1
If I had to present some particular scene as typical of the peculiar
vileness and mischief wrought by this modern warfare that Germany has
elaborated and thrust upon the world, I do not think I should choose as
my instance any of those great architectural wrecks that seem most to
impress contemporary writers. I have seen the injuries and ruins of the
cathedrals at Arras and Soissons and the wreckage of the great church
at Saint Eloi, I have visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen
photographs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at Ypres--a building
I knew very well indeed in its days of pride--and I have not been very
deeply moved. I suppose that one is a little accustomed to Gothic ruins,
and that there is always something monumental about old buildings; it is
only a question of degree whether they are more or less tumble-down. I
was far more desolated by the obliteration of such villages as Fricourt
and Dompierre, and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens
round about them, and my visit to Arras railway station gave me all the
sensations of coming suddenly on a newly murdered body.
Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the actual
fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only temporary,
that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the people of the
devastated villages would return to build their houses and till their
fields again. But I see now that not only are homes and villages
destroyed almost beyond recognition, but the very fields are destroyed.
They are wildernesses of shell craters; the old worked soil is buried
and great slabs of crude earth have been flung up over it. No ordinary
plough will travel over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere
chunks of timber, horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of
big shells, and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the
mess. Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high explosives, and
across it run the twisting trenches and communication trenches eight,
ten, or twelve feet deep. These will become water pits and mud pits into
which beasts will fall. It is incredible that there should be crops from
any of this region of the push for many years to come. There is no shade
left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the spirit
to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are the sole
proofs that life may still go on.
The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are
obliterated. It is just possible to trace the roads in them, because
the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing of the guns
and ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-outs. One dug-out
in particular there promises to become a show place. It must be the
masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs; it is made as if its makers
enjoyed the job; it is like the work of some horrible badger among
the vestiges of what were pleasant human homes. You are taken down a
timbered staircase into its warren of rooms and passages; you are shown
the places under the craters of the great British shells, where the wood
splintered but did not come in. (But the arrival of those shells must
have been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting
shafts set with iron climbing bars. In this place German officers and
soldiers have lived continually for nearly two years. This war is,
indeed, a troglodytic propaganda. You come up at last at the far end
into what was once a cellar of a decent Frenchman's home.
But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at Fricourt. At
Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery, and they turned the
dead out of their vaults and made lurking places of the tombs. I walked
with M. Joseph Reinach about this place, picking our way carefully
amidst the mud holes and the wire, and watched the shells bursting away
over the receding battle line to the west. The wreckage of the graves
was Durereqsue. And here would be a fragment of marble angle and here
a split stone with an inscription. Splinters of coffins, rusty iron
crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled into the mud, amidst
the universal barbed wire. A little distance down the slope is a brand
new cemetery, with new metal wreaths and even a few flowers; it is
a disciplined array of uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of
soldiers' names. Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will
ever get a chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as
they have done its predecessor.
We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses
towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to
ourselves what the place had been. Many things are recognisable in
Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for instance,
there are quire large triangular pieces of the church wall upstanding
at Dompierre. And a mile away perhaps down the hill on the road towards
Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery are very distinct. A sugar
refinery is an affair of big iron receptacles and great flues and pipes
and so forth, and iron does not go down under gun fire as stone or brick
does. The whole fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell
holes, that raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general
shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at the
bottom of the sea.
There wasn't a dog left of the former life of Dompierre. There was not
even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy road. The guns
muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark sang. But a little way
farther on up the road was an intermediate dressing station, rigged up
with wood and tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men
into an ambulance. The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though
they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.
As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery I heard
the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us. I turned and
beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to be happening in
this incredible war. This man was, I suppose, a native officer of some
cavalry force from French north Africa. He was a handsome dark brown
Arab, wearing a long yellow-white robe and a tall cap about which ran
a band of sheepskin. He was riding one of those little fine lean horses
with long tails that I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose
fore and aft of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots
were stuck into great silver stirrups. He might have ridden straight
out of the Arabian nights. He passed thoughtfully, picking his way
delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and coming into
the road, broke into a canter and vanished in the direction of the
smashed-up refinery.
2
About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons there is an effect of
waiting stillness like nothing else I have ever experienced. At Arras
the situation is almost incredible to the civilian mind. The British
hold the town, the Germans hold a northern suburb; at one point near the
river the trenches are just four metres apart. This state of tension has
lasted for long months.
Unless a very big attack is contemplated, I suppose there is no
advantage in an assault; across that narrow interval we should only
get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to hold, and so it
would be for the Germans on our side. But there is a kind of etiquette
observed; loud vulgar talking on either side of the four-metre gap leads
at once to bomb throwing. And meanwhile on both sides guns of various
calibre keep up an intermittent fire, the German guns register--I think
that is the right term--on the cross of Arras cathedral, the British
guns search lovingly for the German batteries. As one walks about the
silent streets one hears, “_Bang_---Pheeee---woooo” and then
far away “_dump._” One of ours. Then presently back comes
“Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_” One of theirs.
Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town goes on. _Le Lion
d'Arras_, an excellent illustrated paper, produces its valiant sheets,
and has done so since the siege began.
The current number of _Le Lion d'Arras_ had to report a local German
success. Overnight they had killed a gendarme. There is to be a public
funeral and much ceremony. It is rare for anyone now to get killed;
everything is so systematised.
You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various angles,
and send them off with the Arras postmark. The town is not without a
certain business activity. There is, I am told, a considerable influx
of visitors of a special sort; they wear khaki and lead the troglodytic
life. They play cards and gossip and sleep in the shadows, and may not
walk the streets. I had one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and
then one sees a British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the
pavement, mindful of the spying German sausage balloon in the air. The
streets are strangely quite and grass grows between the stones.
The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now mostly heaps of litter,
but many streets of the town have suffered very little. Here and there
a house has been crushed and one or two have been bisected, the front
reduced to a heap of splinters and the back halves of the rooms left
so that one sees the bed, the hanging end of the carpet, the clothes
cupboard yawning open, the pictures still on the wall. In one place
a lamp stands on a chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off
completely from the world below.... Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_ One would
be irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of London, if
it were not for those unmeaning explosions.
I went to the station, a dead railway station. A notice-board requested
us to walk around the silent square on the outside pavement and not
across it. The German sausage balloon had not been up for days; it had
probably gone off to the Somme; the Somme was a terrible vortex just
then which was sucking away the resources of the whole German line; but
still discipline is discipline. The sausage might come peeping up at any
moment over the station roof, and so we skirted the square. Arras was
fought for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged
breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where the
porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length of the
platform. The station was a fine one of the modern type, with a glass
roof whose framework still remains, though the glass powders the floor
and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot. The rails are rails of
rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall grasses grow amidst the
ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered from a shell or so, but there
are still the sofas of green plush, askew, a little advertisement hung
from the wall, the glass smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a giant had
scattered a great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to
Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on. These tickets are souvenirs
too portable to resist. I gave way to that common weakness.
I went out and looked up and down the line; two deserted goods trucks
stood as if they sheltered under a footbridge. The grass poked out
through their wheels. The railway signals seemed uncertain in their
intimations; some were up and some were down. And it was as still and
empty as a summer afternoon in Pompeii. No train has come into Arras for
two long years now.
We lunched in a sunny garden with various men who love Arras but are
weary of it, and we disputed about Irish politics. We discussed the
political future of Sir F. E. Smith. We also disputed whether there was
an equivalent in English for _embusque._ Every now and then a shell came
over--an aimless shell.
A certain liveliness marked our departure from the town. Possibly the
Germans also listen for the rare infrequent automobile. At any rate, as
we were just starting our way back--it is improper to mention the exact
point from which we started--came “Pheeee---woooo.” Quite close. But
there was no _Bang!_ One's mind hung expectant and disappointed. It was
a dud shell.
And then suddenly I became acutely aware of the personality of our
chauffeur. It was not his business to talk to us, but he turned his
head, showed a sharp profile, wry lips and a bright excited eye, and
remarked, “_That_ was a near one--anyhow.” He then cut a corner over
the pavement and very nearly cut it through a house. He bumped us over
a shell hole and began to toot his horn. At every gateway, alley, and
cross road on this silent and empty streets of Arras and frequently in
between, he tooted punctiliously. (It is not proper to sound motor horns
in Arras.) I cannot imagine what the listening Germans made of it. We
passed the old gates of that city of fear, still tooting vehemently, and
then with shoulders eloquent of his feelings, our chauffeur abandoned
the horn altogether and put his whole soul into the accelerator....
3
Soissons was in very much the same case as Arras. There was the same
pregnant silence in her streets, the same effect of waiting for the
moment which draws nearer and nearer, when the brooding German lines
away there will be full of the covert activities of retreat, when the
streets of the old town will stir with the joyous excitement of the
conclusive advance.
The organisation of Soissons for defence is perfect. I may not describe
it, but think of whatever would stop and destroy an attacking party or
foil the hostile shell. It is there. Men have had nothing else to do and
nothing else to think of for two years. I crossed the bridge the English
made in the pursuit after the Marne, and went into the first line
trenches and peeped towards the invisible enemy. To show me exactly
where to look a seventy-five obliged with a shell. In the crypt of the
Abbey of St. Medard near by it--it must provoke the Germans bitterly to
think that all the rest of the building vanished ages ago--the French
boys sleep beside the bones of King Childebert the Second. They shelter
safely in the prison of Louis the Pious. An ineffective shell from a
German seventy-seven burst in the walled garden close at hand as I came
out from those thousand-year-old memories again.
The cathedral at Soissons had not been nearly so completely smashed up
as the one at Arras; I doubt if it has been very greatly fired into.
There is a peculiar beauty in the one long vertical strip of blue sky
between the broken arches in the chief gap where the wall has tumbled
in. And the people are holding on in many cases exactly as they are
doing in Arras; I do not know whether it is habit or courage that is
most apparent in this persistence. About the chief place of the town
there are ruined houses, but some invisible hand still keeps the grass
of the little garden within bounds and has put out a bed of begonias. In
Paris I met a charming American writer, the wife of a French artist, the
lady who wrote _My House on the Field of Honour._ She gave me a queer
little anecdote. On account of some hospital work she had been allowed
to visit Soissons--a rare privilege for a woman--and she stayed the
night in a lodging. The room into which she was shown was like any other
French provincial bedroom, and after her Anglo-Saxon habit she walked
straight to the windows to open them.
They looked exactly like any other French bedroom windows, with neat,
clean white lace curtains across them. The curtains had been put there,
because they were the proper things to put there.
“Madame,” said the hostess, “need not trouble to open the glass. There
is no more glass in Soissons.”
But there were curtains nevertheless. There was all the precise delicacy
of the neatly curtained home life of France.
And she told me too of the people at dinner, and how as the little
serving-maid passed about a proud erection of cake and conserve and
cream, came the familiar “Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_”
“That must have been the Seminaire,” said someone.
As one speaks of the weather or a passing cart.
“It was in the Rue de la Bueire, M'sieur,” the little maid asserted with
quiet conviction, poising the trophy of confectionery for Madame Huard
with an unshaking hand.
So stoutly do the roots of French life hold beneath the tramplings of
war.