Fête, and

the whole population has got singing drunk and then screaming drunk on

beer. Tens of thousands of men and women flock the streets. There are

fireworks, there is music, there is dancing. The fronts of the

estaminets have been taken out, and seats go from the bar to the middle

of the street; long tables on trestles, and plank seats, have been put

out; piles of shrimps litter the tables from end to end, and the yellow

beer gleams as it streams. Tired children are massed on the cathedral

steps waiting for the fireworks to begin, and past those who sit surges

a tireless crowd.

In the Groensel Maarkt a truly Dostoieffskian scene. A soldier with one

arm, a diminutive woman with dislocated hips, and two children are

singing Flemish songs to a ring of people of varying ages. The old

soldier has a sheaf of leaflets with the words of the songs and sells

them a penny a time, a small boy plays the concertina, "mother" sings

all the while a murmuring sing-song which never rises or falls, and

keeps time with her wasp-like waist, which seems to hang from the black

hump of her hips and sways uncannily back and forth. Father with the one

arm also sings all the while he sells, the little girl sings, and the

boy playing the concertina sings also. To the tune of "Way Down in

Tennessee" they sing:

Ik noem haar mijn everzwijn

Mijn voddenmagazijn

They sing too, over and over again, a Flemish song about the war:

Nog niet genoeg dat hij

Binst d'oorlog was in 't lij

Tot overmaat huns laffe daad

Der duitschers vol van haat...

and a haunting chorus which begins:

Hoe ... kan het bestaan

Dat men een man, die gansch zijn plicht

toch heeft gekweten

and glasses of beer pass over the heads of the audience to the singing

family. All in a dark, empty market-place, with somebody's statue

looking down on the scene and many a tear softening human eyes.

The rockets shoot up to the height of the cathedral spire and break in

coloured lights, the large catherine-wheels are lit, the children clap

and chase one another for firework cases.

At two in the morning strings of men and women holding on to one another

parade the streets and kick out with their legs, attempting to dance

whilst they sing "Tipperary," "Marguerite," "Mademoiselle from

Armentières," "Hoe kan het bestaan," the new girls in knee-skirts with

spindly legs, the old wives in longer heavier ones, exposing when they

dance white baggy drawers like Canterbury bells. At four in the morning

there are still ten thousand in the streets; men and women have made

circles round trees and lamp-posts, and kick out as they try to roll

round; knots of men and girls go staggering past with howls and yells;

young Flemish fellows are squeezing girls of twenty and pressing down

their cheeks with large-mouthed kisses. At six, in the heavenly radiance

of a pure morning, pandemonium still rolls on.

Yes, it is good beer. The first glass of it on a hot day is

refreshing--a flagon at lunch does not come amiss. But these men and

women sat for hours pouring it in with floating shrimps--glasses,

quarts, sitting on low seats with their legs apart, and visibly filling.

And this plenitude did not make them weary. _Au contraire_, beer got

into their toes and their knees and their thighs and their fat arms and

necks, and expressed itself at all points of the body. I suppose one

good reason for running in queues was that all holding on to one another

none could fall down. One of the reasons why the bacchanalia continued

long after morning-life had supervened was that many had forgotten they

had any homes and mostly did not know where they were.

What a night! Six years ago on that other night it was different.

Anxiety and foreboding throbbed in these streets. Belgian manhood in

arms marched away. The British marched away, and by midnight the last

soldier had gone. Suspense ... and then at two in the morning the first

German, a motor-cyclist, armed, goggled, covered with dust, vigilant....

And from the dawn German order reigned in Ghent--no bacchanalias.

The army went out by night by many roads, making, however, for Bruges.

It fell back for the defence, perhaps, of Bruges and of Ostende.

Brussels had fallen, and Ghent--there was not much of Belgium left. The

first morning out of Ghent saw the army at Somerghem, and the second at

Thielt. So tired were the troops that at each halt in the night both

officers and men, lying down by the roadside, fell asleep. At the halts

the men bumped into one another mechanically, like the trucks of a

freight train coming to a sudden stop, and then they just tumbled down

and snored.

Newly tarred barges loll slowly along the Bruges-Ghent canal, and there

is a vista along the straight water to the belfry of Ghent and the

cathedral. The sides of the canal are lush with verdure; health and

happiness spread out from its banks. One would say also the war never

was here. But in Somerghem the old church on the hill crowning the town

has been blown up. Its tower gave a view for leagues around, and the

Devil made good use of it when he had a chance and when he had done his

task blew it up lest others should follow his example. The Germans

evacuated the town just before the end of the war; the Belgian army

bombarded it and placed a gas concentration there. It was retaken, but

at the price of a most beautiful church. The inhabitants are all back.

They remember the Tommies and, of course, the Scots. The Gordons in

their kilts made a lasting impression. Somerghem saw much war life

before the enemy marched away, and German soldier life, with its

violently repressive military discipline and its correspondingly lax

morality, was rife. The more perfect their military obedience the less

heed there was of God.

One sees in these parts not a few war-babies, and worse than these, for

they are innocent enough, one sees war-children in adolescence. The

numbers of depraved young girls is appalling. Perhaps there were many

before the war, but they look rather like war products. How many of them

there are in the beer-houses and backyards of the small towns! It is

difficult to avoid adventures with them. Bertha and Martha, depraved

little rascals, come running along the canal bank, one in clogs, one in

stocking soles. They talk scraps of German and scraps of French, and

make disgusting gestures and throw themselves about in hard, coarse

laughter. Martha is a strong and brazen little hussy with red face and

fat little arms. Bertha is a soft-witted, pallid slip of a girl with

full throat and weak lips. Both have long black finger-nails, both are

in cotton rags; but Bertha has a large yellow festering wound on her

ankle which she says was caused by a bit of shrapnel. Bertha is the

younger. Martha may be sixteen; Bertha would be two years younger. And

Martha would get Bertha into trouble. "Take Bertha!" she says

continually, suggestively making signs. Poor war-children! When the war

began Martha was ten and Bertha was eight. Martha was corrupted in it;

pale, sickly, weak-lipped Bertha, with the shrapnel wound, perhaps not

actually corrupted. When the wound had been examined and their nails cut

they concluded they had met a doctor.

They scamper away at last. The dark water of the canal flows peacefully

between banks of untarnished green. Nature is unqualified loveliness.

At Somerghem, however, behind this veil there has been war, there has

been something of the curse. One begins to notice in old walls patches

of new brick where shell-holes in human habitations have been cobbled.

Re-pointing is going on. The splash where the splinters of iron rived a

whole house has been sought to be gently erased. The most virtuous work

in the world! But it splashed on to the children too, and who can

re-point the Berthas and the Marthas?

Enfin, the fair-sized town of Thielt, would-be picturesque but

surprisingly shabby, not clean, not cleaned up, not quite like Belgium.

The dirtiest of all possible hotels, more like a billet than a hotel,

unswept floors, smashed china, supper in a kitchen which does not gleam

like housewife's honour. It is a town unlike Ghent, unlike Bruges. It

has not, however, been much shelled. British and Belgian gunners seem to

have had orders to spare friendly cities. But there is no doubt that

Thielt was in the war. Half its present inhabitants are _revenants_, as

the French call those pitiful spirits who return to the places where

they used to live. Mine host fled to Paris in 1914, and did not make a

fortune there; he talks bitterly of _Bosches_ and compensation. He is

forty-six and set. Six years ago he felt a young man, he says, but

to-day he is not ready to start anything new.

On then towards Roulers! 'Tis in gloomier country and with poor people.

All high roads are under repair. If shells spared Thielt, they did not

spare the roads. Where British army leather beat the cobbles in that

long march back from Ghent, whistling shells touched later and blew up

the ground that had been beneath their feet. The patient Flemish farmers

hung on to their farms on each side of the shell-pitted road, and their

cattle grazed in the fields with an equanimity that was sublime. For

four years the cannon-thunder never ceased, and every night war flamed

around the heavens, but the men on the soil remained true to the soil

and drove straightly their ploughs.

Not a few farmers were killed; they also were heroes, for they died at

their posts. But no patriotic cockade marks their humble graves.

Plentiful now are the crosses ornamented with flowers and the red, white

and blue, for those _morts pour la patrie_. Above Ardoye the

first-noticed wayside cemetery of German soldiers appears, and there

lies Franz Delmann, of Chemnitz, and many others who died in November,

1917. It is high up on a ridge beside the position of an old German

battery. How the shells used to howl from this eminence over Roulers,

over Passchendaele and leagues of destruction right into Ypres itself!

Here in old days the grubby war-worn Germans plied the guns, and here

the British guns found their prey also, and our enemies were put to

sleep in this acre of death. Now most of the crosses are down, the

cross-pieces of others have been taken away, part of the field has been

dug up with a spade. For after all the ground is appropriated Belgian

property. It was never paid for and it reverts to its owner, dead and

all. What a pathetic tragedy is that of the dead the Germans left

behind! Each cross, each dead one, refers back to some living family,

some home, some set of human circumstances. What thoughts, what

questions do not go out on the air from obscure homes to the dead who

have been left behind! The reins which go from the living to the dead!

But enemies take little stock of one another's dead. Roulers, which is

vis-à-vis to Ypres, lay partially destroyed and now it is being builded

up again. If the dead could be made to pay for it the dead would. The

living for the living! Roulers was a fine city once. The creative eye

sees that it can be so again. The British gunners could have laid it

flat as Ypres but they did not. Ypres can never be raised. But Roulers

will be Roulers once again. As one approaches it, behold, what activity.

New houses have sprung up overnight. There are thousands of piles of

bricks. Every Belgian has learned bricklaying. Clerks, shopkeepers,

salesmen, porters, in shirt sleeves and plaster-sprinkled hats, are at

work--_without trade union rules_. Hundreds of thousands of whitish

vermilion flesh-coloured old bricks are being made fit to use again,

new bricks in tiers are apparent in improvised kilns, and all day and

every day sounds the chipping and slapping of real reconstruction. Iron

girders are being fitted into the gutted depths of old shop-fronts, and

with foundations and framework it is marvellous how speedily old houses

are built up. The city is poor. Its many factory chimneys are innocent

of smoke. Roulers for flax! It was famous for its linen industry. Two

Scotch engineers, met at a hotel, are fitting in new machinery in the

factories. Typical uncommunicative Britons, they volunteer no

information, but sit face to face over their meals, lean over their food

and chuckle to one another in private monosyllables. When asked how they

are getting on, one of them replies:

"Och slowly, man, slowly. They Chairmans didna leave muckle when they

went awa!"

* * * * *

And six years ago the Army continued to fall back. Zeebruges whence it

had started, Bruges and Ostende, and Ghent which it had marched through,

became enemy country without much shedding of blood. No one stood long

for their defence. After Roulers the name of a much less famous place

than Bruges or Ghent came on to men's lips. Did they know that they were

going to stand for the defence of it? No, it is all unlikely. And as

they marched to Ypres they providentially did not know the four years'

hell of which they trod the stage. War all over by Christmas was their

thought if they thought at all as they marched o'er the ridge of

Passchendaele in October, 1914.

The soldier, it is said, has an elementary mind which does not imagine,

does not think--a regimental mind. Others therefore must think about him

and do the thinking for him. See, the dusty khaki-clad regulars as yet

unbaptised by fire, but unknowingly on the brink of annihilation,

treading the ground where

Few shall part where many meet...

And every turf beneath their feet

Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.

Thus they marched into Ypres--"as pretty a town as you'd care to see

after a day's march." Oh, it's highly romantic to look back to it now.

Banners yellow, glorious golden,

On its roof did float and flow.

This, all this, was in the olden time

Long ago.

The business centre of Ypres was invested with a dignity which was not

merely commercial in those old days when the silver chimes rolled

regularly the quarter-hours from the Cloth Hall tower. And the Army

arrived, the army for the defence of Ypres. They will dig trenches and

throw out wire south of Ypres, looking at Kemmel without knowing its

name, walking on Hill 60 before it was numbered and named.

A quiet and little marked country south of Roulers now gives way first

to trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks, and then

to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farm-houses and

cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of

Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire--but now as it

were in tumultuous conflict with Nature. Chiefly remarkable are the

magnificent rushes with their black tops rising from almost every

shell-hole. The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black

rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred

ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest

of wild flowers--pink willow-herb, burly St. John's wort in a yellow

glare, starry blue of outbreaking chicory, hundred-headed blossoming

sweet thistles growing from the hollows where fell, I doubt not,

Caledonia's sons, foxgloves flowering upward attempting to take crimson

to heaven. Ypres by the compass lies south-west. No, there is nothing on

the horizon, not a wall, not a wood, only the bare eminence of Kemmel

Hill. Before you is a vast fen. Some Flemings are at work on it in shirt

sleeves, but not a soul is traversing it. You constantly change your

direction: there is no going directly. It is impassable. You make for

what once was a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now--thrice

thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous

and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs,

rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there still in plenty. Weather-beaten

ammunition baskets with shells intact lie where they fell off the

ammunition waggons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles,

there are graves. There is all but the blood. But from the blood has

risen flowers.

On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards

have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered

trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned

Flemish--what a return!--and they have made shacks of shreds and

patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture

forth--there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the

battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased

to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols

ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by

robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. It has needed

courage to come back to your old ten acres. Few of these Flemish are

owners; they are only tenants. Their landlords allow them now three

years rent free. From the hut made of salvage starts the regeneracy of

the land. In an irregular patch round its gates lies the first reclaimed

ground, a mere kail yard, a bean plot. There are wonderful crops of

beans, higher than beans are wont to grow, bean-stalks to climb up.

Tobacco also has been growing, for the leaves hang wilting from green to

yellow on the outside of the unpainted wooden walls. But beyond the

oasis the tall black-topped reeds, like Guardsmen of the vegetable

world, go rank beyond rank to the eyes' end. One comes to a road, and

there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins

each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for

reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:--"In den Niewen

wereld." Half of them seem to be estaminets.

It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in

one another's estaminets.

"I wouldn't never have come back had I known it was like this," says a

Belgian woman. "I had good job at Rouen all the war, make plenty money,

not like this."

"How was that?"

"Me cook in sergeants' mess, huh, plenty food, plenty money."

"That's where you learned English?"

"Yes."

There were two British Tommies drinking beer at the estaminet, one an

R.E. the other an R.F. both talking knowingly about the old war. They

had a motor-lorry which was waiting outside.

"Take a lift?" said they.

"Where to?"

"Polygon Wood."

To be on one of those old blundering kindly quixotic lorries again,

pounding along a war-stricken highway! One might have thought the old

lorry had now ceased its devils' dance. But no, it still has a duty to

perform. Presently we pass a red-cross ambulance.

"Got any to-day?" cries the R.E. to the driver of the ambulance.

He puts up two fingers.

"Two ..." says the soldier with an air of satisfaction. "We found a

brigadier-general yesterday," he adds.

"How do you mean?"

"Ex-umed 'im. He'd bin missin' since 1916. All this no-man's land bein'

dug up now," said he with a wide sweep of his hand.

"That your job? It's pretty interesting."

"It's jolly hard work. But it 'as its better side. Some fellers the

other day came on a dug-out with three officers in it, and they picked

up five thousand francs between 'em."

The motor-lorry blundered forward toward a stone obelisk planted on a

man-made hillock. On one side was a swamp of green stagnant water; on

the other was a planting out of many hundred crosses of unvarnished

wood. The lorry is full of crosses each named and numbered, roped up in

scores, and these must be dumped inside the enclosure.

The view from the Polygon monument is desolation on all sides. One

living man standing there is as it were monarch of all the dead. It is a

remarkable eminence, a pillar at Thermopylæ, one thing standing where

all else is lying flat. As it stands to-day it has no inscription.

Polygon--myriad-sided--it is one of the strangest standing places and

shrines of the war. Pause thou who livest: salute the dead!

* * * * *

Back thunders the empty lorry--on to the Menin road--and faces Ypres.

You see the grey contour of the tower afar, but doubt whether you are

approaching a city, so flat has all become. Yet certainly it is Ypres.

You enter by a series of new-painted wooden taverns and hotels. You walk

up a wide main street and there is Ypres----

A great dust storm is raging here whilst the sun shines out of a perfect

sky. Here are no rushes, no wild flowers, no moisture, but only infinite

debris and the shatterings of old masonry. There is a suggestion of the

desert. A notice says "THIS IS HOLY GROUND" and a barbed wire fence runs

round the whole centre of old Ypres. Within that enclosure lies a ruined

city. Thousands of years ago such a thing happened; all the people were

slain or taken into bondage. No one came back, the victors went away,

and the ruins remained glaring in the sands--centuries, millenniums.

That is the impression of Ypres to-day. It is grim and moving. It is

like the Pyramids. At least a hundred thousand dead lie round it--an

inner circle of the dead and an outer circle of decay. Looking on those

spacious sun-steeped, sand-blown ruins one's mind is inevitably taken to

the East, and a sense of Shelley's poem comes to one--

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Yet six years ago the Cloth Hall tower chimed the quarter-hours! The

road out from the Menin gate was shady. Polygon Wood was a wood, not a

monument. There was seemingly a château near a wood called Hooge.

Zandwoorde Church had a spire. Behold the army however digging itself

in. There are rudimentary lines of defence making a spider's web across

the Menin road. The Twentieth Brigade flounders from Zandwoorde to

Gheluvelt in newly upturned earth. The Germans who followed so rapidly

to Ghent and Thielt and Roulers are hot on the trail, expecting Ypres

also to be left to them without a blow. But they have not arrived. Our

men are sitting on the parapets of their trenches, singing. There have

been no casualties to mention, a few men lost sight of; three sentries

in fact left unrelieved at Ghent. There is a battalion of Guards in the

line at Klein Zillebeke, and not one has yet been killed or wounded. A

battle is coming, however, for the retirement has ceased.

You turn out of Ypres by the left hand on a road which faces Kemmel

Hill--the Wytschaete road, and you come to a flattened-out village at

cross-roads, called Kruistraat. Where were once ploughed fields is now a

land-ocean of humps and hollows with a foam of wild flowers. Plunging

toward Voormezeele one is intoxicated by a perfume and looking to the

right you see the cause in a field of thistles as thick and close as

wheat. At what was Voormezeele there is now nothing more remarkable than

the crosses of the P.P.C.L.I. the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light

Infantry, who evidently went down in the most terrible way in 1915. Were

not these the Canadians who first tasted the devilry of gas?

Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein

Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently

examining the aluminium ribbons on which the names are fixed to the

wooden crosses--looking perhaps for her husband's grave but with an

expression in her face and form of "They have taken away my Lord, and I

know not where they have laid Him."

Virbranden Molen, where many encamped, is but a name now, and eastward

the wire-covered duck-boards climb across the rushes and thistles to

what was once a front line, past derelict limbers with rusty broken

wheels, past unexploded five-nines--the wildest way. Reeds have filled

the trenches, grass long and withered swarms o'er the parapets. There

are heaps of rusty Mills bombs which no one has ever come to take away

and no one will; there are ration-tins; there is all manner of army

rubbish everywhere. Pilgrims and tourists evidently collect few

souvenirs on the old Ypres front, and few Americans as yet arrive at

Ypres, which has for them a lesser fame than Château Thierry and Verdun.

In October, 1914, the line was far in advance of what became such a

carnage-strewn battlefield. Here is the railway cutting, then in supreme

peace, and beyond it is a pale British monument inscribed with many

names, though already defaced--to the memory of a lost mining and

tunnelling company that took a sudden way to heaven before the war was

won. Beyond it is a first German grave, where lie Fleully, Beck,

Dechert, Mehlhorn, and an unknown, and helmets and old bombs strew the

place where they lie. Klein Zillebeke is now marked by a huge concrete

fort. Zandwoorde and Kruisseecke, which were scenes of hand-to-hand

fighting in 1914, soon fell into German hands and remained within the

enemy's lines throughout the war. The old church at Zandwoorde cannot

now be identified by any ruins--one has to ask where it was. Even the

bricks and the stones seem to have been swept away, but there are three

graves there, Captain Rose and Lieutenant Turnor, of the Tenth Hussars,

and a private soldier nameless and unknown, a sort of batman in death.

An estaminet has jumped up like a weed beside the ruins but it has

little trade. Zandwoorde was once a substantial little place but now

perhaps it will not grow again so readily--it is off the main road and

not served by rail. Kruisseecke will be bigger. On October 21st the

Gordons drove the Germans back from Zandwoorde at the point of the

bayonet. On that day the church tower was twice struck by shells. That

was about the beginning of the history.

The old trenches 'twixt Zandwoorde and Gheluvelt are worn down and

perhaps were never very deep. The shell-holes are much deeper. The land

is desolate and all o'ergrown but it affords a scene of lesser

desolation. The exhumers are patiently seeking for the dead who were

left behind--the old dead of that first battle. It is ghoulish work, but

they have become as matter of fact as can be.

"No, we don't find many Gordons. But we're picking up a lot o' Borders

just now. Yes, and some Grenadiers. Brought in about thirty Borders

yesterday. It isn't a bad job if they'd pay us more. We gets used to it.

They say as how the Americans won't have the British touch their dead

and have given the job over to the French. Fifteen thousand of them to

be boxed and stuffed--there's a lot of work in that."

"You must dig up a fair number of Germans. What do you do with them?"

"Leave them where they are. We notifies the authorities, that's all. Of

course Jerry buried most of his own, and I'll give him credit for that,

he gave every man his eight feet. You don't so easy come across a man

the Germans buried, but some of ours----"

The weather-beaten Tommy, in old flannel shirt and sagging breeches,

waved his hand and grinned with mirth at our British ways.

"'S a funny thing though--the British dead keep much longer than the

Germans. If I put a spade through something and it's soft, I know it's a

Jerry."

"They say the body of a drunkard keeps fresh longest of all because of

the spirit in it."

"Yes, that's true. And if buried in an oilskin it makes a heap of

difference. But it's queer what you find. We came on a fellow the other

day with a bayonet through his jaw. He'd been buried that way. No one

could get the bayonet out----"

"Aren't the Germans doing anything to keep their dead? The Belgians

would look after them if they got a hint from Berlin that it would be

worth while."

"Oh, we'd bury them like Christians if they'd give us another

half-crown on our wages. We ain't got nothing agin 'em--specially the

dead."

"Do you sleep out here on this battlefield?"

"We bin 'ere six months now."

"No ghosts?"

The man smiled. He saw none. He felt the presence of none. Imagination

did not pull his heart-strings. If it did, he would go mad.

* * * * *

Lying in an old trench behold a skull! It is clean and polished--a

soldier's head, low and broad at the brows, high at the back. There is a

frayed hole in an otherwise perfect cranium. The simplest way to pick it

up would be to put a finger in an eye-hole and lift it. You must put

both hands together and raise it fearfully if it be the first skull you

have ever found.... Friend or foe? Hm--there are no identification marks

on this. Thinking anything about it all? No, nothing--long since ceased

to think. Friends living? Probably, somewhere. The more you look at the

skull the more angry does it seem--it has an intense eternal grievance.

This one does not grin, for the mouth has been destroyed. It is just

blind and senseless for ever and ever.

Such is the Golgotha of Zandwoorde. Gheluvelt, the other end of the

line, has now a diminutive yellow tower of new wood from an improvised

church. Kruisseecke is a rusty-roofed, ramshackle, salvage-built

settlement on the site of complete ruin. You see the yellow tower of

Gheluvelt from all around, and like a livid finger the monument at

Polygon Wood is seen far o'er the battlefields pointing to heaven.

* * * * *

In the whole complex story of the battle of Ypres, where so many

regiments were engaged in such diverse parts of the field, with all

their varying calamities and triumphs, it is only possible to realise

the story in glimpses and aperçus. A thousand dramas were being enacted

simultaneously in a clamour so great that no neighbour understood what

was happening to his neighbour. Tragedy was accomplished, swiftly and as

it were privately. A dreadful way of speaking was begotten afterwards,

and men said "He got _his_ at Polygon Wood," or "he got _his_ at the

Château," or "_his_ at Kruisseecke."

Our gallant marchers, with the confetti as it were still sticking to

them, have seen a great deal of Belgium, have been greatly excited, have

reached Ypres with numbers intact, have taken their stand four feet deep

in the clay of the fields of Zandwoorde and have taken a look round.

They have been shelled. The shells have been falling irrelevantly--far

from them. The first man to perish is a colour-sergeant, who, taking a

stroll, gets shot by accident by an over-hasty sentry. The

colour-sergeant did not quite realise the war till then. Others also did

not realise the silent symbol of the fact that in fighting others you

start by killing yourselves. Next to die is a drummer-boy, killed by a

shell on the way to a hamlet called America, a kilometre beyond

Kruisseecke. With what pathos was that dead boy considered! For he was a

child of the Army. Drummer-boys are nearly always orphans, or boys

without homes, brought up in barracks, taught in the Army school, with

the Army for father and mother, the Army for God, the Army for nurse.

Little drummer-boy dead on the way to America--the first to go West! It

is a matter for pause, for a sad thought. If, however, the dead meet one

another in the other world, as so many now believe, the boy will soon be

comforted, for within the week scores of friends, hundreds of

acquaintances, will join him. See a reconnaissance at Polygon Wood and

Eskernest! Out of a whole company, only twenty-five come back. Its

commander killed. Another company half destroyed--its commander killed

also. Two captains buried side by side near a much-shelled

house--rudimentary wooden crosses put o'er their resting-place. They

were eager impetuous captains who had chafed to wait in England all

August and September. Their minds were full of what the war really

meant. But so soon are they sped! For four years the agony of Ypres

beginning in these days will roll impotently on whilst they lie there,

and the war with its gossip, its articles and speeches, its new

inventions and new bitternesses will go on. God loved them and removed

them betimes from the scene.

Yet if they see, if they can hear and know from other realms, what a

spectacle, what an intense interest is theirs. To see the remains of

their own poor companies of soldiers march back to Zandwoorde--the "not

the six hundred," to see the ever-encroaching German and the more and

more intimate and terrible strife proceed. The grand emotions of pity

and fear thrill the air as the tumultuous battle goes on....

The shell-fire ceases to be irrelevant and finds its mark, turns whole

brigades out of their trenches; reinforcements move with the

acceleration of a moving ant-heap which has been kicked over. False news

comes and confounds true news. The Borders are said to have given way.

Guards and Gordons go to their support. Weak points change to strong

points, strong to weak. Columns of assault are launched by the enemy,

first on one point, then on another. A column breaks through at

Kruisseecke at nightfall. The madness of the murder-excitement enters

the trenches, and it is bayonet to bayonet; the rain streams down to

mingle with blood, it is intensely dark, many have lost their clearness

of mind and balance of nerve. But there is a counter-attack. Gallant

Major F----, leading, is shot down; there is a dreadful mêlée and then

silence. The enemy is winning his way. Nevertheless patrols in

Kruisseecke round up a large number and take them prisoner. There is a

dispute as to who is to have the merit of having taken the prisoners.

But what does that matter? Round about this village is confusion worse

confounded. Germans appear dressed up as Gordon Highlanders, then

Gordons are thought to be Germans in disguise. Strange masses roll up

through the rain looking not at all like Germans and crying "We are

French."--"We are Allies"--"Don't shoot"--"Where is Captain P----?" "We

surrender," and things of that kind. The survivors of a Staffordshire

regiment devoid of officers, officers all down and out, come pelting

through the lines having thrown their rifles away. German yells of

victory break out.... It is a terrible night, one night, one little

corner of the ground outside the city. Dawn comes, and Kruisseecke is

with the enemy. It remains with the enemy. And there for many the march

from Zeebruges ends and a personal war history is concluded. The torch

of war has been carried thus far, to the battle of Ypres. The spent

runner gives it to another who carries it in turn--

* * * * *

Back then to Ypres! It is an exposed moorland way. No woods, no houses

stop the even progress of the wind. The trees are stumps no higher than

Venetian masts. Instead of crops in the fields--crosses, an enormous

harvest. Along the Menin road a steam tram rolls. At the entrance to

Ypres is the communal cemetery of the city. Here, around the pre-war

Belgian dead, lie Hussars, Lancers, Dragoon Guards, Scots Guards, all

officers, all of the 1914 fighting. There they were lowered into graves

with the flag about them--there they remain. In this acre of death the

high wooden crucifix still stands, with its riven agonised Lord looking

down. Of the hundreds of thousands of shells which fell in Ypres all

spared Him--all but one which came direct and actually hit the Cross.

That one did not explode but instead, half-buried itself in the wood and

remains stuck in the upright to this day--an accidental symbol of the

power of the Cross.

* * * * *

Ypres is terribly empty. Hundreds of thousands of eyes would look on it

but there are few people who come to look at it--just ones and twos who

stand diminutively in front of the great ruins and peer at them like the

conventional figures in an old print. This absence of the living

intensifies the strange atmosphere. It is said that the city will build

itself up again, but it is possible to feel some doubt on that point.

Perhaps Ypres will never be built again. At present it has some hundred

and fifty places where they sell beer to two where they sell anything

else. Its string of wooden hotels with cubicle bedrooms do not pay. The

curious come for an hour or so from Ostende but do not spend the night.

There is a sense of emptiness and tragedy which cannot be dispelled.

Some sort of unit of British troops does duty instead of police and is

posted to various guards, the sentries being however without rifles. The

soldiers in their "sixth year" impart a certain liveliness. A party of

them at night coming down the middle of the street singing

One word of thine,

Tell the world you are mine,

And the world will be dearer to me,

in a full-throated chorus wakens echoes from dark corners of the ruins.

There is music and dancing in favoured taverns. The returned Belgians do

not perhaps belong naturally to the atmosphere of the sublime. They love

beer and sociality. They will make their money by some means--they are

not too particular how. Civilised ethics do not rule in these places

where war has worked its will.

Strolling along at dusk past the Cloth Hall tower a bright-eyed Belgian

wolf asks you who you are. "_C'est triste, n'est ce pas?_" says he,

pointing to the ruins. _Triste_ is what they are not. The Belgian is

from Poperinghe. It is very dull there now. _Tous les soldats sont

partis._ Also the mamzelles. Pas de jig-a-jig.

"Like a glass of beer?" asks the Belgian.

A spare woman of thirty serves two glasses of ale at a table outside a

hotel. She seems to speak English for preference.

"You want someone to sleep with?" asks the man from Poperinghe.

"No, I sleep with no man."

"Not married?"

"No, and plenty time yet, and I shan't marry an English when I do. The

English are all false."

The man from Poperinghe seems taken aback. At a further table a curious

scene is being enacted. Here are sitting a pioneer corporal and a

sergeant, both wearing the 1914 ribbon. They have their beer, and

between them is an effervescent loose-mouthed Alsatian. The latter, like

the man from Poperinghe, stands treat.

"I vill take you, one minit, I vill take you," says the Alsatian,

kissing the tips of his fingers, "just vait, not ten minits from 'ere."

"Oh you go on, you bloomin' well shut up. I b'lieve you're agent for the

girl or something," says the sergeant.

"No, listen, I'll tell you vot it is.... C'est de gateau, got that,

gateau; naw need to drink any coffee, just ten minits, you see for

yourself."

The sergeant makes a mocking show of biffing him in the eye, and grins

all over his weak sun-burnt face. The shoeing corporal sips at his beer

and smirks. The Alsatian on the tips of his toes, leaning forward on

his chair which is tilted toward the table, gesticulates and slobbers--

"You wait till you see her, you'll felicitation yourself...."

And the sergeant is persuaded against his will and goes with him.

Meanwhile dusk has grown to dark, and the ruined Cloth Hall tower on the

other side of the way seems more gloomy, more moody and threatening, as

if the war were not yet over.

This Ypres is a terrible place still. There is no life when night comes

on but tavern life. Those who live and work here have lost their sense

of proportion. They are out of focus somehow. "You lookin' for dead

soldiers," says a Flemish woman to you with a glaring stare, wondering

if you are one of the exhumers. Death and the ruins completely outweigh

the living. One is tilted out of time by the huge weight on the other

end of the plank, and it would be easy to imagine someone who had no

insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death.

There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit.

One is ashamed to be alive. You try to sleep in a little bed in a

cubicle with tiny doll's house window. You listen to a drunken company

down below singing, "Mademoiselle, have you got any rum?" A French

couple enter the room next door, smacking one another's hips and

confounding one another with coarse violent laughter--that is the light

end of the plank. Then night ensues, the real night, breathless and

sepulchral, the night which belongs to all lost hopes and ended lives

and wearinesses.

You lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly

a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy

masonry. You go to the little window, behold, the whole sky is crimson

once more, and living streamers of flame ascend to the stars. An old

dump has gone up at Langhemarcq. Everyone in Ypres looks out and then

returns to sleep--without excitement. The lurid glare dies down;

stertorous night resumes her sway o'er the living and the dead. For a

moment it was as if the old war had started again.

* * * * *

Day dawns in a mist. A veil hides the inner reality of Ypres, and as a

visitor says--"It looks more picturesque in the mist." Ypres however is

an altar to which the nation must return.

* * * * *

After the great battle most of the survivors marched away. New men took

their places. Glorious captains received their D.S.O.'s, battalions

their first honours. A mere thirty thousand of the old army had stemmed

the onrush of a quarter of a million of the enemy. Ypres remained in

British hands--though badly battered, and the Germans were kept back

from the vital ground of Calais.

At Chateau Wood near Hooge where a placard now says "THIS PLACE WAS

HOOGE" were the remains of many battalions--Grenadiers, Duke of

Wellingtons, Scots Fusiliers; along the Menin road lay Scots Guards,

Borders, Gordons; but all were withdrawn. The Scots marched then to

Dickebusch and Locre and Bailleul, and then to Sailly sur la Lys, and

were out of the battle line ten murky days at least.

Now as you walk out from Ypres along the blighted Dickebusch road midst

the iron thorn bushes of rusty barbed wire and sheaves of old spiral

stakes you still see large notices that WASTE LENGTHENS THE WAR--what

stronger appeal could one make! Does it not still prolong it and ever

will!

A south wind blows volumes of rain out of the clouds on Kemmel Hill, the

old mud is restored on the road, and long plashy pools of water guide

the steps. Dickebusch is getting itself dug out of the mud, and making

fair progress. Of its church amid broken monuments only two needles of

up-jutting wall remain--at altar and entrance. New La Clytte is

soldering itself to the foundations of old La Clytte. Kemmel grows

nearer to the view and all the detail of its hillside can be picked out

by the eye--the wheat field, the pasture, the farm-house. It is one's

eye-neighbour on the left as you march into Locre. Now the Locre

church, unscathed in 1914, unthreatened, is but a heap of red rubble

surmounted by eight beams pointing skyward. Men are digging among the

bricks, uncovering soiled images, figures of the Virgin, altar cloths,

banners, stools. Near by stands a rusty cast-iron church built of

salvage, a straight Protestant meeting house but for some brand-new

coloured effigies of saints set among the seats. One aspect of Locre is

of a diminutive forest of stinging nettles and low stumps of dead trees,

and beyond lie some hundreds of British dead, flanked by a disused

medical shed where the bodies used to be brought out and a burying padre

with clayey hands went through the painfully mechanical service of

throwing "dust to dust." The graves are nicely kept, and the young

Belgium of Locre grows up with this heritage of sacrifice. As you sit on

the ruins of the church looking down to the wet highway muddy

velocipedists come pelting past in a race round their native land. Their

bare thighs are caked with brown mud, and their cotton chemises are

stuck to their bare round-shouldered backs, their intent faces are

dirt-covered--on they dash, a complete and happy irrelevance beside the

old war.

Here is the frontier 'twixt Belgium and France. A rope is drawn across

the road; there was none in the days of the war. The customs gendarmes

will examine you if you are coming into Belgium, though they will pay

little attention if you are going out.

The landscape is one of black dead trees hanging dead arms. Old blown-up

trees lie, root and all, along the roadside. There are great numbers of

sockets of old gas-shells relating to the taking of Locre by the Germans

in April 1918, heaps also of rusty rifle grenades which seem to have

been collected and put by the side of the road. Remarkable ever are the

promiscuously piled mountains of domestic old iron which one passes. It

would be an interesting exercise for a young detective to decide what

each piece of wreckage had been before the war. Certain things you can

be sure about however--oil-drums, coal-scuttles, wash-bowls, chamber

conveniences, armchair and sofa springs, metal guts of mattresses,

perforated bowls for straining greens, coffee-pots, mangling and washing

machines, scales, canisters, salvers--a clean sweep for every farm-house

and every village. And in the new houses there is scarcely one saved

utensil carried forward. Among the new articles introduced one may

remark china casts of Charlie Chaplin in gala attire.

The frontier land is hilly. One skirts the upland of which Mount Kemmel

on the left is the most prominent feature. It is three or four

kilometres from the rope of the frontier to the French line of douane

and its customs-gendarmes. One looks down to the first town in France,

Bailleul, and it looks like a picture which someone has drawn and then

crossed out with black lines and smudged. As one approaches, this is

found to be the residential suburb or park called L'asile, with

grandiose buildings, now an appalling wreck with not one redeeming new

patch upon it. Heaps of debris stand higher than houses, and houses

which have not fallen have as it were been pushed forward upon one

another. The frontier gendarmes examine your passport and you are free

in France. You see the first diminutive huts of the French returned

refugees, and then in the mud of the street, urchins playing bat and

ball with a slowly-expiring frog which they hold by one dangling leg,

and toss to the boy with the bat. A few steps further and it is

Bailleul.

Bailleul too is a great wreck as remarkable as Ypres, and its progress

of recuperation is much slower. It does not cater for war pilgrims or

take the money of tourists, and so there are no prominent hotels and few

estaminets. Most of its houses are down, its ways are choked with ruin,

and in the evening nondescript squads of workmen shuffle through the

streets to their homes in barracks and cellar.

* * * * *

Still the old Army of 1914 marches on. When it entered Bailleul all was

calm. Its great red-brick houses stood fairly and uncracked. The people

had had a fright, but they held on. They held on through years of the

war, and though the guns kept pounding away at them they did not wholly

abandon it till 1918 when the Germans seized the town as part fruit of

their second great Spring attempt to end the war. Then it was "fort

abimée." The owners all fled, and what they left an enemy army

ransacked.

Thousands of officers and men were snugly billeted in November 1914 at

Locre and Bailleul and Meteren. Sir John French came and chatted with

men in the billets--about the battle of Ypres. New drafts came out from

England. There had been a clearance of reservists and first volunteers.

Each stricken battalion received its half a thousand to make up.

Practically new units were organised for the winter defence of the new

lines, and when the time was come they marched three leagues nearer to

their enemy--to Sailly sur la Lys and Laventie and Neuf Berquin,

Estaires--such names of destiny! When the King came to Sailly sur la Lys

at the end of November he could not see his guardsmen because they were

already in the fighting line and it was thought it would be unsoldierly

to call them back for the King to see, to which the King agreed.

The flowers are withered, the thistles which gave their fragrance to the

air at Ypres are white with down. Peasants everywhere are scything weeds

and burning them in smoking heaps. But the trenches beyond Sailly are

still shaggy-topped with teazle crowns and woolly nettle heads. One

wonders how many different units at what different times occupied those

1914 trenches. Here still, one picks up old blue water-bottles and faded

green straps and pouches of British uniforms. They are poor

trenches--the mere staves that lined them to keep up the mud are all

warped and good dug-outs are few.

The Germans of course swept o'er all this in 1918. Witness the "busted"

concrete telegraph posts growing dozens of rusty iron wires from their

stumps, witness the lumpy solid cement-bags by the side of the road. But

between 1914 and 1918 what a history! A little way beyond the British

line is a cemetery called "V.C. corner." There are two hundred and

thirty crosses and on every cross is exactly the same legend--"G.R.U.

Unknown Australian soldier." There is no name in the whole of the

cemetery. Some time some band of Australians charged here and did not

come back and were not taken prisoner. Old rifles with broken rusty

bayonets have been placed against the white-washed cross-surmounted

entrance. Not many paces on one comes to the German line wrought in

impregnable concrete, a line of snug beds in which it seems one might

comfortably await the Last Day. But one concrete structure has been

mined and looks as if it had been thrown bodily into the air without

flying into bits. Now it stands poised upside down on a heap of dirt

beside a profound pit. The Germans who were there when that happened are

nearer now to the unknown Australian soldiers than we are.

In 1914 there was none of this concrete. Both sides were equal in the

mud, and the same no-man's land lay between. Even the wire had not been

thrown out--or was of a most rudimentary kind. Friend and foe heard one

another talking from across the wet fields--even called to one another

and were without especial bitterness. On the right and towards Laventie

a nervous Indian division kept up a heavy rifle fire all night long, but

otherwise the war was mild. Frost-bite harmed more than iron. The first

night raids were planned--sporting expeditions in which the thrills were

sufficiently novel. Pleasantries were often exchanged with the enemy who

was found to be possessed of plenty of English slang, and occasionally

an English soldier who knew some German risked being thought a spy by

his comrades and replied.

Someone however planned a sharp attack on Lille. It was really the

predecessor of the battle of Neuve Chapelle and should be called perhaps

the battle of Fromelles. But it was completely abortive and the details

were removed from public news--the first and last night attack of its

kind. The date was exactly one week before Christmas, and looking at

that narrow strip of no-man's land in which the attack spent itself one

realises afresh how ineffectual were all these little battles of the

war. Men died: that was all their effect.

The attack was timed to start at six in the evening. Men were hoisted to

the parapets and lay flat awaiting a signal, the blowing of a whistle.

At the sound of the whistle they stood up and walked slowly and

cautiously forward not to disturb the Germans. The moment the enemy

discerned them and fired they were to rush forward as one man and enter

the German trenches. Some men walked hand in hand; some unfortunately

lost their heads and ran forward at once. The night was black as pitch

and full of the unknown. It was not long before the enemy began to fire,

and men dropped rapidly, leaving the inevitable gaps and disconnections

in the line. It is incredible to realise it: the affair lasted all night

long, and scarcely anyone knew where anyone else was. But back and forth

they ranged in that fatal width of eighty yards of no-man's land, and in

one battalion alone a hundred and eighty men were lost. As was to be

expected, the troops were highly complimented and medals were

plentifully awarded to the heroes who survived. Lille was safe as ever.

Little Fromelles, just behind the enemy lines, was safe as Lille. The

dead lay in front of the German trenches, and the foe carried some of

them to the graveyard at Fromelles and buried them. But seven days

later, on the Christmas Day armistice, many still lay green on the

green earth where they had fallen.

A curious day in the war--that first twenty-fifth of December. It was

surely a moment of hope after great suffering and in the midst of the

great anxiety. Probably all the nations engaged felt horrified by what

they had done, and a sort of penitence ranged in men's minds, a belated

regret that a better way than war had not been found to solve Europe's

problems. By most of the private soldiers and young officers it was

fervently believed that all would be over soon. And away at home there

was such idealistic hope as that the soldiers on both sides might

unanimously refuse to fight and that thus war might die of old age and

prove that it had truly been an anachronism. Immense new armies were

drilling in England, France, Germany, Russia, but they would never be

needed. Germany would speedily be forced back to the Rhine and would

capitulate, indemnifying France and Belgium handsomely and owning

herself in the wrong. Our armies held the Germans on the West and the

enemy was short of shells. The Russian "steamroller" was at work on the

other side of Europe, and men were betting one another that Przemysl

would fall before the New Year. Germany also was short of food, and our

sea power would cause her to starve. In Germany on the other hand, a

sense of great military superiority prompted the thought that soon all

the enemies of the Fatherland would be crushed.

Despite the details of atrocities on both sides there was not the extent

of international bitterness that existed later. There was much talk of

an armistice, and there would have been official sanction for a general

temporary peace if Germany had not been so deeply distrusted. As it was,

there was a cessation of hostilities in many parts of the line and

meetings of enemies which amounted to fraternisation. This first

Christmas was the only one on which there was innocent and bloodless

armistice. Next year men were killed; and in 1916 despite the hopes of

rank and file there were few handshakes, few interchanges of civility

and greeting.

But the first Christmas Day was a holiday. A party of Germans came over

from Fromelles and a party of ours went over to the German trenches.

Here in this narrow no-man's land where but a week ago had been that

"clash by night," foes met as friends. The Germans agreed to bring over

those of the dead which had not been buried. This was a matter of great

solemnity. The grey German soldiers put the bodies on stretchers and

brought them to the midst of no-man's land. Graves were dug there and

then. Detachments of British and German troops formed up in line, and a

German and an English chaplain read prayers alternately in the two

languages. It must have been heart-rending for our fellows to look on

the faces of the dead they knew so well, some of whom had set out for

the attack in such high spirits. And they lay with their terrible

wounds, the silent and ghastly fruits of the war, and it seemed they had

nothing in common with Christmas and the festival of peace and goodwill.

The arrangements for the armistice had been made in this way. On the

night of Christmas Eve the German trenches were lit up with lanterns and

there was much singing of carols and popular German music. Now and then

there would be shouting across at the British lines, Christmas wishes

and attempts to enter into conversation. Early on Christmas morning one

of our scouts went out accordingly and met a German patrol. The latter

gave him a glass of whisky and some cigars with a message that if we

didn't fire at them they wouldn't fire at us. There had been no firing

since nightfall and an armistice was agreed to. At about dawn a party of

Germans came over to our wire fence and a party of our men went out to

meet them. The meeting was most friendly, and there was a general

exchange of small souvenirs and much mirth. Out of their abundance our

men gave the Germans of their Christmas puddings which were received

with great appreciation. Cigarettes were smoked, and there was much

conversation in which Tommy made himself understood and the German

mustered all his English. They all said they were tired of the war but

were convinced Germany would soon win. One or two had lived in England,

one even had an English wife, another had had an English sweetheart in

Suffolk, and these were very eager to get back, so they said. The German

opinion about the war was that France was on her last legs; Russia had

had a tremendous defeat in Poland and would soon be ready to make peace.

England remained to be broken, but with France and Russia out of the way

it would not be difficult to come to terms. They thought the war might

come to an end in January, 1915, in the following month. They professed

to hate their officers but were evidently afraid of them. It was clear

that discipline was carried further in the German army than in ours and

that it was very much harsher.

The German officers, without tokens of rank, seemed much less at ease

than their men and were inclined to observe a sort of official silence.

One pointed to the dead and said in French "Les braves!" indicating a

reverence for fallen foes. Another volunteered the information that the

officers who had died a week ago had been buried in the graveyard at

Fromelles. There were dignified exchanges of tokens of remembrance among

officers--not very convincing perhaps as evidence of brotherly love, but

there was no mistaking the good-humour and camaraderie of rank and file

which continued all the while.

What a sad moment when officers saluted and the men marched back to

continue the bitterness and folly of Europe's suicide. And _feu de joie_

at midnight and massed choruses of carol singing! Christmas 1914 how far

away wert thou from happiness and peace!

And Fromelles church on the hill has been rased to the ground. The

English dead have been taken away--only French remain, and amidst the

great smash-up of tombstones are seven or eight wooden crosses for

Chasseurs Alpins and French dragoons.

So 1914 passed and the new year opened with a long war penitence when in

two months a battalion in the line lost but four or five men. Both sides

were short of shells and were saving themselves for the Spring. We shall

march soon to Neuve Chapelle. Meanwhile men are practising in the use of

the jam-tin and the hair-brush bombs--for the British army went to war

without a bomb, despised bombs. It went also without helmets, without

metal hats. Men went to war in service hats. It will take some

maniac-(sic) patriot to jump from the gallery of the House of Commons

into the midst of dreaming politicians, yelling "Give them metal

helmets" ere something of the kind be furnished. There are now

proceeding rehearsals of a battle behind the lines. Neuve Chapelle is

being thoroughly rehearsed against a dummy foe. The power of shrapnel to

destroy barbed wire is being tried--the verdict being that the narrower

the front attacked the more chance of completely destroying the wire. As

the war was eventually decided on the broadest of fronts, so the new

phase of the war which started with Neuve Chapelle was begun on the

narrowest of fronts. Be it noted, a continuation of the grand strategic

movements of 1914 has already been rendered impracticable by the

organisation of trench defences.

On March 10th was the first concentration on the enemy's line, the first

attempt to pierce it. Behold the once crowded breastworks on the road to

Aubers and Neuve Chapelle. The great shaggy earthwork is covered with

dense thistle now. There are mounds of filled sand-bags all hanging in

clots like shirt-tails of innumerable men. This was the jumping-off

point for the attack. It was bristling with tense excited soldiers that

wild March morning, but no one lives there now--only swarms of

whispering grasshoppers. The earth-wave goes on across the flat country;

it is uncontrollably wild, and the peasants who work on the fields

before and in front of it have left it alone as a work of despair to

clear. It looks like an old Roman line.

It is pitiful and pathetic now to walk to Neuve Chapelle and

Aubers--where officers clutched their revolvers, and men with bayonets

fixed thought their last thoughts of home whilst they plunged perchance

to death. All the German defences are in concrete--the wonderful 1916

concrete, massive, impregnable. At Aubers there are six hundred and

eighty block-houses of concrete, with walls three feet thick. There are

impudent watch-towers of it.

The roadway, still littered with shrapnel and fragments of rifles and

bombs, crawls across disintegrated Nature to ramshackle Neuve Chapelle,

and then there is that beautiful wood beyond, so often sketched, not

dead, leafing from all its trunks. As one looks on its lacework of

loveliness set against the sky one thinks of a martyr whose faith has

been proved--rescued from fire in time to avert destruction.

Neuve Chapelle however was no victory as also it was no defeat. =GOOD

NEWS TO-NIGHT= said the placards of the London papers, but what had

happened was merely a rehearsal with many accidents. The fighting lasted

three days. The enemy gave as much as he took. Men spent the night in

trenches waist-deep in water, and were shelled mercilessly. They got up

prematurely to attack; to face fires of execution--the serried array of

the enemy's machine gunnery. Did not a battalion of Guards lose three

officers and a hundred men whilst speeding over a mere hundred and fifty

yards? On the other hand certainly German positions were isolated and

hundreds of foemen walked demurely into captivity behind the British

lines.

You will look in vain for the graves of thousands of heroes. The bodies

have been taken far away, but Neuve Chapelle has its cemetery of exhumés

covered with brown level-raked earth behind a fertile beanfield. Captain

Sir Edward Hulse, hero of a night raid at Fromelles, lies buried by the

wayside, and he died at Neuve Chapelle. As for German dead, there is a

strange absence of graves, but beyond Neuve Chapelle is a field of

outrageous thistles and broad-bladed rotting crosses, some down, some

standing, all with faded inscriptions, but the thistles are so thick and

high one might easily pass by without observing an old graveyard of our

dread enemy. It would be interesting to read a German account, oh, not

an official one, of this battle of Neuve Chapelle, an account by one of

the common soldiers who fraternised with his enemy on Christmas Day and

had to kill him ere Easter had arrived.

A long black touring-car has drawn up at the side of the road at Neuve

Chapelle, and a handsome grey-haired English gentleman looks on the

ruins. Says a small boy to him, "Daddy, what did the Germans do here?"

"I don't know, my boy," says he. "But there was a great battle here

early in the war, and we tried to win it. I don't think anybody won."

* * * * *

So the Army went back to its football leagues and boxing competitions

which afforded a happy subsidiary interest. True, some of the athletes

and bright particular sporting stars had fallen, but others constantly

arrived from inexhaustible old England. As regards the war a rigorous

optimism set in. Complete victory was postponed for two months. There

must be more and better rehearsals, that was all. A passion for

discipline and the shooting of cowards set in. Poor R---- was shot beside

Laventie. Sergeant-majors "came into their own."

Now however a new peace has settled upon Laventie. Even the workmen seem

working quietly. Most of the old billets of 1914-15 lie in tumultuous

heaps of brick dust and beams, though here and there are houses with the

number of the billet marked and the number of men it would hold. Many a

tap-room where our fellows gave voice to beer and _vin blanc_ has passed

into nothingness--the heavy boots clattering under the tables, the red

faces above, the bottles and glasses, the gambling-boards, the

pale-faced non-committal French women unashamed by the filth of the

talk--where are they all? The old owners have gone, dead perhaps, or

they found better business elsewhere. Often those who served in those

taverns behind the line were not the real owners but a sort of

adventurer who came in when the real people fled in panic. Tommy was the

source of their profit, they plied him with beer and girls, and gave

shelter to gambling sharps and got France a bad name. Anyhow, the

people you see now are a sober quiet-faced folk with a real unending

gratitude and affection for the British soldier. They preserve nothing

but good memories of him, and no calculations enter into their love.

The old tavern of the Blue Horse seems to be down, but the Grand Cheval

Blanc still stands and other taverns of the horse--Laventie was a

horse-breeding place in days gone by. To-day it has only a tiny

population--and is nothing. It perhaps will not be a notable place

again.

The mind goes on to the rest-billets of Hinges and Busnes and to the

march to Festubert across a country less scarred by war than there, less

gassed perhaps, for gas killed more than shells. There are new plans of

battle, more auguries of complete victory. Brigadiers themselves come to

lesser commanders to explain in person the secrets of the Festubert

attack. It amounts to little more than an intensification of the

bombardment rehearsed at Neuve Chapelle, and the pouring of a greater

number of men through the neck of devastation thus made, a pitiful

suicide trap as it turned out, but a natural experiment.

Hinges, though in 1915 far enough from shell fire to be a place of

rest-billets and the drilling of new drafts and the bringing of musketry

practice up to high regimental standards, is now a wreck, its church as

completely ruined as our Wenlock Abbey and looking not unlike it.

Hinges has a commanding position with a view far o'er the stricken _Nord

du France_. Behind its ridge of high land Bethune remained comparatively

immune, its centre alone being utterly destroyed. No doubt parts of

Bethune would have fallen into German hands in 1918 had Hinges not held.

The neighbouring village of Locon fell--a mile or so to the North-east.

Merville which is due North fell also, and shells from three sides

screamed against this little village and the Canadians defending it.

Hinges now is quietly rebuilding itself and is a little-visited war

hamlet. A memory and shrine of the Festubert fight is the wayside

cemetery with its Gordons and Black Watch and Lancs men. Here lie two

unknown British soldiers of Lancashire regiments and on their temporary

wooden crosses have been nailed metal discs of the Lancastrians with

bright red roses and the words:--"They win or die who wear the rose of

Lancashire." Some devotee of his county has placed this disc on

thousands of the graves of the Lancastrians.

On the evening of the 15th May 1915, 2nd and 6th Gordons, 1st

Grenadiers, 2nd Scots and Borders marched out to the junction of the

roads rue de Bois and rue de l'Epinette, then filed through trenches

held by Indian troops, and reached an allotted storming position west of

"Princes Road." An elaborate time-table had been arranged, and each

unit knew its angle relative to the "gap in the wire" which the

artillery were going to make. At midnight all the troops were in

position. At a quarter past three in the morning Scots Guards and

Borders started up to lead the assault. What a narrow-fronted

concentrated effort it was may be judged by the battalion formation,

which was in eight lines of two platoons each.

One cannot be sure now what trenches each unit filled, but the trenches

are there and it is not difficult to imagine the crush of khaki in the

warm May night, the shrieking and thundering of the bombardment. Three

o'clock in the morning and the rum being doled out and the men poised

and ready for the race of death.

Near the corner of rue de l'Epinette and just before the village of

Richebourg l'Avoué lie three Colonels and a Major side by side--they are

the commanders of the Grenadiers and of the 2nd Border regiment, Major

Kennet the second in command of the 1st Grenadiers, and Colonel

Alexander of a Yorkshire regiment--all four perished at Festubert. The

corner of rue de l'Epinette has now a cottage of wood and bricks with a

cast-iron roof, a bright garden of flowers and beans. Opposite stands a

new estaminet. There is a jolly field of gathered haricots hanging to

dry on ten-foot poles. Once more, iron thorn-bushes of barbed wire each

side of the way, and where the men dug themselves in by the side of the

road--water and reeds. The Indian section has become the Indian

cemetery, and the brave dusky boys of Asian hills have passed away.

Festubert is a little place where the pile of old white stone and cement

which was the village church is higher than the huts which have sprung

up around it. But where are those blossoming orchards through which our

boys charged in the dawn twilight, where are the dead who lay so long

unrecovered in that pitiful no-man's land beyond? Unrecovered then and

irrecoverable now.

On the 27th May 1915, ten days after the battle, General Joffre

inspected the whole Seventh Division, which was drawn up in three great

columns, a brigade in each, and with the 20th Brigade and its pipers

leading, all marched past to the salute. Another day came the Divisional

Commander General Gough, and perched high up on the central pile of

straw and midden in a large farm-yard he thanked the men for

Festubert--they had done what was asked and more--"as always," he added.

Yet the Seventh Division had been destroyed at the First battle of

Ypres, only its framework had remained; its large reinforcements had

been worked off in the night-raids and at Neuve Chapelle, and its second

reinforcements had been almost exhausted at this Festubert. The speeches

were made, not so much to the heroes as to new drafts. Kitchener's army

was however flooding into France, and despite enormous casualties we

were beginning in a way to have a national army. What was left of the

old army became the instructors of the new. The regular army gave way to

the volunteers.

It was a time of heart-searching in England. Optimism and pessimism

began to be sharply defined. Russia had been routed. Lord Northcliffe

made his sensational effort to make an easy-going London face bitter

reality. Mr. Lloyd George at the Ministry of Munitions began to take a

larger broader view of the military aspect of the war than did most of

his colleagues. Preparations were made for the manufacture of shells for

the terrific onslaught of the Somme next year. Whilst many poor fools

still thought that 1915 would see us through the strife, plans on the

basis of a three or four years struggle were being definitely made. Then

we were beginning to manufacture poison gas and had at last invented a

handy bomb--the Mills grenade, our answer to the stick-bombs which

dangled from the belts of German soldiers. It was a time of far-reaching

military plans and dreams. All grown-up children who were not themselves

tin soldiers were playing soldiers. Flying men carried terror across the

skies, and sailors of submarines carried it under the sea. No prophet

knew the number of men who would have to be killed before the

politicians would be ready to come to Versailles to discuss the matter.

From England, France and Germany three or four million must actually

die--that fact was unknown. In the summer of 1915 the number who had

died was far from that figure. It is curious however to think of the

many who had laid themselves down in earth's earthy bed in the full

faith that their sacrifice would not be in vain--to think of the proud

Germans, the fine ones, not the base ones, who believed in their Kaiser

and that wonderful German Fatherland to which they owed their life

before they owed their death, and to think of what was to come. Germany

and her Kaiser not only defeated but humiliated and cast lower than all

nations in old Europe; to think of the loyal Russian soldiers who

perished in the first enthusiasm of the war with a bright starry faith

in Russia, her Church and her Tsar, of the Grand Duke Oleg for instance,

that young hero whose warm blood grew cold whilst the street-bred people

of Berlin knocked nails in great Hindenburg's wooden statue--to think of

these first Russians who lay dead with their weapons beside them in

1914-15, and then to think of the hideous revolution and those murders

in Ekaterinburg when all Russia fell; to think of the fine youth of

England and Scotland, of France, of Serbia, who died in the faith not

only of national victory but of a victory for humanity, the boys whose

fragment of iron destiny clove their brains or rived their hearts at the

outset of the fray, and then to think of that sordid clash of

selfishness at Versailles and of the untamed menagerie of Europe let

loose in 1920. The spiritualists quickly claimed to get special messages

from the dead. But did the dead only speak to the spiritualists? Did

they say nothing more than was said to them? Most of us alas, hear

nothing or only a "Dinna ye hear it?" a wailing of the pipes at an

infinite number of poor soldiers' funerals.

Well, the war enters a new phase in the summer of 1915. It will be

fought in a larger more terrible way, the number of millions of deaths

will begin after a while to seem not so far off. Killing becomes the

religion of the hour.

The first hundreds of thousands of the volunteers roll up. The old

Seventh Division which we have been following is broken up and

reconstructed. The Guards Division was formed. So Scots Guards and

Grenadiers marched away to join new comrades, to leave behind brave

Borders and Gordons and Devons and Duke of Wellingtons. The 92nd feted

the Scots, the Devons the Grenadiers; the Gordon pipers played all the

laments of the clans and "_Will ye no come back again!_"

And they went to Wizernes to prepare for the battle of Loos--a conflict

which the gallant Highland lads were destined to enter first and the

bright polished Guards but second, yet both to shine and die.

In June General Foch's Tenth Army launched its Artois attack against the

great ridge of "Notre Dame de Lorette" which commands the Lens country

from the South as the high ground of Loos does from the North. A hundred

thousand Frenchmen perished for Notre Dame and it is henceforth a place

of pilgrimage for France. The battle was the prelude to our battle of

Loos and whilst the great new British army in reserve drilled and

marched away to the North, it heard each night the drum-fire of the 75's

rolling from the South. Later in the war when the British took over all

the line 'twixt Lens and Arras the Canadians took Foch's victory a step

further and captured Vimy Ridge. What Foch did in the summer of '15 was

however to be eclipsed by what the combined armies should do in the

autumn. Reliance was placed chiefly on the new man-power. The earlier

battles of Neuve Chapelle and Festubert had been tests of the

relationship of gun-power and man-power. Opinion inclined to support the

theory that a superiority in numbers was the most telling factor in a

battle. This seemingly was disproved, and the next theory was that in

order to obtain victory there must be overwhelming superiority both in

guns and in men. The Somme battle proved that even these were not

enough.

In the battle of Loos however all the interest was centred on men, men

personally. The new base was St. Omer, the picturesque ecclesiastical

town with its castellated church towers in relief against the sky--all

so thronged with khaki--henceforth till the war ends to be a great war

centre. France lies in a bower beyond, and there are squads of poplar

trees on hills, and green and happy meadows never scarred by shells or

wilted by gas. On the left on the road out to Wizernes is now a large

cemetery, and here lie French dead with the tricolour upon them, British

with an infinity of flowers and wreaths, Americans with grim and tall

white crosses--American dead who will not be exhumed perhaps. Behind the

American graves stand wedges of unpainted wood--a Chinese plot where lie

what was mortal of many unknown coolies. On the right lie Germans, on

the left _soldados_ of Portugal. This is called playfully the souvenir

cemetery--there are so many of the dead they can be thus arranged, as

children might arrange their toys. St. Omer was known as a great base

hospital to which alas, so many were called to look their last upon

their dying children, dying sons of England breathing out their last

words before their bodies were laid away. There are those who are fond

of saying that everything began at St. Omer. But for many also it was

the place where it all--_ended_.

The cemetery past, (How it rains on it now!) you come to aerodromes all

tortured and torn, indications of Handley Page but no indications of

those who fly, the cages are all empty and there stands not a sentry. In

plain blunt English the passer-by is told that "_Trespassers will be

shot_" but in the heavy rain of a Saturday afternoon a muddy crowd of

French boys are playing a football match. Chinamen evidently worked

beside these aerodromes, for you see their scrawls on the sheds and

shelters.

Wizernes, where the Guards Division was formed, lies in a hollow below a

long green ridge. Most of it is painted white--including _Au bon Diable_

a tavern of some name. The people know a passing Englishman, not by the

cut of his clothes alone but by his walk and his complexion and style.

Standing at their doorways old men give military salutes to any

Englishman who happens to go by. All know bits of our tongue, of which

they are as proud as if they had wounds to show. A poor woman in a

little beer-house has eight daughters, five of whom are married and a

sixth has a child by a Canadian. Little Renée, flaxen-haired,

ruddy-cheeked, is getting on very well and the mother adores her, though

a father in the New World his progeny has forgotten. This sixth daughter

of substantial mother was in service at Havre and met the soldier

there; she is now in service at St. Omer and not at all "ruined." There

are thousands of baby tokens of the war in France. Some died no doubt,

through lack of care; lightly they came and lightly they go, but a

widespread sentimental feeling about departed Tommy shields those who

now, live from any feeling of disgrace.

Of course the men at the base begot more infants than the men in the

line, the latter were too much used up for "love" or "lust," saw fewer

girls and had less time on their hands. But all had their opportunities.

As we know, a great number of marriages were effected, and not a few

overseas men are now living with French wives.

That has little however to do with Wizernes, whence behold Lord Cavan's

men marching away one dull September morn. The music of the bands is

refracted from that long parallel ridge of hill which goes with the road

toward Arques--the drums, the fifes, the brilliant array; each company

compact, glittering--the new Division. Some of it is utterly new, such

as 4th Grenadiers and 1st Welsh straight from Little Sparta, others

trail already a great war history from other divisions of the old army.

But the numbers are good. Sergeants are yelling at men who will be dead

in a few weeks' time. Men are silently reviling those on whom destiny

itself will quickly take revenge. All looks very authentic and lasting.

Unchecked optimism moreover reigns supreme. These compact units in their

unhurried and ever regular quick march believe that they will win the

war. Lens will be taken by others. They will come into action at the

critical moment, somewhere near Douai. They will pierce the German belt

of defence, split the enemy army, "roll up their line," and Germany

realising that she is beaten will at once sue for peace. There may be

some delay in formalities--then home for Christmas!

Behold in the Grand Place at Arques immaculate General Heywood

inspecting his Third Brigade with its new units. Arques has a tall

obelisk there now--_a ses cent cinquante heroiques et glorieux enfants,

mort pour la France et la liberté_.

These inspections were as great an ordeal as the going into battle

itself. In the line at least there were no drill-sergeants and

regimental sergeant-majors. However, inspections cease and the long

march in the rain begins, and new leather beats cobbled highways for

many a long fifty minutes, and weary backs and feet find ten minutes in

the hour all too little for recuperation. A little-touched happy

agricultural country, with Calvaries here and there erected and blessed

in 1919 in token of thanks that the land was spared from invasion. By

Aire to Fontaine St. Hilaire, to the sight of the first coal pyramids

of the Lens country and to the hearing of the first mighty thunders of

the opening great battle. The Guards were told that they were intended

for a sort of anchor to the cavalry. The Division would press on, and

somewhere beyond Loos the cavalry would come up from behind, pass

through the ranks, and press on to Douai. The Division would perhaps

come into action at the Canal at Douai. So when the cavalry overtook the

Guards whilst yet on the road to Loos it was assumed that the whole

British army was in advance of its program, Douai taken, and the enemy

in disorderly retreat. But on the day when optimism reached its height a

Colonel in a motor coming back from the front gave the duller tidings

that the attack had been held up. However, the sight of the cavalry

regiments going past in all their splendour was a sort of lasting

encouragement in the simple soldier's mind.

It is a gloomy sordid country with dirty mining villages placarded with

yellow appeals to the proletariat and "Vive la Russie!" "Vive la

revolution sociale!" and dirty homes and black-faced men in sooty coaly

shirts--miserable Sailly, miserable Vermelles. Then the road debouches

upon wide open country, the terrain and the landscape of the battle. It

is a chalky heath interlaced and inter-run with trenches and barbed

wire. The trenches were mostly dug by Scottish miners and were said to

be the admiration of the troops in 1915. But standards in trench digging

were low in the first year of the war, and one does not admire them now.

The landmarks of the horizon are peaked coal-heaps. The road which goes

to Lens is bare and hard. Loos and Hulluch are on the left, and also the

German line. Close in to the suburbs of Lens the line crosses the road.

Shells must have come thick and fast on these September days. It is not

a covetable country to march over under fire. One wonders what exactly

the first divisions accomplished here on the days before the Guards came

up. Special correspondents were given facilities at the time and one

remembers among other things Mr. Buchan's despatch with its native pride

in Highland regiments, and a sort of belief that they themselves had won

the day. One had the impression of a sort of trial charge of kilted lads

which showed what they would do later on. Indeed some of the Highlanders

must have actually got into Lens. Nothing could stop them but death.

Were the lines between Vermelles and Loos German? These were supposed to

have been captured during the first days of the attack. The Guards in

artillery formation swept across leftward to Loos, past the spent

legions--to the line, to Hill 70, the barrier to Lens city.

It is memorable to be in Loos on the anniversary of the opening of the

battle, to walk up Hill 70 by the sharp-dug clumsy communication-trench,

to reach the lateral lines on the brow of the hill and look down toward

the shattered town. And Loos lies in disruption and dejection. It lost

every roof, now it has perhaps a score of new ones visible to the eye.

The machinery of the pit-head is all down, likewise the clangorous iron

tower which shells seemed unable to destroy. Rusty wreckage runs along

the base of the coal heap, the length of a long train. Heavy green shrub

almost covers the coal embankment. On Hill 70 itself the old rusty wire

remains, though so scanty as if much had corroded away. Shell-holes seem

to afford more cover than the pitiful scrapings in the chalk of the old

trenches. There is a burnt-out wood on the left; on the right is the

insurgent industrialism of unruined fosses; ahead are chalk-pits,

chalk-mounds, thistles, dry grass, poppies, all dazzling in a bright

September noon. Innumerable grasshoppers are whispering in the breeze,

and from all horizons one hears also the softened clatter of building.

You can even hear what is going on in Lens.

There is little of the debris of the fight--a rotten butt-end of a

rifle, a few shreds of German bombs, an old-fashioned gas bag. One

recalls that the British first used gas at Loos. The air on Hill 70 on

that September day was pregnant with gas. Many of our fellows died of

it. The Germans on their side made much use of stick-bombs. The hill

was strewn with "buckshee" bombs. Did not a young soldier valiantly

digging drive a pick through one, and send himself and Lord Petre of the

Grenadiers to better country? The enemy manufactured vast quantities of

this bomb--it was a pet toy of his, curiously exemplifying his mind. Its

stated object was to terrify rather than to kill, and Englishmen

believing more in iron and "good shrapnel effects" always despised it.

But it was responsible for an enormous number of accidents.

On the brow of the hill and beyond there are increasing signs of German

habitation. Near a vast white wallowing mine-crater there is a barricade

of sand-bags and wire, the point of difference 'twixt friend and foe.

After that one soon comes upon those wooden framed cellarways which

plunge from the side of the trench into the bowels of the earth. They go

down and down and are seldom explored by soldier or civilian. Some of

these have their gruesome secrets in their dark depths. Many Germans

were killed in them. Fear and industry conceived them. They were safe

enough at ordinary times, but death-traps in an attack; a man at the

bottom of a steep pit stood little chance against an enemy at the door

with a bomb. The British and French in this case understood the war

better than the Germans. A slighter cover or shelter whilst giving less

sense of security did give vigilance and alertness. Germany dug the

grave of her cause far from the ends she had in view and settled down to

a war of concrete and defence when she should have understood her lines

as the merest temporary abiding places on the way to victory. It

prolonged the settlement for years.

How the cornflowers blossom on the German side! Did not they sow the

seeds here for their Kaiser. They sowed the seed--and now it blossoms on

the wilderness. Bright blue flowers shine in the midst of withered

nature, otherwise in September 1920 the crest of Hill 70 is so covered

with brittle yellow weeds that a match would set it aflame from end to

end. It is like a dried inland beach of the old war. The waves no longer

roll up with thunder and expire as once they did. But you can see in

imagination the young Guards officer in his Burberry, cane in hand

leading his flower of manhood--forward, forward, toward the shore of

Lens--see the expiring first line and the second line that follows

passing through and over it, the third that goes again---- They were the

waves which at last crumbled all defences.

Not that Loos was a triumph of attack. Little justice will no doubt be

done on our side to the German defence of Lens, but it was a defence

which rivalled ours of Ypres. The enemy was driven back on both sides of

it during the later campaigns of the war (chiefly in 1917). Technically

and theoretically the Germans could be forced to yield it at any

moment. But in practice it could not be taken from them. We'd take it

were it of iron; they'd hold it were it of butter. Artillery laid the

town flat, but artillery could not destroy the cellars, and of every

cellar the German, with the reinforcement of iron and concrete, made a

machine-gun nest or post for riflemen. For the rest, we held nearly all

the Vermelles--Lens road, and the greater part of that from La Bassee to

Lens. From Hill 70 one sees geographically a wide landscape of the war.

It was a remarkable vantage-ground for beholding the doings of one's own

side.

One aspect of the fighting on Hill 70 ought not to be forgotten, and

that was the work of the stretcher-bearers who for the sake of each

wounded comrade they brought in exposed themselves constantly to death.

The heavy bodies, the uneven and entangled way down an exposed hillside,

the shells howling and bursting, the sniper's bullet whipping through

the air--these made up the stretcher-bearers' Calvary-walk. They did

their duty and ceased to think of whether they themselves would live or

die. And Loos was nothing to the Somme--as those will tell you who came

through both.

But the battle of Loos was not ended at Loos. All the worst of the

fighting was away to the left by Bois de Hugo and Chalk-pit wood where

Scots and Coldstream strove again and again to establish a continuous

line. The German system of trenches was entered, and Hulluch-ward, La

Bassee-ward, a strife more bloody than Loos itself continued. On the

night of the 29th September there is a relief on Hill 70--the 22nd

Londons come in. The survivors of the Guards march off to billets in

Sailly and about. But the fight continues for halves of trenches, for

corners, for turnings. German and British are living in the same

madhouse together and fighting for complete possession room by room.

Now the new British bomb appears--the Mills grenade, the trench-clearer.

Germans are fought in the white alleys with bombs, bombs only and bombs

ever. October 1915 was the great month of bomb-mania. Its emblem should

be the man and the bomb ready to throw. The Guards were soon back in the

fray, and on the night when the bombs came up so great was the

fascination that "Jocks" and "Bill Browns" were bombing one

another--each thinking the other was the enemy.

It is all indescribably wild now--Gun trench, Grab Alley, Big Willie,

Hohenzollern and the rest, cement-coloured, or yellow with a withered

prairie of weeds. Notices at various points indicate _chasse reservée_:

the shooting rights are now reserved. Frenchmen with shot-guns and dogs

prowl along the parapets, peppering the noisy partridges which they

rouse up in scores. Decaying rifles lie in the trenches, rusty

bayonets, and muddy shreds of belts and pouches. On the German side the

inevitable litter of unexploded but sodden bombs; undo the metal

protectors and you find the very string which caused them to explode has

rotted in its case. No tourists turn up on these wild wastes. It is too

terrible for them--and you cannot motor over innumerable pits.

On Sunday October 3rd you can picture the survivors of Loos at "Divine

Service" at Sailly la Bourse. On the evening of the Sunday they marched

to Gun trench. The trench was so called because the enemy had a gun on

it. Fifty yards of the centre the Germans held, and the British were in

the trench both on the left and on the right of the enemy, and strove to

bomb him out of it entirely.

The gun was worked heavily, and shell after shell landed on parapet or

parados scattering solid slag, ravaging chalk, burying men. The unburied

were engaged all night digging out lost comrades and trench-repairing.

It seems mere matter-of-fact when set down in dull print--but oh, the

physical agonies of apprehension, the shuddering, the shattering of

nerves physically under such conditions. It is easily understood how men

were glad to be hit to get away and find peace. Death must at times have

been eagerly desired and sought. It was called hell: it was hell. The

new Kitchener divisions were thus not long in getting to the reality of

war.

In the diaries of the time you find much reference to gas fatigue.

British gas was used whenever the wind seemed favourable. Gas did not

seem however to have power to stifle many enemy defenders. Gas fatigue

was the carrying of the cylinders to the line. Emplacements were dug for

cylinders below the parapet of the trench and "riveted" with sand-bags.

Twenty or thirty cylinders would be thus ranged together at intervals of

twenty-five yards. The cylinders contained the gas in liquid form, and

ejection was worked on the syphon principle. This use of gas was seldom

justified by results, and added an infernal torture and ugliness. It was

a true diabolism. Almost always it afflicted the side which operated it

as much as it did the enemy. Protection against gas was clumsy and

inadequate. We started with the "stokers' pad" which was proved useless.

Then we had a cotton pad soaked in hypo and tied on by veiling which was

supposed to protect the eyes. And then followed cloth helmets soaked in

hypo, helmets with mica eyes, very smelly, clammy, and unreliable.

Mustard gas at a later date brought the respirator. But the protection

at Loos and Hulluch was the old hypo bag of which not a few still lie

about.

The war was becoming quite complicated and new. A Lewis gun was first

used in the battle for Hohenzollern Redoubt, and in time each battalion,

nay, each company, will have its Lewis gunners. Steel helmets were also

issued at Hohenzollern and were considered curiosities. One battalion

received five helmets! They were supposed to be for the special use of

the bombers. But then everyone became a bomber in that battle.

It is with awe that one looks on the silent empty Hohenzollern system

now, where trenches for many days were choked with dead. Some commanders

in those days thought double rum-rations put the necessary devil into

men to carry them through the ordeal of a fray, and it is common talk in

the Army that some of the units that went into the storming of

Hohenzollern Redoubt knew very little of what they were doing. One thing

is certain: alcohol has power to banish fear from men's minds, if fear

there happen to be. It dulls the brain to danger. But then alas, it

often dulls it to much else. Cool heads were needed to meet the German.

And the night-attack at Hohenzollern failed. The dead lay as if emptied

out of sacks into the pits, into the trenches, some head downward, some

with legs alone visible. Whilst it rained in London, and the evening

crowds glided along Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly talking of

anything and everything, happily, snugly,--away out there in the

darkness lay such a scene. It was most near, but an impenetrable black

curtain hid it from the eyes.

War in 1915 failed. We failed; the Germans failed. The German failure

was the greater because it was not their rôle to stand and be attacked.

Germans and Allies were not unequally matched. The result was a

deadlock. Both sides came to the conclusion that no one in his wildest

dreams of preparation for war had foreseen the number of shells and guns

necessary to obtain victory. Fighting therefore slackened off in the

trenches, and the real centre of war-activity was transferred to what we

called "the home front," to the factories and war-industries of England,

France, and Germany and Austria. All the wet and gloomy winter saw the

ammunition heaping up for the myriad-fold destruction of men in 1916.

Germany prepared a mountain of death to hurl at Verdun; Britain a

mountain of death to hurl from the Somme. No serious discussion of the

campaigns of 1915 was allowed to the peoples of the countries. Gallipoli

however was evacuated and Serbia over-run, and Bulgaria came into the

war on the other side. With the military power of the Tsar lying low

Germany had fair hopes of victory. Neither Britain nor France had much

to cheer them, but they knew that their resources were mighty, and they

knew that their enemy on the Western front did not seem to want to fight

and was continually on the defensive.

It did not stir the mind of the soldier much. The autumn leaves fell for

the Germans, and Christmas came for the British Tommy, and unfulfilled

promises in plenty. A winter of rain and mist above, and water and mud

below, and a sense of "a long long way to Tipperary and to everywhere

else" were the lot of the British soldier. The war lost its tension

after the Hulluch fighting was over. Unofficial fraternisation set in on

many fronts. This was a mutual understanding by the rank and file of

both sides. The Germans were quickest in arranging it--indeed their

alacrity in this direction suggested the belief that it was organised

from above and was intended as a way of winning the war, by undermining

discipline and worming out secrets and spying. This however was not so.

For if it undermined one side it undermined the other as much also, and

if one side learned secrets so could the other. Moreover officers on

both sides disliked it, and they for their part could not fraternise

with enemy officers. Their quarrel was more serious. Officers understood

more about the war and had more of the collective guilt of the war upon

their minds than had the rank and file. Not that a winter lull was not

to their liking. They were glad enough of the effects of these _petites

armistices_. On the French fronts more was arranged than on that held by

the British. Parties came over into one another's trenches. In Russia

unfortunately fraternisation resulted in a constant loss of Muscovite

rifles and material in exchange for _Schnapps_. Probably the British

fraternised least of all, and though one has heard of Tommy's concert

party in which "Brother 'Ans was arst ter sing the 'im of 'ate" it did

not amount to more than tacit agreements not to shoot.

The crack regiments on both sides were however indisposed for any kind

of truce. They set the tone in discipline and were far from that Charlie

Chaplin attitude towards the war which characterised some others. What

was the astonishment of some of the Guardsmen when "taking over" at

Laventie, after Loos and Hohenzollern, to see the easy-going way of

warfare which had developed. "I saw a Jerry on top of the enemy parapet

working away in broad daylight as cool as could be," said a sergeant.

"Of course I at once got a bead on him."

"What're you going to do? You're surely not going to fire on him?" asked

one of the men of the outgoing regiment. "You'll spoil the game."

"How's that?"

"Why, they'll begin shooting at you."

"What d'you think of that?" said the sergeant. "I fired just to let them

know the Guards had come."

Nevertheless even the Guards were mollified. Warfare dwindled to

nothing. "Jerry" was very confiding. Christmas was coming. The war

after all was not so serious and perhaps would not be renewed in the

Spring. Inactivity always seems to soften opposing rank and file toward

one another. It tends to bring them back to the natural human

relationship. By Christmas there was a widespread popular sense for a

thoroughgoing reconciliation in no-man's land. What had happened at

Christmas in 1914 was the needful precedent. It was a sort of playful

legend in the army. On Christmas Day there would be a going over and a

shaking of hands and exchange of souvenirs and drinks. Both sides looked

forward to it.

But the authorities evidently thought it dangerous. Orders to the effect

that there should be no fraternisation were sent out, and a

staff-officer here and there spent Christmas Eve in the trenches to see

that the orders were carried out. He could not however effect very much.

At ten o'clock that night the men in all the trenches both German and

English were talking without restraint, and the dark muddy lines of

Laventie had a voice as of some great club at night when all the members

are discussing at once. Germans were shouting invitations across,

British were shouting invitations; and promises were made for next day.

At dawn therefore parties went over, and whole battalions might have

followed them had not the artillery at once set up a barrage. It was

found also that sentries on both sides had been ordered to fire. Some

obeyed, some did not. One Guards sentry was proud of having fired

fifteen rounds. But he did not hit anyone. Meanwhile the troops about

Neuve Chapelle and Aubers got across in large bodies. Even on the

Guards' front men risked their lives to shake hands. Did not one thus

lose his life that morning!

There is a little old cemetery by the side of the road a mile or so from

Laventie, and there lie prominently side by side two corporals of the

Sixth Black Watch (Newell and Willis) and behind their graves is that of

a certain Sergeant Oliver who perished on Christmas Day. A tall rose

tree with crimson roses blooming even in the autumn is growing from the

earth where he lies. Beside him lies one who was both captain and

knight, with only a dock rising from his feet. On all graves are weeds

except on that of the man who gave his life to shake hands on Christmas

Day.

* * * * *

The winter life of 1915-16 was one of mud and frostbite in the line, and

taverns and songs when out. The whole corner of Northern France about

Armentières begot a sort of British character. Not that it was like any

district at home. Or that the way of life resembled anything anywhere

else at any time. Tommy in the _estaminet_, Tommy with his sing-song in

billets, Tommy on the march slogging through the mud--began as it were

to belong to France and to the war. He ceased to look like an imported

article. He was disposed to be at home, and like Mark Tapley, that most

characteristic of English types of men, to be happy even under the most

melancholy circumstances. The soldier, whatever his inward sorrows,

often so deep, so poignant, always kept a cheery face and had a

devil-may-care smile for whatever came along. Of course he had his

grousing fits. But they passed. He was most himself when singing. To

France he sang all the old songs he ever knew and more besides which he

invented. How vulgar, in London how banal were the songs--"vulgar songs

which make you cough and blow your nose" as Kipling put it, the

seemingly maudlin _Hullo my dearie I want you to-night_ sort of song.

But in France how real, how passionate! A group of men stand in the

partial shelter of a shattered building crooning together whilst it

rains, whilst it pours on the mud outside! In England the words which

they sing are sentimental drivel, they are the barrel-organ and its

handle turning, but in France they are the voice of a suppressed

yearning and suffering--

I ... shall meet you ... to-night, dear--

In my beautee ... ful dream ... land.

And your eyes will be bright, dear,

With ... the love light ... that shines for me.

The only place where the soldier could meet her, till there came one of

those madly-coveted greedily-snatched moments of leave, when a man

dashed, with the mud of the trenches still on him, straight to

"Blighty."

There was a curious note of self-pity in many of the sentimental songs,

and men gloated over the love of home. The love of mother became warmer

in imagination (_Lordy, lordy lordy, how I love her!_); the tenderness

of wife and sweetheart became desired in a way which could only be

expressed in songs--and in letters, those most precious of all tokens of

the war, the letters which men sent from the front to those who loved

them. The little English soldier sang his very heart out asking his

Lizzie to "keep the kettle boiling," asking anyone and everyone to

Keep the home fires burning

Till the boys come home!

Even so, he would not allow himself to get down-hearted or to remain for

long in a sentimental mood. The humorous inventive vein came to his

assistance. He did not possess ready-made chansonettes of the French

type. The music-hall had not provided them, but he straightway began to

invent them to satisfy the need. So sprang into being _Mademoiselle from

Armenteers_ which was reputed to have fifty thousand verses--anyone

could invent a verse at any moment. So was born _Roll on, my Three_,

that soldiers' litany and chorus, _The one-eyed Riley_, and many another

burlesque. Then every well-known hymn and popular song had its war

parody expressing the soldier's mind in lighter vein---- Some of the

parodies of popular songs improved on the originals. Thus--

I wore a tunic, an old khaki tunic,

But you wore civilian clothes.

Whilst we were in the trenches

You were mashing all the wenches,

What a blessing no one knows!

We fought at Loos whilst you scoffed the booze.

on the basis of--

I wore a tulip, a bright yellow tulip,

But you wore a red red rose.

was extremely diverting, as was

I've lost my oil-bottle and pull-through,

I've lost my four by two.

on the basis of "Love's beautiful garden."

Endless were these songs and parodies now fast receding into limbo.

Where so much was ugly and of the burlesque there was also much that was

true and simple and direct, from the heart. Perhaps the most popular

song in some regiments was, after all, "Mary." There was no parody of

"Mary," and one was always hearing or singing--

The sweetest blossom on the tree

Cannot compare with Ma ... ry!

The men lifted the roofs of the taverns with their songs. The war which

increased life's suffering tenfold, increased life's music tenfold also.

So the winter was sung through, a winter of rain and snow, with low

skies, with mists, mist on land and sea and in the eyes and in the mind,

the melancholy interim of 1915-16, where no one understood anything

except that there was suffering. Meanwhile however the munition-makers

on the home fronts went on manufacturing the stuff of death in

ever-increasing appalling vast quantities.

The Germans were the first to resume the struggle. 1916 presented itself

as a year of destiny for Mittel-Europa and world-power. Russia lay low.

Serbia was ravaged even to the shores of Greece. A galvanised Turkey had

been raised from death and had driven France and Britain from the gates

of the Hellespont. There remained but one vital enemy--France. Britain

would soon compose the war if France were worsted. So now all the might

of Prussia was forged into a weapon of assault, and the weapon was

hurled in the centre.

There commenced the terrible manslaughter of Verdun. Irresistible

Germany met immovable France, and men by the myriad were sent post-haste

to heaven. Between the petty forts of a French city Europe heaped a

great pyramid of skulls to the sky. As in Verestchagin's picture, one

saw an emblem of war without compromise and without cowardice.