THERE AND BACK.
An inhuman philosopher or a strong, silent poseur might affect to treat
with indifference his leave from the Front. Personally I have never met
a philosopher inhuman enough or a poseur strongly silent enough to
repress evidence of wild satisfaction, after several months of war at
close quarters, on being given a railway warrant entitling him to ten
days of England, home, and no duty. But if you are a normal soldier who
dislikes fighting and detests discomfort, the date of your near-future
holiday from the dreary scene of war will be one of the few problems
that really matter.
Let us imagine a slump in great pushes at your sector of the line, since
only during the interval of attack is the leave-list unpigeonholed. The
weeks pass and your turn creeps close, while you pray that the lull may
last until the day when, with a heavy haversack and a light heart, you
set off to become a transient in Arcadia. The desire for a taste of
freedom is sharpened by delay; but finally, after disappointment and
postponement, the day arrives and you depart. Exchanging a "So long"
with less fortunate members of the mess, you realise a vast difference
in respective destinies. To-morrow the others will be dodging crumps,
archies, or official chits "for your information, please"; to-morrow,
with luck, you will be dodging taxis in London.
During the journey you begin to cast out the oppressive feeling that a
world and a half separates you from the pleasantly undisciplined life
you once led. The tense influence of those twin bores of active service,
routine and risk, gradually loosens hold, and your state of mind is
tuned to a pitch half-way between the note of battle and that of a
bank-holiday.
Yet a slight sense of remoteness lingers as you enter London. At first
view the Charing Cross loiterers seem more foreign than the peasants of
Picardy, the Strand and Piccadilly less familiar than the
Albert-Pozieres road. Not till a day or two later, when the remnants of
strained pre-occupation with the big things of war have been charmed
away by old haunts and old friends, do you feel wholly at home amid your
rediscovered fellow-citizens, the Man in the Street, the Pacifist, the
air-raid-funk Hysteric, the Lady Flag-Seller, the War Profiteer, the
dear-boy Fluff Girl, the Prohibitionist, the England-for-the-Irish
politician, the Conscientious Objector, the hotel-government bureaucrat,
and other bulwarks of our united Empire. For the rest, you will want to
cram into ten short days the average experiences of ten long weeks. If,
like most of us, you are young and foolish, you will skim the bubbling
froth of life and seek crowded diversion in the lighter follies, the
passing shows, and l'amour qui rit. And you will probably return to the
big things of war tired but mightily refreshed, and almost ready to
welcome a further spell of routine and risk.
The one unsatisfactory aspect of leave from France, apart from its
rarity, is the travelling. This, in a region congested by the more
important traffic of war, is slow and burdensome to the impatient
holiday-maker. Occasionally the Flying Corps officer is able to
substitute an excursion by air for the land and water journey, if on one
of the dates that sandwich his leave a bus of the type already flown by
him must be chauffeured across the Channel. Such an opportunity is
welcome, for besides avoiding discomfort, a joy-ride of this description
often saves time enough to provide an extra day in England.
On the last occasion when I was let loose from the front on
ticket-of-leave, I added twenty-four hours to my Blighty period by a
chance meeting with a friendly ferry-pilot and a resultant trip as
passenger in an aeroplane from a home depot. Having covered the same
route by train and boat a few days previously, a comparison between the
two methods of travel left me an enthusiast for aerial transport in the
golden age of after-the-war.
The leave train at Arriere was time-tabled for midnight, but as, under a
war-time edict, French cafes and places where they lounge are closed at
10 P.M., it was at this hour that muddied officers and Tommies
from every part of the Somme basin began to crowd the station.
Though confronted with a long period of waiting, in a packed
entrance-hall that was only half-lit and contained five seats to be
scrambled for by several hundred men, every one, projected beyond the
immediate discomfort to the good time coming, seemed content. The
atmosphere of jolly expectancy was comparable to that of Waterloo
Station on the morning of Derby Day. Scores of little groups gathered to
talk the latest shop-talk from the trenches. A few of us who were
acquainted with the corpulent and affable R.T.O.--it is part of an
R.T.O.'s stock-in-trade to be corpulent and affable--sought out his
private den, and exchanged yarns while commandeering his whisky. Stuff
Redoubt had been stormed a few days previously, and a Canadian captain,
who had been among the first to enter the Hun stronghold, told of the
assault. A sapper discussed some recent achievements of mining parties.
A tired gunner subaltern spoke viciously of a stupendous bombardment
that allowed little rest, less sleep, and no change of clothes. Time
was overcome easily in thus looking at war along the varying angles of
the infantryman, the gunner, the engineer, the machine-gun performer,
and the flying officer, all fresh from their work.
The train, true to the custom of leave trains, was very late. When it
did arrive, the good-natured jostling for seats again reminded one of
the London to Epsom traffic of Derby Day. Somehow the crowd was squeezed
into carriage accommodation barely sufficient for two-thirds of its
number, and we left Arriere. Two French and ten British officers
obtained a minimum of space in my compartment. We sorted out our legs,
arms, and luggage, and tried to rest.
In my case sleep was ousted by thoughts of what was ahead. Ten days'
freedom in England! The stout major on my left snored. The head of the
hard-breathing Frenchman to the right slipped on to my shoulder. An
unkempt subaltern opposite wriggled and turned in a vain attempt to find
ease. I was damnably cramped, but above all impatient for the morrow. A
passing train shrieked. Cold whiffs from the half-open window cut the
close atmosphere. Slowly, and with frequent halts for the passage of war
freights more urgent than ourselves, our train chugged northward. One
hour, two hours, three hours of stuffy dimness and acute discomfort.
Finally I sank into a troubled doze. When we were called outside
Boulogne, I found my hand poised on the stout major's bald head, as if
in benediction.
The soldier on leave, eager to be done with the preliminary journey,
chafes at inevitable delay in Boulogne. Yet this largest of channel
ports, in its present state, can show the casual passer-by much that is
interesting. It has become almost a new town during the past three
years. Formerly a headquarters of pleasure, a fishing centre and a
principal port of call for Anglo-Continental travel, it has been
transformed into an important military base. It is now wholly of the
war; the armies absorb everything that it transfers from sea to railway,
from human fuel for war's blast-furnace to the fish caught outside the
harbour. The multitude of visitors from across the Channel is larger
than ever; but instead of Paris, the Mediterranean, and the East, they
are bound for less attractive destinations--the muddy battle-area and
Kingdom Come.
The spirit of the place is altogether changed. From time immemorial
Boulogne has included an English alloy in its French composition, but
prior to the war it shared with other coastal resorts of France an
outlook of smiling carelessness. Superficially it now seems more British
than French, and, partly by reason of this, it impresses one as being
severely business-like. The great number of khaki travellers is rivalled
by a huge colony of khaki Base workers. Except for a few matelots,
French fishermen, and the wharfside cafes, there is nothing to
distinguish the quays from those of a British port.
The blue-bloused porters who formerly met one with volubility and the
expectation of a fabulous tip have given place to khakied orderlies, the
polite customs officials to old-soldier myrmidons of the worried
embarkation officer. Store dumps with English markings are packed
symmetrically on the cobbled stones. The transport lorries are all
British, some of them still branded with the names of well-known London
firms. Newly-built supply depots, canteens, and military institutes
fringe the town proper or rise behind the sand-ridges. One-time hotels
and casinos along the sea-front between Boulogne and Wimereux have
become hospitals, to which, by day and by night, the smooth-running
motor ambulances bring broken soldiers. Other of the larger hotels, like
the Folkestone and the Meurice, are now patronised almost exclusively by
British officers.
The military note dominates everything. A walk through the main streets
leaves an impression of mixed uniforms--bedraggled uniforms from trench
and dug-out, neat rainbow-tabbed uniforms worn by officers attached to
the Base, graceful nursing uniforms, haphazard convalescent uniforms,
discoloured blue uniforms of French permissionaires. Everybody is
bilingual, speaking, if not both English and French, either one or other
of these languages and the formless Angliche patois invented by Tommy
and his hosts of the occupied zone. And everybody, soldier and civilian,
treats as a matter of course the strange metamorphosis of what was
formerly a haven for the gentle tourist.
The boat, due to steam off at eleven, left at noon,--a creditable
performance as leave-boats go. On this occasion there was good reason
for the delay, as we ceded the right of way to a hospital ship and
waited while a procession of ambulance cars drove along the quay and
unloaded their stretcher cases. The Red Cross vessel churned slowly out
of the harbour, and we followed at a respectful distance.
Passengers on a Channel leave-boat are quieter than might be expected.
With the country of war behind them they have attained the third degree
of content, and so novel is this state after months of living on edge
that the short crossing does not allow sufficient time for them to be
moved to exuberance. One promenades the crowded deck happily, taking
care not to tread on the staff spurs, and talks of fighting as if it
were a thing of the half-forgotten past.
But there is no demonstration. In a well-known illustrated weekly a
recent frontispiece, supposedly drawn "from material supplied," depicts
a band of beaming Tommies, with weird water-bottles, haversacks,
mess-tins, and whatnots dangling from their sheepskin coats, throwing
caps and cheers high into the air as they greet the cliffs of England.
As the subject of an Academy picture, or an illustration for "The Hero's
Homecoming, or How a Bigamist Made Good," the sketch would be excellent.
But, except for the beaming faces, it is fanciful. A shadowy view of the
English coast-line draws a crowd to the starboard side of the boat,
whence one gazes long and joyfully at the dainty cliffs. Yet there is no
outward sign of excitement; the deep satisfaction felt by all is of too
intimate a nature to call for cheering and cap-throwing. The starboard
deck remains crowded as the shore looms larger, and until, on entry into
Dovstone harbour, one prepares for disembarkation.
The Front seemed very remote from the train that carried us from
Dovstone to London. How could one think of the wilderness with the
bright hop-fields of Kent chasing past the windows? Then came the
mass-meeting of brick houses that skirt London, and finally the tunnel
which is the approach to the terminus. As the wheels rumbled through the
darkness of it they suggested some lines of stray verse beginning--
"Twenty to eleven by all the clocks of Piccadilly;
Buy your love a lily-bloom, buy your love a rose."
It had been raining, and the faint yet unmistakable tang sniffed from
wet London streets made one feel at home more than anything else. We
dispersed, each to make his interval of heaven according to taste,
means, and circumstances. That same evening I was fortunate in being
helped to forget the realities of war by two experiences. A
much-mustached A.P.M. threatened me with divers penalties for the
wearing of a soft hat; and I was present at a merry gathering of
theatrical luminaries, enormously interested in themselves, but
enormously bored by the war, which usurped so much newspaper space that
belonged by rights to the lighter drama.
Curtain and interval of ten days, at the end of which I was offered a
place as passenger in a machine destined for my own squadron. The bus
was to be taken to an aircraft depot in France from Rafborough
Aerodrome. Rafborough is a small town galvanised into importance by its
association with flying. Years ago, in the far-away days when aviation
itself was matter for wonder, the pioneers who concerned themselves with
the possibilities of war flying made their headquarters at Rafborough.
An experimental factory, rich in theory, was established, and near it
was laid out an aerodrome for the more practical work. Thousands of
machines have since been tested on the rough-grassed aerodrome, while
the neighbouring Royal Aircraft Factory has continued to produce
designs, ideas, aeroplanes, engines, and aircraft accessories. Formerly
most types of new machines were put through their official paces at
Rafborough, and most types, including some captures from the Huns, were
to be seen in its sheds. Probably Rafborough has harboured a larger
variety of aircraft and aircraft experts than any other place in the
world.
My friend the ferry-pilot having announced that the carriage waited, I
strapped our baggage, some new gramophone records, and myself into the
observer's office. I also took--tell this not in Gath, for the transport
of dogs by aeroplane has been forbidden--a terrier pup sent to a
fellow-officer by his family. At first the puppy was on a cord attached
to some bracing-wires; but as he showed fright when the machine took off
from the ground, I kept him on my lap for a time. Here he remained
subdued and apparently uninterested. Later, becoming inured to the
engine's drone and the slight vibration, he roused himself and wanted to
explore the narrowing passage toward the tail-end of the fuselage. The
little chap was, however, distinctly pleased to be on land again at
Saint Gregoire, where he kept well away from the machine, as if
uncertain whether the strange giant of an animal were friendly or a
dog-eater.
It was a morning lovely enough to be that of the world's birthday. Not a
cloud flecked the sky, the flawless blue of which was made tenuous by
sunlight. The sun brightened the kaleidoscopic earthscape below us, so
that rivers and canals looked like quicksilver threads, and even the
railway lines glistened. The summer countryside, as viewed from an
aeroplane, is to my mind the finest scene in the world--an unexampled
scene, of which poets will sing in the coming days of universal flight.
The varying browns and greens of the field-pattern merge into one
another delicately; the woods, splashes of bottle-green, relieve the
patchwork of hedge from too ordered a scheme; rivers and roads
criss-cross in riotous manner over the vast tapestry; pleasant villages
and farm buildings snuggle in the valleys or straggle on the slopes. The
wide and changing perspective is full of a harmony unspoiled by the
jarring notes evident on solid ground. Ugliness and dirt are camouflaged
by the clean top of everything. Grimy towns and jerry-built suburbs seem
almost attractive when seen in mass from a height. Slums, the dead
uniformity of long rows of houses, sordid back-gardens, bourgeois public
statues--all these eyesores are mercifully hidden by the roofed surface.
The very factory chimneys have a certain air of impressiveness, in
common with church towers and the higher buildings. Once, on flying over
the pottery town of Coalport--the most uninviting place I have ever
visited--I found that the altered perspective made it look delightful.
A westward course, with the fringe of London away on our left, brought
us to the coast-line all too soon. Passing Dovstone, the bus continued
across the Channel. A few ships, tiny and slow-moving when observed from
a machine at 8000 feet and travelling 100 miles an hour, spotted the
sea. A cluster of what were probably destroyers threw out trails of dark
smoke. From above mid-Channel we could see plainly the two coasts--that
of England knotted into small creeks and capes, that of France bent into
large curves, except for the sharp corner at Grisnez. Behind was
Blighty, with its greatness and its--sawdust. Ahead was the province of
battle, with its good-fellowship and its--mud. I lifted the puppy to
show him his new country, but he merely exhibited boredom and a dislike
of the sudden rush of air.
From Cape Grisnez we steered north-east towards Calais, so as to have a
clearly defined course to the aircraft depot of Saint Gregoire. After a
cross-Channel flight one notes a marked difference between the French
and English earthscapes. The French towns and villages seem to sprawl
less than those of England, and the countryside in general is more
compact and regular. The roads are straight and tree-bordered, so that
they form almost as good a guide to an airman as the railways. In
England the roads twist and twirl through each other like the threads of
a spider's web, and failing rail or river or prominent landmarks, one
usually steers by compass rather than trust to roads.
At Calais we turned to the right and followed a network of canals
south-westward to Saint Gregoire, where was an aircraft depot similar to
the one at Rafborough. New machines call at Saint Gregoire before
passing to the service of aerodromes, and in its workshops machines
damaged but repairable are made fit for further service. It is also a
higher training centre for airmen. Before they join a squadron pilots
fresh from their instruction in England gain experience on service
machines belonging to the "pool" at Saint Gregoire.
Having been told by telephone from my squadron that one of our pilots
had been detailed to take the recently arrived bus to the Somme, I
awaited his arrival and passed the time to good purpose in watching the
aerobatics and sham fights of the pool pupils. Every now and then
another plane from England would arrive high over the aerodrome, spiral
down and land into the wind. The ferry-pilot who had brought me left for
Rafborough almost immediately on a much-flown "quirk." The machine he
had delivered at Saint Gregoire was handed over to a pilot from Umpty
Squadron when the latter reported, and we took to the air soon after
lunch. The puppy travelled by road over the last lap of his long
journey, in the company of a lorry driver.
The bus headed east while climbing, for we had decided to follow the
British lines as far as the Somme, a course which would be prolific in
interesting sights, and which would make us eligible for that rare gift
of the gods, an air-fight over friendly territory.
The coloured panorama below gave place gradually to a wilderness--ugly
brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were
mottled by shell-holes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt
furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths--the
desolation surrounding the Fronts of yesterday and to-day.
North of Ypres we turned to the right and hovered awhile over this city
of ghosts. Seen from above, the shell of the ancient city suggests a
grim reflection on the mutability of beauty. I sought a comparison, and
could think of nothing but the skeleton of a once charming woman. The
ruins stood out in a magnificent disorder that was starkly impressive.
Walls without roof, buildings with two sides, churches without tower,
were everywhere prominent, as though proud to survive the orgy of
destruction. The shattered Cathedral retained much of its former
grandeur. Only the old Cloth Hall, half-razed and without arch or
belfry, seemed to cry for vengeance on the vandalism that wrecked it.
The gaping skeleton was grey-white, as if sprinkled by the powder of
decay. And one fancies that at night-time the ghosts of 1915 mingle with
the ghosts of Philip of Spain's era of conquest and the ghosts of great
days in other centuries, as they search the ruins for relics of the city
they knew.
Left of us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became
household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was
dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings,
which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent,
were the trenches, old and new, front-line, support, and communication.
Small saps projected from the long lines at every angle. So complicated
was the jumble that the sinister region of No Man's Land, with its
shell-holes, dead bodies, and barbed wire, was scarcely distinguishable.
A brown strip enclosed the trenches and wound northward and southward.
Its surface had been torn and battered by innumerable shells. On its
fringe, among the copses and crests, were the guns, though these were
evidenced only by an occasional flash. Behind, in front, and around them
were those links in the chain of war, the oft-cut telephone wires. The
desolation seemed utterly bare, though one knew that over and under it,
hidden from eyes in the air, swarmed the slaves of the gun, the rifle,
and the bomb.
Following the belt of wilderness southward, we were obliged to veer to
the right at St. Eloi, so as to round a sharp bend. Below the bend, and
on the wrong side of it, was the Messines Ridge, the recent capture of
which has straightened the line as far as Hooge, and flattened the Ypres
salient out of existence as a salient. Next came the torn and desolate
outline of Plug Street Wood, and with it reminiscences of a splendid
struggle against odds when shell-shortage hampered our 1915 armies.
Armentieres appeared still worthy to be called a town. It was battered,
but much less so than Ypres, possibly because it was a hotbed of German
espionage until last year. The triangular denseness of Lille loomed up
from the flat soil on our left.
As we passed down the line the brown band narrowed until it seemed a
strip of discoloured water-marked ribbon sewn over the mosaic of open
country. The trench-lines were monotonous in their sameness. The
shell-spotted area bulged at places, as for example Festubert, Neuve
Chapelle (of bitter memory), Givenchy, Hulluch, and Loos. Lens, well
behind the German trenches in those days, showed few marks of
bombardment. The ribbon of ugliness widened again between Souchez and
the yet uncaptured Vimy Ridge, but afterwards contracted as far as
Arras, that ragged sentinel of the war frontier.
At Arras we entered our own particular province, which, after months of
flying over it, I knew better than my native county. Gun-flashes became
numerous, kite balloons hung motionless, and we met restless aeroplane
formations engaged on defensive patrols. With these latter on guard our
chance of a scrap with roving enemy craft would have been remote; though
for that matter neither we nor they saw a single black-crossed machine
throughout the afternoon.
From Gommecourt to the Somme was an area of concentrated destruction.
The wilderness swelled outwards, becoming twelve miles wide at parts.
Tens of thousands of shells had pocked the dirty soil, scores of mine
explosions had cratered it. Only the pen of a Zola could describe
adequately the zone's intense desolation, as seen from the air. Those
ruins, suggestive of abandoned scrap-heaps, were formerly villages. They
had been made familiar to the world through matter-of-fact reports of
attack and counter-attack, capture and recapture. Each had a tale to
tell of systematic bombardment, of crumbling walls, of wild hand-to-hand
fighting, of sudden evacuation and occupation. Now they were nothing but
useless piles of brick and glorious names--Thiepval, Pozieres, La
Boiselle, Guillemont, Flers, Hardecourt, Guinchy, Combles, Bouchavesnes,
and a dozen others.
Of all the crumbled roads the most striking was the long, straight one
joining Albert and Bapaume. It looked fairly regular for the most part,
except where the trenches cut it. Beyond the scrap-heap that once was
Pozieres two enormous quarries dipped into the earth on either side of
the road. Until the Messines explosion they were the largest mine
craters on the western front. Farther along the road was the scene of
the first tank raids, where on September 16 the metal monsters waddled
across to the gaping enemy and ate up his pet machine-gun emplacements
before he had time to recover from his surprise. At the road's end was
the forlorn stronghold of Bapaume. One by one the lines of defence
before it had been stormed, and it was obvious that the town must fall,
though its capture was delayed until months later by a fierce defence at
the Butte de Warlencourt and elsewhere. The advance towards Bapaume was
of special interest to R.F.C. squadrons on the Somme, for the town had
been a troublesome centre of anti-aircraft devilries. Our field-guns now
being too close for Herr Archie, he had moved to more comfortable
headquarters.
Some eight miles east of Bapaume the Bois d'Havrincourt stood out
noticeably. Around old Mossy-Face, as the wood was known in R.F.C.
messes, were clustered many Boche aerodromes. Innumerable duels had
been fought in the air-country between Mossy-Face and the lines. Every
fine day the dwellers in the trenches before Bapaume saw machines
swerving round each other in determined effort to destroy. This region
was the hunting-ground of many dead notabilities of the air, including
the Fokker stars Boelcke and Immelmann, besides British pilots as
brilliant but less advertised.
Below the Pozieres-Bapaume road were five small woods, grouped like the
Great Bear constellation of stars. Their roots were feeding on hundreds
of dead bodies, after each of the five--Trones, Mametz, Foureaux,
Delville, and Bouleaux--had seen wild encounters with bomb and bayonet
beneath its dead trees. Almost in the same position relative to the
cluster of woods as is the North Star to the Great Bear, was a
scrap-heap larger than most, amid a few walls yet upright. This was all
that remained of the fortress of Combles. For two years the enemy
strengthened it by every means known to military science, after which
the British and French rushed in from opposite sides and met in the main
street.
A few minutes down the line brought our machine to the sparkling Somme,
the white town of Peronne, and the then junction of the British and
French lines. We turned north-west and made for home. Passing over some
lazy sausage balloons, we reached Albert. Freed at last from the
intermittent shelling from which it suffered for so long, the town was
picking up the threads of activity. The sidings were full of trucks, and
a procession of some twenty lorries moved slowly up the road to
Bouzincourt. As reminder of anxious days, we noted a few skeleton roofs,
and the giant Virgin Mary in tarnished gilt, who, after withstanding
bombardments sufficient to have wrecked a cathedral, leaned over at
right angles to her pedestal, suspended in apparently miraculous fashion
by the three remaining girders.
We flew once more over a countryside of multi-coloured crops and
fantastic woods, and so to the aerodrome.
* * * * *
Snatches of familiar flying-talk, unheard during the past ten days of
leave, floated from the tea-table as I entered the mess: "Folded up as
he pulled out of the dive--weak factor of safety--side-slipped away from
Archie--vertical gust--choked on the fine adjustment--made rings round
the Hun--went down in flames near Douai."
The machine that "went down in flames near Douai" was piloted by the man
whose puppy I had brought from England.