During the four and a half months of that fighting the war
correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched
on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our
glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked
eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide
curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre
Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the
eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by distant
shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes,
bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests used to tap
at my door when I came back from the battlefields all muddy, with a
slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague
me like that, saying:
“What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a
slaughter on both sides.”
“It is all your fault,” I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him. “You
do not pray enough.”
He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.
“Monsieur,” he whispered, “after eighty years I nearly lose my faith
in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory?
Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!”
One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to
boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and
saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of
our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors
of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled
corpses of Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I saw
dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside
their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of doomed men,
nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses, where I took a nip
of whisky with them now and then before they attacked again; and groups
of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks through their own harrowing
fire; and always, always, streams of wounded by tens of thousands.
There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish Chateau,
which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores of times
when I passed it I saw it crowded with the “walking wounded,” who had
trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, fourteen hours
sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer “cheerful” like the gay
lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life,
excited by their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; boys
in age, but old and weary in the knowledge of war. The slime of the
battlefields had engulfed them. Their clothes were plastered to their
bodies. Their faces and hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their
steel hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were
strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud who huddled
round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on wooden forms, waiting for
ambulances. Yet they were stark in spirit still.
“Only the mud beat us,” they said. Man after man said that.
“We should have gone much farther except for the mud.”
Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded,
with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not
beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range
shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were
blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was
killed halfway through a sentence.
There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high
velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times
in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according
to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia
because of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond.
Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and
God's heaven.
The little old town of Cassel on the hill--where once a Duke of York
marched up and then marched down again--was beyond shell-range, though
the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make
holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There
is an inn there--the Hotel du Sauvage--which belongs now to English
history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian.
It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who loved life
could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a table-cloth,
with candle-light glinting in glasses, while outside the windows the
flickering fires of death told them how short might be their tarrying
in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the
blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was
Mademoiselle Suzanne, “a dainty rogue in porcelain,” with wonderfully
bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young officer
who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever so
long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long again.
Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to which
Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott,
the pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get
that angle of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often
blusterous, very dark, wet with heavy rain. The door opened, and other
officers came in with waterproofs sagging round their legs and top-boots
muddy to the tags, abashed because they made pools of water on polished
boards.
“Pardon, Madame.”
“Ca ne fait rien, Monsieur.”
There was a klip-klop of horses' hoofs in the yard. I thought of
D'Artagnan and the Musketeers who might have ridden into this very yard,
strode into this very room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Madame
played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all kinds, and any
accompaniment to any song. Our young officers sang. Some of them touched
the piano with a loving touch and said, “Ye gods, a piano again!” and
played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele was taken a
Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of all, after
other tunes, “The Long, Long Trail,” which his comrades sang.
“Come and play to us again,” said Madame.
“If I come back,” said the boy.
He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel.
From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On every moonlight
night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One
could see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie
Capelle and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where peasants
and children were killed with them. For some strange reason Cassel
itself was never bombed.
“We are a nest of spies,” said some of the inhabitants, but others had
faith in a miraculous statue, and still others in Sir Herbert Plumer.
Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle Suzanne
behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an eyelid,
though officers in the room were startled.
“Vous n'avez pas peur, meme de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of
death?”) I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Je m'en fiche de la mort!” (“I don't care a damn for death!”)
The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to
young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes
and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain hours of
the day without special permits from the A.P.M., who made trouble in
granting them. Three Scottish officers rode down into Cassel. They had
ridden down from hell-fire to sit at a table covered with a table-cloth,
and drink tea in a room again. They were refused permission, and their
language to me about the A.P.M. was unprintable. They desired his blood
and bones. They raised their hands to heaven to send down wrath upon
all skunks dwelling behind the lines in luxury and denying any kind of
comfort to fighting-men. They included the P.M. in their rage, and all
staff-officers from Cassel to Boulogne, and away back to Whitehall.
To cheer up the war correspondents' mess when we assembled at night
after miserable days, and when in the darkness gusts of wind and rain
clouted the window-panes and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were
falling in near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their beds
and soldiers mangled in wayside burns, we had the company sometimes
of an officer (a black-eyed fellow) who told merry little tales of
executions and prison happenings at which he assisted in the course of
his duty.
I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death for cowardice
(there were quite a number of lads like that). He was blindfolded by a
gas-mask fixed on the wrong way round, and pinioned, and tied to a post.
The firing--party lost their nerve and their shots were wild. The boy
was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and the A.P.M. had to shoot
him twice with his revolver before he died.
That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a gentleman who
seemed to like his job and to enjoy these reminiscences.
The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the
Canadians, and that year's fighting on the western front cost us 800,000
casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he
reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for what was to
happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried. For the first time
the British army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of
deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch.
They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter,
such as that in Flanders.
Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the
limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children,
or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again. They hated this
war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then as an escape
from intolerable life under fire. They would have been superhuman if
they had not revolted in spirit, though still faithful to discipline,
against the foul conditions of warfare in the swamps, where, in spite
of all they had, in that four months or so of fighting, achieved the
greatest effort of human courage and endurance ever done by masses of
men in obedience to command.