I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of
the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French
soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of
France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the
reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their
lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to “The Empire” left
them stone--cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall,
when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not because they hated
Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a
fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the
war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood)
like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would
have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so
in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G. H. Q. “What's
patriotism?” asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in
his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down in the roots of
their hearts, and, as with a boy who came from the village where I lived
for a time, the name of some such place held all the meaning of life to
many of them. The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went
back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents
sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws.
The smell of the fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees,
the heritage that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched
them with the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought.
The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of
expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under
a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city
and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was
the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the
embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept
his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he had watered his mother's
plants... London! Good old London!... His heart ached for it sometimes
when, as sentry, he stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No
Man's Land.
One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane
a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on
the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the
building, and listened. The men were singing “Auld Lang Syne” to the
accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts,
and the old tune--so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the
war zone--sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the
concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army sang “God Save
the King.” I heard it sung a thousand times or more on royal festivals
and tours, but listening to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders,
where a number of “K.'s men” lay on the straw a night or two away from
the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they had to take their turn, I
heard it with more emotion than ever before. In that anthem, chanted
by these boys in the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been
king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where
his men lay sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen
outside that barn and hear those words:
Send him victorious, Happy and glorious.
As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his
tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag
that meant to them some old village on the Sussex Downs, where a mother
and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls
were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old London,
where the 'buses went clanging down the Strand.
As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the
click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s men, standing sentry outside
the camp.
“Who goes there?”
It was a cockney voice.
“Friends.”
“Pass, friends. All's well.”
Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of
a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and
destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New
Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young
soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hell-fires and killed
in great numbers, which made all things different in the philosophy of
modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the music of an
epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to
the future race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. Yet it
was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham Rye, who said,
like a voice of Fate, “All's well.”
V
When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches
in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in
every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master
all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large
numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll
in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few
rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could not “answer back.”
In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open fire. We
called this monster “grandma,” and there was a little group of generals
on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the effect of the first shell.
Its target was on the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some
trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by our generals
and by God. Preliminary to the attack our field-guns opened fire with
shrapnel, which scattered over the German trenches--their formidable
earthworks with deep, shell-proof dugouts--like the glitter of confetti,
and had no more effect than that before the infantry made a rush for the
enemy's line and were mown down by machine-gun fire--the Germans were
very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak--in the usual way
of those early days. The first shell fired by our monster howitzer was
heralded by a low reverberation, as of thunder, from the field below
us. Then, several seconds later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a
tall, black column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze clawed
at it and tore it to tatters.
“Some shell!” said an officer. “Now we ought to win the war--I don't
think!”
Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two)--“aunty,” as we
called it.
Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, and gradually
our gun-power grew and grew, until we could “answer back,” and give more
than came to us; but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the racket,
as the Old Army had done, being strafed by harassing fire, having their
trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, and their bodies broken,
at all times and in all places within range of German guns.
Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had observation of our
position. From the Westhook Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge his observers
watched every movement of our men round Ypres, and along the main road
to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of them were visible.
From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and Messines
they could see for miles across our territory, not only the trenches,
but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind them and the
roads through the villages. They looked straight into Kemmel village
and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched among its ruins
and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and
vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch village and the gaunt
ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from Fleet Street who was
cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the
roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of
white dust which would tell them when men were marching by--more cannon
fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and
Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with
shells to spare ranged upon separate farm-houses and isolated barns
until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They
shelled the roads down which our transport wagons went at night, and the
communication trenches to which our men moved up to the front lines,
and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail
against their 5.9's, which in those early days we could only answer by
a few pip-squeaks. They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our
men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister
with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead
Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated
Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and
Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres.
All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places,
searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under
constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young
officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage
their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls.
They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the
climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty
feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken
chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, “It's quite cozy,
after all!”
And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street clubs, in the same
tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor--while they
listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be to-day or
to-morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking, that
bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and tear
them to bits and make a mess of things.
There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these
holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine
judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was
cruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses
of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries
of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink into the
squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk--silk
pajamas--and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of
gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew out the
back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He
crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language, and then lit
another gold--tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast.
His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old traditions of service
to an officer of the Guards, and he provided excellent little meals,
done to a turn, until something else happened, and he was buried alive
within a few yards of his master... Whenever I went to the canal-bank,
and I went there many times (when still and always hungry high
velocities came searching for a chance meal), I thought of my friend
in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had lived there in the worst
days, and some of whom had died there. They hated that canal-bank and
dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and there was the laughter
of men who hid the fear in their hearts and were “game” until some
bit of steel plugged them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to
tatters.