My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It
was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had
the idea.
“It would be a great adventure,” he said, as we stood listening to the
gun-fire over there.
“It would be damn silly,” said a staff officer. “Only a stern sense of
duty would make me do it.”
It was Gullett who was the brave man.
We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any
battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for
ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living
soul.
Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the
broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of
shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves. There
was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry and
twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had been
once a fair city.
For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not
speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers of
the sinking sun and the first stars that glimmered in a pale sky, the
frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us.
The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken
arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from
end to end by a thunderbolt. A recent shell had torn out a slice so that
the top of the tower was supported only upon broken buttresses, and the
great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. The Cloth Hall was but
a skeleton in stone, with immense gaunt ribs about the dead carcass of
its former majesty. Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's was a stark ruin,
which gleamed white through the darkening twilight.
We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster
Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into
their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their
riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated
arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I
stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried life.
It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of
rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron
lamp-posts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken
way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and plants
still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed by the
daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been all
wrecked.
The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms, and
in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we stumbled
over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes. The silence was broken
now by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I jumped sideways
with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be the signal for our
batteries, and shell after shell went rushing through the night, with
that long, menacing hiss which ends in a dull blast.
The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells followed each
other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, echoed back by the ruins of
Ypres in hollow, reverberating thunder-strokes. The enemy was answering
back, not very fiercely yet, and from the center of the town, in or
about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses or of huge
blocks of stone splitting into fragments.
We groped along, scared with the sense of death around us. The first
flares of the night were being lighted by both sides above their
trenches on each side of the salient. The balls of light rose into the
velvety darkness and a moment later suffused the sky with a white glare
which faded away tremulously after half a minute.
Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the
roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields between
Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance. The whole
shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We could
see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We stared
across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge crater, and
those trenches which were battered to pieces but not abandoned in the
first battle of Ypres and the second battle.
That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British
soldiers--there were years to follow when many more would lie there--and
as between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a
great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on this
ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our loneliness
here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and made me see
unnatural things.
No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures approaching
him through a clump of trees. His words rang out like pistol-shots.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
“Friends!” we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a shaking bayonet.
“Come close to be recognized!” he said, and his voice was harsh.
We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sentries sometimes shot
too soon.
“Who are you?” he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we explained
he laughed gruffly. “I never saw two strangers pass this way before!”
He was an old soldier, “back to the army again,” with Kitchener's men.
He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa--“Little wars
compared to this,” as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a
bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right
word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more
“luminous” than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness,
except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the
illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the
roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another battalion
at Hooge, who were hard pressed. “They went along under a lot of
shrapnel and had many casualties.”
He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful way, with phrases
of almost biblical beauty in their simple truth, and the soul of the
man, the spirit of the whole army in which he was a private soldier, was
revealed when he flashed out a sentence with his one note of fire, “But
the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!”
We wandered away again into the darkness, with the din of the
bombardment all about us. There was not a square yard of ground unplowed
by shells and we did not nourish any false illusions as to finding a
safe spot for a bivouac.
There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where a man might say “No
shells will fall here.” But one place we found where there seemed some
reasonable odds of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we might
curl up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not be “crumped”
before the dawn. There were several of these shelters there, but,
peering into them by the light of a match, I shuddered at the idea of
lying in one of them. They had been long out of use and there was a foul
look about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to rot there.
They were inhabited already by half-wild cats--the abandoned cats of
Ypres, which hunted mice through the ruins of their old houses--and
they spat at me and glared with green-eyed fear as I thrust a match into
their lairs.
There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on which we put our
cake and Cointreau, and here, through half a night, my friend and I
sat watching and listening to that weird scene upon which the old moon
looked down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked over all the
problems of life and death and the meaning of man's heritage.
Another sentry challenged us--all his nerves jangled at our apparition.
He was a young fellow, one of “Kitchener's crowd,” and told us frankly
that he had the “jimjams” in this solitude of Ypres and “saw Germans”
every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us--“for company.
It was becoming chilly. The dew made our clothes damp. Cake and sweet
liquor were poor provisions for the night, and the thought of hot
tea was infinitely seductive. Perhaps somewhere one might find a few
soldiers round a kettle in some friendly dugout. We groped our way
along, holding our breath at times as a shell came sweeping overhead or
burst with a sputter of steel against the ramparts. It was profoundly
dark, so that only the glowworms glittered like jewels on black velvet.
The moon had gone down, and inside Ypres the light of the distant flares
only glimmered faintly above the broken walls. In a tunnel of darkness
voices were speaking and some one was whistling softly, and a gleam of
red light made a bar across the grass. We walked toward a group of black
figures, suddenly silent at our approach--obviously startled.
“Who's there?” said a voice.
We were just in time for tea--a stroke of luck--with a company of boys
(all Kitchener lads from the Civil Service) who were spending the night
here. They had made a fire behind a screen to give them a little comfort
and frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense of humor,
cynical and blasphemous, but even through their jokes there was a
yearning for the end of a business which was too close to death.
I remember the gist of their conversation, which was partly devised for
my benefit. One boy declared that he was sick of the whole business.
“I should like to cancel my contract,” he remarked.
“Yes, send in your resignation, old lad,” said another, with ironical
laughter.
“They'd consider it, wouldn't they? P'raps offer a rise in wages--I
don't think!”
Another boy said, “I am a citizen of no mean Empire, but what the hell
is the Empire going to do for me when the next shell blows off both my
bleeding legs?”
This remark was also received by a gust of subdued laughter, silenced
for a moment by a roar and upheaval of masonry somewhere by the ruins of
the Cloth Hall.
“Soldiers are prisoners,” said a boy without any trace of humor. “You're
lagged, and you can't escape. A 'blighty' is the best luck you can hope
for.”
“I don't want to kill Germans,” said a fellow with a superior accent.
“I've no personal quarrel against them; and, anyhow, I don't like
butcher's work.”
“Christian service, that's what the padre calls it. I wonder if Christ
would have stuck a bayonet into a German stomach--a German with his
hands up. That's what we're asked to do.”
“Oh, Christianity is out of business, my child. Why mention it? This is
war, and we're back to the primitive state--B.C. All the same, I say my
little prayers when I'm in a blue funk.
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child.”
This last remark was the prize joke of the evening, received with much
hilarity, not too loud, for fear of drawing fire--though really no
Germans could have heard any laughter in Ypres.
Nearby, their officer was spending the night. We called on him, and
found him sitting alone in a dugout furnished by odd bits from the
wrecked houses, with waxen flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and
an old cottage clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair
which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a Devonshire lad,
with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his loneliness,
with a roof over his head which would be no proof against a fair-sized
shell.
He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been
surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him.
He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his
green armchair.
The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a little
while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as the first
faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire burst
out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new spasms of
ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing them, had an
attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.
The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated
fireworks after a night of orgy.
In a distant field a cock crew.
The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the
ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed
again nakedly. Then the guns ceased for a while, and there was quietude
in the trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways, went two tired
figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swiftness to escape the early
morning “hate” which was sure to come as soon as a clock in Vlamertinghe
still working in a ruined tower chimed the hour of six.
I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles
of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and
pack-mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to
Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about,
and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and
their flashes were red through the Flanders mist. Always this capital of
the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about.
“Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert.”
So said the traffic man at the crossroads.
As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened the strap of one's
gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one's soul icily.