To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all
roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a
trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of
a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in
the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a
rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by
many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be
little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for
painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival
Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and
comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who
would deny it.
You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come
perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless,
sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. The country after
that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the
map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and
radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium--or
whatever it be--is all gone away, and there stretches for miles
instead one of the world’s great deserts, a thing to take its place no
longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the
Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named
the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the
trenches. Overhead floats until it is chased away an aëroplane with
little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful
height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation
and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out
round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him;
black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint
tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.
You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a
railway, perhaps a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a
village, and hear English songs, but no one who has not seen it can
imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a desert
clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by
some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country.
Would it not be glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like
that?
Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only
one field from skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one
goes with companions that this event in our history has drawn from all
parts of the earth. On that road you may hear all in one walk where is
the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they laid a
drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a
farmer lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee
crop; you may hear Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.
In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes
of exclamation after them, written up on notice boards among the
ruins. Ruins and German orders. That turning movement of Von Kluck’s
near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it we might have had
ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may comfort
himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny
shapes the world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination
can have had no place amongst the scheme of things.
Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the
road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and
lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge
shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and
hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty
regularly you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by,
and it can be a very strong wind indeed. One’s horse, if one is
riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen horses far more
frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting in
the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no
great attention from man or beast.
And so we come in sight of the support trenches where we are to dwell
for a week before we go on for another mile over the hills, where the
black fountains are rising.