Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed between
England and the long, straight road which led to No Man's Land. The
seven-day-leave men were coming back by every tide, and all other leave
was canceled.
New “drafts” were pouring through the port by tens of thousands--all
manner of men of all our breed marching in long columns from the
quayside, where they had orders yelled at them through megaphones by
A.P.M.'s, R.T.O.'s, A.M.L.O.'s, and other blue tabbed officers who dealt
with them as cattle for the slaughterhouses. I watched them landing from
the transports which came in so densely crowded with the human freight
that the men were wedged together on the decks like herrings in barrels.
They crossed from one boat to another to reach the gangways, and one by
one, interminably as it seemed, with rifle gripped and pack hunched,
and steel hat clattering like a tinker's kettle, came down the inclined
plank and lurched ashore. They were English lads from every country;
Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders,
South Africans, Canadians, West Indian negroes of the Garrison
Artillery; Sikhs, Pathans, and Dogras of the Indian Cavalry. Some of
them had been sick and there was a greenish pallor on their faces. Most
of them were deeply tanned. Many of them stepped on the quayside of
France for the first time after months of training, and I could tell
those, sometimes, by the furtive look they gave at the crowded scene
about them, and by a sudden glint in their eyes, a faint reflection of
the emotion that was in them, because this was another stage on their
adventure of war, and the drawbridge was down at last between them and
the enemy. That was all, just that look, and lips tightened now grimly,
and the pack hunched higher. Then they fell in by number and marched
away, with Redcaps to guard them, across the bridge, into the town
of Boulogne and beyond to the great camp near Etaples (and near the
hospital, so that German aircraft had a good argument for smashing Red
Cross huts), where some of them would wait until somebody said, “You're
wanted.” They were wanted in droves as soon as the fighting began on the
first day of July.
The bun shops in Boulogne were filled with nurses, V.A.D.'s, all kinds
of girls in uniforms which glinted with shoulder-straps and buttons.
They ate large quantities of buns at odd hours of mornings and
afternoons. Flying-men and officers of all kinds waiting for trains
crowded the Folkestone Hotel and restaurants, where they spent two hours
over luncheon and three hours over dinner, drinking red wine, talking
“shop”--the shop of trench-mortar units, machine-gun sections, cavalry
squadrons, air-fighting, gas schools, and anti-gas schools. Regular
inhabitants of Boulogne, officers at the base, passed to inner rooms
with French ladies of dangerous appearance, and the transients envied
them and said: “Those fellows have all the luck! What's their secret?
How do they arrange these cushie jobs?” From open windows came the music
of gramophones. Through half-drawn curtains there were glimpses of khaki
tunics and Sam Brown belts in juxtaposition with silk blouses and
coiled hair and white arms. Opposite the Folkestone there was a park of
ambulances driven by “Scottish women,” who were always on the move
from one part of the town to the other. Motor-cars came hooting with
staff-officers, all aglow in red tabs and armbands, thirsty for little
cocktails after a dusty drive. Everywhere in the streets and on the
esplanade there was incessant saluting. The arms of men were never
still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted
every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every
subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude
of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a
monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of
men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification
of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out
against it, and went by all officers except their own with a careless
slouch and a look of “To hell with all that handwagging.”
Seated on high stools in the Folkestone, our young officers clinked
their cocktails, and then whispered together.
“When's it coming?”
“In a few days... I'm for the Gommecourt sector.”
“Do you think we shall get through?”
“Not a doubt of it. The cavalry are massing for a great drive. As soon
as we make the gap they'll ride into the blue.”
“By God!... There'll be some slaughter”
“I think the old Boche will crack this time.”
“Well, cheerio!”
There was a sense of enormous drama at hand, and the excitement of it in
boys' hearts drugged all doubt and fears. It was only the older men, and
the introspective, who suffered from the torture of apprehension. Even
timid fellows in the ranks were, I imagine, strengthened and exalted by
the communal courage of their company or battalion, for courage as
well as fear is infectious, and the psychology of the crowd uplifts
the individual to immense heights of daring when alone he would
be terror--stricken. The public-school spirit of pride in name and
tradition was in each battalion of the New Army, extended later to the
division, which became the unit of esprit de corps. They must not “let
the battalion down.” They would do their damnedest to get farther than
any other crowd, to bag more prisoners, to gain more “kudos.” There was
rivalry even among the platoons and the companies. “A” Company would
show “B” Company the way to go! Their sergeant-major was a great fellow!
Their platoon commanders were fine kids! With anything like a chance--
In that spirit, as far as I, an outsider could see and hear, did
our battalions of boys march forward to “The Great Push,” whistling,
singing, jesting, until their lips were dry and their throats parched
in the dust, and even the merriest jesters of all were silent under the
weight of their packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day, through
the beauty of that June in France, thousands of men, hundreds of
thousands to the edge of the battlefields of the Somme, where the enemy
was intrenched in fortress positions and where already, before the last
days of June, gunfire was flaming over a vast sweep of country.
V
On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only
lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British
armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous
reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month
after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when
those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits
by shell-fire, gassed in thousands, until all that country became
a graveyard; when they went forward to new assaults or fell back in
rearguard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in their first
attack no more than one chance in five of escape, next time one chance
in four, then one chance in three, one chance in two, and after that
no chance at all, on the line of averages, as worked out by their
experience of luck. More boys came out to take their places, and more,
and more, conscripts following volunteers, younger brothers following
elder brothers. Never did they revolt from the orders that came to them.
Never a battalion broke into mutiny against inevitable martyrdom. They
were obedient to the command above them. Their discipline did not break.
However profound was the despair of the individual, and it was, I know,
deep as the wells of human tragedy in many hearts, the mass moved as it
was directed, backward or forward, this way and that, from one shambles
to another, in mud and in blood, with the same massed valor as that
which uplifted them before that first day of July with an intensified
pride in the fame of their divisions, with a more eager desire for
public knowledge of their deeds, with a loathing of war's misery, with
a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to
acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there
were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of
ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of
these feats the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass
followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were
many, as in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as
the center of the fury before their knees gave way or they dropped dead.
Each wave of boyhood that came out from England brought a new mass of
physical and spiritual valor as great as that which was spent, and in
the end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers
and swept through in a rush to victory, which we gained at the cost
of nearly a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and all our
wealth, and a spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that
now England is for a time sick to death and drained of her old pride and
power.