One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British
soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took
over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of
Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it
seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other
places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in
advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy
but a little undergrowth--and the queerest part of it all was the sense
of safety, the ridiculously false security with which one could wander
about the village and up the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that
one's movements were being watched by German eyes and that the whole
place could be blown off the face of the earth... but for the convenient
fact that the Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond
the footpath, were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own
guns.
That sounded like a fairy-tale to men who, in other places, could not go
over the parapet of the first-line trenches, or even put their heads up
for a single second, without risking instant death.
I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A
battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after
an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of
French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the British
infantry surrounding them--it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with
the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood--the
lieutenant insisted upon leading the way to the top of the hill.
He made a slight detour to point out a German shell which had fallen
there without exploding, and made laughing comments upon the harmless,
futile character of those poor Germans in front of us. They did their
best to kill us, but oh, so feebly!
Yet when I took a pace toward the shell he called out, sharply, “Ne
touchez pas!” I would rather have touched a sleeping tiger than that
conical piece of metal with its unexploded possibilities, but bent low
to see the inscriptions on it, scratched by French gunners with wore
recklessness of death. Mort aux Boches was scrawled upon it between the
men's initials.
Then we came to the hill-crest and to the last of our trenches, and,
standing there, looked down upon the villages of Vaux and Curlu,
separated by a piece of marshy water. In the farthest village were the
Germans, and in the nearest, just below us down the steep cliff, our own
men. Between the two there was a narrow causeway across the marsh and a
strip of woods half a rifle-shot in length.
Behind, in a sweeping semicircle round their village and ours, were the
German trenches and the German guns. I looked into the streets of both
villages as clearly as one may see into Clovelly village from the crest
of the hill. In Vaux-sur-Somme a few British soldiers were strolling
about. One was sitting on the window-sill of a cottage, kicking up his
heels.
In the German village of Curlu the roadways were concealed by the
perspective of the houses, with their gables and chimney-stacks, so that
I could not see any passers--by. But at the top of the road, going out
of the village and standing outside the last house on the road, was a
solitary figure--a German sentry.
The French lieutenant pointed to a thin mast away from the village on
the hillside.
“Do you see that? That is their flagstaff. They hoist their flag for
victories. It wagged a good deal during the recent Russian fighting. But
lately they have not had the cheek to put it up.”
This interpreter--the Baron de Rosen--laughed very heartily at that
naked pole on the hill.
Then I left him and joined our own men, and went down a steep hill
into Vaux, well outside our line of trenches, and thrust forward as
an outpost in the marsh. German eyes could see me as I walked. At any
moment those little houses about me might have been smashed into rubbish
heaps. But no shells came to disturb the waterfowl among the reeds
around.
And so it was that the life in this place was utterly abnormal, and
while the guns were silent except for long--range fire, an old-fashioned
mode of war--what the adjutant of this little outpost called a
“gentlemanly warfare,” prevailed. Officers and men slept within a few
hundred yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas at
night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous excursion, such as
Sir Walter Manny would have liked, between thirty or forty men on one
side against somewhat the same number on the other.
Our men used to steal out along the causeway which crossed the marsh--a
pathway about four feet wide, broadening out in the middle, so that a
little redoubt or blockhouse was established there, then across a narrow
drawbridge, then along the path again until they came to the thicket
which screened the German village of Curlu.
It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were creeping forward from
the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in party-colored
clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible
between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly
contact was made.
Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles, the zip-zip
of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility.
It was a sharp encounter one night when the Loyal North Lancashires held
the village of Vaux, and our men brought back many German helmets and
other trophies as proofs of victory. Then to bed in the village, and a
good night's rest, as when English knights fought the French, not
far from these fields, as chronicled in the pages of that early war
correspondent, Sir John Froissart.
All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out into the wood,
where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might
betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon
two men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood,
motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through the brushwood. If I
had followed the path on which they stood for just a little way I should
have walked into the German village. But, on the other hand, I should
not have walked back again....
When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our own trenches
again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit to that grim little
outpost in the marsh. If all the war had been like this it would have
been more endurable for men who had no need to hide in holes in the
earth, nor crouch for three months below ground, until an hour or two of
massacre below a storm of high explosives. In the village on the marsh
men fought at least against other men, and not against invisible powers
which belched forth death.
It was part of the French system of “keeping quiet” until the turn of
big offensives; a good system, to my mind, if not carried too far.
At Frise, next door to Vaux, in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a
little too far, with relaxed vigilance.
It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through the reeds and
enter the French line and exchange souvenirs with the sentries.
“Souvenir!” said one of them one day. “Bullet--you know--cartouche.
Comprenny?”
A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, sat up with a grin
and said, “Mais oui, mon vieux,” and felt in his pouch for a cartridge,
and then in his pockets, and then in the magazine of the rifle between
his knees.
“Fini!” he said. “Tout fini, mon p'tit camarade.”
The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that little village in the
loop of the Somme, and “pinched” every man of the French garrison. There
was the devil to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of the
French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees.
Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in the zone of war,
when the battles of the Somme began, and were blown off the map.