At a turning, during a lull in the storm, I come very unexpectedly
upon a little knot of French sailors. I cannot refrain from beckoning
to them, as one would beckon to children whom one had suddenly found
again in some distant jungle, and they come running to the door of my
car equally delighted to see someone in naval uniform. They seem to
be picked men; they have such gallant, comely faces and such frank,
spirited eyes. Other sailors, too, who were passing by at a little
distance and whom I had not called, come likewise and surround me as
if it were the natural thing to do, but with respectful familiarity,
for are we not in a strange country, and at war? Only yesterday, they
tell me, they arrived a whole battalion strong, with their officers,
and they are camping in a neighbouring village while waiting to "down"
the Boches. And I should like so much to make a _détour_ and pay them
a visit in their own camp if I were not pressed for time, tied down to
the hour of my audience with His Majesty. Indeed it gives me pleasure
to associate with our soldiers, but it is a still greater delight to
associate with our sailors, among whom I passed forty years of my
life. Even before I caught sight of them, just from hearing them talk,
I could recognise them for what they were. More than once, on our
military thoroughfares in the north, on a pitch-dark night, when it was
one of their detachments who stopped me to demand the password, I have
recognised them simply by the sound of their voices.
One of our generals, army commander on the Northern Front, was speaking
to me yesterday of that pleasant, kindly familiarity which prevails
from the highest to the lowest grade of the military ladder, and which
is a new tone characteristic of this essentially national war in which
we all march hand in hand.
"In the trenches," he said to me, "if I stop to talk to a soldier,
other soldiers gather round me so that I may talk to them too. And they
are becoming more and more admirable for their high spirits and their
brotherliness. If only our thousands of dead could be restored to us
what a benefit this war would have bestowed upon us, drawing us near
together, until we all possess but one heart."
It is a long way to the General Headquarters. Out in the open country
the weather is appalling beyond description. The roads are broken
up, fields flooded until they resemble marshes, and sometimes there
are trenches, _chevaux de frise_, reminding the traveller that
the barbarians are still very near. And yet all this, which ought
to be depressing, no longer succeeds in being so. Every meeting
with soldiers--and the car passes them every minute--is sufficient
to restore your serenity. They have all the same cheerful faces,
expressive of courage and gaiety. Even the poor sappers, up to their
knees in water, working hard to repair the shelter pits and defences,
have an expression of gaiety under their dripping service-caps. What
numbers of soldiers there are in the smallest villages, Belgian and
French, very fraternally intermingling. By what wonderful organisation
of the commissariat are these men housed and fed?
But who asserted that there were no Belgian soldiers left? On the
contrary, I pass imposing detachments on their way to the front, in
good order, admirably equipped, and of fine bearing, with a convoy of
excellent artillery of the very latest pattern. Never can enough be
said in praise of the heroism of a people who had every reason for not
preparing themselves for war, since they were under the protection
of solemn treaties that should have preserved them forever from any
such necessity, yet who, nevertheless, sustained and checked the brunt
of the attack of the great barbarism. Disabled at first and almost
annihilated, yet they are recovering themselves and gathering around
their sublimely heroic king.