During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full
ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying
waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but by
carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that
it was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is only that
our laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity above that of
primitive savages. “The decision to retreat,” he says, “was not reached
without a painful struggle. It implied a confession of weakness that was
bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to lower our own. But as
it was necessary for military reasons we had no choice. It had to be
carried out... The whole movement was a brilliant performance... The
retirement proved in a high degree remunerative.”
I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I went into beautiful
little towns like Peronne, where the houses were being gutted by
smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the enemy had just
gone out of them after touching off explosive charges which had made all
their cottages collapse like card houses, their roofs spread flat upon
their ruins, and their churches, after centuries of worship in them,
fall into chaotic heaps of masonry. I wandered through the ruins of
old French chateaux, once very stately in their terraced gardens, now a
litter of brickwork, broken statuary, and twisted iron--work above open
vaults where not even the dead had been left to lie in peace. I saw the
little old fruit-trees of French peasants sawn off at the base, and the
tall trees along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar our
passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the roadways, which had
to be bridged for our traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the
enemy's retreat.
There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this
desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand as
before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon close
approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown out from
cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the ruins in a
silence that was broken only by the sound of one's own voice or by a
few shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy was in the next
village, or the next but one, with a few field-guns and a rear-guard of
machine-gunners.
In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with
objects lying amid the litter, he had left “booby traps” to blow our men
to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a
fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was
eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little
knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in
another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and ashes.
Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-tricks. Our
engineers found most of them before they were touched off, but one went
down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of imminent danger. All
through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an
evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It
exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts
and in the ruins they had made.
In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds
in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had been driven
in from the other villages burning around them, their own villages,
whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people who had lived
under German rule and talked with many of them--old women, wrinkled
like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp
cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of French chateaux,
and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger that was not quite
starvation. It was from these people that I learned a good deal about
the psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the Somme.
They told me of the terror of these men at the increasing fury of our
gun-fire, of their desertion and revolt to escape the slaughter, and
of their rage against the “Great People” who used them for gun-fodder.
Habitually many of them talked of the war as the “Great Swindle.” These
French civilians hated the Germans in the mass with a cold, deadly
hatred. They spoke with shrill passion at the thought of German
discipline, fines, punishments, requisitions, which they had suffered
in these years. The hope of vengeance was like water to parched throats.
Yet I noticed that nearly every one of these people had something good
to say about some German soldier who had been billeted with them. “He
was a good-natured fellow. He chopped wood for me and gave the children
his own bread. He wept when he told me that the village was to
be destroyed.” Even some of the German officers had deplored this
destruction. “The world will have a right to call us barbarians,” said
one of them in Ham. “But what can we do? We are under orders. If we do
not obey we shall be shot. It is the cruelty of the High Command. It is
the cruelty of war.”
On the whole it seemed they had not misused the women. I heard no
tales of actual atrocity, though some of brutal passion. But many women
shrugged their shoulders when I questioned them about this and said:
“They had no need to use violence in their way of love--making. There
were many volunteers.”
They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as though touching money
and said, “You understand?”
I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of
young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the liberated
districts. “All those are the children of German fathers,” said the old
Reverend Mother. “That is the worst tragedy of war. How will God punish
all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”
Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne,
where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a
babies' creche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty
little ones whose chorus of “Guten Tag! Guten Tag!” was like the
quacking of ducks.
“After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them,” she said.
“And then?” I asked.
“And then many of them will die.”
She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of the
old Reverend Mother.
“How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for
the guilty.”
Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs, which
deal with the strategy and machinery of war.