The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, but rendered
great service to France at that time. By February of 1915 we had taken
over a new line of front, extending from our positions round Loos
southward to the country round Lens and Arras. It was to this movement
in February that Marshal Joffre made allusion when, in a message to our
Commander-in-Chief on March 2d, he said that “the French army remembered
that its recent call on the comradeship of the British army met with an
immediate and complete response.”
By liberating an immense number of French troops of the Tenth Army and
a mass of artillery from this part of the front, we had the good fortune
to be of great service to France at a time when she needed many men and
guns to repel the assault upon Verdun.
Some of her finest troops--men who had fought in many battles and had
held the trenches with most dogged courage--were here in this sector of
the western front, and many batteries of heavy and light artillery
had been in these positions since the early months of the war. It was,
therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to the defense of Verdun
when British troops replaced them at the time the enemy made his great
attack.
The French went away from this part of their battlefront with regret and
emotion. To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long ridge
of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to
Hebuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the
Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.
I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw the visible
reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn there, and told the
story of all the struggle there by the upheaval of earth, the wreckage
of old trenches, the mine--craters and shell-holes, and the litter of
battle in every part of that countryside.
I went there first--to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette looking
northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, which the enemy held as
a strong barrier against us above the village of Souchez and Ablain
St.-Nazaire and Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured--when
they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I saw in their places
the men who had lived there and fought there as one may read in the
terrible and tragic narrative of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu.
I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. (Never once did he admit
any fine weather to alleviate the suffering of his comrades, thereby
exaggerating their misery somewhat.) It was raining, and there was a
white, dank mist through the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny on the way to
the spur of Notre Dame. It clung to the undergrowth, which was torn by
shell-fire, and to every blade of grass growing rankly round the lips
of shell-craters in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the red
pantaloons of the first French armies who had fought through those woods
in the beginning of the war.
I roamed about a graveyard there, where shells had smashed down some of
the crosses, but had not damaged the memorial to the men who had stormed
up the slope of Notre Dame de Lorette and had fallen when their comrades
chased the Germans to the village below.
A few shells came over the hill as I pushed through the undergrowth with
a French captain, and they burst among the trees with shattering boughs.
I remember that little officer in a steel helmet, and I could see a
Norman knight as his ancestor with a falcon as his crest. He stood so
often on the sky-line, in full view of the enemy (I was thankful for the
mist), that I admired but deplored his audacity. Without any screen to
hide us we walked down the hillside, gathering clots of greasy mud in
our boots, stumbling, and once sprawling. Another French captain joined
us and became the guide.
“This road is often 'Marmite,'” he said, “but I have escaped so often I
have a kind of fatalism.”
I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells which a few
minutes before had burst in our immediate neighborhood, cutting off
twigs of trees and one branch with a scatter of steel as sharp as knives
and as heavy as sledge-hammers.
Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which afterward
I passed through scores of times on the way to Vimy when that ridge was
ours. The ragged ruin of its church was white and ghostly in the mist.
On the right of the winding road which led through it was Souchez Wood,
all blasted and riven, and beyond a huddle of bricks which once was
Souchez village.
“Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground,” said the French
officer. “Their bodies lie thick below the soil. Poor France! Poor
France!”
He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all
that youth of France which even then, in March of '16, had been offered
up in vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war. Rain was slashing down
now, beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of French soldiers
who stood shivering by the ruined walls while trench-mortars were making
a tumult in the neighborhood. They were the men of Henri Barbusse--his
comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed together in a
confraternity of misery. They were plastered with wet clay, and their
boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue
coats were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and made pools
round their feet. They were unshaven, and their wet faces were smeared
with the soil of the trenches.
“How goes it?” said the French captain with me.
“It does not go,” said the French sergeant. “'Cre nom de Dieu!--my men
are not gay to-day. They have been wet for three weeks and their bones
are aching. This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a little
fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the dirty Boche starts
shelling again. So we do not get dry, and we have no warmth, and we
cannot make even a cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up there
on Vimy looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his sleeve and says
those poor devils of Frenchmen are not gay to-day! That is true, mon
Capitaine. Mais, que voulez-vous? C'est pour la France.”
“Oui. C'est pour la France.”
The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those
comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of
Neuville St.-Vaast.
“Poor fellows,” he said, presently. “Not even a cup of hot coffee!...
That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes--afterward! But at what a
price!”
So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine
church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little streets
of comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old hill of
Vimy, and within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish
heap mingled with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies'
perambulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts.
Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay
under a blood-soaked blanket.
“It is a bad wound?” asked the captain.
The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face,
waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a
pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.
“He may live as far as the dressing station,” said one of the Frenchmen.
“It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just now, over
there.”
The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sand--bags at the end of a
street of ruin.
Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, hobbling gait. Both
of them were wounded in the legs, and had tied rags round their wounds
tightly. They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed,
with brooding eyes.
“The German trench-mortars are very evil,” said the captain.
We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sand-bags
to look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and
thrust out by communication trenches to the edge of the village in which
we walked. A boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the captain,
who stepped back and said, in an emotional way:
“Tiens! C'est toi, Edouard?”
“Oui, mon Capitaine.”
The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes and long, black
eyelashes.
“You are a lieutenant, then? How does it go, Edouard?”
“It does not go,” answered the boy like that French sergeant in Ablain
St.-Nazaire. “This is a bad place. I lose my men every day. There were
three killed yesterday, and six wounded. To-day already there are two
killed and ten wounded.”
Something broke in his voice.
“Ce n'est pas bon du tout, du tout!” (“It is not good at all, at all!”)
The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.
“Courage, mon vieux!”
The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud. Sharp
stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the
high, long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette.
Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells cut
through the air above us like scythes. The caldron in this pit of war
was being stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us, covered
by a bloody blanket like the other one. From slimy sand-bags and wet
ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. A boot with some
pulp inside protruded from a mud--bank where I stood, and there was a
human head, without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of
a shell--hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year before,
when swarms of boys, of the '16 class, boys of eighteen, the flower of
French youth, rushed forward from the crossroads at La Targette, a few
hundred yards away, to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They
captured them, and it cost them seven thousand in killed and wounded--at
least three thousand dead. They fought like young demons through the
flaming streets. They fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire.
Machine--guns cut them down as though they were ripe corn under the
sickle. But these French boys broke the Prussian Guard that day.
Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the
fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below
earth at the Labyrinth--sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches,
an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by frequent
rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and hands,
flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in
the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for
something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the Labyrinth,
until in February of '16 they went away after greeting our khaki men who
came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen
there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused trenches below
Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.