IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those

battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many

nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British

family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there

were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all

the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition which belong to

the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about the world.

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years

of war over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and

Lowlanders with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches

the German soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained harmony

that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into the

firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no

officer received his command unless he spoke it as fluently as running

water by Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue until a

few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form fours and know their

left hand from their right in Welsh.

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the peasants

in these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old Saxon words

which puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought the

northern bur with them and the grit of the northern spirit. And Ireland,

though she would not have conscription, sent some of the bravest of her

boys out there, and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons

the old fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly again, and

the blood of her race has been poured out upon these tragic fields.

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with Irish

boys at the beginning of '16 that I found it hard not to believe that

a part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In one

old outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows lay

cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave out

a sweet, sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the

loft, to which they climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs.

I went up the ladder after them--it was very shaky in the middle--and,

putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark

figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs.

One boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny whistle

very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the straws.

“The craytures are that bold,” said a boy from County Cork, “that when

we first came in they sat up smilin' and sang 'God Save Ireland.' Bedad,

and it's the truth I'm after tellin' ye.”

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the

shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and

soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at

making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a

few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no

Protestant with a grudge against the Pope.

There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the Dublins and the

Munsters were up in the firing-line at the Hohenzollern. The shelling

was so violent that it was difficult to get up the supplies, and some

of the boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was the only

complaint which one of them made when I asked him what he thought of his

first experience under fire.

“It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I'd been after thinking, if

only my appetite had not been bigger than my belt, at all.”

The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who had just come out

from the old country to join their comrades in the firing-line. When the

Germans put over a number of shells, smashing the trenches and wounding

men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted to get over the

parapet and make a dash for the enemy. “'Twould taych him a lesson,”

they told their officers, who had some trouble in restraining them.

These newcomers had to take part in the digging which goes on behind the

lines at night--out in the open, without the shelter of a trench. It was

nervous work, especially when the German flares went up, silhouetting

their figures on the sky-line, and when one of the enemy's machine-guns

began to chatter. But the Irish boys found the heart for a jest, and one

of them, resting on his spade a moment, stared over to the enemy's

lines and said, “May the old devil take the spalpeen who works that

typewriter!”

It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had come fresh to the

trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of war

until then. But they came out proudly--“with their tails up,” said one

of their officers--after their baptism of fire.

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn on

the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors--who were myself and

another--the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came

striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under

their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around

them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their

breath for “the good old Irish tune” demanded by the captain.

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish yesterdays,

and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the yearning of

them.

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round? The

shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.

She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; They're

hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.

Then the pipers played the “March of O'Neill,” a wild old air as

shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish

battle-cries against Elizabeth's pikemen and Cromwell's Ironsides.

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the

old people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that

Flemish barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the boys

who were out there fighting.

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of an

Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself,

with all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which came

crying from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could carry

across the sea.

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy,

a poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and torn,

and caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger along.

But they pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when they

passed their brigadier, who called out words of praise to them.

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them,

after a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps

round German redoubts, up there in the swamps.

X

Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a glint

of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good

flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to

fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of

Flanders were white.

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all

the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our

soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from

Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy ridges

on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the rubbish heaps

in Flemish farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where

British soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely country

which led to the trenches, every furrow in the fields was a thin white

ridge, and the trees, which were just showing a shimmer of green, stood

ink-black against the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak

down each tall trunk on the side nearest to the wind. The old windmills

of Flanders which looked down upon the battlefields had been touched by

the softly falling flakes, so that each rib of their sails and each rung

of their ladders and each plank of their ancient timbers was outlined

like a frosty cobweb.

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through the blizzard with

ermine mantles over their mackintosh capes, and mounted men with their

heads bent to the storm were like white knights riding through a white

wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun--limbers drawn up

by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals, were

all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed in

the great quietude.

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the

piled sand-bags and snow-men of sentries standing in the shelter of the

traverses. The tarpaulin roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts were so

changed by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places of

fairy folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a Christmas

hiding-place, and not of soldiers stamping their feet and blowing on

their fingers and keeping their rifles dry.

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty even to No Man's

Land, making a lace-work pattern of barbed wire, and lying very softly

over the tumbled ground of mine-fields, so that all the ugliness of

destruction and death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes

fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them tenderly. It was as

though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold their wings above

the obscene things of war.

For a little while the snow brought something like peace. The guns were

quieter, for artillery observation was impossible. There could be no

sniping, for the scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches. The

airplanes which went up in the morning came down quickly to the powdered

fields and took shelter in their sheds. A great hush was over the war

zone, but there was something grim, suggestive of tragic drama, in this

silent countryside, so white even in the darkness, where millions of men

were waiting to kill one another.

Behind the lines the joke of the snow was seen by soldiers, who were

quick to see a chance of fun. Men who had been hurling bombs in the

Ypres salient bombarded one another with hand-grenades, which burst

noiselessly except for the shouts of laughter that signaled a good hit.

French soldiers were at the same game in one village I passed, where the

snow-fight was fast and furious, and some of our officers led an attack

upon old comrades with the craft of trappers and an expert knowledge of

enfilade fire. The white peace did not last long. The ermine mantle on

the battlefield was stained by scarlet patches as soon as men could see

to fight again.