a day. So do most of the others. This is how you prove to the line
that you have a right to be at G. H. Q. When you get to know G. H. Q.
it seems like any other business institution. Many are there who don’t
want to be there; but they have been found out. They are specialists,
who know how to do one thing particularly well and are kept doing it.
No use of growling that you would like a “fighting job.”
G. H. Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound
of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that
it commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts
consummate. One has seen dreary, flat lands of mud and leafless trees
become fair with the spring, the growing harvests reaped, and the
leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same place;
the soldiers billeted in the same villages; the puffs of shrapnel
smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same villages
being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of guns; always
the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains drawn, speed
by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of the thing
holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an organised
civilisation working at destruction win the admiration. There is
a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of
response to orders.
One is under varying spells. To-day he seems in the midst of a
fantastic world, whose horror makes it impossible of realisation.
To-morrow, as his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among
wheat-fields where peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it
is a world of peace, and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a
train for the distant roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real
of worlds, an exclusive man’s world, where nothing counts but organised
material force, and all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a
part of the permanent population.
One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like
the energy of the sun. The war is going on forever. The reaper cuts the
harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews itself.
Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of men.
The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes eternal.
Nothing can stop it.
XV
TRENCHES IN WINTER
A trench must be “experienced”--Appearance of the trench--A
trench periscope--“One hundred and fifty yards away”--
Imagination at work--The dead wall opposite--Trench realism--
A genuine officer--A night excursion--General Mud--The German
flares--A house in a trench wall--Oozing walls--“A ditch in
the mud”--Discovered by a searchlight--Suspense--Arrival of
supplies--The relief and cleanliness.
The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is that
between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the mud
and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds were
much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is like no
other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed with
glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the mud
had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the automobile.
In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the Western
prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go into a
trench as often as I pleased I became “fed up” with trenches, as the
British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a railroad
cut. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as a ditch where
some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and looking across a
field at some more men who were eating sausage and “K. K.” bread, each
party taking care that the other did not see him.
Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that
censorship will permit. Whoever “tours” one is convinced that none of
the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and writes one
of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like what they
thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public still
fails to visualise a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes so
much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all the
powers of destruction within man’s command are in deadlock has become
a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by words. No one has
yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of lightning, or Niagara
Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He cannot put any one
else there. He can only be there himself.
The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of
a wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the
doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets,
which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a
pleasant prospector’s camp in Alaska. Only everybody was in uniform and
occasionally something whished through the branches of the trees. One
looked up to see what it was and where it was going, this stray bullet,
without being any wiser.
We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of sandbags--
simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an ordinary
pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like
bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid across the
top of the pile. Of course, you did not wear a white hat or wave a
handkerchief. One does not do that when he plays hide-and-seek.
Or, if you preferred, you might look into a chip of glass, with your
head wholly screened by the wall of sandbags, which got a reflection
from another chip of glass above the parapet. This is the trench
periscope; the principle of all of them is the same. They have no more
variety than the fashions in knives, forks and spoons on the dinner
table.
One hundred and fifty yards away across a dead field was another wall
of sandbags. The distance is important. It is always stated in all
descriptions. One hundred and fifty yards is not much. Only when you
get within forty or fifty yards have you something to brag about. Yet
three hundred yards may be more dangerous than fifteen, if an artillery
“hate” is on.
Look for an hour and all you see is the wall of sandbags. Not even a
rabbit runs across that dead space. The situation gets its power of
suggestion from the fact that there are Germans behind the other wall--
real, live Germans. They are trying to kill the British on our side
and we are trying to kill them; and they are as coyly unaccommodating
about putting up their heads as we are. The emotion of the situation
is in the fact that a sharpshooter might send a shot at your cap; he
might smash a periscope; a shell might come. A rifle cracks--that is
all. Nearly every one has heard the sound, which is no different at the
front than elsewhere. And the sound is the only information you get. It
is not so interesting as shooting at a deer, for you can tell whether
you hit him or not. The man who fires from a trench is not even certain
whether he saw a German or not. He shot at some shadow or object along
the crest which might have been a German head.
Thus, one must take the word of those present that there is any
more life behind than in front of the sandbags. However, if you are
sceptical you may have conviction by starting to crawl over the top of
the British parapet. After dark the soldiers will slip over and bring
your body back. It is this something you do not see, this something
the imagination visualises, that convinces you that you ought to be
considerate enough of posterity to write the real description of a
trench. Look for an hour at that wall of sandbags and your imagination
sees more and more, while your eye sees only sandbags. What does this
war mean to you? There it is; only you can describe what this war means
to you.
Many a soldier who has spent months in trenches has not seen a
German. I boast that I have seen real Germans through my glasses.
They were walking along a road back of their trenches. It was most
fascinating. All the Germans I had ever seen in Germany were not half
so interesting. I strained my eyes watching those wonderful beings as I
might at the first visiting party from Mars to earth. There must have
been at least ten out of the Kaiser’s millions.
In summer that wood had become a sylvan bower, or a pastoral paradise,
or a leafy nook, as you please. The sun played through the branches in
a patchwork; flowers bloomed on the dirt roofs of the shanties, and a
swallow had a nest--famous swallow!--on one of the parapets. True,
it was not on the front parapet; it was on the reserve. The swallow
knew what he was about. He was taking a reasonable amount of risk and
playing reasonably secure to get a front seat, according to the ethics
of the war correspondent. The two walls of sandbags were in the same
place that they had been six months previously. A little patching had
been done after some shells had hit the mark, though not many had come.
For this was a quiet corner. Neither side was interested in stirring up
the hornets’ nest. If a member of Parliament wished to see what trench
life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the safest
places for a few minutes’ look at the sandbags which Mr. Atkins stared
at week in and week out. Some Conservatives, however, in the case of
Radical members, would have chosen a different kind of trench to show;
for example, that one which was suggested to me by the staff officer
with the twinkle in his eye in my best day at the front.
In want of an army pass to the front in order to write your own
description, then, put up a wall of sandbags in a vacant lot and
another one hundred and fifty yards away and fire a rifle occasionally
from your wall at the head of a man on the opposite side, who will
shoot at yours--and there you are. If you prefer the realistic to the
romantic school and wish to appreciate the nature of trench life in
winter, find a piece of wet, flat country, dig a ditch seven or eight
feet deep and stand in icy water looking across at another ditch, and
sleep in a cellar that you have dug in the wall, and you are near
understanding what Mr. Atkins has been doing for his country. The ditch
should be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines binding the squares of
a checker-board; that makes more work and localises the burst of shells.
Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require
mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits
on all who wage war underground in Flanders. Incidentally, you must
look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck. For all the
while you are fighting Flanders as well as the Germans.
To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then,
arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which
will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will
do for high explosive shells that burst on contact; and sink heavier
charges of dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines--and set
them off, while you engage some one to toss grenades and bombs at you.
Though scores of officers’ letters had given their account of trench
life with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my
first trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents,
I saw the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of
that particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the
Victoria Cross, won in another war for helping to “save the guns.” He
made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the kind
who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf, send out
a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew how to
use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around or when
he returned to the club-house.
Men could go into danger behind him without realising that they were
in danger; they could share hardship without realising that there were
any hardships. Such as he put faith and backbone into soldiers by their
very manner; and if their professional training equal their talents,
when war comes they win victories.
Of course, we had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British
warms, those short, thick coats which accrue a modicum of mud for you
to carry besides what you are carrying on your boots. We walked along
a hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares,
which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of
light. They seemed to be saying: “Come on! Try to crawl up on us and
play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will stop
you. Come on! We make the night into day, and watching never ceases
from our parapet.”
Occasional rifle-shots and a machine gun’s ter-rut were audible from
the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left
as far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of
mud, as one might cross lots when he had lost his way, and plunged on
till the commanding officer said, “We go in here!” and we descended
into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could
be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup. Mud oozed from
the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wood supports
which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the German
trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of battle
where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war was
strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen feet.
The soldier tries to kill his adversary; he tries to prevent his
adversary from killing him. He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking
life. While he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as
curses mud. Mother Earth is still unconquerable. In her bosom man still
finds security; such security that “dug in” he can defy at a hundred
yards’ distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She
it is that has made the deadlock of the trenches and plastered their
occupants with her miry hands.
The C. O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over
an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in
his house in the trench-wall to a stooping posture, said that all was
quiet. His uniform seemed fleckless. Was it possible that he wore
some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters? He was another of the
type of Captain P----, my host at Neuve Chapelle; a type formed on
the type of seniors such as his C. O. Unanalysable this quality, but
there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing.
A man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in midwinter as
in a drawing-room has my admiration. They never lose their manner,
these English officers. They carry it into the charge and back in the
ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much as that
their friends will “cut out the hero stuff,” as our own officers say.
In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or
sitting. The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on
guard, whose faces were half hidden by coat collars or ear-flaps--
imperturbable, silent, marooned and marooning, watchful and fearless.
The thing had to be done and they were doing it; and they were going to
keep on doing it.
There was nothing dry in that trench, unless it was the bowl of a man’s
pipe. There were not even any braziers. In your nostrils was the odour
of the soil of Flanders, cultivated by many generations through many
wars. As night wore on the sky was brightened by cold, winter stars and
their soft light became noticeable between the disagreeable flashes of
the flares.
We walked on and on. It was like walking in a winding ditch; that was
all. The same kind of walls at every turn; the same kind of dim figures
in saturated, heavy army overcoats. Slipping off the board walk into
the ooze, one was thrown against the mud wall as his foot sank. Then
he held fast to his boot straps lest the boot remain in the mud while
his foot came out. Only the C. O. never slipped. He knew how to tour
trenches. The others were as clumsy beside him as if they were trying
to walk a tight rope.
“Good night!” he said to each group of men as he passed, with the cheer
of one who brings a confident spirit to vigils in the mud and with that
note of affection of the commander who has learned to love his men by
the token of ordeals when he saw them hold fast against odds.
“Good night, sir!” they answered; and in their tone was something which
you liked to hear--a finer tribute to the C. O. than medals which
kings can bestow. It was affection and trust. They were ready to follow
him, for they knew that he knew how to lead. I was not surprised when I
heard of his promotion, later. I shall not be surprised when I hear of
it again. For he had brain and heart and the gift of command.
“Shall we go on or shall we go back?” he asked when we had gone about a
mile. “Have you had enough?”
We had, without a dissenting voice. A ditch in the mud--that was all,
no matter how much farther we went. So we passed out of the trench into
a soapy, slippery mud which had been ploughed ground in the autumn,
now become lathery with the beat of men’s steps. Our party became
separated, when some foundered and tried to hoist themselves with both
boot straps at once. The C. O. called out in order to locate us in the
darkness, and the voice of an officer in the trenches cut in: “Keep
still! The Germans are only a hundred yards away!”
“Sorry!” whispered the C. O. “I ought to have known better.”
Then one of the German searchlights that had been swinging its stream
of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye on
us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-splashed
figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette.
“Stand still!”
That is the order whenever searchlights come spying in your direction.
So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and wondering. It
was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our thoughts out of
the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was the eye of death
looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we should have
known that we were discovered and that it was no longer good tactics to
stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into the porridge. The
searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the machine gun was nodding or
perhaps he did not think us worth while. Either supposition was equally
agreeable to us.
We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our
backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of
soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench. Through
the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed wire, every
board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in the ditch. The
searchlights and the flares and the machine guns waited for the relief.
They must be fooled. But in this operation most of the casualties in
the average trenches, both British and German, occurred. Without a
chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by an assassin in the
night.
When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the trenches
came out, a magnet drew their weary steps--cleanliness. They thought
of nothing except soap and water. For a week they need not fight mud
or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud, waged war against
both British and Germans. Standing on the slats of the concrete floor
of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated outer skin of
clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and, naked, leapt into
great, steaming vats, where they scrubbed and gurgled and gurgled and
scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply the towels, they were men with
the feel of new bodies in another world.
Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and
disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the
houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and
rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip--but chiefly rest and the
joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often
twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical
man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger
and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back from
fatigue to the glow of strength.
Those who came out of the trenches quite “done up,” Colonel Bate,
Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After
the washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play
dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up. They
had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just as well as
he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought into that
isolated room which every man must pass through before he was admitted
to the full radiance of the colonel’s curative smile. When they were
able to return to the trenches, each was written down as one unit more
in the colonel’s weekly statistical reports. In summer he entertained
_al fresco_ in an open air camp.
XVI
IN NEUVE CHAPELLE
British advance--The human stone wall moves--Neuve Chapelle “on
the map”--The travelled British army--A demolished trench--
Stray bullets--The intelligence system--A captured spy--
Old friends--Power of the British artillery--Front line
breastworks--Business-like readiness--A cosy house--A ticklish
walk--Glowing braziers--“How do they feel in the States?”--
The Rhine or Berlin?--The passing of the “Soldiers Three”--The
modern Tommy--Capturing a helmet.
Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich
farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where
the farmers could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a
notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having
to go to the neighbouring town of Béthune, Neuve Chapelle became famous
only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a village
after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire.
It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which
have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen
thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here
the British after the long winter’s stalemate in the mud, where they
stuck when the exhausted Germans could press them no farther, took the
offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.
The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the
guns’ destruction; and they kept on while the shield of shell-fire
held. When it left an opening for the German machine guns through its
curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns
had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was
learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were
reached.
The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and come
to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew that
the thing could be done with guns and shells enough--and only with
enough. This means a good deal when you have been under dog for a long
time. Months were to pass waiting for enough shells and guns, with
many little actions and their steady drain of life, while every one
looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was something definite
for a man to say that he had been wounded at Neuve Chapelle and quite
indefinite to say that he had been wounded in the course of the day’s
work in the trenches.
No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have
looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was going
on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing it. My
view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still steaming.