In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by courtesy
a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General Headquarters
at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time to time,
according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was very
peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women worked
while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied us by
the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick ride over
Cassel Hill to the edge of the Ypres salient and the farthest point
where any car could go without being seen by a watchful enemy and blown
to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we walked, up sinister roads, or
along communication trenches, to the fire-step in the front line, or
into places like “Plug Street” wood and Kemmel village, and the ruins
of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle--the training-schools of
British armies--where always birds of death were on the wing, screaming
with high and rising notes before coming to earth with the cough that
killed... After hours in those hiding-places where boys of the New Army
were learning the lessons of war in dugouts and ditches under the range
of German guns, back again to the little white chateau at Tatinghem,
with a sweet scent of flowers from the fields, and nightingales singing
in the woods and a bell tinkling for Benediction in the old church tower
beyond our gate.
“To-morrow,” said the colonel--our first chief--before driving in for
a late visit to G. H. Q., “we will go to Armentieres and see how the
'Kitchener' boys are shaping in the line up there. It ought to be
interesting.”
The colonel was profoundly interested in the technic of war, in its
organization of supplies and transport, and methods of command. He was
a Regular of the Indian Army, a soldier by blood and caste and training,
and the noblest type of the old school of Imperial officer, with
obedience to command as a religious instinct; of stainless honor, I
think, in small things as well as great, with a deep love of England,
and a belief and pride in her Imperial destiny to govern many peoples
for their own good, and with the narrowness of such belief. His
imagination was limited to the boundaries of his professional interests,
though now and then his humanity made him realize in a perplexed way
greater issues at stake in this war than the challenge to British
Empiry.
One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield,
with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in chalky
ditches below their breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a colleague
of mine and said in a startled way:
“This must never happen again! Never!”
It will never happen again for him, as for many others. He was too tall
for the trenches, and one day a German sniper saw the red glint of his
hat-band--he was on the staff of the 11th Corps--and thought, “a gay
bird”! So he fell; and in our mess, when the news came, we were sad at
his going, and one of our orderlies, who had been his body-servant, wept
as he waited on us.
Late at night the colonel--that first chief of ours--used to come home
from G. H. Q., as all men called General Headquarters with a sense of
mystery, power, and inexplicable industry accomplishing--what?--in those
initials. He came back with a cheery shout of, “Fine weather to-morrow!”
or, “A starry night and all's well!” looking fine and soldierly as the
glare of his headlights shone on his tall figure with red tabs and a
colored armlet. But that cheeriness covered secret worries. Night after
night, in those early weeks of our service, he sat in his little office,
talking earnestly with the press officers--our censors. They seemed
to be arguing, debating, protesting, about secret influences and
hostilities surrounding us and them. I could only guess what it was all
about. It all seemed to make no difference to me when I sat down before
pieces of blank paper to get down some kind of picture, some kind
of impression, of a long day in place where I had been scared awhile
because death was on the prowl in a noisy way and I had seen it pounce
on human bodies. I knew that tomorrow I was going to another little
peep-show of war, where I should hear the same noises. That talk
downstairs, that worry about some mystery at G. H. Q. would make no
difference to the life or death of men, nor get rid of that coldness
which came to me when men were being killed nearby. Why all that
argument?
It seemed that G. H. Q.--mysterious people in a mysterious place--were
drawing up rules for war correspondence and censorship; altering rules
made the day before, formulating new rules for to-morrow, establishing
precedents, writing minutes, initialing reports with, “Passed to you,”
or, “I agree,” written on the margin. The censors who lived with us and
traveled with us and were our friends, and read what we wrote before the
ink was dry, had to examine our screeds with microscopic eyes and with
infinite remembrance of the thousand and one rules. Was it safe to
mention the weather? Would that give any information to the enemy?
Was it permissible to describe the smell of chloride-of-lime in the
trenches, or would that discourage recruiting? That description of
the traffic on the roads of war, with transport wagons, gun-limbers,
lorries, mules--how did that conflict with Rule No. 17a (or whatever it
was) prohibiting all mention of movements of troops?
One of the censors working late at night, with lines of worry on his
forehead and little puckers about his eyes, turned to me with a queer
laugh, one night in the early days. He was an Indian Civil Servant, and
therefore, by every rule, a gentleman and a charming fellow.
“You don't know what I am risking in passing your despatch! It's too
good to spoil, but G. H. Q. will probably find that it conveys accurate
information to the enemy about the offensive in 1925. I shall get the
sack--and oh, the difference to me!”
It appeared that G. H. Q. was nervous of us. They suggested that our
private letters should be tested for writing in invisible ink between
the lines. They were afraid that, either deliberately for some
journalistic advantage, or in sheer ignorance as “outsiders,” we might
hand information to the enemy about important secrets. Belonging to
the old caste of army mind, they believed that war was the special
prerogative of professional soldiers, of which politicians and people
should have no knowledge. Therefore as civilians in khaki we were hardly
better than spies.
The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in the moonlight,
after a day up the line, where young men were living and dying in dirty
ditches. I could see that he was worried, even angry.
“Those people!” he said.
“What people?”
“G. H. Q.”
“Oh, Lord!” I groaned. “Again?” and looked across the fields of corn
to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were
learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn
came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that
day--or yesterday was it?--kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with
his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer... How sweet was
the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star twinkled above the
low flashes of gun-fire away there in the salient.
“They want us to waste your time,” said the officer. “Those were the
very words used by the Chief of Intelligence--in writing which I have
kept. 'Waste their time!'... I'll be damned if I consider my work is to
waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good fools see that
this is not a professional adventure, like their other little wars; that
the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to know what its
men are doing? They have a right to know.”