It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death was not the only
reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest
even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far
ridge, and left the world in darkness.
On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the
great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it. The red ball
just showed above the far line of single trees which were black as
charcoal on the edge of a long, straight road two miles away, and from
its furnace there were flung a million feathers of flame against the
silk-blue canopy of the evening sky. The burning colors died out in
a few minutes, and the fields darkened, and all the corn-shocks paled
until they became quite white, like rows of tents, under the harvest
moon. Another night had come in this year of war.
Up Ypres way the guns were busy, and at regular intervals the earth
trembled, and the air vibrated with dull, thunderous shocks.
“The moon's face looks full of irony to-night,” said the man by my side.
“It seems to say, `What fools those creatures are down there, spoiling
their harvest-time with such a mess of blood!'”
The stars were very bright in some of those Flemish nights. I saw the
Milky Way clearly tracked across the dark desert. The Pleiades and
Orion's belt were like diamonds on black velvet. But among all these
worlds of light other stars, unknown to astronomers, appeared and
disappeared. On the road back from a French town one night I looked
Arras way, and saw what seemed a bursting planet. It fell with a scatter
of burning pieces. Then suddenly the thick cloth of the night was rent
with stabs of light, as though flashing swords were hacking it, and a
moment later a finger of white fire was traced along the black edge of
the far-off woods, so that the whole sky was brightened for a moment
and then was blotted out by a deeper darkness... Arras was being shelled
again, as I saw it many times in those long years of war.
The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was rather horrible. Their
strange, intense quietude, when the guns were not at work, made them
dead, as the very spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One night,
as on many others, I walked through one of them with a friend. Every
house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam came through any crack. No
footstep, save our own, told of life. The darkness was almost palpable.
It seemed to press against one's eyeballs like a velvet mask. My nerves
were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny silence and invisibility
that I started violently at the sound of a quiet voice speaking three
inches from my ear.
“Halte! Qui va la?”
It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the wall of a house
in such a gulf of blackness that not even his bayonet was revealed by a
glint.
Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world was there, close
to the lines of the bronzed cornfields splashed with the scarlet of
poppies, and the pale yellow of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away
and away, without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met the
sky.
I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across to a slope of
rising ground where there was no ripening wheat, and where the grass
itself came to a sudden halt, as though afraid of something. I knew the
reason of this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for miles
each way. Those were the parapets of German trenches, and in the ditches
below them were earth-men, armed with deadly weapons, staring out across
the beauty of France and wondering, perhaps, why they should be there
to mar it, and watching me, a little black dot in their range of vision,
with an idle thought as to whether it were worth their while to let a
bullet loose and end my walk. They could have done so easily, but did
not bother. No shot or shell came to break through the hum of bees or
to crash through the sigh of the wind, which was bending all the ears of
corn to listen to the murmurous insect-life in these fields of France.
Close to me was a group of peasants--a study for a painter like Millet.
One of them shouted out to me, “Voilà les Boches!” waving his arm to
left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them.
A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice munched
an apple, like Audrey in “As You Like It,” and between her bites told
me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that she had been
nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came bursting all
round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to great holes
in the field), and described the coming of the Germans into her village
over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about the whereabouts of
French soldiers and had given one of those fat Germans a blow on the
face when he had tried to make love to her in her father's barn. Her
mother had been raped.
In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within
shell-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of
them was driving the reaping--machine and looked like a gunner on his
limber, with his kepi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of
his comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the edge of the
wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased their work to drink out of a
leather wine-bottle which had been replenished from a hand-cart. It was
a pretty scene if one could forget the grim purpose which had put those
harvesters in uniform.
The same thought was in the mind of a British officer.
“A beautiful country, this,” he said. “It's a pity to cut it up with
trenches and barbed wire.”
Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two away
from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no mercy
for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men's
souls, not shirking the next ordeal.
It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of '15, that one found
one's way to many of the trenches that marked the boundary-lines of the
year's harvesting, and in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the shells of our
batteries, answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn howls of
murder across the heads of peasant women who were gleaning, with bent
backs.
In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under showers of shrapnel,
but the long avenues between the trenches were cool and pleasant in the
heat of the day. It was one of the elementary schools where many of our
soldiers learned the A B C of actual warfare after their training in
camps behind the lines. Here one might sport with Amaryllis in the
shade, but for the fact that country wenches were not allowed in the
dugouts and trenches, where I found our soldiers killing flies in the
intervals between pot-shots at German periscopes.
The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pursuit of killing time
and life (with luck), and sniping was hot on both sides, so that the
wood resounded with sharp reports as though hard filbert nuts were being
cracked by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men was hit by
a sniper, and his body was carried off for burial as I went toward the
first line of trenches, hoping that my shadow would not fall across
a German periscope. The sight of that dead body passing chilled one a
little. There were many graves in the bosky arbors--eighteen under one
mound--but some of those who had fallen six months before still lay
where the gleaners could not reach them.
I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land
between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping
flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were
many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of
the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there
was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel
bullets and a litter of limbs.