The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a
territory forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five
months of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of
slaughter, wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war.
As an eye-witness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw day by
day the tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred and fifty
thousand men had passed through our casualty clearing stations, and
then were not finished. I went among these men when the blood was wet
on them, and talked with hundreds of them, and heard their individual
narratives of escapes from death until my imagination was saturated
with the spirit of their conflict of body and soul. I saw a green, downy
countryside, beautiful in its summer life, ravaged by gun-fire so that
the white chalk of its subsoil was flung above the earth and grass in a
wide, sterile stretch of desolation pitted with shell-craters, ditched
by deep trenches, whose walls were hideously upheaved by explosive fire,
and littered yard after yard, mile after mile, with broken wire, rifles,
bombs, unexploded shells, rags of uniform, dead bodies, or bits of
bodies, and all the filth of battle. I saw many villages flung into ruin
or blown clean off the map. I walked into such villages as Contalmaison,
Martinpuich, Le Sars, Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of
burning and the fumes of explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose up
to one's nostrils and one's very soul, when our dead and German dead lay
about, and newly wounded came walking through the ruins or were carried
shoulder high on stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously the
living, unwounded men who went through these places knew that death
lurked about them and around them and above them, and at any second
might make its pounce upon their own flesh. I saw our men going into
battle with strong battalions and coming out of it with weak battalions.
I saw them in the midst of battle at Thiepval, at Contalmaison, at
Guillemont, by Loupart Wood, when they trudged toward lines of German
trenches, bunching a little in groups, dodging shell-bursts, falling in
single figures or in batches, and fighting over the enemy's parapets. I
sat with them in their dugouts before battle and after battle, saw their
bodies gathered up for burial, heard their snuffle of death in hospital,
sat by their bedside when they were sorely wounded. So the full tragic
drama of that long conflict on the Somme was burned into my brain and
I was, as it were, a part of it, and I am still seared with its
remembrance, and shall always be.
But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if he
refused to admit the heroism, the gallantry of youth, even the gaiety of
men in these infernal months. Psychology on the Somme was not simple
and straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not their dominating
emotion, except in the worst hours. Men hated this fighting, but found
excitement in it, often exultation, sometimes an intense stimulus of
all their senses and passions before reaction and exhaustion. Men became
jibbering idiots with shell-shock, as I saw some of them, but others
rejoiced when they saw our shells plowing into the enemy's earthworks,
laughed at their own narrow escapes and at grotesque comicalities of
this monstrous deviltry. The officers were proud of their men, eager
for their honor and achievement. The men themselves were in rivalry
with other bodies of troops, and proud of their own prowess. They were
scornful of all that the enemy might do to them, yet acknowledged his
courage and power. They were quick to kill him, yet quick also to give
him a chance of life by surrender, and after that were--nine times
out of ten--chivalrous and kindly, but incredibly brutal on the rare
occasions when passion overcame them at some tale of treachery. They had
the pride of the skilled laborer in his own craft, as machine-gunners,
bombers, raiders, trench-mortar--men, and were keen to show their skill,
whatever the risks. They were healthy animals, with animal courage as
well as animal fear, and they had, some of them, a spiritual and moral
fervor which bade them risk death to save a comrade, or to save a
position, or to kill the fear that tried to fetter them, or to lead men
with greater fear than theirs. They lived from hour to hour and forgot
the peril or the misery that had passed, and did not forestall the
future by apprehension unless they were of sensitive mind, with the
worst quality men might have in modern warfare--imagination.
They trained themselves to an intense egotism within narrow boundaries.
Fifty yards to the left, or five hundred, men were being pounded to
death by shell-fire. Fifty yards to the right, or five hundred, men
were being mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the time being their
particular patch was quiet. It was their luck. Why worry about the other
fellow? The length of a traverse in a ditch called a trench might make
all the difference between heaven and hell. Dead bodies were being piled
up on one side of the traverse. A shell had smashed into the platoon
next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat under their own mud-bank and
scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop them
out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism seemed to me the
instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous places when I saw them in the
line. In a little way, not as a soldier, but as a correspondent, taking
only a thousandth part of the risks of fighting-men, I found myself
using this self-complacency. They were strafing on the left. Shells were
pitching on the right. Very nasty for the men in either of those places.
Poor devils! But meanwhile I was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank
Heaven for that!
“Here,” said an elderly officer--one of those rare exalted souls who
thought that death was a little thing to give for one's country's
sake--“here we may be killed at any moment!”
He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though
announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged as
a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle.
“But,” said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, “I
don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!”
He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man,
soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was
in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He hated
the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously, desperately,
heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times, when he
paid not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly
specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he thrust the
thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged a joke
with the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in a state of
mental exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement,
he acted regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost
miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do
as he did by the passion within him--passion of love, passion of hate,
passion of fear, or passion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were
the leaders, the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of
their intensity of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and
the comfort that came from their real or apparent self-confidence in
frightful situations. Those who got through were astonished at their
own courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously
that they were immune from shells and bullets. They walked through
harassing fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so
often that some of them had a kind of disdain of shell-bursts, until,
perhaps, one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often it
did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a wreath of
smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock of fear. Men
differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it was no question
of difference in courage.
In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the mass they
seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that
Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle--a few days
after--looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy
in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the mass, heroism in the
mass. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who
bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with whom
one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his job,
the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength, the
bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on in
this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which he
had abandoned--all mingled with those other qualities of pride and
comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the strange
complexity of his psychology.