intact and peaceful, a passing glance from an automobile, in March,
1915, Neuve Chapelle in ruins was the one town in Europe which I most
wanted to see. Correspondents had not then established themselves. The
staff officer whom I asked if I might spend a night in the new British
line was a cautious man. He bade me sign a paper freeing the British
army from any responsibility. Judging by the general attitude of the
Staff, one could hardly take the request seriously. One correspondent
less ought to please any Staff; but he said that he had an affection
for the regulars and knew that there were always plenty of recruits
to take their places without resorting to conscription. The real
responsibility was with the Germans. He suggested that I might go out
to the German trenches and see if I could obtain a paper from them.
He thought if I were quick about it I might get at least a yard in
front of the British parapet in daylight. His sense of humour I had
recognised when we had met in Bulgaria.
Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the
travelled British army. At the brigade headquarters town, which, as
one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in
mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me. I found that I
had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come across
a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote Asia
which British officers are fond of making. He was “all there,” whether
dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the trenches. I
made myself at home in the parlour of the private house occupied by
himself and staff, while he went on with his work. No flag outside the
house; no sign that it was Headquarters. An automobile stopped in front
only long enough for an officer to enter it or alight from it. Brigade
headquarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies
like to locate for their guns.
“Are you ready? Have you your rubber boots?” the brigadier asked a few
minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door. It would not
do to approach the trenches until after dark. Of course, I had rubber
boots. One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to trenches
without rubber boots in winter. “I’ll take my constitutional,” he
added; “the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise.”
He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand why
the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had gone a mile
or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point where, just
at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from battalion
headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had yielded beet
root in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-holes. Dusk
settled into darkness. No human being was in sight except ourselves.
“There’s the first line of German trenches before the attack,” said my
companion. “Our guns got fairly on them.” Dimly I saw what seemed like
a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost out
of the shape of a trench by British shells. “There was no living in it
when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get out.”
Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and destruction
by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent or ricochet
bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of spent bullets
at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had gone high
over the British trenches; it had carried the full range; and the
chance of its hitting any one was ridiculously small. But the nearer
you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a
victim. “Hit by a stray bullet!” is a very common saying at the front.
At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and
following this we came to a peasant’s cottage. Inside, two soldiers
were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a
window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had
stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires
stretched on poles--the wires that form the web of the army’s
intelligence.
Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire.
There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately
repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for
entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be
filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir
John French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and
this battalion headquarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same space of
time that a railroad president may speak over the long distance from
Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.
These two men at the table, their faces tanned by exposure, men in the
thirties, had the British regular of long service stamped all over
them. War was an old story to them; and an old story, too, laying
signal wires under fire.
“We’re very comfortable,” said one. “No danger from stray bullets or
from shrapnel; but if one of the Jack Johnsons come in, why, there’s no
more cottage and no more argument between you and me. We’re dead and
maybe buried, or maybe scattered over the landscape, along with the
broken pieces of the roof.”
A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room,
which had passageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds.
This seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a
private’s khaki. He had come into this battalion’s trenches from our
front and said that he belonged to the D---- regiment and had been out
on patrol and lost his way.
It was two miles to that regiment and two miles is a long distance to
stray between two lines of trenches so close together, when at any
point in your own line you will find friends. It was possible that this
fellow’s real name was Hans Schmidt, who had learned cockney English in
childhood in London, and in a dead British private’s uniform had come
into the British trenches to get information to which he was anything
but welcome. He was to be sent under guard to the D---- regiment for
identification; and if he were found to be a Hans and not a Tommy--
well, though he had tried a very stupid dodge he must have known what
to expect when he was found out, if his officers had properly trained
him in German rules of war.
I had a glimpse of him in the candlelight before stooping to feel my
way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer
ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds around
the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose from his
seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot, tobacco, pipes,
a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and maps.
If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple
as the major’s, there would be less affectation in the world. He
introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and
to one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and
blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.
It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade
headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the war
began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion
Williams, U.S.M.C., reads this out in Peking, let it tell him that the
major is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the
outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking
Club.
“How is it? Paining you any?” asked the major of Captain P----, on the
other side of the table.
“No account. It’s quite all right,” said the captain.
“Using the sling?”
“Part of the time. Hardly need it, though.”
Captain P---- was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling; who
seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place; who
goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and shells
and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but they are
given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way of smiling
at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more often found at
the front than back at Headquarters; or perhaps it is more noticeable
there.
“You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday,” the major
explained. “He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the
trench.” I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given
to such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk
about his arm. “You are to go with him into the trench for the night,”
the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.
“Aren’t you going to have dinner with us?” the major asked him.
“Why, I had something to eat not very long ago,” said Captain P----.
One was not sure whether he had or not.
“There’s plenty,” said the major.
“In that event, I don’t see why I shouldn’t eat when I have a chance,”
the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit,
particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for
plenty of body-furnace heat.
We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese;
what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and starting
for the trench, this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to carry
my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking The Hague
conventions.
Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls
in the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other
fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and that
broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a good
eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by one of the
monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried on for ten
feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top of the
stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day, which
was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg and fought within about
the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground, had been paid
for by shells, bullets, and human life.
But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We
are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line
are held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is
raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes
practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud
and water.
We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a spotty
white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British breastworks
still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of this
wall rifles were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly
gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp,
quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and
mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all,
meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling
fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of
the new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where
pickets watched in the open in the old days before armies met in
pitched battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the
parapet, watching.
Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of
another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of
woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their
advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells
in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along
this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop
is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had
risen to a man’s height, and with rifles and machine guns had riddled
the German counter-attack.
And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they,
too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies were
fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across the
open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.
“Will you have a shot, sir?” one of the sentries asked me.
“At what?”
“Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see
moving,” he said.
But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to
accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two
thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it
died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.
“Now, which is my house?” asked Captain P----. “I really can’t find my
own home in the dark.”
Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in
height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud. The mud is
put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.
“Here you are, sir!” said a soldier.
Asking me to wait until he made a light, the captain bent over as if
he were about to crawl under the top rail of a fence and his head
disappeared. After he had put a match to a candle and stuck it on a
stick thrust into the wall, I could see the interior of his habitation.
A rubber sheet spread on the moist earth served as floor, carpet,
mattress, and bed. At a squeeze there was room for two others besides
himself. They did not need any doormat, for when they lay down their
feet would be at the door.
“Quite cosy, don’t you think?” remarked the captain. He seemed to feel
that he had a royal chamber. But, then, he was the kind of man who
might sleep in a muddy field under a wagon and regard the shelter of
the wagon body as a luxury. “Leave your knapsack here,” he continued,
“and we’ll go and see what is doing along the line.”
In other words, after you had left your bag in the host’s hall, he
suggested a stroll in the village or across the fields. But only to see
war would he have asked you to walk in such mud.
“Not quite so loud!” he warned a soldier who was bringing up boards
from the rear under cover of darkness. “If the Germans hear they may
start firing.”
Two other men were piling mud on top of a section of breastwork at an
angle to the main line.
“What is that for?” the captain asked.
“They get an enfilade on us here, sir, and Mr. ---- (the lieutenant)
told me to make this higher.”
“That’s no good. A bullet will go right through,” said the captain.
“We’ll have to wait until we get more sandbags.”
A little farther on we came to an open space, with no protection
between us and the Germans. Half a dozen men were piling earth against
a staked chicken wire to extend the breastworks. Rather, they were
piling mud, and they were besmirched from head to foot. They looked
like reeking Neptunes rising from a slough. In the same position in
daylight, standing full height before German rifles at three hundred
yards, they would have been shot dead before they could leap to cover.
“How does it go?” asked the captain.
“Very well, sir; though what we need is sandbags.”
“We’ll have some up to-morrow.”
At the moment there was no firing in the vicinity. Faintly I heard the
Germans pounding stakes, at work improving their own breastworks.
A British soldier appeared out of the darkness in front.
“We’ve found two of our men out there with their heads blown off by
shells,” he said. “Have we permission to go out and bury them, sir?”
“Yes.”
They would be as safe as the fellows piling mud against the chicken
wire, unless the Germans opened fire. If they did, we could fire
on their working party, or in the direction of the sound. For that
matter, we knew through our glasses by day the location of any weak
places in their breastworks and they knew where ours were. A sort of
“after-you-gentlemen-if-you-fire-we-shall” understanding sometimes
exists between the foes up to a certain point. Each side understands
instinctively the limitation of that point. Too much noise in working;
a number of men going out to bury dead or making enough noise to be
heard, and the ball begins. A deep, broad ditch filled with water made
a break in our line. No doubt a German machine gun was trained on it.
“A little bridging is required here,” said the captain. “We’ll have it
done to-morrow night. The break is no disadvantage if they attack; in
fact, we’d rather like to have them try for it. But it makes movement
along the line difficult by day.”
When we were across and once more behind the breastworks, he called my
attention to some high ground in the rear.
“One of our officers took a short cut across there in daylight,” he
said. “He was quite exposed and they drew a bead on him from the German
trench and got him through the arm. Not a serious hit. It wasn’t
cricket for any one to go out to bring him in. He realised this and
called out to leave him to himself, and crawled to cover on his hands
and knees.”
I was getting the commonplaces of trench life. Thus far it had been a
quiet night and was to remain so. Reddish, flickering swaths of light
were thrown across the fields between the trenches by the enemy’s Roman
candle flares. One tried to estimate how many flares the Germans must
use every night from Switzerland to the North Sea.
On our side, the only light was from our braziers. Thomas Atkins has
become a patron of braziers made by punching holes in buckets; and so
have the Germans. Punch holes in a bucket, start a fire inside, and you
have cheer and warmth and light through the long night vigils. Two or
three days before we had located a sniper between the lines by seeing
him swing his fire pot to make a draft against the embers.
If you have ever sat around a campfire in the forest or on the plains
you need be told nothing further. One of the old, glamourous features
of war survives in these glowing braziers, spreading their genial rays
among the little houses and lighting the faces of the men who stand or
squat in encircling groups around the coals, which dry wet clothes,
slake the moisture of a section of earth, make the bayonets against the
walls glisten, and reveal the position of a machine gun with its tape
ready for firing.
Values are relative, and a brazier in the trenches makes the
satisfaction of a steam-heated room in winter very superficial and
artificial. You are at home there with Tommy Atkins, regular of an old
line English regiment, in his heavy khaki overcoat and solid boots
and wool puttees, a sturdy, hardened man of a terrific war. He, the
regular, the shilling-a-day policeman of the empire, was still doing
the fighting at the front. The new army, which embraces all classes,
was not yet in action.
This man and that one were at Mons. This one and that one had been
through the whole campaign without once seeing Mother England for whom
they were fighting. The affection in which Captain P---- was held
extended through his regiment, for we had left his own company behind.
At every turn he was asked about his arm.
“You’ve made a mistake, sir. This isn’t a hospital,” as one man
expressed it. Oh, but the captain was bored with hearing about that
arm! If he is wounded again I am sure that he will try to keep the fact
a secret.
These veterans could “grouse,” as the British call it. Grousing is one
of Tommy’s privileges. When they got to grousing worst on the retreat
from Mons, their officers knew that what they really wanted was to make
another stand. They were tired of falling back; they meant to take a
rest and fight a while. Their language was yours, the language in which
our own laws and schoolbooks are written. They made the old blood
call. For months they had been taking bitter medicine; very bitter for
a British soldier. The way they took it will, perhaps, remain a greater
tribute than any part they play in future victories.
“How do they feel in the States?” I was asked. “Against us?”
“No. By no means.”
“I don’t see how they could be!” Tommy exclaimed.
Tommy may not be much on argument as it is developed by the
controversial spirit of college professors, but he had said about
all there was to say. How can we be? Hardly, after you come to know
T. Atkins and his officers and talk English with them around their
campfires.
“The Germans are always sending up flares,” I remarked. “You send up
none. How about it?”
“It cheers them. They’re downhearted!” said one of the group. “You
wouldn’t deny them their fireworks, would you, sir?”
“That shows who is top dog,” said another. “They’re the ones that are
worried.”
I had heard of trench exhaustion, trench despair, but there was no sign
of it in a regiment that had been through all the hell and mire that
the British army had known since the war began. To no one had Neuve
Chapelle meant so much as to these common soldiers. It was their first
real victory. They were standing on soil won from the Germans.
“We’re going to Berlin!” said a big fellow who was standing, palms
downward to the fire. “It’s settled. We’re going to Berlin.”
A smaller man with his back against the sandbags disagreed. There was a
trench argument.
“No, we’re going to the Rhine,” he said. “The Russians are going to
Berlin.” (This was in March, 1915, remember.)
“How can they when they ain’t over the Balkans yet?”
“The Carpathians, you mean.”
“Well, they’re both mountains and the Russians have got to cross them.
And there’s a place called Cracow in that region. What’s the matter of
a pair of mountain ranges between you and me, Bill? You’re strong on
geography, but you fail to follow the campaign.”
“The Rhine, I say!”
“It’s the Rhine first, but Berlin is what you want to keep your mind
on.”
Then I asked if they had ever had any doubt that they would reach the
Rhine.
“How could we, sir?”
“And how about the Germans. Do you hate them?”
“Hate!” exclaimed the big man. “What good would it do to hate them?
No, we don’t hate. We get our blood up when we’re fighting and when
they don’t play the game. But hate! Don’t you think that’s kind of
ridiculous, sir?”
“How do they fight?”
“They take a bit of beating, do the _Boches_!”
“So you call them _Boches_!”
“Yes. They don’t like that. But sometimes we call them Allemands, which
is Germans in French. Oh, we’re getting quite French scholars!”
“They’re good soldiers. Not many tricks they’re not up to. But in my
opinion they’re overdoing the hate. You can’t keep up to your work on
hate, sir. I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too.”
“Still, you would like the war over? You’d like to go home?”
They certainly would. Back to the barracks, out of the trenches. They
certainly would.
“And call it a draw?”
“Call it a draw, now! Call it a draw, after all we’ve been through--”
“Spring is coming. The ground will dry up and it will be warm.”
“And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in
August, we tell the _Boches_.”
“Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees, or
whatever those mountains are, too. I read they’re all covered with snow
in winter.”
It was good, regular soldier talk, very “homey” to me. As you will
observe, I have not elided the h’s. Indeed, Tommy has a way of
prefixing his h’s to the right vowels more frequently than a generation
ago. The “Soldiers Three” type has passed. Popular education will have
its way and induce better habits. Believing in the old remedy for
exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum every
day to the men. But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy regulars,
and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they have seen
fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child’s play. So they
asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.
Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism. He fights
because he is paid and it is his business. That is an insinuation.
Tommy doesn’t care for the “hero stuff,” or for waving flags and
speech-making. Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of thing
kills. His weapons are bullets. To put it cogently, he is fighting
because he doesn’t want any Kaiser in his.
Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all
the editorials and the recruiting campaign? Is not that what England
and France are fighting for? It seems to me that Tommy’s is a very
practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to
hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to
the Germans.
“Would you like a _Boche_ helmet for a souvenir, sir?” asked a soldier,
who appeared on the outer edge of the group. He was the small, active
type, a British soldier with the _élan_ of the Frenchman. “There are
lots of them out there among the German dead”--the unburied German
dead, who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile
counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle. “I’ll have one for you on
your way back.”
There was no stopping him; he had gone.
“Matty’s a devil!” said the big man. “He’ll get it, all right. He’s
equal to reaching over the _Boches_’ parapet and picking one off a
_Boche’s_ head!”