The French stubbornness before Verdun shone out like a miracle. It was

an unexpected revelation of French tenacity and corporate strength. A

Bismarckian contempt for the Frenchman had almost been the accepted

measure of the French in Europe. They were considered degenerate,

corrupt, lacking in spirit, loud to boast but quick to run away. The

rapidity with which Germany overran France in 1914 had confirmed this

opinion, despite the battle of the Marne. But Verdun revealed to Germany

a new and terrible France. The whole of the rest of the war, as it were,

paused to look on in wonder. France has raised now her memorials at

Verdun, but it needs no monument. Verdun is written in iron upon

Europe's heart. Dead called to the living there to join them. Verdun was

never taken, but it always lured the enemy on--the lodestone of the

charnel house.

Rightly understood, the battle of the Somme was not a greater battle

than that of Verdun. It was similar; it was our Verdun battle. It also

was a "blood-bath" for both sides. It also was a spending of the

ammunition which the winter, spring, and summer preparations had brought

forth. Tens of thousands of those who sang so light-heartedly through

the winter found eternal peace, stretched like lost star-fishes in the

Somme mud. From Albert with the Virgin leaning from the church-tower,

to within sight of the miserable, hitherto uncoveted, town of Bapaume

what a progress! One of the heaviest epics in history, the slowest, most

heavy footed of charges! As if each man bore a hundredweight of lead on

his feet to keep him back when he would have rushed to gain the day!

Hundreds met their death, not through shot or shell, but by actual

drowning in mud. Hundreds were sent back to the rear partially

distraught before they got the signal to leap forth to personal attack.

The massing of the Somme artillery out-Heroded Herod--the greatest

concentration of noise and destruction that the world had known. The

greatest strain of the Somme battle was mental, and its greatest effect

was no doubt moral. The extent of territory gained was no indication of

the true result of the battle. The actual numbers of the dead might have

been a greater indication had they not generally been hidden at the

time. For the peace-quorum of death was being approached--there was a

large advance towards hate's _desirabilia_, the three and a half

millions who had to be slain. Men might have taken some comfort from

that dreadful thought had they known. But it was theirs to fight and

labour on in blindness.

The Somme country was an extension of the British line. As our army

doubled, trebled, quadrupled, so it multiplied the extent of France

which it defended. From the flats of Flanders and Northern France we

gradually progressed to a more diversified country of long ridges and

downs, pleasanter in peace but equally terrible in war. As you approach

it now by train the cemeteries roll into view on every hand. The dead

are as it were drawn up in solid columns to greet you as you pass, as it

were one live man were monarch o'er all the dead. The Army that went to

guard the line is still there, still on duty--in Plot A, Plot B, Plot C,

Plot Z, of multitudinous war-cemeteries marked now by map-references.

The dead challenge the living in choruses of silence from broad fields

of burial. The hills remain like great mounds in the mist, the same bare

ridges of Cæsar's wars two thousand years ago, the same o'er which

perchance mankind will climb to death as many centuries hence,

antediluvian hummocks of old earth, somnolent, green, indifferent. Earth

suggests itself constantly as something mightier than man. It is not the

prostrate earth of Ypres Salient, but one which war has much less power

to sear. Man's habitations and cities topple down, forests are fired

away, but the elemental lines and contours of the hills remain unbroken

and as it were indifferent both to time and history. These rivers too,

by which men name their battles, flow on, flow away without a conscious

memory even of a yesterday. The innocence of the Somme, the virginity

of the Ancre, these have overcome all hate and blood, and lightly

forgotten them.

The Judas trees have leafed afresh upon the banks of Ancre, and every

individual leaf is chattering and shivering--because, they say, two

thousand years ago the betrayer hanged himself upon an aspen bough. The

aspens give voice to the wind, and beside them the little willows are

all silent. Tangled wild flowers cling to the river banks, and limpid

water passes in bright armfuls over green sedgy tresses. On either hand

the giant reeds lift their pompous heads. Shell-pits are pits of

greenery. Deep brown of sagging rusty wire seems to be the complementary

colour of an intense and shadowy green. In the road where the sentry

stood guarding the crossing of the rail all is empty now. No

dust-covered mud-splashed lorries come blundering and tearing along the

high-road any more. There is a silence which is unearthly, as if the

composed deep sleep of the dead had conquered the ways of the living.

The little white towns and villages lie splashed in wreckage--without

the power to lift themselves again. Your Ville sur Corbie, your Meault

with its dirt-choked green strewn with pontoon boats, your Fricourt and

Carnoy--all prostrate, inert--they lie on the ground as if sewn to it.

On the left comes into view the triple blackness of the silhouette of

Notre Dame at Albert. Trees with the horror of the martyrs on their

receding withered hands seem fixed for years in the momentary awfulness

of death, menacing, aghast, uprearing. Narrow crooked trenches in

disorderly array seem to be hurrying forward, carrying their old wire

with them--as if they too had to follow the men they once held. But they

pause on the shores of dreadful pools and ponds, dead-horse and dead-men

stagnancies that ponder and are still and reflect indifferently the grey

sky above and the grey, blasted, shattered timber-bits on either hand.

Oh Albert, what a place of death thou art now, with thy returned

children playing hide and seek around the heaps of thy homes. How is it

possible to _return_ to this place. It is not a return: no one can ever

return to the Albert of 1914. These that we see are revenants come to

look at spectral homes. For Albert is dead. There you can realise that a

human home is a living being like the woman who made it. It can prosper

or decay. It can go shabby and suffer. It can be wounded or maimed--it

can be killed. We mercifully hide our dead in Earth's great bosom--but

we leave our dead homes long when they lie, in all their horror and

terror. There stands a shrunken little house where the tiles have been

swept away, the plaster also, and the bare laths of the ceiling are all

exposed, but they look like a cap bashed down on the head of a dead man.

Yonder lies a recumbent habitation with a welter of grey laths and

beams on its burst-out side, like the sun-dried ribs of a dead

dromedary. Beyond it stands a wall that is left, and then an outraged

home with madness fixed in its visage in the moment of death-agony. Here

is a house with gutted entrails half congealed and terrible to behold.

There is a house that died simply of shock. But its neighbour

_vis-à-vis_ was hit by some striding giant with iron fist. Rows of

houses are seen cowering, as if they had had their hands up trying to

ward off the dreadful fate which stalked above them. Houses lie killed

as it were in the action of flight, veritably in the act of treading on

one another's heels in a frenzy to get away. There are houses which are

abased, houses which have fallen foremost on their faces, houses which

have fallen backwards, bottom over top into confusion and debris behind,

houses with their sides torn off as men's sides were torn off in the

war, exposing for one instant beating hearts. There are houses where

simply the life-breath has gone out--dead, blind, empty and desolate.

One can hardly think of the existence once of rooms, the

marriage-bedrooms of sweet human honeymoons, the room where the baby

slept a baby's untroubled sleep, the children's room where one thinks of

a child's cry in the night or a child's lisped prayer before its mother

or the crucifix, the room where the home met, the table round which went

food and talk and laughter in a common innocence and ignorance of

destiny--all gone now in shapeless ruin.

All the houses were the children of Notre Dame--the leaning Virgin who

hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the

Cathedral-church, and yearned o'er the city. The miracle of her suspense

in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder, and the soldiers said the

city would never be taken as long as she remained un-shot down from the

eminence of the great church.

Alas, Albert had its day of fate and of complete sacrifice ere the war

should end--when all should go, yea, Virgin and all, and only Golgotha

remain, Golgotha and the Roman soldiers who smote the Master with their

spears as He hung from the Cross.

Twilight settles down upon the dead, the twilight of time and misery.

The dreadful reality of destruction becomes more intense and real. After

all, sunlight and the noonday do not always show us truth. They are in

themselves so full of life and happiness that they divert attention from

ruins and death unto themselves. Only in the grey light of afternoon and

evening, and looking with the empty eye-socket of night-darkness can one

easily apprehend what is spread out here--the last landscape of tens of

thousands who lie dead. Hamlet must go to the battlements at the time

when the ghost walks. The light of day hides the unseen world, or

cannot quite hide it. But there is one moment when the ghost of Albert

grows into vision majestically before the eyes. You go out through the

primeval jungle of dead weeds, the tripartite crowned heads of brown

teasles looking like low-lying spectral regalia of the death-kingdom,

past dug-outs and deeps and quagmire, past the prostrate ribaldry and

obscenity of war's doings with the earth--to the dark-flowing water

which nurses its forgotten secrets, flowing on, flowing on. You wait,

and whilst mist chills the marrow the ghostly moment of Albert comes

once more. Night has more than heralded itself; it is here in a

vast-fronted army and comes onward. Demon-eyes look over the ridges,

flash angrily, greedily; the roar of battle thunder bursts up; the

gas-shells cat-calling across the sky fall in showers on the mud;

field-guns are advanced to point-blank range--there comes the tide of

the war-worn German soldiery of March 1918, war-worn and yet exultant;

the English are driven out, the leaning Virgin falls, and the city is

given over to the enemy. Albert is dead; even its soul has died. English

soldiers will come back in August, recapture it, but not the city they

defended so long, not the city of the little Notre Dame leaning

passionately o'er its life and its defence.

* * * * *

From Albert to Bapaume, from Fricourt by Carnoy and Maricourt to

Longueval and Ginchy and Le Transloy, a pleasant day's walk now. There

is the incomparable Somme silence, a silence achieved by the tremendous

thunderous contrast in history, a silence from the stilled hearts of the

dead, a deafness and a muteness. Then when the mist disperses, and the

sun lifts his awful radiance o'er the scene, there are audible the lowly

orchestras of flies and bees. The rags of horses' skeletons lie on the

roadway, and beside a ruined direction-post a clean-picked horse's skull

has been placed on the stump of a tree. Lifting one's eyes to the view

there rolls forth to the horizon vast moors empurpled here and there and

with gashes of white on wan green wastes. An organised tour by car

whirls past upon the road raising phantom hosts of white dust. It will

do the whole Somme campaign in an hour and bring up safely at some

French hotel where hot lunch and foaming beer persuade the living that

life is still worth while. There was once a picture in _Simplicissimus_

of a Cook's guide showing a human skull to some tourists--

"This, sir," said he, "was a young man."

It was meant for irony. But surely it is good for everyone who talks of

war to go and get that thought--_this was a young man_. It does not

matter that tourists whirl past without pause in a car. Let each and

everyone come and dip a corner of a handkerchief in the blood of the

war--for remembrance. Come to the sacrament of the young man's blood

which was shed instead of yours.

The road you traverse to the Somme altar is the road which hundreds of

thousands of young men trod, marching to moments of destiny, moments of

victory; the Manchesters to Montauban, South Africans to Delville, Royal

Scots to Guillemont, the Guards to Les Boeufs, the Durham Light Infantry

to the Butte of Warlencourt, the 47th Londons to Eaucourt l'Abbaye--and

many others; they marched from the quiet places of the homeland and the

empire, from Loos, from Laventie, from Flanders; defenders of Ypres and

defenders of Arras, marching with their drums, marching with their

bayonets, to Britain's quarrel and her mightiest enemy. Behind them were

ranged the guns, and in front of them was Prussia. Now the desolation of

Nature alone suggests what a desolation there was of men. The terrible

woods are impressionist pictures of the ruined vitals of great

regiments, and you can hold a forest in your mind as you would a skull

in your hands and say--_This was a forest._ _This was an army._

The generality of men and women however will not do that. The new-born

generations mask their grief, and you will see if you walk into Bernafay

Wood that a young Bernafay Wood is rising midst the dead masts of the

old--self-sown. It will grow higher every year till the old is hidden.

The masts will fall, will rot, will recede from this bright sunlight,

and relapse into the shade which the new trees will give them, and then

soon all will be forgotten. Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead

lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no

body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British

soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are

rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything.

The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade

by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich

in their masses of brown-stained wood, will pass. They will first be

re-set-up in stone. 1921 will see them rolling out in new stone crosses,

at first startlingly pallid and virginal, but as the months go on,

getting gradually greyened and darkened, rain-washed, wind-blown, then

falling a little from the straight. Flowers will bloom as new summers

shine o'er the dead. Visitors will come. There will be a greater time of

visiting the cemeteries and the battlefields than there yet has been.

Gardeners will be conscientious, and then some less conscientious as the

years roll by and visitors become less. Most of the cemeteries in the

more obscure places will be half-forgotten and gone desolate. There must

come a time when no more visit the burial-places of the great war than

visit now the cemeteries of the Crimea. In 1914 the great cemetery

above Sevastopol, kept by a German gardener, had become from a national

point of view utterly unvisited and forgotten. A roll used to be kept

there of the visitors who came in their hundreds after the Crimean war

was over, dwindling to a score a year and then to less than ten, and

then to twos and threes and ones. The living who survived the Crimea do

not need to go to Russia now, for they have joined the dead long since.

So it will be with us; we shall join the authentic dead, and the young

ones will have forgotten whilst chattering of some other war.

Meanwhile look reverently at the graves of the men of the 32nd A.I.F.,

with little rising suns adorning the centre-posts of their crosses! See

where lies Capt. Claude with his high memorial, or Private Harry who

carried out an equal sacrifice with him.

Rusty old cans on ten-foot poles mark the limits of the burial-ground,

and a notice says "Cemetery closed" as one might read outside a theatre

at night--"Pit full" "Gallery full" "Stalls full." On the hillside

above, sounds the laughter of men and the clatter of spades where a new

acre of God is being dug, the foundations of a new theatre being laid.

Here French Negroes, Flemings, and French peasants are at work under the

guidance of British soldiers. Occasionally a car rushes up through the

dust and a couple of British officers come forward to see how things

are going on.

Passing on to Longueval you see the masts of Longueval Wood, but before

you come to it there stands now at the cross-roads a "café-restaurant,"

an unpainted wooden hut. Here with the sun streaming full on their faces

sit two Falstaffian wights with bottles labelled Malaga between them and

glasses full. On their dewy red chins and necks there are three or four

folds of flesh; red veins run down their necks like gutters at the side

of a house. They hold hands and sing and make everyone in the tavern

laugh--then swallow--swallow--swallow, the wine rolls down their

exuberant gullets.

Suddenly there is a note of warning in the restaurant, whisperings about

_l'officier_, to make it appear as if the men were drinking beer, the

woman comes and takes the wine-bottles and pours their contents into

metal tankards, sweeps the table clean of wine driblets, and reprimands

the topers.

They pull themselves together and take on a sobered gait. One of them

opens a sand-bag in his possession and brings out two enormous doorsteps

of bread and butter. Silence reigns. There is a suspense. Someone

evidently is expected. Will it be a dapper, constrained, politely

inquisitive British officer? Hardly! Ah, here he is! Enter fiery British

sergeant-major with bristling moustache and bright crown on his sleeve,

stout, smart, and red.

"Na then," says he, darting upon the Falstaffs, "play the game, play the

bloomin' game. Come on, travai in the cemetery. Officeer come, no bon

pour moy, bon pour vous, no bon pour moy. Com' on now or I'll jolly well

have to shift yer. The Belgiques and the Algerians know all about yer.

It's all over the place."

"Ca ne fait rien."

"Ca-ne-fait-rien pour vous but not pour moy. Officeer bocu faché avec

moy. You no catch it, I catch it, compris?"

One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.

"Yers I know," says the sergeant-major indignantly. "Moy zig-zag las'

night. But n-no zig-zag to-day."

They offer him their glasses--apparently of beer. He sips one and then

drains it, and then drains the other one too.

"Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others," he

continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall

back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a

heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out

like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the

nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.

"Na then," says he. "Quick March to the cemetery!" And they go.

How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the

living!

* * * * *

The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn

sunshine the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit

of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those

mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some shores when a

neap-tide leaves them bare.

Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it

will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. The _sinistrés_ of the

Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits,

levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their

little petrol-ploughs. The shell-splashed approaches to the line can

with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself

has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real worship bending

over _la France_ and he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred

times what he has already done--and he will do it. A hundredth part of

the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine

parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this

fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and

rise on full fleshy stalks, and they are thick like a wall. They grow

from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and

all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible

yet, though not so terrible if still impassable. You see gleaming above

the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross shining afar and make

it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some ship to a

white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th

Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a

conventional scribble on the moor--the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out

on to a limy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the

returned peasants making _sauter les abris_ with dynamite, and then the

eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from

the centre of a large tableland. It is the Butte of Warlencourt, for the

possession and retention of which what quantities of blood were shed,

the famous Butte which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs.

Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light

Infantry--to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf.

Regt. 159 who held the Butte against all comers in 1916 and recaptured

it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their

monument a concrete base. From the top of the Butte there is a complete

circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards

Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were

waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods,

wrecks of villages--a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the

great Somme scene.

[Illustration]

It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from

Albert runs smooth and level below the Butte, a track for

space-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness

of the massed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the

left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorials of

the German dead--Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and

the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they

are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short

of it--like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they

tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of

1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening

liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues

of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front;

rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A

fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late

autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to

superintend a burying party--some three hundred sodden green bundles to

be disposed of--three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the

verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of

Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find "the

everlasting arms." He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the

war-bred cynicism of those who believed in letting _others_ be heroic.

He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in

"putting his back into it," and doing even the meanest duty as if it

were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men.

He was so energetic in the football field playing officers versus

sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and

gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday

evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted

till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used

such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He

exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used

expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his

grave at C---- and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to

use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had

his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males, _entre eux_,

a "man's man." Poor hero--from that night of burying green bundles to

that morning when we buried him--he marched through the valley of the

shadow of death, tormented as Pilgrim was by hobgoblins and satyrs. But

when he died he shed his war body, he shed that lurid phraseology, and

became once more, no doubt, the Kingsley-Carlylean hero that he was,

with some sort of knowledge of human sorrow which those who lived in

peace knew not. So it must have been also with those who once breathed

within the sodden green bundles. They shook off something evil when they

died, but in passing through it they must somehow have understood more.

Sorrow dimmed the eyes even of the hardest swearer of the Army. And the

dead now constrain us to a new human tenderness, they empower us to

touch more delicately and to understand more deeply--to love more. Pity

for us if we do not now live differently because of the dead!

Thus as one walks through Bapaume and sees the children of new Bapaume

playing in their innocence in the streets and the ruins, one can look

down on them more tenderly, more caressingly, for the sake of the dead,

passing on, as it were, man's forgiveness to man. And in our

relationships with the grown-ups, our neighbours, ourselves dressed

differently, we can have more patience, more compassion, more readiness

to help and to be kind. It comes from the dead, it comes from the living

who were dead.

What that winter was before the Germans retreated! What the hours on the

Cross were before the Saviour died! In our loathing of pain we shudder

to think of it. Others bore it; we must bear it. And when the time is

passed Golgotha remains, that Golgotha which was in fact so near to the

gate of the Temple itself. In Bapaume, where all houses have been made

vaults, stand the white ruins of a church, greyish-white and spectral as

if of the material of another world. But for its pointing walls it is

one white ruin, loveliness in a heap and the baleful shadow of the hand

of the malefactor. In the ruins of the church of the leaning Virgin at

Albert the first words one reads are JESUS NATUS EST, as if the ruins

had been given tongue to say in the moment of death the supreme

Christian paradox, and at Bapaume as you reverently approach this

strange new _Pieta_ you see still unshattered the Church's Latin carved

on stone--AD MEUM SANCTUARIUM--to My sanctuary. If, like Thomas, you do

not believe, you must go forth and touch with your hands and feel with

your eyes--to My sanctuary!

Bapaume lies more abased even than Albert. It is as if its stones had

had a soul and been afraid, vibrant with the horror of humanity. The

consternation of inanimate matter is expressed in its ruins. The Hotel

de Ville, its seat of power, was evidently built of large granite blocks

which the rising German mine of March 1917 must have scattered like hail

over the town. And amidst these mighty stones flew the tender bodies and

the spirits of the French deputés, Albert Taillandier and Raoul Briquet,

who had just said in their hearts--_The enemy hath departed_, when the

enemy was suddenly at their doors.

The _sinistrés_ are living in cellars and wooden huts. The

railway-station is two "baby elephants" of rusty iron. Where were large

shops and as one can imagine, in the old days, shop-fronts full of

ladies' costumes and hats, windows displaying bedroom suites of

furniture, windows full of stationery and books, are now diminutive

piles of rubbish pathetically ticketed with the name of the old

establishment--Maison Betrancourt, Maison this, Maison that--_transferée

à un autre lieu_. In the Grande Place stands the much-shrapnelled base

of a monument where the stone hero has gone to join the hero he

commemorated, and the spite of a new era has even endeavoured to erase

his name.

Where thousands lived and loved and pushed their trade and died, now but

a few hundred hold together in the midst of the wilderness. They have

assembled from all points of the compass. War whirled some to Germany,

some to Paris, some to the Pyrenees. The hopeful came back and the

faithful decided to stay. It is a picture of human triumph over

destruction, but only a pathetic triumph, not a glorious one. In the

summer, with long days and warm nights it is less unnatural to live in

this waste. Warmth and light join the _sinistrés_ to all France and

Europe, but winter with its short days and cold and great darkness folds

away the vision of a resurrection. A poky train, without lights, creeps

at night from Achiet to Bapaume through villages of fearful name.

Bapaume becomes conscious of all the dreadful places which surround it,

places whose names are full of the awe of death and of the

war--Riencourt, Bullecourt, Ervillers, Mory, Vaulx-Vraucourt, and a

hundred others, nothing in themselves but held in the cerements of the

dead.

It is a strange walk now, to the Hindenburg line. You are traversing

ground which was four times overtrodden and overfought. The Germans took

it in 1914. We shelled it in 1916 and drove the enemy out in 1917. The

enemy swept over it in March 1918 and then let it go as he retired in

September. German, French, and British lie buried beside one another.

The Germans lost their dead and then recaptured them. It is an appalling

country, still as it were sulphurous with the war, stinking vaguely of

cordite. The dead have got a grip on it, and hold with their hands the

lap of earth which the peasants are ploughing. The air which is apt to

sparkle in autumn frost is full of the light of the eyes of the men who

once lived. And that light rests about the broken barns and billets and

churches and halls. There is an influence which is pulling one way all

the time, and that is not towards this world.

The graveyards are many, and they have their history. It always seems a

pity that it was not allowed during the war to make mention on the cross

how and where each soldier met his death. The military mind imagined

that such details might give information to the enemy or to the Press,

and forbade anything beyond name, number, and regiment. Texts also were

prohibited, the chaplains being over-ruled. Not that texts could

entirely be kept out. In one of the cemeteries near Bapaume there stands

for the time being a large wooden cross inscribed "He is not here; he

is risen," which has an astonishing effect amidst a thousand crosses

which are dumb.

There are many many rows of human bodies planted out near

Vaulx-Vraucourt, first a German cemetery with its old crosses torn to

bits, partly no doubt by shells; and then side by side a regular British

cemetery where lie many Australians, one of whom, Lieut. Pidgeon (aged

23) has a little figure of Christ riven from a crucifix stuck in the

earth beside his wooden cross. Here lie also many of the Leeds Rifles,

seven even in one grave, killed evidently in the terrible encounter with

the German machine-gunners in September '18. The German memorials go

more into decay each day, but a man is paid to keep the British bright

and clean and in repair, and his dog bites at the heels of the pilgrim

as he walks from the dead to the dead. Facing both are the gaunt white

ruins of the village church and the hideous smashage of the French

communal cemetery, and there the people have put artificial roses in old

rusty shell-cases in front of their stricken memorials.

Further on, beside the light railway which runs north to Ecoust, there

are tiny cemeteries. In one of these Germans and British are mingled,

thus--Gefreiter Luckenmeyer of the German Field artillery betwixt a man

of the Londons and a man of the Devons, and a German unknown and a

British Tommy lie in a little plot together by themselves. In some

cemeteries the bodies of our foes were buried just outside those of our

own kindred, but as exhumed bodies were brought in, ever increasingly,

it has come about that we have surrounded German graves with our own,

and as it were accidentally forgiven our enemies and received them into

the midst of the family.

Over the way at Vraucourt Copse, perched high in a sun-kissed wheatfield

lies Lieut. A. S. Robinson of the Royal Scots, with 22 private soldiers'

names inscribed on his cross. One wondered if it would be true to

say--"Here he lies where he longed to be" and did he love Stevenson and

often quote

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig my grave and let me lie.

These Royal Scots have the widest of all starry skies above them and the

unbarred gate of heaven in its midst.

A little further still and you have the Australian cemetery at Noreuil

at the corner of the road, rectilinear, handsome, clean and cared-for,

neatly fenced in with wire and having a little white gate by which to

enter. But outside the cemetery and as it were falling back in every

attitude of banishment and despair, the old faded wood and broken

crosses of the Germans, overgrown with weeds, crazy-roofed crosses,

aslant, tumbled. In 1916 the enemy began to bury here. In 1917 he left

his dead behind. In 1918 he recaptured them and repaired the

crosses--and added to them. In 1918 it was a decent graveyard; one could

read the names of all the dead. But their kindred went away and forgot.

Their crosses are the monuments of the forgotten and the vague memorial

of a useless sacrifice.

Doubtless the drama of the penultimate year 1917 did not centre in the

supra-Somme country. Its scenes of action were at Lens and Vimy, at

Pilkelm Ridge and Passchendaele. The year which ran on from the German

retirement was the strangest of the war, promising everything,

fulfilling nothing, beginning with Haig's victory interview and ending

with the failures in Flanders and the German break-through from Cambrai.

It was the year of American self-announcement, of the Russian

revolution, of the pros and contras of peace at Stockholm, of the

victory of the Bolsheviks, of the Italian debacle. Germany seemed to

grow stronger all the year, and the morale of the Allies waned. Men no

longer betted one another that it would be all over by Christmas. Lord

Grey's supposed prediction was forgotten. The whisper went abroad that

"it might last a lifetime," and then in mock cynicism, _They say the

first seven years will be the worst_. New units hitherto untried in the

war still made their appearance, whole battalions whose war-history

commences with the conflicts about Lens or the battles for

Passchendaele Ridge. The Derby drafts were reputed to come marching to

the strains of "The Church's One Foundation" singing their own

confession--

We are Lord Derby's Army

Just come across the sea.

We cannot march, we cannot shoot,

What bloomin' good are we?

And the old army said "Where have you been this long while?" The

conscripts however were to follow in even more desperate case, and when

they first reached France and their tender feet struck the cobbled

roadways they sang--not a hymn, but a new version of "Auld Lang Syne"--

We're here because we're here,

Because we're here, because we're here,

We're here because we're here,

Because we're here, because we're here.

"Take me back to dear old Blighty!" was the song of the whole army and

had completely displaced Tipperary.

No doubt owing to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line the

Allied plan of attack for the summer had been foiled. All the machinery

of assault had been arranged for a stubborn and dreadful prolongation of

the Somme battle between the horizons where winter had halted it. The

greatest concentration of guns which the war had seen had to be

liquidated. New gun-positions had to be dug and a new concentration

achieved. Telephone and telegraph had to be brought up to a new line.

Organisation work which would ordinarily have been accomplished in the

quiet winter months had to be done through the campaigning season of

Spring and Summer. Men looked less seriously on the war, though the war

was not less serious for them. Witness the sinister stare of the Lens

country which knew the 1917 army and has looked on terrible things. We

made Lens in 1917 into a narrow deep pocket full of Germans. The taking

of it was confidently anticipated. Fleet Street wanted it to serve on a

platter to Herod. But it could not be had though thousands died for it.

The enemy held it by miracle. It was impossible to hold such a position

but the impossible held.

Grey and terrible is Vimy Ridge with its line of block-houses and the

masts of Farbus Wood. Looking outward from Vimy o'er the vast Arras

war-scape the eye is sick and returns in vision to itself as the dove

returned to the Ark when it found no other mercy of the Lord above

misery's tide.

Praise God the enemy could not do to Arras what we did to Lens! Arras

still lives, surmounting the grandeur of her ruins. The Cathedral with

the top of its massive tower gnawn off by Fate is to be preserved for

ever as a memorial of these days. You can climb from the grass-grown

rubble below to mountains of lime and broken stone and reach a high

eminence against the pinky-grey fissured wall of the tower. It is

sunset, and you look down upon widespread recuperative Arras standing in

pink haze into which smoky air or fog is pouring. The houses are grey or

splotchy with their shrapnel marks still on them, but there are others

which are red and white, and these stand gaping with empty glassless

windows. You look on spangling new red roofs, you look on Noah's Arks,

you look on half-consumed unsupported walls, you look on shadows which

are pits where houses were. On the one hand is the lofty massiveness of

the Episcopal Palace--on the other the irrecoverable smash of poor men's

homes. From all this great city below, pious men and women used to come

to the Cathedral--but now no more shall they come.

You step down from the height, and cross the cobbled immensity of the

Cathedral Square. Every shop all the four sides has the same façade

above, the same porticos below, and from grimy and broken windows four

hundred ruined wizened houses stare. Then night has come. God has called

away the redness and left the murk. You turn and see the mountain of

God's house. There is no tint of rose in the grey walls now, no petty

detail of ruin, but one general effect. The Cathedral tower is a great

black mass. It is suffering made supreme and dominant, the shadow of a

mediæval Christ on the Cross. It is a romantic but dreadful pointer full

of terror and power. Men creep diminutively across the vast and shoppy

square, and the great feudal shadow above them makes them smaller yet.

All night the shadow reigns, becoming even mightier in the moonlight,

and crowning itself with starry diadem. But there come the mists of the

morning and then morn itself, and you may stand where now no longer Mass

is heard--on the East side of the Cathedral, and see the white light of

heaven streaming through gossamer and driving out pale silhouettes of

the shadows of all the bleared houses of the Square. There are pale

peaked shadows of all the façades which face the Cathedral. Over your

head sounds the rush of dove's wings. Men and women everywhere are

moving; men with their tools and women with their baskets. The life of

the city goes on, but the dream of the ruin has fallen back into the

night and limbo, and will not be recovered till the stars come again.

The city of Arras was the pilot city of the British in 1917. All

Flanders looked to her from the left, all France from the right. And in

'18 when the tide of Fortune changed she was our bulwark of defence and

was right in the fighting line like a Coeur de Lion with battle-axe at

Acre. Our mighty city of coal and steel in England has chosen specially

to identify itself with Arras--Newcastle-on-Tyne--and Arras has many

English sons. It is no doubt natural to say that Newcastle has adopted

Arras, as we might say of a converted man that he had taken Christ to

himself, but the deeper truth is that Arras has adopted Newcastle--"Ye

have not chosen me but I have chosen you."

The British victories at Arras and the French victories above Verdun

were of happy augury. But no victory is a victory unless followed by a

victory, and Time itself wilts laurels. Haig's dream of striking the

enemy hard and often, leaving no time to recover from a blow at one

point before calamity fell upon him at another, proved only a dream. The

German invention of mustard gas and the appearance of many hostile tanks

upon the scene were examples of the unforeseen. Very efficient tank-guns

and studied methods of attack upon tanks reduced the usefulness of our

new war-engine to comparatively low terms. In the late summer we

embarked on a new campaign in Flanders, and our best weapon was a still

boundless belief in our ability to "beat the Hun" whom, mentally, in

every possible way, the army under-rated. The Hun, so-called, suffered

nothing like so much as our fellows. He would not have stood so much.

And of all war-struggles, that which sank at last to rest in the

wilderness of Poelcapelle and Passchendaele in the November of the year

seemed the most hopeless.

Much of the main interest of humanity was transferred from the strife at

the front to other scenes of action. 1917 was an air and water year, a

submarine year, a Gotha year. London was terrified by day by wonderful

almost invisible planes which ravaged East-end schools and caused the

exodus from Whitechapel to Brighton. Daylight raids were followed by

starlight raids, and although the papers of the time laughed at such

affairs and said we liked them, there is no need to keep up that

deception now. London suffered in mind excruciatingly.

With the persistent bombing of London came a more systematic bombing of

the lines at night. It is more unpleasant, though really safer, to await

bombs in open fields than it is in London, but the soldier loathed the

bomb from air far more than he did the shell. The transverse movement of

the shell no doubt gives the mind more scope for judgment and calm than

does the missile falling vertically.

The Germans were so impressed by this fear of bombs that they

endeavoured to give shelter underground to each and every one of their

soldiers when threatened from above. There must have been a regular

routine like fire-drill when our bombing planes went over, and Fritz was

marched into his enormous subterranean shelters. British and French

troops had no such organised way of escape, and they had to find what

cover they could where they were. It was always surprising what a number

of miscellaneous casualties were caused by the night-bombers.

Expectation of the German planes' approach was intense, and men could

distinguish readily the sound of the engines of our own planes and those

of the enemy. There seemed to be something peculiarly sinister in the

sound of a "Jerry" and men were fond of imitating it in screeds of words

in the style of "Hush hush hush, here comes the bogey man!"

A characteristic imitation given sometimes at regimental concerts used

to run in this way:--

_I-see-ye, I-see-ye, I-see-ye,

I-see-ye.

I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming.

Biv-eee, biv-eee, biv-eee.

Sh, sh........sh.

HAH!

I'm off, I'm off, I'm off,

I'm off!_

And a current French marching-song of the time imitated the promiscuous

crump of bomb-explosions thus:--

_Il pleut, il pleut des bombes

(Et boum! et bon! badaboum et bon!)

Il s'ecriera Guillaume

Rentrons, rentrons--

Zon, zon._

But no rhyme in any language ever expressed that lurid splash on the

night-sky when a bomber was destroyed, that effusion of crimson which

caused men's eyes to dilate looking up at it, that sense of dreadfulness

and awe and satisfaction, that banishment of pity through fear's

reaction which steeped men's minds, as if on the floor of their souls an

answering red glow appeared. It was tragical to be bombed, but how much

more so to see the bomber die. They died most dreadful deaths, those

Zeppelin crews and aero-bus teams, and yet of course they merely died.

They met the common soldier's destiny---- Nevertheless you could not

lessen the sensation of watching an airman's death by reasonableness. In

the lurid spectacle in the heavens men saw not death but a

hieroglyphic--a sign.

Men did not liken them to Lucifer cast from heaven, but their fall was

like the rebel angels' fall--

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition.

Day-flying was different and affected the mind in an entirely different

way. Even the stricken night-bomber, when his charred remains were seen

by daylight, became in enemies' eyes nothing but honourable. The triumph

over him was forgotten in a sort of triumph in him. There was a

naturally chivalrous attitude towards dead airmen. That chivalry was

sometimes spoiled by human jackals--but the majority nevertheless

instinctively preserved it.

Many of the graves of our airmen were marked by crosses which are

adorned with carven wings, and in this speaks, not only a military but a

human pride. Foot-soldiers did not see in the aeroplane a mere

mechanical contrivance but a new human victory over matter. The feats of

airmen flattered pedestrian souls, who knew thereby that they could fly

if they would, flattered us all. Because men had to enter some section

of the fighting services thousands chose to fly and fight who otherwise

would not have been tempted off the firmer elements of land and sea.

They conquered the first nausea of fear, and learned to live with danger

as with a wife. They tumbled above us and we marvelled, not taking

anywise into account the war-sting which started them, bidding neither

sit nor stand but go. One is not sorry that the guns speak no more. One

is not sorry that the night-bombers and Zeppelins have ceased to menace

us. But the emptiness of the heavens by day has its sadness now in

France, its human wanness and melancholy. One realises that the war

brought out the flier--as it were before his time, and we must wait long

ere we see in peace the state of air society which he prefigured.

Down below the airmen trudged heavy-footed men. The airmen were

literally supermen; those below were a sort of undermen. In heavily

weighted boots, with backs bent and not straightened by war's routine,

with clumsily encumbered bodies, trudged under-humanity, through mud,

along gulleys, into holes and pits, down into subterranean chambers. The

underman enjoyed no human exaltation except occasionally at the prospect

of getting free; he had no mercurial lightness on his heels, no rapid

quicksilver of mounting imagination; instead, he was gripped downward

and held till he died or there was peace. It used to be a common saying

that from the moment you stepped off at Havre you were a slave. You

walked in the chains of the war. Men's hearts hardened. They told

themselves they wanted nothing and cared nothing. Their minds fell

victims to a dull passivity or false boisterousness. They banished the

bright ego and took up with a Cerberus, yowled the dog-language of the

army, and got selfishly irate over biscuits and slops and bully-beef.

They grew more and more dirty and came out in boils. Coarse hair grew

apace, brows grew lower, hands that had any cunning in them grew to mere

claws and clutches, eyes dullened, and the ear-gate stood ajar for the

sound of animal noises and animal confessions. The war was a Bacchanalia

for the animal in man.

It was in 1917 that Paris leave as a supplement to the usual home leave

was common. This was understood as for the soldier's health. It would

stop the boils and ease the system. Men could draw a handsome arrear of

pay on the strength of Paris leave, and once in Paris they went deeper

than in the dug-outs of the war. Or units were withdrawn to places where

the women thronged. Men were robbed by the war of their respect unto

their living selves. And 1917 saw the entry of puritan America into the

war, the nation of vice-hunting and prohibition, and the rest. But it

did not raise the morality of rank and file. The Yanks were shipped with

a thirst. The men brought up in sheltered Western communities proved to

have no more power than we had to resist the temptations of European

vice. The virus of the army seems to have been the same in United States

training grounds as in those of England. Material conditions imposed

some restraint, but imagination fed the starved side of men's souls with

lurid pictures of what obtained in France. Uncle Sam's common soldiers,

handsome and clean as they were, and brave, yet brought with them an

expectancy which caused them to take no moral lead but on the contrary

to plunge headlong into that war-mire which we had all been making. And

disease ravaged the American ranks. Some few thousands fell dead on the

field of battle and some tens of thousands were wounded, but disease

casualties filled the hospitals. It was fortunate for America's manhood

that the war was not protracted. Their war enthusiasm was pushing them

on. They did not realise that what they called "the shooting gallery"

was a myriad-fold death-trap. Death in many shapes was ready to raven on

America. As her men were inexperienced in war's alarms, so also were

they unfitted to face the moral ordeal. Humanitarianism, materialism,

and a superimposed morality do not produce men more capable of

withstanding temptation. Purity depends too often on keeping temptation

away. The Yanks brought their own brand of bad language with them--a

language beside which lurid English was but pale. Where they had learned

such verbal frightfulness seemed puzzling. But curiously enough it

caused the American soldier to be hail-fellow well-met. He brought no

airs of moral superiority or prudishness. It became a pastime in the

British army to imitate admiringly the American type of swearing. It is

all beyond the power of the pen. But those who heard it know. If the

Yanks had kept to this extreme they would have remained enduringly

popular--but they vaunted their prowess and exaggerated their feats and

ignored the reality of the hell through which others had been, and they

started the talk of their winning the war, and so lost ground. The

Americans in France were on the whole perplexing to the average

European. Their exaggerated thirst for war's relaxations on the one

hand tended to make them one with the other armies in the field, but

their idea of superiority kept them separate.

At Calais now the boxes are stacked on the quays with the embalmed

American dead. At great cost of time and labour the dead soldiers are

being removed from the places where they fell and packed in crates for

transport to America. In this way America's sacrifice is lessened. For

while in America this is considered to be America's own concern, it is

certain that it is deplored in Europe. The taking away of the American

dead has given the impression of a slur on the honour of lying in

France. America removes her dead because of a sweet sentiment towards

her own. She takes them from a more honourable resting-place to a less

honourable one. It is said to be due in part to the commercial

enterprise of the American undertakers, but it is more due to the

sentiment of mothers and wives and provincial pastors in America. That

the transference of the dead across the Atlantic is out of keeping with

European sentiment she ignores, or fails to understand. America feels

that she is morally superior to Europe. American soil is God's own

country and the rest is comparatively unhallowed. To be one in death

with Frenchmen, Italians, Negroes, Chinamen, Portuguese, does not suit

her frame of mind. Of course, lack of imagination, lack of knowledge of

the war and of the great mix-up of the dead is natural enough at a

distance of three thousand miles--the vain thought that the identity of

dead bodies with human beings can be retained. As it is, the inscription

on every hundredth cross in France is probably a misnomer. There never

was time for meticulous care, and the dead were not always buried by

full daylight or identified by other than the slightest of clues. Is it

remarkable if someone receives instead of soldier son the body of a

coolie from China, or if a citizen should receive what portends to be

his own corpse? By risking such accidents the majesty of the dead is

offended. If love desired its dead again, love should come and lift its

dead with its own hands and carry it home.

Politically understood, there should be no property in the dead bodies

of this great war. There is only one totality of death and suffering.

The dead of the war are a blend. One high stone might stand at the head

of each cemetery, and on it all the names be inscribed. The little

crosses with name and numbers on each are but desperate human reminders

of individuality. But for a dreadful peace, worse than the war, America

would have been convinced, as was her war-commander Pershing, that it

was nobler to leave her sacrifices on the altar with the others.

Had America's ideal won all had been different, but only the side she

joined won and not the ideal. France and England broke the spirit of

America's great President and ruined him as the Kaiser was ruined,

relegated him to another Amerongen, drove him to his Ekaterinburg too,

the third great monarch and leader of men to lose his crown in the war.

The American masses were left leaderless, bereft of their ideal. In

contempt for a vain France and distrust of a lip-serving inimical

England they plunged for "_America first and always and one hundred per

cent_." But had Wilson carried his great program there had been no

estrangement, no exhuming of the American dead. America would have

gloried in her European shrines. Therefore in looking upon the collapsed

heaps of coffins in the harbour and the dead glowering through riven

wood, one is really looking upon an aspect of the Treaty of Versailles.

In the second year after the war you see terrible things. Who could have

foreseen thousands of dead stacked in the holds of Atlantic vessels,

making their unmurmurous return across the ocean!

It is night again in human history, deep night, when we dream things of

evil and look upon sights of horror which we have no power to dispel. In

the gathering gloom of the autumn of 1920 see a whole succession of

phantoms stalking. Ireland goes wailing and clanking her chains.

Exultant France struts and threatens. Ghosts of Tsar and Tsarina are

crying pitifully from Siberian dust. Red demons, mirthless and terrible,

stare at us from Russia. Italia stabs nightly fair Fiume. And all the

while maledictory shouts and cries are heard on all hands.

Spectres and ghosts and things of evil stalk around and terrify us, and

there is only one way to lay them low, and that is by the token of the

Cross--by the token of the crosses, the hundreds of thousands of them

that run out like rows of pins in France. It is only coming from France

that the right approach can be made to new life. Let each new man faring

forth into this beset enchanted world dip his soul in the blood of the

Altar of France--or if not his very soul, let him at least dip a

kerchief or a flag there--for remembrance. With that charm he can

uncurse curses and disenchant enchantment and break through the chimeras

and fogs which cling to the base of the mountain of the world, and he

will reach the singing-bird and the water of life at the top of the

mountain, and then restore, as in the Arabian tale, the dead to life.

Doubtless every man who was in the Army and took a chance of death and

yet escaped, must have reflected on his good fortune, the strange light

of Providence which fell upon his destiny and spared him whilst on all

hands his friends and neighbours and fellow-countrymen had fallen. As

the soldier left the Army and became civilian again he inevitably

thought to himself--"Whereas I might have been dead I am alive; whereas

I might be bond I am free." And some indeed could add "Whereas I might

have been a cripple, or blind, or lamed, or a neurasthenic or a

shell-shocked broken man I am sound and fit and have a whole life and

freedom to give to the new time which comes with the blessing of peace."

The Frenchman came back to a glorified and magnified France; to a proved

capacity to defeat and hold in check a deadly and historical enemy. The

Englishman came back to a free England, to a nation who was queen of the

nations, to a larger and more untrammelled world-empire; the Belgian to

a justified and safeguarded Belgium; the American to an America which

had achieved for the first time in history a complete sense of

nationhood and unity. The Serbian returned to a resurrected Serbia and a

prospective future of Southern Slav greatness. Of the Italian, who

joined in the war as a bargain with the others and did not fight

primarily for our ideals, we will say nothing. But how near we all were

to being beaten, and to realising the very opposite of the present happy

potentialities. But a turn in the wheel or a hair in the scale, and the

French would have been slaves, the Englishman beaten on land if not on

sea would have returned cowering to his little island, empire falling

from his grasp and almost the whole bill of the war to defray by the

efforts of his restive working-class population; the Belgian a German

subject; the American flouted and anxious with the shadow of a terrible

new war to fight all by himself in the years to come; the Serbian a peon

of Bulgaria or shackled in the heavy rusty Austrian irons. When we are

in despair in 1920, 1921, 1922 we should all say to ourselves--"Whereas

we might have been slaves we are free; whereas we might have been dead

we are alive----" It is what the graveyards of France tell those who

look at them. The dead are all pointing mutely to themselves. Their

crosses are the direction-posts of new life.

Our enemy came nearer to overthrowing us by the result of the Russian

Revolution than by anything else. The defection of Russia, the

liberation of the German and Austrian Eastern armies, nearly took

victory away from us, and we have God and our cause to thank for

salvation. In the late summer and autumn of 1917 the tide of victory

turned and began to roll the other way. At the battle for Passchendaele

commenced the last year of the war. In that year we experienced every

emotion of victory and defeat. The year opened inauspiciously at

Passchendaele where so many fell trying to traverse an infernal area of

wire and pits and mud, facing the reinforced machine-gunners, facing the

new gas, facing the fire of a vastly increased artillery. Many a cheery

boy with muddy uniform and bright morning face stood up for the last

time at Passchendaele, and unexpectedly--died for England. You may seek

their bodies in the Flemish earth to-day. Perhaps one of them is the

unknown soldier in the Abbey. But their spirits are far away from here.

They are watchful and radiant and celestial now--not so lovable perhaps

in their immortality, for how can mortals feel for the immortals, but

enormously more lovable in our mortal conception of them than ever they

were when alive--the dead of the last year of the war.

Passchendaele was followed by the sudden triumph of the Austrian armies

in the Italian Alps, and the surrender of a hundred thousand Italians

and a thousand guns. Revolutionary propaganda was said to have been

ravaging the Italian soldier's mind. Others said the Italians sold the

day to the enemy. But the prime cause of Austrian victory was to be

sought in the great accession of strength due to the Russian lapse from

war. No more offensives of Brusilof; no Grand Duke Nicholas any more to

terrify Vienna; not even a Kornilof! Austria naturally rounded upon her

Southern foe with double might. Vienna bells rang forth and Berlin

floated in military joy. Wilhelmstrasse, the street of the Kaiser,

reflected deeply and sucked in the significance of the new victory.

After a desperate summer of peace-seeking suddenly a last hope of

triumph dawned like a fiery star late in the night and nigh unto

morning. The thought of coming with a white flag to the Council of

Europe was banished. Instead the stern decree of war to the uttermost

bound the German mind to the old choice of "complete victory or

downfall." Despite our opinion of the enemy conveyed in sneers at

concrete dug-outs and funk-holes and the "Kamerad" cry, the Germans

decided to come all out and win or lose on a gambler's throw. It was

perhaps more calculated and more calculable than the cast of the dice,

but if the Allies won, Germany had no second chance and would know that

she had lost.

Teutonic preparations went ahead. The Allies took little stock of these

preparations, not believing that the enemy had much kick left in him.

Instead of organising our defence we planned a new attack upon the

Germans, and to the astonishment and chagrin of the latter the Byng Boys

carried off the laurels of the Battle of Cambrai. Fritz was taken by

surprise in late November, and we nearly went all the way to Cambrai.

Fleet Street wished to have joy-bells rung in London, but the Church

wisely bade us wait, while wrathful Germany averred that we had gone

into a trap in which we should presently be terribly caught. Then in the

break-through of Gouzeaucourt we learned the lesson that a new and more

dangerous enemy was in front of us.

As you walk now along the Byng Boys way on a November afternoon and the

sun goes down in greyness and gloom you can feel the mystery of the

battle as if it had occurred hundreds of years ago. Reality has become

remote, remote as the last songs and shouts of the men who went through.

Sadness has covered the earth. It is all incredibly empty and desolate.

On a post on the road you discern through the evening mist ICI BOURSIES

and then after much plodding you pass the grey empty Canal du Nord with

its crumpled rusty bridges, and skirt the naked bones of Bourlon Wood.

Then by the side of the road all the dead of Anneux are lined up to see

you pass. You go on, but _they_ remain. It seems as if when you have

passed some spectral sergeant must say to all those pallid ranks "Fall

out!" and the order is broken up, and the dead mingle and commingle till

another comes past upon the broad highway. Night settles like a curtain

shutting off Cambrai from the view, and no light on any hand tells of a

return to home or of happiness restored. Suddenly the silence is broken

by three blundering lorries--old lorries of the war tearing past you

back on the road to Bapaume--ghostly lorries laden with doors, doors

only, to be dumped at some wilderness somewhere which was once a town.

They pass, and the night-silence resumes its sway, and there are no

stars but it is utter peace. Again a spectral post--ICI FONTAINE, ICI

FONTAINE NOTRE DAME, and you have reached the end of the fight, and the

bridge where life met death and both stood at last immobile, unyielding.

A happier-looking place is the wood of Havrincourt where a Brigade of

Guards was sleeping, waiting and resting after the ordeal of Bourlon and

Fontaine. They had been relieved on the 26th November and marched back

in snow to this wood where in the umbrage of the forest and on the

carpet of withered leaves and snow they set up many tents. And whiles

they rested the enemy put into action a bold plan of encirclement which

might have caused the complete loss of Sir Julian Byng's army and guns

and of everything else in the pocket of Cambrai. One of the most

remarkable moments of the whole war occurred. Of many impressions of

what took place the story which one of the Guards' quartermasters tells

is most pictorial. He had set off early in the morning of the 30th

November for Villers au Flos to get money to pay his men. They had just

come out of action. He rode through Metz and Bertingcourt, where the

other Brigades were billeted, and no one was stirring. There was no hint

of coming trouble when he passed through Ruyaulcourt, where lay the

Divisional Headquarters Staff. On all roads were the usual road-carts,

plodding along in humdrum style. But by the time he reached Villers au

Flos, however, an alarm of some kind had evidently come, for the cashier

was busy packing up his cash and his papers, and flatly refused to pay

out any money whatever. Though not wishing to confess fright, he was

evidently extremely perturbed.

"But I must have money for the men," cried the visiting officer. "The

coffee-bars and canteens will soon be arriving up there and opening; the

men are tired after the fighting. They have won a great victory and must

have some relaxation now, so you'll have to give me some money."

"It isn't a victory, it's a retreat," said the cashier. "They say the

Germans have broken through."

"Rot," said the Guardsman. "I have just come from the line and all is

quiet. You get wind up easily, you folk."

He gained his point, and was happy to turn about his horse with a full

16,000 francs to pay out. On his return, however, the German

break-through became apparent and he realised that the cashier had been

right. He sampled all the adventures of the situation. First he saw

soldiers without rifle or equipment running intently, and he, not

suspecting the significance of their flight, thought there was a

paper-chase on, arranged by some regiment that was resting in the

neighbourhood. But at Bertingcourt, to his great astonishment, he met a

battalion of Guards in fighting order marching to action in the opposite

direction from that in which he understood the enemy to be. It was

incredible that it could have happened, but he realised that the enemy

had somehow shifted his ground. This regiment had been fighting at

Bourlon and Fontaine in the north--and now they were marching south to

fight again. South and not north--what could have happened! He "passed

the time of day" to the commander and learned that the worst was true,

the enemy had broken through at Gouzeaucourt. The further he rode along

the way to Havrincourt Wood the stranger became the sights which

confronted his eyes. The roads, which had now been cleared by order,

began to have troops going up to stem the German advance, and every now

and then a car plunging the other way. Out of Bertingcourt he met the

2nd Brigade Machine-Gun transport, saddled up and under orders. The

water in the jackets of the machine-guns was frozen and they wondered

how they'd thaw them. There were still many fugitives on the road, and

at cross-roads he overheard two of them who were contradicting one

another in the most violent language as to which was the way. He could

tell that their nerves had got the better of them by their high falsetto

tones. They were as unlike characteristic British soldiers as it is

possible to imagine. At Metz-en-Couture there was a complete jam of

traffic, which lasted all the way along the high-road towards

Gouzeaucourt. The retiring masses were greatly in excess of those going

up. They were mostly the transport of those who belonged to the

rear--railway-men, A.S.C., ambulance, canteen, Y.M.C.A. and what-not. A

pained expression was on the chauffeurs' faces, every one of whom

seemed to desire to say what a terrific speed he would make if he could

only get clear of the deadlock. He saw the ranks of the Guards broken

and made uneven by the struggle to get through. Outside Metz was a

Colonel of Grenadiers on horseback, enraged past belief at the

obstruction of his Guardsmen, and addressing the chauffeurs and

wagon-men in every imaginable blend of language. His aspect so terrified

our officer with the cash that he decided to make a detour and get to

his quarters at Havrincourt Wood by a cross-country route. But the

Germans had a high-velocity gun on Metz and shelled it methodically, and

he had not taken many steps when an exploding shell wounded his horse in

the head. He did not want anything to happen to him with 16,000 francs

on his person, so he decided to brave the presence of the justifiably

enraged Grenadier and proceed along the roadway as best he could. This

he did, but when at last he got to Havrincourt Wood his battalion was

gone and he was not able to get abreast of his men and pay them till

they came out of action some days afterwards and the Germans had been

stopped.

The alarm had come about breakfast-time. Nothing was doing in camp; no

parades. Both officers and men were taking things easy in order to shake

off the Bourlon Wood exhaustion. Some were sleeping, some were shaving,

one Brigadier was in his bath, when the order came for the Guards to

stand-to and be in readiness, as the position east of Gouzeaucourt was

considered "obscure."

The Headquarters of the 1st Brigade was at Metz, and a great deal was

due, no doubt, to the Brigadier who discovered that the Germans had

broken through and promptly decided to push on and occupy the high

ground east of Gouzeaucourt. The General of the 1st Brigade of Guards

was a fine figure of a soldier, with bold eyes, massive shoulders and

brows, and finely-curved smiling lips. Mounted on his white horse at the

cross-roads of Metz he was in charge of the situation. It was he who saw

the first fugitives come in, green, trembling, speechless with panic,

and as others followed breathless the same way, he deflected their

course into a great courtyard, lately the courtyard of the Army Corps

Headquarters. With that the Brigadier rode out along the Gouzeaucourt

road, and presently beyond Gouzeaucourt Wood he came into contact with

German patrols, and he rode back to Metz and called out the Guards.

Meanwhile the extraordinary stampede continued--Labour men, gunners with

breech-blocks in their hands, riflemen with or without rifles and

equipment, transport, some men half-dressed. And those who could speak

called out to those whom they met that the Germans were coming. There

were officers as well as men, and even chaplains, in the throng, and a

German aeroplane hovered overhead and followed with machine-gun fire,

methodically stirring up the panic to a higher and higher pitch. The

Guards debouched from Metz in close column and deployed in artillery

formation under cover of Gouzeaucourt Wood. As they hurried up the road

they passed the fugitive streams going the other way. The look on the

Guards' faces as they encountered the others was one of astonishment and

bewilderment. It would have been difficult to agree that the two streams

of troops belonged to the same nation. Two different conditions of

soldiery. With one there was discipline, with the others discipline had

gone.

The road from Gouzeaucourt to Metz is a sort of gully, a deep-dug way

between high banks, and along the sides one still sees shards of old

rifles, rusty helmets, bits of equipment, and mess-tins. The peasants in

farming the ditches have unearthed not a few Mills' bombs which now

repose in piles by the side of the road. Here also reposes a dug-up

Lewis gun and various parts and bits of war's attire thrown away

possibly in the stampede, perhaps however, despite an inevitable

association of ideas, belonging to another moment of the war. For

although the Guards re-established the line once more it broke again in

the succeeding March, when once more the Germans pursued their foes

through the jetsam-covered streets of Gouzeaucourt.

Gouzeaucourt was evidently greatly smitten by the war. It is a very

extensive village raked by the devil from end to end. It swarms now on

housetop and in yard with builders and joiners. A widespread clatter

ascends from every road so that the very sparrows cannot hear themselves

chirp. Hundreds of white barrack-like shelters have sprung into being.

But as if the villagers had not had time for small amenities, every

street and alley is strewn with brickbats. The scenery of the war still

holds, and November 30th could be played over again without loss of

reality from the scene.

The road out to Metz is quiet enough now with carts of turnips jolting

along where three Novembers ago the lorries were fleeing. On the top of

the bank stretches the view of a war moorland becoming once more

grain-productive. To the north lies a pleasant boscage, the verdure of

Havrincourt. Along the south goes the straight line and the tree-stumps

which mark the Cambrai-Peronne road.

Metz-en-Couture looks like a great rubbish-heap from which masses of

decaying brickwork are projecting. It is much less alive than

Gouzeaucourt. Its returned French peasants are however at work. Like all

desolated places which are off the railway it has to depend on motor

transport for the materials of reconstruction, and it is

characteristically behindhand compared with towns on the railway. And

Gouzeaucourt is well served by a railway from Cambrai.

At Metz-en-Couture is a roadside cemetery. How good that most of the

cemeteries are actually close to the highways, and even automobilists

speeding past will see them, though it be only a blur on the

consciousness. All the crosses will fade into one another as a car

passes them. Here at Metz the Chinese and the Germans are put together

as outcasts from the pens of decency if not from God's grace. But it

will be all one to the man who passes by and does not pause to see. The

pilgrim however will find the graves of the stalwart Guardsmen, and

remember that they met their end saving the day and marching the right

way when the foe had broken through. The whole winter of 1917-18 might

have been very terrible had the Germans gained a great victory here, and

bad as it was the rout of March 1918 might have been complete. As you

walk back from Metz to Gouzeaucourt you figure again the way the enemy

was stopped and his grand potential victory robbed of its crown. In

Gouzeaucourt the Guards took back a hundred and fifty guns. Beyond

Gouzeaucourt Wood they cleared out the machine-gunners. Next day at dawn

the Grenadiers made good the line and together with the Indian cavalry

closed the gap and dug in. The Indians were most happy in their

association with the Guards in victory, and averred that henceforth

December First would always be known as Grenadiers' Day.

Back at Metz the low-flying German airman who with his machine-gun had

been whipping up the panic of the men who had fled was shot down. He was

a young officer of the fearless angry type, terribly mortified at being

taken prisoner. He was put in a cage by himself till one of our runaways

came into the courtyard and began to strike a Charlie Chaplin pose, and

the officer in charge lost his patience and thrust him in with the

German. The German was striding up and down like a lion or tiger, and

the sudden depression of the erstwhile Charlie Chaplin gave to the

latter the gait of an Androcles thrown to a wild beast to be destroyed.

Later in the day German prisoners began to flow along the road from

Gouzeaucourt to Metz in considerable numbers. What was the astonishment

of the "Jerries" to find when they were put into the barbed-wire

enclosures that their neighbours, also enclosed, were British and not

German, and to see the mixed crowd of Old Bills, Labour-men,

artillerymen, infantry, engineers, and even padres and officers mixed

with men. Presently however these were marched out of the cages and

lined up in miscellaneous squads derived from varying units with no

distinction of rank. Rifles were put into their hands and an attempt was

made to use them as a reserve defence in the trenches outside Metz. This

however proved impossible. The disease of panic had gripped their minds,

and at the idea of being sent to fight once more many threw their rifles

down.

Up in the lines there were many comical scenes and disputes. The men

made themselves at home in the abandoned dug-outs which they found, and

where the dinner had been left cooking they finished it and ate it.

Drummers and pipers found superb quarters, and such original owners as

turned up were much annoyed. Disputes were settled by neutral soldiers

as a rule and went in favour of those who had not lost guns or abandoned

their posts.

Where the railway intersects the Gouzeaucourt-Cambrai road was a

wonderful supply train, better than any golden wreck in desert-island

story. This was stacked with every imaginable kind of food. The Germans

had been through it, but had devoted their attention almost exclusively

to the letters and the despatch-bags. They had taken away a few tit-bits

but what was left sufficed the Guards for days. The transport was warned

not to send up their rations for three days but to send up limbers

instead to cart the food. At the disposal of the victors were also a

number of abandoned motor-cars. There is a lively impression of a

Sergeant-major going to and fro in a Ford car to this wonderful train.

Authorities asked afterwards who had pillaged the train--the culprits

ought to be brought to justice. But those in charge of that section of

the line felt that the action was possibly excusable under the

circumstances. Had they condemned it they had condemned themselves. The

following lines by an unknown author appeared some months after the

incident at Gouzeaucourt and men in the ranks copied it into their

notebooks and diaries.

The Guards' Division were out to rest

They wanted it;

They'd "popped it"--"as on parade."

(What a jest!)

Then they'd held the line and had done their best

And were out.

Twenty-four hours had scarcely passed;

They were resting.

When an orderly--bearing a message fast--

"The Germans have broken through at last,

You're wanted."

And wanted they were--without a doubt--

At Gouzeaucourt.

The Huns had turned a lot of us out--

(A lot of us, mind you--supposed to be stout)

"Help wanted!"

Weary and footsore and stiff with cold--

Weren't shirking,

The Guards' Division, demeanour bold,

With drummers playing (so I'm told)

Went at 'em.

Said an A.P.M. as they marched along--

"Stand back there!"

Get out of the way, you funking throng,

They'll put to rights what you've done wrong,

THE GUARDS DIVISION.

(And they did.)

After Gouzeaucourt it was slowly borne in upon the military mind that

the "initiative," as it is called, had passed to the enemy, and that the

role of attack would not be ours for a while. There was a great

disparity between the forward mind and the rear mind. The forward mind

registering all the buffets and "sticking it" was getting very sick of

the war. The rear mind, making plenty of profit, playing men across the

map like chess pieces, preserved all its zest. The rear mind had great

patience and little imagination. It dreamed of a year, be it 1919 or

1920 or 1921, when America would be affording her maximum strength.

America had to be played into the war. She had started late, and it

would take years to commit her fully and make her spend according to her

means. The Tommy and the poilu would hold on till then. The Hun, as the

red hats loved to call the foe, would also play the game. 1918 was never

intended as the final year of the war--as far as the rear mind was

concerned, even though the men of fifty be called up and drilled with

youths of eighteen. Fortunately for us all, the Germans had decided to

win or lose and put all things to the test that year. Theirs had been

the supreme crime of starting the war, but let us acknowledge that they

at least had the grace at last to "hands up" when they saw their game

was lost and did not keep us at it for five years more. Germany at least

saved us at last from what may be called the blood lust of the rear.

March 21st came with its never-to-be-forgotten bid for all or nothing,

with the Kaiser in command and all Germany on the march. The largest

numbers of men involved and the broadest front of action in the war.

"_Nach Paris_" was the cry--"Paris, Paris," the exultant yell of the

Goth bearing down upon the new Rome.

On the 19th and 20th there were suspicions that something new was in

preparation on the German side. "From Headquarters to Headquarters," as

one officer puts it, "throbbed the order to man the battle-stations."

The night of the 20th was of intense darkness, and the watchful sentries

at their posts stared into a deep and silent curtain of fog. The vague

light that comes before dawn revealed only the mist.

Then suddenly on a mighty breadth of line spoke the guns, came the swift

chasing shells through the sky, and the chorus of their sighs and their

cat-calls and yells and the hubbub of disruption in their explosion.

Trench mortars of all calibres and field-guns had been brought up to

closest range under cover of mist and darkness, and pounded into all

our trenches thick and warm with khaki and live flesh and blood, and

from behind the field-guns, but not far behind, in serried ranks spoke

the heavy guns, the Russian heavies, the Italian heavies, the grand

Austrian heavies, heaving death and destruction in the paths of retreat.

Accommodated with the heavies in fiendish fraternal task were the light

guns in vast numbers which flung the gas-bombs in tens of thousands to

the spots where of a certainty there must be congestion of traffic in

the British rear. It was ten minutes to five in the morning of the 21st

March--_der Tag_ had come, the hour of German fate had struck.

Our guns replied at once in mighty salvos from accustomed points on the

horizon, but also many hitherto silent guns and batteries spoke for the

first time. A steady and perhaps unimaginative confidence was expressed

by our artillery, but it was quickly realised that we were out-gunned

and out-manned. Our battery positions were soon drenched with mustard

gas. The enemy firing was remarkably accurate and scored direct hits on

many headquarters, billets, and ammunition dumps which had never been

assailed before. The roads all received a great deal of attention and at

many vital points deep craters threatened to hold up traffic for hours.

Daylight streamed through the mist. The guardians of the line with

strained nerves and brain stood on the alert expecting grey Fritz

momentarily to emerge from the mist with lowering brows and bayonet at

the port. Our machine-guns chattered at the unknown, and meanwhile the

enemy wire-cutters were at work clearing the way. It was not until

half-past nine that the anonymous artillery gave way to the deadly

personality of the foe. On the same lavish scale as that in which the

guns were firing, stick-bombs showered into the front lines, exploding

with their deafening and would-be-terrifying concussion of high

explosive. The enemy soldiers got rid of all the bombs they had right

away, and then very soon they were themselves to be seen. Tommy faced

forward. But Fritz, though he came steadily across no-man's land

offering an easy target, came also from the flanks and was soon to be

seen in the rear. British troops were massed here and there and posted

in clusters of defence, but the enemy with his vastly extended waves

broke through at the thin places and the empty places. The alarm went to

the flanks and the rear, but the runners found their various

headquarters and destinations full of the men in grey. Surrenders were

rapid on all hands. It was a puzzle what had happened. Brave units

fought it out against fearful odds. Some reserve battalions led by their

Colonels rushed in to counter-attack, and the Colonels fell and the

battalions fell. Other reserve battalions received orders to retire and

they retired. Others received no orders of any kind and remained where

they were and were overtaken. All day of the 21st and all night long our

lines were confusion worse confounded. On the 22nd there were Generals

in the fray encouraging the defence in person and trying to re-establish

lost contact right and left. But towards nightfall the last lines were

over-run and the enemy was through.

The British menace was lifted from St. Quentin and Cambrai, from La Fere

and Laon. The enemy plunged for Arras, Peronne and Ham, and for the

far-flung hope of Albert, Doullens, Amiens, Compiègne. They rolled our

legions back, they set Divisions marching, fleeing; they captured

front-line men in tens of thousands, captured second-line men in tens of

thousands, captured artillerymen, captured their guns, captured the Old

Bills and Charlie Chaplins a-mending the roads, captured Red-cross men,

captured Chinamen, captured the Y.M.C.A., captured an infinite array of

stores and shells. If they were doubtful of themselves at first, their

faith soon lit up, as how could it fail to light. The banner of a

victorious end of the war and a crown of all German privations and

sufferings was raised. "I heard nothing more dreadful in the war," said

an English captain, "than the yell of the German cheers as their first

men entered Ham and they knew they had broken the line and had us

running. _Paris_, _Paris_ was the watchword, and many a Teutonic

soldier mortally wounded in the moment of victory, sank joyfully to the

rest of death in the belief that the Vaterland and the Kaiser were

winning through at last."

And the embattled hosts swept onward toward Amiens, where at last the

onrush was stabilised. A greater victory had been won than the German

dreamed of when he planned. The offensive paused at last as it must, but

a staggering blow had been dealt at the forces of George the Fifth. The

King was down, and even if he were not counted out this time it was

doubtful if he could survive many such rounds if the German could repeat

such blows.

What a time that was for England! The war staff tried to keep the

consternation to themselves but it could hardly be done. The whole

nation trembled with anxiety and apprehension. In France, as we now

know, screened from public view, the leaders of France and England met

in a grave mood. There was Milner and Haig and Foch and Clemenceau.

Haig, with a terribly pallid and drawn face looked as if he had not

slept for three nights. Foch was nervous and excitable, and carried in

his hand a small wooden wand on the knob of which was carved a poilu's

head.

"I will do my best," said Haig pathetically, "to stop them before

Amiens," and it seemed he doubted whether it could be done.

"We can always stop the Boche," said Foch, "we must stop him where he

is, not at Amiens."

"But how?"

"Well, I could do it," said Foch. "Seal up the centre. The Boche has

broken through the British and the French armies. His forces are pushing

against the wings of folding-doors; each door gives a little, making a

gap between, and through the gap the enemy is pouring. Seal up the gap,

seal it up!"

There was only one way of sealing it up, and that was by uniting French

and British forces under one single commander. Lord Milner saw it. He

started up and pointed dramatically with his finger to Foch standing

there with his wooden wand, and he cried out:

"There is the man."

Haig, endowed by God and nature with a fine character, at once came

forward and agreed. No littleness stood in his way at that moment of

destiny. Foch was the man, let Foch take the supreme command. Foch took

it and poured French troops to our aid and stopped the tide and saved

the great city, the railway-key of Calais and of Paris.

The great German effort had resulted first in German victory, then in a

dramatic change in the leadership of the war. Doubtless the German took

little stock of Foch. It seemed of good augury to our foe that the enemy

should have been forced to make a change in command. Changes of the

kind are seldom good in the midst of a strenuous campaign. But the sway

of Foch nevertheless gave a new faith to the whole army of the Allies.

The famous S.O.S. was sent to Wilson: _We have our backs to the wall but

send your army quickly or we perish_. And Wilson speeded up the

transport of his army in a marvellous way. He also saved us.

Amiens, whose fate was in the balance for so many days, became baptised

as a shrine of the war as the enemy long-range guns sent to it fire and

death unintermittently.

What new fields and cities the enemy had opened for destruction! Had the

Germans stayed before the city, the Cathedral of St. Firmin might have

become as remarkable a ruin as the shrine of St. Vaast. St. Firmin is

the patron saint of Amiens and is supposed to hold the city in his

protection, and the pious of Amiens prayed to St. Firmin and to God in

March 1918 as never before. That their prayers availed whereas other

cities had fallen despite all prayer is not a fact on which to lay much

stress. But it was just six months to the festival of St. Firmin, and

ere that happy day came round the dreadful menacing demon had fled far

from their walls.

Two years later behold the procession of the relics of St. Firmin at

Amiens. The Church parades in praise and mediæval glory--cherubic boys

in crimson and white lace, young tonsured monks with health and life

throbbing from their close-cropped skulls, aged ecclesiastics with

Latinised faces, beautiful youths carrying emblems and banners, and then

supported on either hand by wise and reverend fathers comes the Bishop,

crowned with a gilded mitre crimson within and golden without, and

streaming with two golden streamers hanging behind. He bears his golden

crook, and before his arrested step and hand held up in blessing the

people sway like reeds when the wind which bloweth where it listeth

passes over them. From his uplifted hand and his arrested pose there

flung out mysterious power. You felt it; it was the blessing of the

Church imparted with all the consciousness of true succession even from

Peter and from Christ.

So they bear what is left of the memory and the dust of St. Firmin,

nodding as they go, looking like an ecclesiastical picture on a vast

canvas, and singing to their measured steps--_Salve, Salve_.

The second round of 1918 was fought on the Lys when the Germans 'twixt

Ypres on the north and Bethune in the south plunged towards Hazebrouck

and St. Omer. Bailleul and Merville fell, the eminence of Kemmel was

taken and Locre, and it seemed likely that the enemy would do with the

sanctuary of Ypres what he had done with that of Albert.

The smashed centre of Bethune and the wilderness of its Grande Place

testifies to the violence of the onset, and Hazebrouck still bears the

marks of a great trembling and nervous shock. Hazebrouck had its three

days of anguish when all its people fled, and the town, like a victim in

a dungeon, awaited the coming of the persecutor. The cross-roads at

Vieux Berquin are almost as sinister in the after-the-war light as they

were then, and in all the waste fields which ran with destiny and khaki

that April the rusty wire still lies in tangles. Rain streams on the

choked cemeteries once but sparse with graves, now full and overflowing

with the dead and their crosses. But you seek in vain for hundreds and

thousands of defenders, names of V.C.'s, names of the brave

undecorated--all lost now in the unknown, the plenitude of unknown

soldiers.

The German won his second round, though not too well, not shaping very

well. There were hammer-blows, but not the dreadful death-dealing weight

of the March fighting. French troops had been hurried to Belgium by

Foch, and once more they stopped the rot and possibly saved our now

rather nervy army. Certainly the enemy was now having matters his own

way. But Arras fortunately held, and that was our centre of defence. All

expected that the next attack would be upon the city, an attempt at

encirclement from the north and from the south. A wet spring wore on to

early summer and all the army waited.

The third attack was of an entirely unexpected kind, being an almost

overwhelming blow at France and France alone--an attempt to put her

entirely out of gear and make it impossible for Foch to send more troops

to help the British army, an attempt to destroy the spirit and the

mobility of the army of France. The enemy advanced on a front broader

even than that of March 21st, and found an even thinner, weaker line of

defenders. Once more Germany was able to do even more than she dreamed,

and plunged towards Paris, making the sky drone and tremble with the

ominous thunder of her approaching guns.

As we all know now the enemy went too far, and had not the men to man

his greatly extended lines or the labour to reorganise the new rear. He

had spent his energy too lavishly, and Foch had all that was necessary,

the one extra punch which sent the German reeling even in the moment

which should have held his greatest pride. The fourth round was won by

Foch and the Americans. The fifth by the British when they rolled the

foe back from Amiens. After that Fritz was a lost man and floundered

backward homeward, playing only for time, and only on his defensive,

with all the triumph gone, hope gone, faith gone, and only punishment

and humiliation ahead of him. In but a short while after the most

terrible defeats it could be said that the Allies had won the war.

The land o'er which the great advance was made is quiet enough now. To

the towns and cities of the back areas the circus is coming for the

first time since the war. After the leaping from trapeze to trapeze in

mid-air, after the walking the tight rope, and the facing wild beasts in

their cages, and other feats of daring, the clowns come tumbling into

the arena. So it is also in life. There is one all in Turkey-red riding

backward on an ass, telling all and sundry how much more clever he is

than the genuine heroes they have been clapping. He gains in the long

run more applause than the tight-rope dancer. Then two funny Columbines

with air-blown bladders pretend to fight and whack at one another with

resounding boshes, clumps and raps, laying one another out, panting for

breath, exhausting themselves, almost expiring, and yet weakly hitting

out with their quaint weapons. And the populace forgets the thrill of

the spectacle of the man in the lions' cage making wild beasts jump

through hoops of fire. The clowns are to its taste. The scene-shifters

are quietly preparing the arena for the next heroic item--"A Roman

spectacle when the gladiators meet"--and the clowns divert public

attention from the carpentering of such a show until all is ready for

the heroes to come out. A fourth clown all the while strikes heroic

attitudes and mimics the after-the-war celebrities with apt

buffoonery--now he is Wilson with the fourteen points, now he is

D'Annunzio in mock heroic pose saying "J'y suis, j'y reste," now Lloyd

George making the Germans pay by letting the Germans off paying. The

malice of the buffoons provokes great mirth and takes the attention of

the crowd so well that the heroes are almost forgotten, Tom Wildwest

glowering from one of the exits and handling his rope and running noose

as if he'd like to lasso the whole bunch of clowns and pull them out of

the arena and the public gaze.

In the summer of 1918 there was a waiting time. The enemy was held and

his utter defeat was manifest, but Time paused and the denouement

paused. The French and Americans carried on. The British reorganised.

The Germans began the knight's tour of the board with the right move

first. The British army was bored with the war and looked homeward.

Special wires conveyed the Derby result and the verdict of the

Pemberton-Billing case. Pemberton-Billing became a great hero of the

rank and file. The book of the 47,000 names of people who could be

blackmailed was a popular idea--such is the readiness to believe evil.

At a battalion Sports near Saulty the Duke of Connaught watched the

battalion clowns arrange a race for the tiniest tots of the French

village. One clown had printed on his back "Breezy Bacchus" and the

other "One of the 47,000," which was thought a most amusing and

up-to-date cognomen. "One of the 47,000" won the obstacle race by and

by. He had won the obstacle race each annual Sports of his battalion, an

unwounded Tipperary man who had come right through, not only the hazards

of so many races, but of the great race itself. Fate however claimed him

at last when the war was nearly over, and a lone cringing gas shell

sneaking through the air came and took his leg off. The French

villagers, whose children he had guided in the baby race, shrugged their

shoulders and had nothing to say.

The war-sun which was now setting did not sink in a grey haze or in mere

cloud, but in blood. To take the final victory-march of even one

Division, from Arras to Maubeuge--is it not marked by fresh graves all

the way? The old and the new laid down their lives prodigally.

There is an extra sorrow for their death now because the pathos of being

so near to deliverance and yet missing it was not known then. Though the

German was beaten the war might last for years. A common gag used to

be--

"Heard the news?"

"What's that? The war over?"

"All over bar the shouting."

But it was ironical, and there were few who saw the faint gleam of the

new hope which came with the German retreat.

The Army did not know when it began its advance that the familiar ruins

of old villages were being left behind for good, that Berles au Bois

with its growing graveyard and ruined church was placed finally behind,

Monchy, Blairville, Hamelincourt, St. Leger, Bullecourt, Ecoust, behind

for ever, that Albert, Maricourt, Bapaume, re-conquered Peronne, were

all permanently held and soon to be left far in obscurity in the rear.

It is strange to come back over this track again and see the site of

hideous and monstrous latrines now overgrown with rankest weeds, to see

the ruined barns all re-roofed, to see the dank acre into which, wrapped

in the flag, your comrades were lowered down, to see what was left of

the village church of Berles now brought flat because as it stood it was

a menace, to see the place where but for the grace of God you might

yourself be lying with a cross above your head, to see Monchy lifting

itself with great difficulty from its sunken blocks of stone, to listen

to the stillness and deadness of old lifeless ruins, to cross the

stubble fields to Adinfer and hear the petrol plough methodically

scouring the old lines, to approach once more the dreadfulness of

Ayette.

The villagers have come back to the craters of death. There is an

estaminet where was nothing before; there are salvage-made huts with

"baby-elephant" roofs built o'er spots where for days lay the dead in a

torture of wire. A family is in the estaminet, it was divided into five

parts by the war--five members of the family each in a different place

and none of them in touch with any other, each believing the other four

dead, two in different parts of Germany, one in Paris, one in Belgium,

one in the Pyrenees. They are poor people, touched by their suffering to

tenderness and generosity, and when there comes to them one who served

as a soldier in the war they spread their best before him and do not

want to take money for it--wonderful for France. But the people who have

suffered are the best people there as elsewhere.

At Ablainzville the new brick cabins grow into being amid the high

seared masts of her dead trees. At sunset the hard-working peasants are

still in the fields. They have heaped old iron and wire on to the roads,

and filled up the shell-holes and burned the weeds and broken the

intractable hard moorland with tractor-drawn ploughs. They have riven

the sturdy roots of the docks and the reeds, they have driven St. John's

wort and rocket and willow-herb from the grain-field, turning up the

tramped-down battered earth in huge slabs and chunks. The league of

death which goes over the brow of the hill, that old no-man's land which

the machine-guns swept is now a great black upturned drive of ploughing

in which alight thousands of crows, all extruding from the earth and

discussing what they find, talking and grabbing, fluttering and flying.

Sodden green equipment has been ploughed into the earth and still lies

half exposed, and helmets like little coal-buckets disturb here and

there the even surface of the land. It is heavy going, and your boots

want to lift tons of mother earth, but you struggle on with eyes

furtively engaged in "spotting" here a shell and there a bomb. Next year

the corn will cover up all our sins.

The peasants complain that the Government gives them nothing. The

Germans replaced some of the cattle they stole, but how about the French

who commandeered their horses at the beginning of the war and in

exchange gave them a merely nominal sum. In the stricken areas how few

are the horses now! The conservative peasant who does not like changing

his agricultural habits has been forced to the use of the petrol engine.

His chief motive force is the old lorry engine. But of course he does

more with that than he did with the horse, and when one has walked right

across the zone of desolation and come to the little-touched farms on

the other side one cannot but feel that the peasants working their

horses there are not getting on so quickly as the deprived ones with

their motors.

Many of the refugees when they came back started at an absolute zero.

Their plight would have driven a less stubborn people to despair, but

they set-to and worked, and can already show a dumbfounding progress.

Theirs is a hard life without luxury and with little food, but with the

capital of their toiling hands they are making wealth for themselves and

France once more. The people of the war-lands will recover quicker than

their Governments, and whilst with every year the plight of the national

exchequer gets worse the plight of the domestic exchequer will improve.

There are too many parasites feeding on the Governments, and the latter

have too many obligations in the matter of paying interest on loan. All

France is placarded with appeals to French people to take up

State-loans--the object of such loans being to get money to pay the

interest on past loans. French people cannot be persuaded to pay onerous

taxes. The Germans, without great commercial activity, cannot make the

French deficit good, and we see the State sliding slowly but steadily

downward like a loosened avalanche toward a precipice. But in the light

of the French peasants' steady unremitting toil one need have little

fear for the nation itself. It will get rid of this type of Government

and the mountains of debt when the time comes. Long after sunset, in the

after-murk of night, sound the droning of the petrol-ploughs on the old

battlefields, and the clatter of hammer and plane in the stricken

villages.--Vive la France!

* * * * *

It is twenty miles to Cambrai by the seemingly Druidical remains of

Lagnicourt and the life-clusters of Queant, Pronville, Moeuvres,

Fontaine. Cambrai is resurgent. No one is in mourning except those

widows whom black suits. The merry-go-rounds and the razzle-dazzle with

all manner of toy-booths and gipsy-shows occupy the market-place on

which grandiose buildings with broken windows stare. In the town gardens

is a statue without a head, and on its base is engraved--"_Son invention

fut un bienfait pour son pays_."

He probably made some improvement in the manufacture of silk, but an

ironical British soldier has written in English beneath--_He invented

the gun stock_.

On the way out from Cambrai the towns of Boussieres and St. Hilaire look

as if no war had been, and the trains are all running on the road to

Solesmes. Where men stalked their foes along the railway embankment,

where men won military medals and D.C.M.s and one the V.C. all is

perfect prose. Where so many died and risked their lives a

life-insurance office has reopened. All slumbers on the road to Le

Quesnoy and Bavai. You have passed through the war area and come to the

unscarred green of innocent fields and the undesolated symmetry of

unscathed woods. Peasants lead the horses in the plough, and cows in

plenty graze in sun-steeped pastures.

It is November 10th and the same strong highway on which two years ago

the army marched to the end of the war. At the end of a fair fine

afternoon the sun is sinking slowly but must be in eclipse ere it set.

Peasants are sitting on heaps of stones at La Longueville looking

westward. In the smoky capitals of Europe nothing will be seen, but

something is due to happen if the sky keeps clear and will be visible at

the last outposts of the war.

From the grandeur of the setting sun pale shadows are cast of posts and

cows and houses and railings and heaps of stones. Unexpectedly they

faint away as something steals upon the splendour of the radiant disc

and stops the brightness of the rays. Myriads of wisps of cloud, like

tiny hands, assist at the eclipse, laying the sun to rest in a dreadful

bloody bath, agonising and bleeding and growing less and going down,

with evil triumphing over good. Out, brief candle! Yes, it is out--it is

night. The last day of the war is done--tomorrow Armistice. The reaper

has put up his scythe--the angel of death has gone by. A bitter wind

passes swiftly along the high-road, just touching you, just making you

aware that something invisible and unkind has passed you, having a going

and a coming which is not yours.

So in a mood which has changed you walk the last miles of the war--to

the fortress of Maubeuge. Here is gloomy smoky Douzies, and there, yes

at that very spot, is the place where the Brigade messenger was accosted

and you read his message--_Hostilities will cease as from eleven

o'clock_. Yonder the factory sheds where you heard the first lecture on

demobilisation, where you sang "Take me back to dear old Blighty!" with

such a will, and a free issue of rum punch was made to all. There the

erstwhile deserted steel works which men said would be years before they

worked again. The great stacks smoke, belying the prophecy, and on the

night wind comes the clangour of tireless machinery working for France,

working for Peace. On the railway all the twisted rails are gone, the

lines gleam with the brightness of train-wheels and go straight to

Maubeuge. Upon the roadway lie the disjecta membra of an armoured train

marked Lot 1 and Lot 2 and likely to remain till time itself remove

them.

You descend into the trough where the moat goes round the fortress, and

by a wooden bridge enter Maubeuge, the city of the end of the war, one

of the cities where the war ended. At Maubeuge then let us be silent

with those who are silent whilst at Westminster the Unknown is buried

and the Cenotaph unveiled and at Paris the Arc de Triomphe receives its

guest.

November the eleventh in the morning--there is Mass in the Cathedral for

the _poilu inconnu_, the anonymous soldier of France, and about an empty

coffin swathed with the tricolour are ten high candles. The sacrifice is

sanctified with holy water and incense. The divine elements are raised

from the Altar. The throngs of the pious all cross themselves. Comes the

alarm crash of the Sanctus thrice repeated, the mumbo-jumbo of

fast-gabbled Latin, the exultant organ. You stand wedged in by a pillar,

the only Englishman there now, and as your eye ranges o'er the scene it

reads on the Cathedral wall the inscription which is nearest. _N'oublie

pas pecheur endurci que c'est pour la troisième fois que Jesus est

tombé!_ "Forget not, hardened sinner, that it is now for the third time

that Jesus has fallen," suggestive and unforgettable monition given in

the half-light of the Cathedral.

A Te Deum which does not rend the sky nor the Cathedral roof passes

sweetly o'er our heads, and the congregation with its wreaths and flags

files out to march with bands to the cemeteries of Maubeuge. It is still

not eleven by the clock. But it will be eleven in the Place des Casernes

where the Guards were drawn up on parade that November morning. The

barrack square then!

Behold it dirty and drab. A squad in sabots is being detailed by a

corporal for fatigue duty. They answer their names, their old tunics are

all undone, they shuffle across the square. But it is eleven. Silence

then. Let us be silent with all who are silent.

_EPILOGUE_

The afternoon train speeds from Maubeuge to Paris. "Am I right for

Paris?" you ask, and a Frenchman replies facetiously "Nach Paris, nach

Paris." In a few hours you roll up the whole Western front. You traverse

infinite graveyards and scenes of desolation like an arrow of thought,

and alight where the German soldiers wished to be. The train has come

from Berlin: it has passed through Cologne and the zone held by the

occupying army. It roars forward to St. Quentin, Noyon, Compiègne, like

the symbol of the March offensive. But in all the little shattered towns

and villages joy-flags are flying and the bands are playing. It is

to-day a fête of French victory and French peace. Besides being

Armistice Day it is the Cinquantenaire of the Republic, the day of the

celebration of the first fifty years of the present Republic of France,

and Paris will be alight from end to end to-night with fairy lights.

Paris and France will render homage to the Republic which brought

victory. In 1870 under the fatal Government of Napoleon the Third the

hated German conquered France. Then the Napoleons fell and Gambetta made

possible "la revanche du Droit." It could hardly have been predicted

that within fifty years the stricken unstable France of 1870 would lay

the Prussian low. The victory over the Germans has been an enormous

confirmation of the success of the "Third Republic" and has shed a glory

on the line of Presidents from Thiers to Millerand which is perhaps not

entirely appreciated in other countries. The Republic celebrating its

fiftieth birthday on November 11th sunned itself in as much glory as the

Army or the Nation. It is true that "un soldat sans nom, representant la

foule heroique des poilus, repose dans l'Arc de Triomphe"--a nameless

soldier representing the heroic crowd who fought is buried now in the

Arc de Triomphe--but it is also true that the heart of Gambetta carried

in a chariot accompanied the hearse of the unknown soldier, and whilst

the soldier was buried in the first storey of the triumphal arch the

heart of Gambetta was placed in the Pantheon itself. All must redound to

the greatness of France and of the Republic.

As you step from the train at Paris you realise that everyone is out for

gaiety even before the gaiety has commenced. The Parisians are holding

on to one another, humming and singing baby-song, making believe to

stumble as they walk. Gone are the care and solemnity of the weekday

Paris crowd. A heaviness has been shed, everyone feels light as if there

was quicksilver in his heels. Evening is just turning to night and all

houses are giving forth their people, and they stream to the centre in

ever increasing crowds--all gay, all light-hearted, all without a

thought of ever coming home. The city is cleverly decorated with massed

flags, arcades of flags, but without those strings of bunting which so

often look like coloured washing hanging out to dry. The illuminations

are to be most elaborate. Hundreds of thousands of francs are being

spent in coloured light effects. There will be a torchlight procession,

massed bands, and street dancing till morning. Long lines of men and

women holding on to one another plunge through the crowds, and scream,

and break, and join again. Everyone is wearing a little flag of the

Republic. Men and women are to be seen carrying little red paper

lanterns on bamboo sticks. Every restaurant and café is crammed and

jammed with people with flushed faces. The waiters, having lost control,

bring you dishes you have not ordered, but you graciously accept them

faute de mieux. Hawkers keep bellowing the last editions of the papers,

especially of _L'intransigeant_, which says that the meaning of the

festivity is that the Allies are agreed to force Germany to fulfil the

treaty to the letter. Night meanwhile has become night with no stars

above and all the stars below.

The crowds have become immense. If you are at the Place de la Concorde

where part of the torchlight procession is forming up and men are

playing on the crowd with ghastly searchlights, then you are likely to

remain at the Place de la Concorde. It will take you two hours to

struggle to the Place de l'Opera. On the Underground railway some

stations are blocked, and no one can get either in or out--notably Hotel

de Ville. Out at the Arc de Triomphe there is a cavalry guard with drawn

sabres. The Arc very fittingly has no illumination, but its dark mass

catches the light beams from the buildings around. No one knows what is

going to happen here, all the little folk stand on tip-toe and strain

their eyes and yet see nought. Lots of girls are mounted on men's

shoulders with legs round men's necks and their ankles grasped in male

hands, and they certainly see the nothing which is to be seen. All are

laughing, all are ready to sing and to roll in gaiety. Presently some

statesmen in carriages pass out between lines of cavalrymen; big Bertha,

the great gun, follows them and then an empty Roman chariot and the

hearse on which the _poilu inconnu_ was carried. But even when these

pass the crowd remains riveted to the place where the unknown soldier

reposes--constantly expecting some marvel of the night to start from

there.

Similar crowds hold the Place Vendome where Napoleon stands on his

column of stone, the St. Simon of Paris. This statue also commemorates a

national victory over Germany, though it elevates one soldier so high.

The design of the frieze at the foot of the column is one of

accoutrements and weapons and adornments and uniforms and guns, but

without a limb or a face anywhere, the meaning being that one man wore

all the glory. Here is exhibited not much joy in the Republic but a

whole series of advertisement for French State loans. On the whole, the

Cinquantenaire of the Republic may be a good advertisement for

Government Stock. All manner of provincials have come to Paris for this

day, and there is no doubt they are dazzled by the grandeur of France.

At the Palais Royal there is one of the most radiant designs in coloured

lights. The whole front of the place is covered with a picture of light

which reminds one of the advertisements of the great white way between

40th and 50th Street, New York. Crimson and emerald and gold tell the

glory of the fifty years of the Republic, the numbers 1870 and 1920

being festooned with dazzling light, and the names of all the Presidents

in one great row--Thiers, MacMahon ... to Deschanel and Millerand--given

the prominence of a dynasty. On all the sidewalks down below are trees

of naked flames, gas-pipes with branches coming up out of the pavement

and instead of leaves little jets of twinkling flame at which the crowd

lights its cigarettes. The entrances to the grand avenues are surmounted

by fantastic arches of most gorgeous illuminated colouring. In front of

all this stand men and women thoroughly epaté, hypnotised by it, with

mouths open and eyes dilated.

"Oh but it's wonderful!" "I cannot take my eyes off it, can you?" "Look,

neighbour, just look at that, eh!" "Ah but look!" "What splendour!"

"What an effect!" And there is audible all the while a continuous

collective low murmur of approbation and satisfaction.

You walk slowly along the Avenue de l'Opera. There are uninterrupted

rows of footlights along the bases of first and second storeys throwing

a lurid glamour on solemn and stately tricolours. So it is all the way

to the Opera House, and happy crowds, fluttering and chattering, now

breaking into an infection of expectancy when all push forward to see

some imagined interest somewhere, and then lurching back in gay

disillusion and laughter. The lofty buildings like monuments to the

goddess of Trade look down on diminutive people with bright faces and

round heads, and the stone itself of Paris seems indulgent.

Away however in those strange fields covered with darkness at this

midnight hour, unilluminated, lie the silent ones, crosses without

end--the signs of life laid down. France will not forget them and we

shall not forget.

So let us leave this gaiety behind and take the midnight train for

Calais, for Dover, for London, for the Cenotaph, the Abbey, for new

life. It is a full train and pulls out soberly from the gay city, and

bears onward, onward to the little channel and the waiting boat which

ere the dawn shall face the wonderful white cliffs of Albion and home.

The most enduring moment of Armistice Day will be the silence at eleven,

the moment of communion. In America in many cities work ceased at eleven

but every one was instructed to make the utmost noise possible. Thus a

year ago at New Orleans the writer of these lines listened to an

infernal din of train whistles, factory syrens, steam horns and hooters,

clashing church-bells, roaring Klaxon-horns, hammering of anvils,

squeaking of trumpets, and shouts of people. And the thought inevitably

came--the West does not understand. It did not suffer as we did and came

into a share in it all too late. Only the end of a small war can express

itself in noise; the end of such an one as this in Europe was silence.

And a fitting monument of silence is the Cenotaph, the empty tomb.

England is very happy in the Cenotaph, much more happy than in the Edith

Cavell statue, which leaves out the last words of the kind nurse, does

not say "_Patriotism is not enough_," but writes "Brussels Dawn"

instead, making her a kindler of anger against a foe rather than a

salver of wounds. The impersonal cenotaph, without any Cross or weeping

Christ, or rampant lions, without even the pronoun "our" which some

wished to see upon it--"Our glorious dead," instead of "The glorious

dead," can stand for all who laid down their lives baptised or

unbaptised, white or coloured, friend or foe. For even Germans had to

die that Europe might be free.

So in leaving the fields of the dead and the beginning and the end of

the war and Paris itself, you come naturally to the Cenotaph, the stone

which gathers to itself all the experience and all that was sacred in

the war--the altar at the summit of a thousand weary steps. It stands in

the midst of England's great street of Government, 'twixt Nelson and the

Abbey, and says to all who pass--"Go and do thou likewise." To all the

selfish, "_We were not selfish_;" to the clamorous, "_We are silent, yet

we speak_;" to the strident and ambitious, to the self-seekers and the

cynical, to those who live as though there had been no sacrifice, to

those who sneer at the ideal, "_We suffered and died that you might have

your life, that all might have more life; we suffered and died for the

good of the whole!_"

When Millerand was elected President of France his supporters insisted

always that they had found a man whose public life would be worthy of

France _and of her dead_. France's ideal is that through the sacrifice

of her sons France should become "greater yet." Our men did not die that

England might become greater, but that Europe might be saved from

tyranny and greed, and it is for us and our public men to see that their

sacrifice shall never seem to grow barren.

It will grow barren unless we who now live are ready to continue the

sacrifice. No good comes into the world but after struggle and pain. No

new life comes but through death, no common weal is gained without

giving and serving. Our common life must have a foundation of human

hearts, ready to give, ready to live, for England and for us all.