The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all
its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered
forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest
tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old
battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st,
when our lines were stormed and broken by his men's odds against our
defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like
all who knew what had happened better than the troops themselves.
Every day after the first break-through we pushed out in different
directions--Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes until we came up
with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back and back, day after
day, with increasing speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It was
a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It was a chaos like that of
upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying to rescue its eggs and
sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed by some controlling
or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and sticks these
soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our front-lines, were
trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks, ambulances, hospital
stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, agricultural implements,
transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A. tents, gun-horse and mule
columns, while rear-guard actions were being fought within gunfire of
them and walking wounded were hobbling back along the roads in this
uproar of traffic, and word came that a further retreat was happening
and that the enemy had broken through again...
Amiens seemed threatened on the morning when, to the north, Albert was
held by a mixed crowd of Scottish and English troops, too thin, as I
could see when I passed through them, to fight any big action, with an
enemy advancing rapidly from Courcellette and outflanking our line by
Montauban and Fricourt. I saw our men marching hastily in retreat to
escape that tightening net, and while the southern side of Amiens was
held by a crowd of stragglers with cyclist battalions, clerks
from headquarters staffs, and dismounted cavalry, commanded by
Brigadier-General Carey, sent down hurriedly to link them together and
stop a widening gap until the French could get to our relief on the
right and until the Australians had come down from Flanders. There was
nothing on that day to prevent the Germans breaking through to Amiens
except the courage of exhausted boys thinly strung out, and the lagging
footsteps of the Germans themselves, who had suffered heavy losses
all the way and were spent for a while by their progress over the wild
ground of the old fighting-fields. Their heavy guns were far behind,
unable to keep pace with the storm troops, and the enemy was relying
entirely on machine-guns and a few field-guns, but most of our guns were
also out of action, captured or falling back to new lines, and upon the
speed with which the enemy could mass his men for a new assault depended
the safety of Amiens and the road to Abbeville and the coast. If he
could hurl fresh divisions of men against our line on that last night of
March, or bring up strong forces of cavalry, or armored cars, our line
would break and Amiens would be lost, and all our work would be in
jeopardy. That was certain. It was visible. It could not be concealed by
any camouflage of hope or courage.
It was after a day on the Somme battlefields, passing through our
retiring troops, that I sat down, with other war correspondents and
several officers, to a dinner in the old Hotel du Rhin in Amiens. It
was a dismal meal, in a room where there had been much laughter and,
throughout the battles of the Somme, in 1916, a coming and going of
generals and staffs and officers of all grades, cheery and high-spirited
at these little tables where there were good wine and not bad food, and
putting away from their minds for the time being the thought of tragic
losses or forlorn battles in which they might fall. In the quietude of
the hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered by flower-beds,
I had had strange conversations with boys who had revealed their souls a
little, after dinner in the darkness, their faces bared now and then by
the light of cigarettes or the flare of a match.
“Death is nothing,” said one young officer just down from the Somme
fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. “I don't care a
damn for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its
uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the
animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck... My nerves are
like fiddle-strings.”
In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between their
stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and ditches
under frightful fire which had “wiped out” their platoons or companies.
A bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling gull, used
to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his wing, and
its head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on the figures
in khaki--until suddenly it would clap its long bill rapidly in a
wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire--“Curse the bloody bird!” said
officers startled by this evil and reminiscent noise--and caper with
ridiculous postures round the imperturbable gull... Beyond the lines,
from the dining-room, would come the babble of many tongues and the
laughter of officers telling stories against one another over their
bottles of wine, served by Gaston the head-waiter, between our
discussions on strategy--he was a strategist by virtue of service in the
trenches and several wounds--or by “Von Tirpitz,” an older, whiskered
man, or by Joseph, who had a high, cackling laugh and strong views
against the fair sex, and the inevitable cry, “C'est la guerre!” when
officers complained of the service... There had been merry parties in
this room, crowded with the ghosts of many heroic fellows, but it was a
gloomy gathering on that evening at the end of March when we sat there
for the last time. There were there officers who had lost their towns,
and “Dadoses” (Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies) whose
stores had gone up in smoke and flame, and a few cavalry officers back
from special leave and appalled by what had happened in their absence,
and a group of Y.M.C.A. officials who had escaped by the skin of their
teeth from huts now far behind the German lines, and censors who
knew that no blue pencil could hide the truth of the retreat, and war
correspondents who had to write the truth and hated it.
Gaston whispered gloomily behind my chair: “Mon petit caporal”--he
called me that because of a fancied likeness to the young
Napoleon--“dites donc. Vous croyex quils vont passer par Amiens? Non,
ce n'est pas possible, ca! Pour la deuxieme fois? Non. Je refuse a le
croire. Mais c'est mauvais, c'est affreux, apres tant de sacrifice!”
Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for company's sake,
fixing up accounts as though the last day of reckoning had come...as it
had. Her hair, with its little curls, was still in perfect order. She
had two dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a waxen
pallor. She was working out accounts with a young officer, who smoked
innumerable cigarettes to steady his nerves. “Von Tirpitz” was going
round in an absent-minded way, pulling at his long whiskers.
The war correspondents talked together. We spoke gloomily, in low
voices, so that the waiters should not hear.
“If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the coast.”
“Will that be a win for the Germans, even then?”
“It will make it hell in the Channel.”
“We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire.”
“France won't give in now, whatever happens. And England never gives
in.”
“We're exhausted, all the same. It's a question of man-power.”
“They're bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow.”
“I don't see that at all. There's still a line...”
“A line! A handful of tired men.”
“It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux to-night. It
commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map.”
“They won't.”
“We keep on saying, 'They won't.' We said, 'They won't get the Somme
crossings!' but they did. Let's face it squarely, without any damned
false optimism. That has been our curse all through.”
“Better than your damned pessimism.”
“It's quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is to
keep them back? There's nothing up the road.”
“It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. How they would
laugh!”
“We shouldn't laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on things.”
“How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication.
Anything may happen in the night.”
Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There
were two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All
the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise
of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass.
Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the
floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways.
Then some one laughed.
“Not this time!”
The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table, and
lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the loud
hum of airplanes, the well known “zooz-zooz” of the Gothas' double
fuselage. More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the same
sound of explosives and falling masonry. The anti--aircraft guns got to
work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells winging over the
roofs.
“Bang!... Crash!”
That was nearer again.
Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.
“They're making a mess outside. Perhaps we'd better get away before it
gets too hot.”
Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the
increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she
controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer
who was settling up for a group of others.
The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly bright
and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets were flooded
with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver above intense
black shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by projecting
walls.
“Curse the moon!” said one officer. “How I hate its damned light”
But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and
into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were
running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one
doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of
the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and
paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions.
Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding
monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.
An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white
under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.
“A fellow was killed just by my side.” he said. “We were standing in a
doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a
log, without a sound, as dead as a door-nail.”
There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note
which vibrated like 'cello strings, very loudly, and with that sinister
noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they passed across
the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel
below them. From time to time they went away until they were specks of
silver and black; but always they came back again, or others came, with
new stores of bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went on all
through the night.
I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was
impossible. My will-power was not strong enough to disregard those
crashes in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful
falling noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the
ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which I
lay engulfed in the chaos of this wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many times
I said, “To hell with it all... I'm going to sleep,” and then sat up in
the darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on the electric
light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in the corridor there was a
stampede of heavy boots. Officers were running to get into the cellars
before the next crash, which might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The
thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law of gravity. I walked
along the corridor, now deserted, and saw a stairway littered with
broken glass, which my feet scrunched. There were no lights in the
basement of the hotel, but I had a flash-lamp, going dim, and by its
pale eye fumbled my way to a stone passage leading to the cellar. That
flight of stone steps was littered also with broken glass. In the cellar
itself was a mixed company of men who had been dining earlier in the
evening, joined by others who had come in from the streets for shelter.
Some of them had dragged down mattresses from the bedrooms and were
lying there in their trench-coats, with their steel hats beside them.
Others were sitting on wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while
there were others on their knees, and their faces in their hands, trying
to sleep. There were some of the town majors who had lost their towns,
and some Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three private soldiers,
and some motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel
lying together on dirty straw. By one of the stone pillars of the
vaulted room two American war correspondents--Sims and Mackenzie--were
sitting on a packing-case playing cards on a board between them. They
had stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering light played
on their faces and cast deep shadows under their eyes. I stood watching
these men in that cellar and thought what a good subject it would be for
the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a comfortable place. There
was only one place on the bare stones, and when I lay down there my
bones ached abominably, and it was very cold. Through an aperture in the
window came a keen draft and I could see in a square of moonlit sky a
glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A direct hit on the Hotel
du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this vaulted room and end a game of
cards. After fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that the
room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this damp cellar
and these hard stones. I returned to it and lay down on the bed again
and switched off the light. But the noises outside, the loneliness of
the room, the sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up
again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again.
Many houses round about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage
was being made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the room,
smoking cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty explosion, very
close, made all my nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the
best place. If one had to die it was better to be in the company of
friends. Down I went again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He,
too, was a wanderer between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.
“I am getting bored with this,” he said. “It's absurd to think that this
filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense calls one
down. Anyhow, I can't sleep.”
We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well as
sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the mattresses,
vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or
gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the
old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ol' Bill, with a
fierce frown above his black mustache. Sims and Mackenzie still played
their game of cards, silently, between the guttering candles.
I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to
the cellar, six times that night. There was never ten minutes' relief
from the drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens.
It was at four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me
wandering before.
“Let us go for a walk,” he said. “The birds will be away by dawn.”
It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hotel
du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was
still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler
sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of horses
and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway
was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had
collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been
stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by
bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had
been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The
air raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first light of dawn came into the
sky....
That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military
authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving
everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops--where
there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many
people must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own
houses--I never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of
the tragedy in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the
first high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them about
the city, destroying many other houses. A fire started by these shells
formed a great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois
Cailloux, where there had been an arcade and many good shops and houses.
I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted ironwork when
I went through the city after the day of exodus.