E-text prepared by A. Langley



THE SOUL OF THE WAR

by PHILIP GIBBS

with an Introduction by ANTHONY LANGLEY
written for Project Gutenberg







Contents


   I. The Foreboding
  II. Mobilization
 III. The Secret War
  IV. The Way Of Retreat
   V. The Turn Of The Tide
  VI. Invasion
 VII. The Last Stand Of The Belgians
VIII. The Soul Of Paris
  IX. The Soldiers Of France
   X. The Men In Khaki
      Conclusion



Introduction


This book is a companion book to another book by Philip Gibbs that is
already in the Project Gutenberg library, namely _Now It Can Be Told_[1].
Together, both books constitute the war-time memoirs of British
war-correspondent Philip Gibbs, one of the few officially accredited
journalists allowed on the British sector of the Western front. He
covered the war from beginning to end. _The Soul of the War_ is the
first part of his memoirs, published in 1915, _Now It Can Be Told_ is the
second part, but published immediately after the war. Taken together,
both books are amongst the most important and influential books published
in English during the Great War, being in no small part responsible for
the emergence of the "Lost Generation" myth of the 1920's.

A pre-war best-selling author and journalist, Philip Gibbs was one of
the most outstanding British war-time reporters and writers. Like many
reporters in the opening months of the war, Philip Gibbs and his
companions seemed to posses the knack for being in the wrong place at
the wrong time, following armies across northern France in the vain
hope of being on hand to witness battle. He never really succeeded
during the first year, aside from joining a British volunteer ambulance
service on the Ypres front in late 1914. But while other reporters
unashamedly spruced up their reporting, dramatizing and glorifying
small insignificant incidents and passing occurrences of no import,
Gibbs knew how to talk to soldiers coming from or going to the front
lines, how to convey their thoughts and fears and vividly describe
their battle experiences. Gibbs was a very serious writer, and
extremely proficient at his trade. He knew how to get to the essence of
things, to describe the feel of the times, the general attitude, and
the hopes and fears of both fighting men and civilians. Not only is
this voluminous book a brilliantly written commentary on the opening
months of the war, it is also infused with an inner sadness that could
well be considered a precursor to the post-war "lost generation" myth,
which is yet another indicator at how well Gibbs could gage the feel of
the times and assess its impact on future developments in society.

In this first book of his, he tells of his wanderings during the first
year of the war, as he tried (in vain) to witness the fighting in
France. His observations, descriptions and opinions are however well
worth reading; they are accurate, insightful and to the point. He gives
detailed descriptions of both British and French soldiers and includes
an incredibly atmospheric portrait of Paris during the opening months
of the war as well as a moving account of his time spent with the
British Field Hospital in Furnes. After being arrested in 1915 on
general principle by the British authorities as a nuisance and
potential loose-lipped journalist, he was afterwards appointed one of
the few officially accredited journalists attached to the British
forces on the Western front. Thereafter Gibbs continued filing
dispatches till the end of hostilities. His writing is heartily
sympathetic to the common soldier and war-time refugees, but quite
critical to those in power. After the war he was knighted for his
valuable patriotic services and enjoyed a distinguished career as
novelist and writer.

He served yet again as accredited reporter during the opening months of
the Second World War, being billeted in the same areas in France as
during the Great War. After the evacuation of the BEF in 1940 he
remained in Great Britain. His son followed in his footsteps, taking up
the profession of war reporter for the British press.

                                         Anthony Langley


     [1] Now It Can Be Told, by Philip Gibbs, is Project Gutenberg
         E-book #3317, nicbt10.txt and nicb10.zip. See
         https://www.gutenberg.org/etext02/nicbt10.txt
         or
         https://www.gutenberg.org/etext02/nicbt10.zip





Chapter I
The Foreboding



1


What man may lay bare the soul of England as it was stirred during
those days of July when suddenly, without any previous warning, loud
enough to reach the ears of the mass of people, there came the
menace of a great, bloody war, threatening all that had seemed so
safe and so certain in our daily life? England suffered in those
summer days a shock which thrilled to its heart and brain with an
enormous emotion such as a man who has been careless of truth
and virtue experiences at a "Revivalist" meeting or at a Catholic
mission when some passionate preacher breaks the hard crust of his
carelessness and convinces him that death and the judgment are
very near, and that all the rottenness of his being will be tested in the
furnace of a spiritual agony. He goes back to his home feeling a
changed man in a changed world. The very ticking of the clock on the
mantelpiece of his sitting-room speaks to him with a portentous,
voice, like the thunder-strokes of fate. Death is coming closer to him
at every tick. His little home, his household goods, the daily routine of
his toil for the worldly rewards of life, his paltry jealousies of
next-door neighbours are dwarfed to insignificance. They no
longer matter, for the judgment of God is at hand. The smugness
of his self-complacency, his life-long hypocrisy in the shirking of
truth, are broken up. He feels naked, and afraid, clinging only to
the hope that he may yet have time to build up a new character,
to acquire new spiritual strength, and to do some of the things he
has left undone--if only he had his time over again!--before the
enemy comes to grips with him in a final bout.

That, with less simplicity and self-consciousness, was the spirit of
England in those few swift days which followed the Austrian ultimatum
to Serbia, and Germany's challenge to France and Russia. At least in
some such way one might express the mentality of the governing,
official, political, and so-called intellectual classes of the nation who
could read between the lines of diplomatic dispatches, and saw,
clearly enough, the shadow of Death creeping across the fields of
Europe and heard the muffled beating of his drum.

Some of our public men and politicians must have spent tortured
days and nights in those last days of July. They, too, like the sinner at
the mission service, must have seen the judgment of God
approaching them. Of what, avail now were their worldly ambitions
and their jealousies? They too had been smug in their self-
complacency, hypocrites, shirkers of truth and stirrers up of strife,
careless of consequences. If only they could have their time over
again! Great God! was this war with Germany an unavoidable horror,
or, if the worst came, was there still time to cleanse the nation of its
rottenness, to close up its divisions and to be ready for the frightful
conflict?


2


All things were changed in England in a day or two. The things that
had mattered no longer mattered. The Arming of Ulster and the
Nationalists, Votes for Women, Easier Divorce, the Craze for Night
Clubs--had any of these questions any meaning now? A truce was
called by the men who had been inflaming the people's passion to the
point of civil war. The differences of political parties seemed futile and
idiotic now that the nation itself might be put to the uttermost test of
endurance by the greatest military power in Europe. In fear, as well as
with a nobler desire to rise out of the slough of the old folly of life,
the leaders of the nation abandoned then-feuds. Out of the past
voices called to them. Their blood thrilled to old sentiments and old
traditions which had seemed to belong to the lumber-room of history,
with the moth-eaten garments of their ancestors. There were no
longer Liberals or Conservatives or Socialists, but only Englishmen,
Scotsmen, Irishmen and Welshmen, with the old instincts of race and
with the old fighting qualities which in the past they had used against
each other. Before the common menace they closed up their ranks.


3


Yet there was no blood-lust in England, during those days of July.
None of the old Jingo spirit which had inflamed great crowds before
the Boer War was visible now or found expression. Among people of
thoughtfulness there was a kind of dazed incredibility that this war
would really happen, and at the back of this unbelief a tragic
foreboding and a kind of shame--a foreboding that secret forces were
at work for war, utterly beyond the control of European democracies
who desired to live in peace, and a shame that civilization itself, all
the ideals and intellectual activities and democratic progress of
modern Europe, would be thrust back into the primitive barbarities
of war, with its wholesale, senseless slaughter, its bayonet slashings
and disembowellings--"heroic charges" as they are called by the
journalists--and its gospel of hatred. So humanity was still beastlike,
as twenty centuries ago, and the message of Christianity was still
unheard? Socialistic theories, Hague conventions, the progress of
intelligence in modern democracy had failed utterly, and once again,
if this war came upon the world, not by the will of simple peoples, but
by the international intrigues of European diplomats, the pride of a
military caste and the greed of political tradesmen, the fields of
Europe would be drenched with the blood of our best manhood and
Death would make an unnatural harvesting. Could nothing stop this
bloody business?


4


I think the Middle Classes in England--the plain men and women who
do not belong to intellectual cliques or professional politics--were
stupefied by the swift development of the international "situation," as it
was called in the newspapers, before the actual declarations of war
which followed with a series of thunder-claps heralding a universal
tempest. Was it true then that Germany had a deadly enmity against
us, and warlike ambitions which would make a shambles of Europe?
Or was it still only newspaper talk, to provide sensations for the
breakfast table? How could they tell, these plain, ignorant men who
had always wanted straightforward facts?

For years the newspaper press of England had been divided over
Germany's ambitions, precisely as, according to their political colour,
they had been divided over Tariff Reform or Home Rule for Ireland.
The Liberal Press had jeered at the hair-raising fears of the
Conservative Press, and the latter had answered the jeers by more
ferocious attacks upon German diplomacy and by more determined
efforts to make bad blood between the two nations. The Liberal
Press had dwelt lovingly upon the brotherly sentiment of the German
people for their English cousins. The Conservative Press had
searched out the inflammatory speeches of the war lords and the
junker politicians. It had seemed to the man in the street a
controversy as remote from the actual interests of his own life--as
remote from the suburban garden in which he grew his roses or from
the golf links on which he spent his Saturday afternoons as a
discussion on the canals of Mars. Now and again, in moments of
political excitement, he had taken sides and adopted newspaper
phrases as his own, declaring with an enormous gravity which he did
not really feel that "The German Fleet was a deliberate menace to our
naval supremacy," or joining in the chorus of "We want eight and we
won't wait," or expressing his utter contempt for "all this militarism,"
and his belief in the "international solidarity" of the new democracy.
But there never entered his inmost convictions that the day might
come during his own lifetime when he--a citizen of Suburbia--might
have to fight for his own hearthside and suffer the intolerable horrors
of war while the roses in his garden were trampled down in mud and
blood, and while his own house came clattering down like a pack of
cards--the family photographs, the children's toys, the piano which he
had bought on the hire system, all the household gods which he
worshipped, mixed up in a heap of ruin--as afterwards at
Scarborough and Hartlepool, Ipswich, and Southend.

If such a thing were possible, why had the nation been duped by its
Government? Why had we been lulled into a false sense of security
without a plain statement of facts which would have taught us to
prepare for the great ordeal? The Government ought to have known
and told the truth. If this war came the manhood of the nation would
be unready and untrained. We should have to scramble an army
together, when perhaps it would be too late.

The middle classes of England tried to comfort themselves even at
the eleventh hour by incredulity.

"Impossible!" they cried. "The thing is unbelievable. It is only a
newspaper scare!"

But as the hours passed the shadow of war crept closer, and touched
the soul of Europe.


5


In Fleet Street, which is connected with the wires of the world, there
was a feverish activity. Walls and tables were placarded with maps.
Photographs, gazetteers, time tables, cablegrams littered the rooms
of editors and news editors. There was a procession of literary
adventurers up the steps of those buildings in the Street of
Adventure--all those men who get lost somewhere between one war
and another and come out with claims of ancient service on the
battlefields of Europe when the smell of blood is scented from afar;
and scores of new men of sporting instincts and jaunty confidence,
eager to be "in the middle of things," willing to go out on any terms so
long as they could see "a bit of fun," ready to take all risks. Special
correspondents, press photographers, the youngest reporters on the
staff, sub-editors emerging from little dark rooms with a new
excitement in eyes that had grown tired with proof correcting, passed
each other on the stairs and asked for their Chance. It was a chance
of seeing the greatest drama in life with real properties, real corpses,
real blood, real horrors with a devilish thrill in them. It was not to be
missed by any self-respecting journalist to whom all life is a stage
play which he describes and criticises from a free seat in the front of
the house.

Yet in those newspaper offices in Fleet Street there was no real
certainty. Even the foreign editors who are supposed to have an
inside knowledge of international politics were not definite in their
assertions. Interminable discussions took place over their maps and
cablegrams. "War is certain." "There will be no war as far as England
is concerned." "Sir Edward Grey will arrange an international
conference." "Germany is bluffing. She will climb down at the
eleventh hour. How can she risk a war with France, Russia, and
England?" "England will stand out." "But our honour? What about our
understanding with France?"

There was a profound ignorance at the back of all these opinions,
assertions, discussions. Fleet Street, in spite of the dogmatism of its
leading articles, did not know the truth and had never searched for it
with a sincerity which would lead now to a certain conviction. All its
thousands of articles on the subject of our relations with Germany
had been but a clash of individual opinions coloured by the traditional
policy of each paper, by the prejudice of the writers and by the
influence of party interests. The brain of Fleet Street was but a more
intense and a more vibrant counterpart of the national psychology,
which in these hours of enormous crisis was bewildered by doubt
and, in spite of all its activity, incredulous of the tremendous
possibility that in a few days England might be engaged in the
greatest war since the Napoleonic era, fighting for her life.


6


On my own lips there was the same incredulity when I said good-bye.
It was on July 29, and England had not yet picked up the gauntlet
which Germany had flung into the face of European peace.

"I shall be back in a few days. Armageddon is still a long way off. The
idea of it is too ridiculous and too damnable!"

I lay awake on the night before I left England with the credentials of a
war correspondent on a roving commission, and there came into my
head a vision of the hideous thing which was being hatched in the
council chambers of Europe, even as the little clock ticked on my
bedroom mantelpiece. I thrust back this vision of blood by old
arguments, old phrases which had become the rag-tags of political
writers.

War with Germany? A war in which half the nations of Europe would
be flung against each other in a deadly struggle--millions against
millions of men belonging to the peoples of the highest civilization?
No, it was inconceivable and impossible. Why should England make
war upon Germany or Germany upon England? We were alike in
blood and character, bound to each other by a thousand ties of
tradition and knowledge and trade and friendship. All the best intellect
of Germany was friendly to us.


7


In Hamburg two years ago I had listened to speeches about all that,
obviously sincere, emotional in their protestations of racial
comradeship. That young poet who had become my friend, who had
taken me home to his house in the country and whose beautiful wife
had plucked roses for me in her garden, and said in her pretty
English, "I send my best love with them to England"--was he a liar
when he spoke fine and stirring words about the German admiration
for English literature and life, and when--it was late in the evening and
we had drunk some wine--he passed his arm through mine and said,
"If ever there were to be a war between our two countries I and all my
friends in Hamburg would weep at the crime and the tragedy."

On that trip to Hamburg we were banqueted like kings, we English
journalists, and the tables were garlanded with flowers in our honour,
and a thousand compliments were paid to us with the friendliest
courtesy. Were they all liars, these smiling Germans who had clinked
glasses with us?

Only a few weeks before this black shadow of war had loomed up
with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned
our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood-
brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but
glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their
own country. We clinked glasses again, sang "God Save the King"
and the "Wacht am Rhein," compared the character of German and
English literature, of German and English women, clasped hands,
and said, "Auf wiedersehen!" Were we all liars in that room, and did
any of the men there know that when words of friendship were on
their lips there was hatred in their hearts and in each country a
stealthy preparation for great massacres of men? Did any of, those
German editors hear afar off the thunderstrokes of the Krupp guns
which even then were being tested for the war with France and
England? I believe now that some of them must have known.


8


Perhaps I ought to have known, too, remembering the tour which I
had made in Germany two years before.

It was after the Agadir incident, and I had been sent to Germany by
my newspaper on a dovelike mission of peace, to gather sentiments
of good will to England from prominent public men who might desire
out of their intellectual friendship to us to pour oil on the troubled
waters which had been profoundly stirred by our challenge to
Germany's foreign policy. I had a sheaf of introductions, which I
presented in Berlin and Leipzig, Frankfort and Dusseldorf, and other
German towns.

The first man to whom I addressed myself with amiable intent was a
distinguished democrat who knew half the members of the House of
Commons and could slap Liberal politicians on the back with more
familiarity than I should dare to show. He had spent both time and
trouble in organizing friendly visits between the working men and
municipalities of both countries. But he was a little restrained and
awkward in his manners when I handed him my letter of introduction.
Presently he left the room for a few minutes and I saw on his desk a
German newspaper with a leading article signed by his name. I read it
and was amazed to find that it was a violent attack upon England,
demanding unforgetfulness and unforgiveness of the affront which we
had put upon Germany in the Morocco crisis. When the man came
back I ventured to question him about this article, and he declared
that his old friendship for England had undergone a change. He could
give me no expression of good will.

I could get no expression of good will from any public man in
Germany. I remember an angry interview with an ecclesiastic in
Berlin, a personal friend of the Kaiser, though for many years an
ardent admirer of England.

He paced up and down the room with noiseless footsteps on a soft
carpet.

"It is no time for bland words!" he said. "England has insulted us.
Such acts are not to be tolerated by a great nation like ours. There is
only one answer to them, and it is the answer of the sword!"

I ventured to speak of Christian influences which should hold men
back from the brutality of war.

"Surely the Church must always preach the gospel of peace?
Otherwise it is false to the spirit of Christ."

He believed that I intended to insult him, and in a little while he rang
the bell for my dismissal.

Even Edward Bernstein, the great leader of the Social Democrats,
could give me no consoling words for my paper.

"The spirit of nationality," he said--and I have a note of his words--"is
stronger than abstract ideals. Let England make no mistake. If war
were declared to-morrow the Social Democrats would march as one
man in defence of the Fatherland. . . . And you must admit that
England, or rather the English Foreign Office, has put rather a severe
strain upon our pride and patience!"

My mission was a failure. I came back without any expressions of
good will from public men and with an uneasy sense of dangerous
fires smouldering beneath the political life of Germany--fires of hate
not easily quenched by friendly or sentimental articles in the English
Liberal Press. And yet among the ordinary people in railway trains
and restaurants, beer-halls and hotels, I had found no hostility to me
as an Englishman. Rather they had gone out of their way to be
friendly. Some of the university students of Leipzig had taken me to a
public dance, expressed their admiration for English sports, and
asked my opinion about the merits of various English boxers of whom
I had to confess great ignorance. They were good friendly fellows and
I liked them. In various towns of Germany I found myself admiring the
cheerful, bustling gemutlichkeit of the people, the splendid
organization of their civic life, their industry and national spirit.
Walking among them sometimes, I used to ponder over the
possibility of that unvermeidliche krieg--that "unavoidable war"
which was being discussed in all the newspapers. Did these
people want war with England or with anyone? The laughter of the
clerks and shop-girls swarming down the Friedrichstrasse, the
peaceful enjoyment of the middle-class crowds of husbands and
wives, lovers and sweethearts, steaming in the heat of brilliantly lighted
beer-halls seemed to make my question preposterous. The spirit of
the German people was essentially peaceful and democratic. Surely
the weight of all this middle-class common sense would save them
from any criminal adventures proposed by a military caste rattling its
sabre on state occasions? So I came back with a conflict of ideas....



9



A little bald-headed man came into London about two years ago, and
his arrival was noted in a newspaper paragraph. It appeared that he
was a great statistician. He had been appointed by the Governments
of Canada and the United States jointly to prepare a "statistical
survey of Europe," whatever that may mean. I was sent down to call
upon him somewhere in the Temple, and I was to get him to talk
about his statistics.

But after my introduction he shut the door carefully and, with an air of
anxious inquiry through his gold-rimmed spectacles, asked a strange
question:

"Are you an honest young man and a good patriot?"

I could produce no credentials for honesty or patriotism, but hoped
that I might not fail in either.

"I suppose you have come to talk to me about my statistics," he said.

I admitted that this was my mission.

"They are unimportant," he said, "compared with what I have to tell
you. I am going to talk to you about Germany. The English people
ought to know what I have learnt during a year's experience in that
country, where I have lived all the time in the company of public
officials. Sir, it seems to me that the English people do not know that
the entire genius of intellectual Germany is directed to a war against
England. It dominates their thoughts and dreams, and the whole
activity of their national intelligence."

For an hour the little bald-headed man spoke to me of all he had
heard and learnt of Germany's enmity to England during twelve
months in official circles. He desired to give this information to an
English newspaper of standing and authority. He thought the English
people had a right to know.

I went back to my office more disturbed than I cared to admit even to
myself. There had been a kind of terror in the voice of the little man
who had found time for other interests besides his "statistical survey
of Europe." It seemed that he believed himself in the possession of
an enormous and terrible secret threatening the destiny of our
Empire. Yet nobody would believe him when he told it, however
fervently. My editor would not believe him, and none of his words
were published, in my paper or any other. But sometimes I used to
remember him and wonder whether perhaps in all such warnings that
came to us there were not a horrible truth which one day, when
brutally revealed, would make a mockery of all those men in England
who pooh-poohed the peril, and of the idealists who believed that
friendly relations with Germany could be secured by friendly words.
Meanwhile the Foreign Office did not reveal its secrets or give any
clear guidance to the people as to perils or policy--to the people who
would pay in blood for ignorance.


10


When I stood on the deck of the Channel boat in Dover Harbour
looking back on England, whose white cliffs gleamed faintly through
the darkness, a sense of tragic certainty came to me that a summons
of war would come to England, asking for her manhood. Perhaps it
would come to-night. The second mate of the boat came to the side
of the steamer and stared across the inky waters, on which there
were shifting pathways of white radiance, as the searchlights of
distant warships swept the sea.

"God!" he said, in a low voice.

"Do you think it will come to-night?" I asked, in the same tone of
voice. We spoke as though our words were dangerous.

"It's likely. The German fleet won't wait for any declaration, I should
say, if they thought they could catch us napping. But they won't. I
fancy we're ready for them--here, anyhow!"

He jerked his thumb at some dark masses looming through the
darkness in the harbour, caught here and there by a glint of metal
reflected in the water. They were cruisers and submarines nosing
towards the harbour mouth.

"There's a crowd of 'em!" said the second mate, "and they stretch
across the Channel. . . . The Reserve men have been called out--
taken off the trams in Dover to-night. But the public has not yet woken
up to the meaning of it."

He stared out to sea again, and it was some minutes before he spoke
again.

"Queer, isn't it? They'll all sleep in their beds to-night as though
nothing out of the way were happening. And yet, in a few hours,
maybe, there'll be Hell! That's what it's going to be--Hell and
damnation, if I know anything about war!"

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to the harbour bar.

From each side of the harbour two searchlights made a straight beam
of light, and in the glare of it there passed along the surface of the
sea, as it seemed, a golden serpent with shining scales.

"Sea-gulls," said the mate. "Scared, I expect, by all these lights. They
know something's in the wind. Perhaps they can smell--blood!"

He spoke with a laugh, but it had a strange sound.


11


In the saloon were about a dozen men, drinking at the bar. They were
noisy and had already drunk too much. By their accent it was easy to
guess that they came from Manchester, and by their knapsacks,
which contained all their baggage, it was obvious that they were on a
short trip to Paris. A man from Cook's promised them a "good time!"
There were plenty of pretty girls in Paris. They slapped him on the
back and called him "old chap!"

A quiet gentleman seated opposite to me on a leather lounge--I met
him afterwards at the British Embassy in Paris--caught my eye and
smiled.

"They don't seem to worry about the international situation. Perhaps it
will be easier to get to Paris than to get back again!"

"And now drinks all round, lads!" said one of the trippers.

On deck there were voices singing. It was the hymn of the
Marseillaise. I went up towards the sound and found a party of young
Frenchmen standing aft, waving farewells to England, as the syren
hooted, above a rattle of chains and the crash of the gangway which
dropped to the quayside. They had been called back to their country
to defend its soil and, unlike the Englishmen drinking themselves
fuddled, were intoxicated by a patriotic excitement.

"Vive l'Angleterre!"

An answer came back from the quayside:

"Vive la France!"

It was to this shout that we warped away from the jetty and made for
the open sea. A yacht with white sails all agleam as it crossed the bar
of a searchlight so that it seemed like a fairy ship in the vision of a
dream, crept into the harbour and then fluttered into the darkness
below the Admiralty pier.

"That's a queer kind of craft to meet to-night!" I said to the second
mate. "What is she doing?"

"I'd like to know. She's got a German skipper and crew. Spies all of
them, I guess. But nobody seems to bother."

There were spies watching our own boat as we went across the
Channel, but they were on English vessels. Searchlights from many
warships turned their rays upon us, staring at us from stem to stern,
following us with a far-flung vigilance, transmuting the base metal of
our funnel and brasswork into shining silver and burnished gold. As I
stared back into the blinding rays I felt that the eyes of the warships
could look into my very soul, and I walked to the other side of the boat
as though abashed by this scrutiny. I looked back to the shore, with
its winking lights and looming cliffs, and wished I could see by some
kind of searchlight into the soul of England on this night of fate.
Beyond the cliffs of Dover, in the profound darkness of the night,
England seemed asleep. Did not her people hear the beating of
Death's war drums across the fields of Europe, growing louder and
louder, so that on a cross-Channel boat I heard it booming in my
ears, louder than the wind?




Chapter II
Mobilization



1


The thunderbolt came out of a blue sky and in the midst of a brilliant
sunshine which gleamed blindingly above the white houses of Paris
and flung back shadows from the poplars across the long straight
roads between the fields of France. The children were playing as
usual in the gardens of the Tuileries, and their white-capped nurses
were sewing and chatting in the shade of the scorched trees. The old
bird man was still calling "Viens! Viens!" to the sparrows who came to
perch on his shoulders and peck at the bread between his lips, and
Punch was still performing his antique drama in the Petit Guignol to
laughing audiences of boys and girls. The bateaux mouches on the
Seine were carrying heavy loads of pleasure-seekers to Sèvres and
other riverside haunts. In the Pavilion Bleu at St. Cloud elegant little
ladies of the demi-monde sipped rose-tinted ices and said for a
thousand times; "Ciel, comme il fait chaud!" and slapped the hands of
beaky-nosed young men with white slips beneath their waistcoats
and shiny boots and other symbols of a high civilization. Americans in
Panama hats sauntered down the Rue de Rivoli, staring in the shop
windows at the latest studies of nude women, and at night went in
pursuit of adventure to Montmartre, where the orchestras at the Bal
Tabarin were still fiddling mad tangoes in a competition of shrieking
melody and where troops of painted ladies in the Folies Bergères still
paraded in the promenoir with languorous eyes, through wafts of
sickly scent. The little tables were all along the pavements of the
boulevards and the terrasses were crowded with all those bourgeois
Frenchmen and their women who do not move out of Paris even in
the dogdays, but prefer the scenery of their familiar streets to that of
Dieppe and Le Touquet. It was the same old Paris--crowded with
Cook's tourists and full of the melody of life as it is played by the hoot
of motor horns, the clang of steam trams, the shrill-voiced camelots
shouting "La Presse! La Presse!" and of the light laughter of women.

Then suddenly the thunderbolt fell with its signal of war, and in a few
days Paris was changed as though by some wizard's spell. Most of
the children vanished from the Tuileries gardens with their white-
capped nurses, and the sparrows searched in vain for their bird man.
Punch gave a final squawk of dismay and disappeared when the
theatre of the Petit Guignol was packed up to make way for a more
tragic drama. A hush fell upon Montmartre, and the musicians in its
orchestras packed up their instruments and scurried with scared
faces--to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapesth. No more boats went up to
Sèvres and St. Cloud with crowds of pleasure-seekers. The Seine
was very quiet beneath its bridges, and in the Pavilion Bleu no dainty
creatures sat sipping rose-tinted ices or slapped the hands of the
beaky-nosed boys who used to pay for them. The women were hiding
in their rooms, asking God--even before the war they used to ask
God funny questions--how they were going to live now that their
lovers had gone away to fight, leaving them with nothing but the
memory of a last kiss wet with tears. It was not enough to live on for
many days.


2


During the last days of July and the first days of August Paris was
stunned by the shock of this menace, which was approaching swiftly
and terribly. War! But why? Why, in the name of God, should France
be forced into a war for which she was not prepared, for which she
had no desire, because Austria had issued an ultimatum to Servia,
demanding the punishment of a nation of cut-throats for the murder of
an unnecessary Archduke? Germany was behind the business,
Germany was forcing the pace, exasperating Russia, presenting a
grim face to France and rattling the sword in its scabbard so that it
resounded through Europe. Well, let her rattle, so long as France
could keep out of the whole affair and preserve that peace in which
she had built up prosperity since the nightmare of 1870!

L'année terrible! There were many people in France who
remembered that tragic year, and now, after forty-four years, the
memory came back, and they shuddered. They had seen the horrors
of war and knew the meaning of it--its waste of life, its sacrifice of
splendid young manhood, its wanton cruelties, its torture of women,
its misery and destruction. France had been brought to her knees
then and had suffered the last humiliations which may be inflicted
upon a proud nation. But she had recovered miraculously, and
gradually even her desire for revenge, the passionate hope that one
day she might take vengeance for all those indignities and cruelties,
had cooled down and died. Not even for vengeance was war worth
while. Not even to recover the lost provinces was it worth the lives of
all those thousands of young men who must give their blood as the
price of victory. Alsace and Lorraine were only romantic memories,
kept alive by a few idealists and hotheads, who once a year went to
the statue in the Place de la Concorde and deposited wreaths and
made enthusiastic speeches which rang false, and pledged their
allegiance to the lost provinces--"Quand même!" There was a good
deal of blague in these annual ceremonies, laughed at by Frenchmen
of common sense. Alsace and Lorraine had been Germanized. A
Frenchman would find few people there to speak his own tongue. The
old ties of sentiment had worn very thin, and there was not a party in
France who would have dared to advocate a war with Germany for
the sake of this territory. Such a policy would have been a crime
against France itself, who had abandoned the spirit of vengeance,
and had only one ambition--to pursue its ideals and its business in
peace.


3


There was no wild outbreak of Jingo fever, no demonstrations of
blood-lust against Germany in Paris or any town of France, on that
first day of August, when the people waited for the fateful decision
which, if it were for war, would call every able-bodied man to the
colours and arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and
demand a dreadful sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a
sense of stupefaction which seemed to numb the intelligence of men
so that they could not reason with any show of logic, or speak of this
menace without incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with
one word, uttered passionately and repeated a thousand times a day:
"Incroyable!"

This word was dinned in my ears. I caught the sound of it as I walked
along the boulevards. It would come like a refrain at the end of
sentences spoken by little groups of men and women sitting outside
the cafés and reading every issue of those innumerable newspapers
which flung out editions at every hour. It was the answer I had from
men of whom I tried to get a clue to the secret movements of
diplomacy, and an answer to that question of war or peace. "C'est
incroyable!" They found it hard to believe--they would not believe--
that without any provocation from France, without any challenge,
Germany would deliberately, force this war upon the Triple Entente
and make a bloody shambles of European civilization. Beneath this
incredulity, this stupefaction, there was among most of the
Frenchmen whom I personally encountered a secret dread that
France was unready for the great ordeal of war and that its outbreak
would find her divided by political parties, inefficient in organization,
corrupt in some of her Government departments. The Socialists and
Syndicalists who had fought against the three years' service might
refuse to march. Only a few months before a deputy had hinted at
grave scandals in the provisioning and equipment of the army.

The history of 1870, with its awful revelations of disorganization and
unreadiness was remembered now and lay heavy upon the hearts of
those educated Frenchmen who, standing outside the political arena,
distrust all politicians, having but little faith in their honesty or
their ability. Who could tell whether France--the new France she
had been called--would rise above her old weaknesses and
confront the peril of this war with a strong, pure, and undivided spirit?


5


On August 1 there was a run on one of the banks. I passed its doors
and saw them besieged by thousands of middle-class men and
women drawn up in a long queue waiting very quietly--with a strange
quietude for any crowd in Paris--to withdraw the savings of a lifetime
or the capital of their business houses. There were similar crowds
outside other banks, and on the faces of these people there was a
look of brooding fear, as though all that they had fought and struggled
for, the reward of all their petty economies and meannesses, and
shifts and tricks, and denials of self-indulgences and starvings of soul
might be suddenly snatched from them and leave them beggared. A
shudder went through one such crowd when a young man came to
speak to them from the steps of the bank. It was a kind of shuddering
sigh, followed by loud murmurings, and here and there angry
protests. The cashiers had been withdrawn from their desks and
cheques could not be paid.

"We are ruined already!" said a woman. "This war will take all our
money! Oh, my God!"

She made her way through the crowd with a fixed white face and
burning eyes.


6


It was strange how in a day all gold disappeared from Paris. I could
not see the glint of it anywhere, unless I drew it from my own purse.
Even silver was very scarce and everybody was trying to cash notes,
which were refused by the shopkeepers. When I put one of them
down on a table at the Café Tourtel the waiter shook his head and
said, "La petite monnaie, s'il vous plaît!" At another place where I put
down a gold piece the waiter seized it as though it were a rare and
wonderful thing, and then gave me all my change in paper, made up
of new five franc notes issued by the Government. In the evening an
official notice was posted on the walls prohibiting the export of grain
and flour. People stared at it and said, "That means war!" Another
sign of coming events, more impressive to the imagination of the
Parisian, was the sudden dwindling in size of the evening
newspapers. They were reduced to two sheets, and in some cases to
a single broadside, owing to the possibility of a famine in paper if war
broke out and cut off the supplies of Paris while the railways were
being used for the mobilization of troops.


7


The city was very quiet and outwardly as calm as on any day in
August. But beneath this normal appearance of things there was a
growing anxiety and people's nerves were so on edge that any
sudden sound would make a man start on his chair on the terrasse
outside the café restaurant. Paris was afraid of itself. What uproar or
riot or criminal demonstration might not burst suddenly into this
tranquillity? There were evil elements lurking in the low quarters.
Apaches and anarchists might be inflamed with the madness of blood
which excites men in time of war. The socialists and syndicalists
might refuse to fight, and fight in maintaining their refusal. Some
political crime might set all those smouldering passions on fire and
make a hell in the streets. So people waited and watched the crowds
and listened to the pulse-beat of Paris.

The sharp staccato of revolver shots heard in the rue Montmartre on
the night of July 31 caused a shudder to pass through the city, as
though they were the signal for a criminal plot which might destroy
France by dividing it while the enemy was on the frontier.

I did not hear those shots but only the newspaper reports which
followed them almost as loudly in the soul of Paris. And yet it was only
the accidental meeting of a friend which diverted my attention of
dining in the Croissant Restaurant in which the crime took place at
the very hour when I should have been there. Some years before in
Paris, when France was in the throes of a railway strike which
developed almost to the verge of revolution, I had often gone to the
Croissant at two, three or four in the morning, because it had police
privileges to keep open all night for the comfort of journalists. Other
night birds had found this roost--ladies who sleep by day, and some
of the queer adventurers of the city which never goes to bed. One
night I had come into the midst of a strange company--the inner circle
of Parisian anarchists who were celebrating a victory over French
law. Their white faces had eyes like live coals. They thrust long thin
fingers through shaggy hair and spoke passionate orations nose to
nose. Their sluttish women shrieked with mirth and gave their kisses
to the leader of the gang, who had the face of Christ as painted by
Ary Scheffer.

It was in this interesting place, on the very velvet cushions where I
used to sit to watch the company, that Jaurès was killed on the eve of
the war. The veteran orator of French socialism, the man who could
stir the passions of the mob--as I had seen more than once--so that
at his bidding they would declare war against all the powers of
Government, was struck down as he sat with his back to an open
window divided from the street by a thin curtain. The young assassin
--a patriot he called himself--had been excited to an hysteria of hate
for a man who had tried to weaken the military power of France by
opposing the measure for a three years' service. It was the madness
of war which had touched his brain, and although Jaurès had called
upon the Socialists of France to march as one man in defence of "La
Patrie," this young neurasthenic made him the first victim of that
enormous sacrifice of blood which has since reeked up to God.
Jaurès, an honest man, perhaps, in spite of all his theatrical appeals
to mob passion--honest at least in his desire to make life more
tolerable for the sweated workers of France--was mortally wounded
by those shots through the window blind, and the crimson cushions of
his seat were dyed with deeper stains.


8


For twenty-four hours France was scared by the murder. It seemed
possible that the crime might let loose a tide of passion among the
followers of the Socialist leader. Placards were hastily posted on the
walls by the military governor of Paris professing abhorrence of the
assassination of a great Frenchman, promising a just punishment of
the crime, and calling upon the people to remain calm in this great
national crisis which would decide the destiny of France.

The appeal was not challenged. By a strange irony of fate the death
of Jaurès strengthened the Government which he bad attacked
throughout his life, and the dead body of the man of strife became, on
its way to the grave, the symbol of a united France, of obedience to
its laws, and of a martial fervour which in the old days of rebellion he
had ridiculed and denounced. On a gusty day I saw the Red Flag of
revolutionary socialism fluttering across the Place de la Concorde in
front of the coffin containing the corpse of its leader. Blood red, flag
after flag streamed past, all aglow in the brilliant sunshine, and behind
walked the representatives of every party in the State, including all
those who had denounced Jaurès in life as a traitor, a revolutionist,
and the most evil influence in France. For the first time in history the
aristocrats and the monarchists, the Conservative Republicans and
the Clericals walked in procession behind the blood-red rag.


9


Part of the active army of France was already on the frontiers. Before
the first whisper of war had reached the ears of the people, large
bodies of troops had been sent to the frontier towns to strengthen the
already existing garrisons. But the main army of the nation was
pursuing the ordinary pursuits of civil life. To resist the might of
Germany, the greatest military Power in Europe, already approaching
the frontiers in vast masses of men and machines, France would
have to call out all her manhood which had been trained in military
service.


Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!


The call to arms came without any loud clamour of bugles or orations.
Unlike the scenes in the early days of 1870, there were no street
processions of civil enthusiasts. No painted beauty of the stage
waved the tricolour to the shout of "À Berlin!" No mob orators jumped
upon the café tables to wave their arms in defiance of the foe and to
prophesy swift victories.

The quietness of Paris was astounding, and the first mobilization
orders were issued with no more publicity than attends the delivery of
a trade circular through the halfpenny post. Yet in hundreds of
thousands of houses through France and in all the blocks and
tenements of Paris there was a drama of tragic quietude when the
cards were delivered to young men in civilian clothes, men who sat at
table with old mothers or young wives, or in lowly rooms with some
dream to keep them company, or with little women who had spoilt the
dream, or fostered it, or with comrades who had gone on great
adventures with them between the Quartier Latin and the Mountain of
Montmartre. "It has come!"


10


Fate had come with that little card summoning each man to join his
depot, and tapped him on the shoulder with just a finger touch. It was
no more than that--a touch on the shoulder. Yet I know that for many
of those young men it seemed a blow between the eyes, and, to
some of them, a strangle-grip as icy cold as though Death's fingers
were already closing round their throats.

I seem to hear the silence in those rooms when for a moment or two
young men stared at the cards and the formal words on them, and
when, for just that time, all that life and death, means, came before
their souls. Was this the summons, Death itself? Somewhere on the
German side was a little steel bullet or a bit of shell waiting for the
Frenchman to whom it was destined. How long would it have to wait
to find its billet? Perhaps only a day or two--a question of hours,
slipping away now towards eternity as the clock ticked on. From the
old mother, or the young wife, from the little woman whose emotions
and quarrels, greediness or self-denial, had seemed all that mattered
in life, all that life meant to a young man of twenty-five or so, there
came perhaps a cry, a name spoken with grief, or no word at all but
the inarticulate expression of foreboding, terror, and a woman's
anguish.

"Jean! Mon petit! O, mon pauvre petit!" "C'est pour la patrie... mon
devoir... je reviendrai bientôt... Courage, ma femme!"

Courage! How many million times was the word spoken that night of
mobilization by women who saw the sudden pallor of their men, by
men who heard the cry of their women? I heard it in the streets,
spoken quite brutally sometimes, by men afraid of breaking down,
and with a passionate tenderness by other men, sure of their own
strength but pitiful for those whose spirit fainted at the spectre of
death which stood quite close.


11


In the days that followed the Second of August I saw the whole
meaning of mobilization in France--the call of a nation to arms--from
Paris to the Eastern frontier, and the drama of it all stirs me now as I
write, though many months have passed since then and I have seen
more awful things on the harvest fields of death. More awful, but not
more pitiful. For even in the sunshine of that August, before blood
had been spilt and the brooding spectre of war had settled drearily
over Europe, there was a poignant tragedy beneath the gallantry and
the beauty of that squadron of cavalry that I had seen riding out of
their barrack gates to entrain for the front. The men and the horses
were superb--clean-limbed, finely trained, exquisite in their pride of
life. As they came out into the streets of Paris the men put on the little
touch of swagger which belongs to the Frenchman when the public
gaze is on him. Even the horses tossed their heads and seemed to
realize the homage of the populace. Hundreds of women were in the
crowd, waving handkerchiefs, springing forward out of their line to
throw bunches of flowers to those cavaliers, who caught them and
fastened them to képi and jacket. The officers--young dandies of the
Chasseurs--carried great bouquets already and kissed the petals in
homage to all the womanhood of France whose love they symbolized.
There were no tears in that crowd, though the wives and sweethearts
of many of the young men must have stood on the kerbstone to
watch them pass.

At those moments, in the sunshine, even the sting of parting was
forgotten in the enthusiasm and pride which rose up to those splendid
ranks of cavalry who were on their way to fight foi France and to
uphold the story of their old traditions. I could see no tears then but
my own, for I confess that suddenly to my eyes there came a mist of
tears and I was seized with an emotion that made me shudder icily in
the glare of the day. For beyond the pageantry of the cavalcade I saw
the fields of war, with many of those men and horses lying mangled
under the hot sun of August. I smelt the stench of blood, for I had
been in the muck and misery of war before and had seen the death
carts coming back from the battlefield and the convoys of wounded
crawling down the rutty roads--from Adrianople--with men, who had
been strong and fine, now shattered, twisted and made hideous by
pain. The flowers carried by those cavalry officers seemed to me like
funeral wreaths upon men who were doomed to die, and the women
who sprang out of the crowds with posies for their men were offering
the garlands of death.


12


In the streets of Paris in those first days of the war I saw many
scenes of farewell. All day long one saw them, so that at last one
watched them without emotion, because the pathos of them became
monotonous. It was curious how men said good-bye, often, to their
wives and children and comrades at a street corner, or in the middle
of the boulevards. A hundred times or more I saw one of these
conscript soldiers who had put on his uniform again after years of
civilian life, turn suddenly to the woman trudging by his side or to a
group of people standing round him and say: "Alors, il faut dire Adieu
et Au revoir!" One might imagine that he was going on a week-end
visit and would be back again in Paris on Monday next. It was only by
the long-drawn kiss upon the lips of the woman who raised a dead
white face to him and by the abruptness with which the man broke
away and walked off hurriedly until he was lost in the passing crowds
that one might know that this was as likely as not the last parting
between a man and a woman who had known love together and that
each of them had seen the vision of death which would divide them
on this side of the grave. The stoicism of the Frenchwomen was
wonderful. They made no moan or plaint. They gave their men to "La
Patrie" with the resignation of religious women who offer their hearts
to God. Some spiritual fervour, which in France permeates the
sentiment of patriotism, giving a beauty to that tradition of nationality
which, without such a spirit, is the low and ignorant hatred of other
peoples, strengthened and uplifted them.


13


Sometimes when I watched these scenes I raged against the villainy
of a civilization which still permits these people to be sent like sheep
to the slaughter. Great God! These poor wretches of the working
quarters in Paris, these young peasants from the fields, these
underpaid clerks from city offices had had no voice in the declaration
of war. What could they know about international politics? Why
should they be the pawns of the political chessboard, played without
any regard for human life by diplomats and war lords and high
financiers? These poor weedy little men with the sallow faces of the
clerical class, in uniforms which hung loose round their undeveloped
frames, why should they be caught in the trap of this horrible machine
called "War" and let loose like a lot of mice against the hounds of
death? These peasants with slouching shoulders and loose limbs and
clumsy feet, who had been bringing in the harvest of France, after
their tilling and sowing and reaping, why should they be marched off
into tempests of shells which would hack off their strong arms and
drench unfertile fields with their blood? They had had to go, leaving all
the things that had given a meaning and purpose to their days, as
though God had commanded them, instead of groups of politicians
among the nations of Europe, damnably careless of human life. How
long will this fetish of international intrigue be tolerated by civilized
democracies which have no hatred against each other, until it is
inflamed by their leaders and then, in war itself, by the old savageries
of primitive nature?


14


I went down to the East frontier on the first day of mobilization. It was
in the evening when I went to take the train from the Gare de l'Est.
The station was filled with a seething crowd of civilians and soldiers,
struggling to get to the booking-offices, vainly seeking information as
to the times of departure to distant towns of France. The railway
officials were bewildered and could give no certain information. The
line was under military control. Many trains had been suppressed and
the others had no fixed time-table. I could only guess at the purpose
animating the individuals in these crowds. Many of them, perhaps,
were provincials, caught in Paris by the declaration of war and
desperately anxious to get back to their homes before the lines were
utterly choked by troop trains. Others belonged to neutral countries
and were trying to escape across the frontier before the gates were
closed. One of the "neutrals" spoke to me--in German, which was a
dangerous tongue in Paris. He was a Swiss who had come to Paris
on business for a few days, leaving his wife in a village near Basle. It
was of his wife that he kept talking.

"Ach, mein armes Weib! Sie hat Angst fur mich."

I pitied this little man in a shoddy suit and limp straw hat who had
tears in his eyes and no courage to make inquiries of station officials
because he spoke no word of French. I asked on his behalf and after
jostling for half an hour in the crowd and speaking to a dozen porters
who shrugged their shoulders and said, "Je n'en sais rien!" came
back with the certain and doleful news that the last train had left that
night for Basle. The little Swiss was standing between his packages
with his back to the wall, searching for me with anxious eyes, and
when I gave him the bad news tears trickled down his face.

"Was kann ich thun? Mein armes Weib hat Angst fur mich."

There was nothing he could do that night, however anxious his poor
wife might be, but I did not have any further conversation with him, for
my bad German had already attracted the notice of the people
standing near, and they were glowering at me suspiciously, as though
I were a spy.


15


It was an hour later that I found a train leaving for Nancy, though
even then I was assured by railway officials that there was no such
train. I had faith, however, in a young French officer who pledged his
word to me that I should get to Nancy if I took my place in the
carriage before which he stood. He was going as far as Toul himself.

I could see by the crimson velvet round his kèpi that he was an army
doctor, and by the look of sadness in his eyes that he was not glad to
leave the beautiful woman by his side who clasped his arm. They
spoke to me in English.

"This war will be horrible!" said the lady. "It is so senseless and so
unnecessary. Why should Germany want to fight us? There has been
no quarrel between us and we wanted to live in peace."

The young officer made a sudden gesture of disgust.

"It is a crime against humanity--a stupid, wanton crime!"

Then he asked a question earnestly and waited for my answer with
obvious anxiety:

"Will England join in?"

I said "Yes!" with an air of absolute conviction, though on that night
England had not yet given her decision. During the last twenty-four
hours I had been asked this question a score of times. The people of
Paris were getting impatient of England's silence. Englishmen in Paris
were getting very anxious. If England did not keep her unwritten
pledge to France, it would be dangerous and a shameful thing to be
an Englishman in Paris. Some of my friends were already beginning
to feel their throats with nervous fingers.

"I think so too!" said the officer, when he heard my answer. "England
will be dishonoured otherwise!"


16


The platform was now thronged with young men, many of them being
officers in a variety of brand-new uniforms, but most of them still in
civilian clothes as they had left their workshops or their homes to
obey the mobilization orders to join their military depots. The young
medical officer who had been speaking to me withdrew himself from
his wife's arm to answer some questions addressed to him by an old
colonel in his own branch of service. The lady turned to me and
spoke in a curiously intimate way, as though we were old friends.

"Have you begun to realize what it means? I feel that I ought to weep
because my husband is leaving me. We have two little children. But
there are no tears higher than my heart. It seems as though he were
just going away for a week-end--and yet he may never come back to
us. Perhaps to-morrow I shall weep."

She did not weep even when the train was signalled to start and
when the man put his arms about her and held her in a long
embrace, whispering down to her. Nor did I see any tears in other
women's eyes as they waved farewell. It was only the pallor of their
faces which showed some hidden agony.


17


Before the train started the carriage in which I had taken my seat was
crowded with young men who, excepting one cavalry officer in the
corner, seemed to belong to the poorest classes of Paris. In the
corner opposite the dragoon was a boy of eighteen or so in the
working clothes of a terrassier or labourer. No one had come to see
him off to the war, and he was stupefied with drink. Several times he
staggered up and vomited out of the window with an awful violence of
nausea, and then fell back with his head lolling sideways on the
cushions of the first-class carriage. None of the other men--except
the cavalry officer, who drew in his legs slightly--took the slightest
interest in this poor wretch--a handsome lad with square-cut features
and fair tousled hair, who had tried to get courage out of absinthe
before leaving for the war.


18


In the corner opposite my own seat was a thin pallid young man, also
a little drunk, but with an excited brain in which a multitude of strange
and tragic thoughts chased each other. He recognized me as an
Englishman at once, and with a shout of "Camarade!" shook hands
with me not once but scores of times during the first part of our
journey.

He entered upon a monologue that seemed interminable, his voice
rising into a shrill excitement and then sinking into a hoarse whisper.
He belonged to the "apache" type, and had come out of one of those
foul lairs which lie hidden behind the white beauty of Paris--yet he
spoke with a terrible eloquence which kept me fascinated. I
remember some of his words, though I cannot give them his white
heat of passion, nor the infinite pathos of his self-pity.

"I have left a wife behind, the woman who loves me and sees
something more in me than vileness. Shall I tell you how I left her,
Monsieur? Dying--in a hospital at Charenton. I shall never see her
again. I shall never again take her thin white face in my dirty hands
and say, 'You and I have tasted the goodness of life, my little one,
while we have starved together!' For life is good, Monsieur, but in a
little while I shall be dead in one place and my woman in another. That
is certain. I left a child behind me--a little girl. What will happen to
her when I am killed? I left her with the concierge, who promised to
take care of her--not for money, you understand, because I had none
to give. My little girl will never see me again, and I shall never see her
grow into a woman. Because I am going to be killed. Perhaps in a
day or two there will be no more life for me. This hand of mine--you
see I can grasp things with it, move it this way and that, shake hands
with you--camarade!--salute the spirit of France with it--comme ça!
But tomorrow or the next day it will be quite still. A dead thing--like my
dead body. It is queer. Here I sit talking to you alive. But to-morrow or
the next day my corpse will lie out on the battlefield, like a bit of
earth. I can see that corpse of mine, with its white face and staring eyes.
Ugh! it is a dirty sight--a man's corpse. Here in my heart something
tells me that I shall be killed quite soon, perhaps at the first shot. But
do you know I shall not be sorry to die. I shall be glad, Monsieur! And
why glad, you ask? Because I love France and hate the Germans
who have put this war on to us. I am going to fight--I, a Socialist and a
syndicalist--so that we shall make an end of war, so that the little ones
of France shall sleep in peace, and the women go without fear. This
war will have to be the last war. It is a war of Justice against
Injustice. When they have finished this time the people will have no
more of it. We who go out to die shall be remembered because we
gave the world peace. That will be our reward, though we shall know
nothing of it but lie rotting in the earth--dead! It is sad that to-morrow,
or the next day, I shall be dead. I see my corpse there-----"

He saw his corpse again, and wept a little at the sight of it.

A neurotic type--a poor weed of life who had been reared in the dark
lairs of civilization. Yet I had no contempt for him as he gibbered with
self-pity. The tragedy of the future of civilization was in the soul of
that pallid, sharp-featured, ill-nourished man who had lived in misery
within the glitter of a rich city and who was now being taken to his
death--I feel sure he died in the trenches even though no bullet may
have reached him--at the command of great powers who knew
nothing of this poor ant. What did his individual life matter? ... I stared
into the soul of a soldier of France and wondered at the things I saw
in it--at the spiritual faith which made a patriot of that apache.


19


There was a change of company in the carriage, the democrats being
turned into a third-class carriage to make way for half a dozen officers
of various grades and branches. I had new types to study and was
surprised by the calmness and quietude of these men--mostly of
middle age--who had just left their homes for active service. They
showed no signs of excitement but chatted about the prospects of the
war as though it were an abstract problem. The attitude of England
was questioned and again I was called upon to speak as the
representative of my country and to assure Frenchmen of our
friendship and co-operation. They seemed satisfied with my
statements and expressed their belief that the British Fleet would
make short work of the enemy at sea.

One of the officers took no part in the conversation. He was a
handsome man of about forty years of age, in the uniform of an
infantry regiment, and he sat in the corner of the carriage, stroking his
brown moustache in a thoughtful way. He had a fine gravity of face
and once or twice when his eyes turned my way I saw an immense
sadness in them.


20


As our train passed through France on its way to Nancy, we heard
and saw the tumult of a nation arming itself for war and pouring down
to its frontiers to meet the enemy. All through the night, as we passed
through towns and villages and under railway bridges, the song of the
Marseillaise rose up to the carriage windows and then wailed away
like a sad plaint as our engine shrieked and raced on. At the sound of
the national hymn one of the officers in my carriage always opened
his eyes and lifted his head, which had been drooping forward on his
chest, and listened with a look of puzzled surprise, as though he
could not realize even yet that France was at war and that he was on
his way to the front. But the other officers slept; and the silent man,
whose quiet dignity and sadness had impressed me, smiled a little in
his sleep now and then and murmured a word or two, among which I
seemed to hear a woman's name.

In the dawn and pallid sunlight of the morning I saw the soldiers of
France assembling. They came across the bridges with glinting rifles,
and the blue coats and red trousers of the infantry made them look in
the distance like tin soldiers from a children's playbox. But there were
battalions of them close to the railway lines, waiting at level crossings,
and with stacked arms on the platforms, so that I could look into their
eyes and watch their faces. They were fine young men, with a certain
hardness and keenness of profile which promised well for France.
There was no shouting among them, no patriotic demonstrations, no
excitability. They stood waiting for their trains in a quiet, patient way,
chatting among themselves, smiling, smoking cigarettes, like soldiers
on their way to sham fights in the ordinary summer manoeuvres. The
town and village folk, who crowded about them and leaned over the
gates at the level crossings to watch our train, were more
demonstrative. They waved hands to us and cried out "Bonne
chance!" and the boys and girls chanted the Marseillaise again in
shrill voices. At every station where we halted, and we never let one
of them go by without a stop, some of the girls came along the
platform with baskets of fruit, of which they made free gifts to our
trainload of men. Sometimes they took payment in kisses, quite
simply and without any bashfulness, lifting their faces to the lips of
bronzed young men who thrust their képis back and leaned out of the
carriage windows.

"Come back safe and sound, my little one," said a girl. "Fight well for
France!"

"I do not hope to come back," said a soldier, "but I shall die fighting."


21


The fields were swept with the golden light of the sun, and the heavy
foliage of the trees sang through every note of green. The white
roads of France stretched away straight between the fields and the
hills, with endless lines of poplars as their sentinels, and in clouds of
greyish dust rising like smoke the regiments marched with a steady
tramp. Gun carriages moved slowly down the roads in a glare of sun
which sparkled upon the steel tubes of the field artillery and made a
silver bar of every wheel-spoke. I heard the creak of the wheels and
the rattle of the limber and the shouts of the drivers to their teams;
and I thrilled a little every time we passed one of these batteries
because I knew that in a day or two these machines, which were
being carried along the highways of France, would be wreathed with
smoke denser than the dust about them now, while they vomited forth
shells at the unseen enemy whose guns would answer with the roar
of death.

Guns and men, horses and wagons, interminable convoys of
munitions, great armies on the march, trainloads of soldiers on all the
branch lines, soldiers bivouacked in the roadways and in market
places, long processions of young civilians carrying bundles to
military depots where they would change their clothes and all their
way of life--these pictures of preparation for war flashed through the
carriage windows into my brain, mile after mile, through the country of
France, until sometimes I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and
glitter of this kaleidoscope, the blood-red colour of all those French
trousers tramping through the dust, the lurid blue of all those soldiers'
overcoats, the sparkle of all those gun-wheels. What does it all mean,
this surging tide of armed men? What would it mean in a day or two,
when another tide of men had swept up against it, with a roar of
conflict, striving to overwhelm this France and to swamp over its
barriers in waves of blood? How senseless it seemed that those mild-
eyed fellows outside my carriage windows, chatting with the girls while
we waited for the signals to fall, should be on their way to kill other
mild-eyed men, who perhaps away in Germany were kissing other
girls, for gifts of fruit and flowers.


22


It was at this station near Toul that I heard the first words of hatred.
They were in a conversation between two French soldiers who had
come with us from Paris. They had heard that some Germans had
already been taken prisoners across the frontier, and they were angry
that the men were still alive.

"Prisoners? Pah! Name of a dog! I will tell you what I would do with
German prisoners!"

It was nothing nice that that man wanted to do with German
prisoners. He indulged in long and elaborate details as to the way in
which he would wreath their bowels about his bayonet and tear out
their organs with his knife. The other man had more imagination. He
devised more ingenious modes of torture so that the Germans should
not die too soon.

I watched the men as they spoke. They had the faces of murderers,
with bloodshot eyes and coarse features, swollen with drink and vice.
There was a life of cruelty in the lines about their mouths, and in their
husky laughter. Their hands twitched and their muscles gave
convulsive jerks, as they worked themselves into a fever of blood-
lust. In the French Revolution it was such men as these who leered
up at the guillotine and laughed when the heads of patrician women
fell into the basket, and who did the bloody Work of the September
massacre. The breed had not died out in France, and war had
brought it forth from its lairs again.


23


These men were not typical of the soldiers of France. In the
headquarters at Nancy, where I was kept waiting for some time in
one of the guard-rooms before being received by the commandant, I
chatted with many of the men and found them fine fellows of a good,
clean, cheery type. When they heard that I was a war correspondent,
they plied me with greetings and questions. "You are an English
journalist? You want to come with us? That is good! Every
Englishman is a comrade and we will give you some fine things to
write about!"

They showed me their rifles and their field kit, asked me to feel the
weight of their knapsacks, and laughed when I said that I should faint
with such a burden. In each black sack the French soldier carried--in
addition to the legendary bâton of a field-marshal--a complete change
of underclothing, a second pair of boots, provisions for two days,
consisting of desiccated soup, chocolate and other groceries, and a
woollen night-cap. Then there were his tin water-bottle, or bidon (filled
with wine at the beginning of the war), his cartridge belt, rifle, military
overcoat strapped about his shoulders, and various other
impedimenta.

"It's not a luxury, this life of ours," said a tall fellow with a fair
moustache belonging to the famous 20th Regiment of the line, which
was the first to enter Nancy after the German occupation of the town
in 1870.

He pointed to the rows of straw beds on which some of his comrades
lay asleep, and to the entire lack of comfort in the whitewashed room.

"Some of you English gentlemen," he said, "would hardly like to lie
down here side by side with the peasants from their farms, smelling of
their barns. But in France it is different. We have aristocrats still, but
some of them have to shake down with the poorest comrades and
know no distinction of rank now that all wear the same old uniform."

It seemed to me a bad uniform for modern warfare--the red trousers
and blue coat and the little képi made famous in many great battle
pictures--but the soldier told me they could not fight with the same
spirit if they wore any other clothes than those which belong to the
glorious traditions of France.


24


When I was taken to Colonel Duchesne, second-in-command to
General Foch, he gave me a smiling greeting, though I was a
trespasser in the war zone, and he wanted to know what I thought of
his "boys," what was my opinion of the mobilization, and what were
my impressions of the way in which France had responded to the call.
I answered with sincerity, and when I spoke of the astonishing way in
which all classes seemed to have united in defence of the nation,
Colonel Duchesne had a sudden mist of tears in his eyes which he
did not try to hide.

"It is sublime! All politics have been banished. We are one people,
with one ideal and one purpose--La France!"

Then he came to the business of my visit--to obtain a permit to march
with the French troops.

"It is very difficult," said the Colonel. "General Foch would do all he
could for you--he loves the English--but no French correspondents
are allowed on the frontier, and we can hardly make a distinction in
your favour. Still, I will put your appeal before the general. The answer
shall be sent to your hotel."


25


It was while waiting for this reply that I was able to explore Nancy and
to see the scenes of mobilization. The town was under martial law. Its
food-supplies were under strict supervision by the commandant.
Every motor-car and cart had been commandeered for the use of the
army, and every able-bodied citizen had been called to the colours. I
was the only guest in the Grand Hotel and the manager and his wife
attended to my wants themselves. They were astounded to see me in
the town.

"You are the only foreigner left," they said, "except those who are
under armed guard, waiting to be taken to the Swiss frontier. Look!
there go the last of them!"

Through the glass windows of the hotel door I saw about two hundred
men marching away from the square surrounded by soldiers with
fixed bayonets. They carried bundles and seemed to droop under the
burden of them already. But I fancy their hearts were heaviest, and I
could see that these young men--waiters and hairdressers and
tradesmen mostly of Swiss nationality--were unwilling victims of this
tragedy of war which had suddenly thrust them out of their business
and smashed their small ambitions and booted them out of a country
which had given them a friendly welcome. On the other side of the
fixed bayonets were some women who wept as they called out
"Adieu!" to their fair-haired fellows. One of them held up a new-born
baby between the guards as she ran alongside, so that its little
wrinkled face touched the cheek of a young man who had a look of
agony in his eyes.

That night I heard the shrill notes of bugle calls and going to my
bedroom window listened to the clatter of horses' hoofs and saw the
dim forms of cavalry and guns going through the darkness--towards
the enemy. No sound of firing rattled my window panes. It still
seemed very quiet--over there to the East. Yet before the dawn came
a German avalanche of men and guns might be sweeping across the
frontier, and if I stayed a day or two in the open town of Nancy I might
see the spiked helmets of the enemy glinting down the streets. The
town was not to be defended, I was told, if the French troops had to
fall back from the frontier to the fortresses of Belfort and Toul.

A woman's voice was singing outside in the courtyard when I
awakened next day. How strange that any woman should sing in an
undefended town confronted by such a peril. But none of the girls
about the streets had any fear in their eyes. German frightfulness had
not yet scared them with its nameless horrors.


28


I did not stay in Nancy. It was only the French War Office in Paris who
could give permission for a correspondent to join the troops. This
unfortified town has never echoed in the war to the tramp of German
feet, and its women's courage has not been dismayed by the worst
horrors. But since those days of August 1914, many women's faces
have blanched at the sight of blood--streams of blood sopping the
stretchers in which the wounded have been carried back from the
frontier, which seemed so quiet when I listened at the open window.
Those soldiers I talked to in the general headquarters--how many of
them are now alive? They were the men who fought in Alsace and
Lorraine, when whole battalions were decimated under a withering
shell-fire beyond the endurance of human courage, and who
marched forward to victories, and backward in retreats, and forward
again over the dead bodies of their comrades and corrupting heaps
of German dead, in an ebb and flow of warfare which made the fields
and the woods one great stench of horror, from which there came
back madmen and maimed creatures, and young men, lucky with
slight wounds, who told the tale of things they had seen as though
they had escaped from hell. I met some of them afterwards and
turned sick and faint as I listened to their stories; and afterwards on
the western side of the French front, three hundred miles from Nancy,
I came upon the dragoons of Belfort who had ridden past me in the
sunshine of those August days. Then they had been very fine to see
in their clean uniforms and on their glossy horses, garlanded with
flowers. At the second meeting they were stained and warworn, and
their horses limped with drooping heads, and they rode as men who
have seen many comrades fall and have been familiar with the ways
of death. They were fine to see again, those dirty, tired, grim-faced
men. But it was a different kind of beauty which sent a queer thrill
through me as I watched them pass.




Chapter III
The Secret War



1


It was the most astounding thing in modern history, the secrecy
behind which great armies were moving and fighting. To a civilization
accustomed to the rapid and detailed accounts of news, there was
something stupefying in the veil of silence which enshrouded the
operations of the legions which were being hurled against each other
along the frontiers. By one swift stroke of the military censorship
journalism was throttled. All its lines of communication were cut,
suddenly, as when, in my office, I spoke from Paris to England, and
found myself with a half-finished sentence before a telephone which
would no longer "march," as they say across the Channel. Pains and
penalties were threatened against any newspaper which should dare
to publish a word of military information beyond the official
communiqués issued in order to hide the truth. Only by a careful
study of maps from day to day and a microscopic reading between
the lines could one grope one's way to any kind of clear fact which
would reveal something more than the vague optimism, the patriotic
fervour, of those early dispatches issued from the Ministry of War.
Now and again a name would creep into these communiqués which
after a glance at the map would give one a cold thrill of anxiety and
doubt. Was it possible that the enemy had reached that point? If so,
then its progress was phenomenal and menacing. But M. le Marquis
de Messimy, War Minister of France, was delightfully cheerful. He
assured the nation day after day that their heroic army was making
rapid progress. He omitted to say in what direction. He gave no
details of these continual victories. He did not publish lists of
casualties. It seemed, at first, as though the war were bloodless.


2


One picture of Paris, in those first days of August, comes to my mind
now. In a great room to the right of the steps of the War Office a
number of men in civilian clothes sit in gilded chairs with a strained
look of expectancy, as though awaiting some message of fate. They
have interesting faces. My fingers itch to make a sketch of them, but
only Steinlen could draw these Parisian types who seem to belong to
some literary or Bohemian coterie. What can they be doing at the
Ministry of War? They smoke cigarettes incessantly, talk in whispers
tête-â-tête, or stare up at the steel casques and cuirasses on the
walls, or at the great glass candelabra above their heads as though
they can only keep their patience in check by gazing fixedly at some
immovable object. Among the gilded chairs and beneath the Empire
mirrors which reflect the light there are three iron bedsteads with
straw mattresses, and now and again a man gets up from one of
these straight-backed chairs and lies at full length on one of the beds.
But a minute later he rises silently again and listens intently,
nervously, to the sound of footsteps coming sharply across the
polished boards. It seems to be the coming of the messenger for
whom all these men have been waiting. They spring to their feet and
crowd round a table as a gentleman comes in with a bundle of papers
from which he gives a sheet to every outstretched hand. The Parisian
journalists have received the latest bulletin of war. They read it
silently, devouring with their eyes those few lines of typewritten words.
Here is the message of fate. Those slips of paper will tell them
whether it goes well or ill with France. One of them speaks to his
neighbour:

"Tout va bien!"

Yes, all goes well, according to the official bulletin, but there is not
much news on that slip of paper, not enough for men greedy for
every scrap of news. Perhaps the next dispatch will contain a longer
story. They must come again, these journalists of France, to smoke
more cigarettes, to stare at the steel armour, to bridle their impatience
with clenched hands. This little scene at the Ministry of War is played
four times a day, and there is a tremendous drama behind the
quietude of those waiting men, whose duty it is to tell France and the
world what another day of war has done for the flag.


3


Another little scene comes to my mind as I grope back to those first
days of war. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the Quai d'Orsay,
there is more quietude. It is difficult to realise that this house has been
the scene of a world-drama within the last few days, and that in one
of its reception-rooms a German gentleman spoke a few quiet words,
before asking for some papers, which hurled millions of men against
each other in a deadly struggle involving all that we mean by
civilization. I went to that house and waited for a while in an ante-
chamber where the third Napoleon once paced up and down before a
war which ended disastrously for France. Presently a footman came
through the velvet curtains and said, "Monsieur le Président vous
attend." I was taken into another room, a little cabinet overlooking a
garden, cool and green under old trees through which the sunlight
filtered. A stone goddess smiled at me through the open windows. I
saw her out of the corner of my eye as I bowed to M. Doumergue,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, and, for a time, Prime Minister of France.
For some reason my imagination was touched by that garden of
peace where a Greek goddess smiled in the green twilight.

But M. Doumergue was smiling, too, with that expression of tout va
bien which masked the anxiety of every statesman who had seen
behind the veil. After a few preliminary words he spoke of the
progress of the war and of its significance to the world.

"Civilization itself," he said, "depends upon the success of our arms.
For years Germany has played the part of a bully, basing her policy
upon brute force, and thrusting her sword before the eyes of men.
She was swollen-headed with her military pride. She preached the
gospel of the swashbuckler. And now, after the declaration of this
war, which was none of our seeking, how are they behaving, these
Germans? Like barbarians. They have treated our Ambassador with
infamous discourtesy. They have behaved with incredible insolence
and boorishness to our Consuls. The barbaric nature of the enemy is
revealed in a way which will never be forgotten. Fortunately, we have
European civilization on our side. All the cultured races sympathize
with us. They know that Europe would be lost if the German Empire,
with its policy of blood and iron, with its military caste and tyranny,
should become more dominant and stride across the frontiers of
civilized States. But of the ultimate issue of this war there can be no
doubt. With Great Britain fighting side by side with France, with
Russia attacking on the Eastern front, what hopes can Germany
nourish now? The war may be a long struggle; it may lead to many
desperate battles; but in the end the enemy must be doomed. Where
is her boasted organization? Already our prisoners tell us that they
were starving when they fought. It seems as though these critics of
French military organization were demoralized at the outset. Ils ont
bluffé tout le temps! I can assure you that we are full of confidence,
and perfectly satisfied with the way in which the war is progressing."


4


This Minister of France was "perfectly satisfied." His optimism
cheered me, though all his words had not told me the things I wanted
to know, nor lifted the corner of that veil which hid the smoke and
flash of guns. But the French had taken prisoners and somewhere or
other masses of men were fighting and dying. ... As I came back from
the Quai d'Orsay and a stroll in the Champs Elysées through the
golden twilight of a splendid day, when the lamps of Paris began to
gleam like stars through the shimmering haze and the soft foliage of
the most beautiful highway in the world, there came a clatter of hoofs
and the music of soldiers' harness. It was a squadron of the Garde
Républicaine riding on the last patrol of the day round the ramparts of
Paris. I watched them gallop through the Arc de Triomphe, their black
crinières streaming backwards like smoke from their helmets. They
rode towards the setting sun, a crimson bar across the blue of the
sky, and when I walked back slowly to the heart of Paris the
boulevards were already quiet, and in the velvety darkness which
overtook me there was peace and order. Only the silence of the
streets told me that France was at war.


6


Obviously it was hopeless to stay in Paris waiting for official
permission to follow the armies as a correspondent and to penetrate
more deeply into the heart of that mystery which was fogged more
deeply by the words that came forth every day from the Ministry of
War. The officials were very polite and took great trouble to soothe
the excited emotions of would-be war correspondents. "In a few days,
gentlemen, if all continues to go well." They desired our photographs,
in duplicate, a medical certificate of health, recommendations as to
our mental and moral qualities, formal applications and informal
interviews. But meanwhile the war was being fought and we were
seeing nothing.

News of great victory came to Paris when the bulletins announced
the advance of French troops in Alsace and the capture of Mulhouse
and Altkirch. Instantly there were joyous scenes in the streets.
Boulevards, which had been strangely quiet, became thronged with
men and women called out from the twilight of their rooms by this
burst of sunlight, as it seemed. The news held the magic thrill of an
Alsace restored to France. ... It was long afterwards that Paris heard
strange and evil rumours of reverses down there, of a regiment which
flung down its rifles and fled under a tempest of shells, of officers shot
by their own guns, of a general cashiered for grievous errors.

From Liège there came more news. The imagination of Paris,
deprived of all sustenance as regards its own troops, fed greedily
upon the banquet of blood which had been given to it by the gallant
Belgians. In messages coming irregularly through the days and
nights, three or four lines at a time, it was possible to grasp the main
facts of that heroic stand against the German legions. We were able
to perceive from afar the raking fire of the forts around the city, which
swept the ground so that the most famous regiments of the German
army were mowed down as they advanced with desperate courage.

"If Liège holds out the German troops are in a hopeless position."
These words were repeated along the boulevards of Paris, and
because Liège held out so long the spirit of Paris was exalted.

But, as a journalist out to see things, I was depressed. It was useless
to wait in Paris while the days were slipping by and history was being
made. Official permission was delayed, by fair and courteous words. I
decided to go in search of the war without permission and to get
somehow or other behind the scenes of its secrecy. So my
adventures began, and in a little while my eyes became seared with
the sight of tragedy and my soul filled with the enormous woe of war.


6


It was a strange kind of melodrama that experience in the first two
months of the war. Looking back upon it now, it has just the effect of
a prolonged nightmare stimulated by hasheesh or bang--fantastic, full
of confused dreams, changing kaleidoscopically from one scene to
another, with vivid clear-cut pictures, intensely imagined, between
gulfs of dim twilight memories, full of shadow figures, faces seen a
little while and then lost, conversations begun abruptly and then
ended raggedly, poignant emotions lasting for brief moments and
merging into others as strong but of a different quality, gusts of
laughter rising between moods of horrible depression, tears
sometimes welling from the heart and then choked back by a brutal
touch of farce, beauty and ugliness in sudden clashing contrasts, the
sorrow of a nation, the fear of a great people, the misery of women
and children, the intolerable anguish of multitudes of individuals each
with a separate agony, making a dark background to this too real
dream from which there was no awakening.

I was always travelling during those eight or nine weeks of history--for
the most time I had two companions with me--dear fellows whose
comradeship was a fine personal pleasure, in spite of all the pain into
which we plunged. Together we journeyed continually and
prodigiously, covering thousands of miles during those weeks, in all
sorts of directions, by all sorts of ways, in troop trains and cattle
trucks, in motor-cars and taxi-cabs, and on Shanks's nag. There were
no couriers in those days between France and England, and to get
our dispatches home we often had to take them across the Channel,
using most desperate endeavours to reach a port of France in time
for the next boat home and staying in Fleet Street only a few hours
before hurrying back to Dover or Folkestone in order to plunge again
into the fever of invaded France. Later Paris was our goal, and we
would struggle back to it along lines choked with munitions of war or
completely held for the transport of great masses of troops, arriving,
at night as a rule, weary for lack of sleep, dirty from the filth of cattle
trucks crowded with unwashed men and women, hungry after
meagre rations of biscuits and cheese, mentally and physically
exhausted, so that one such night I had to be carried upstairs to my
room, so weak that I could not drag one leg after the other nor lift a
hand from the coverlet. On another day one of my companions--the
Strategist--sat back, rather quiet, in a taxi-cab which panted in a
wheezy way along the interminably straight roads of France, through
villages from which all their people had fled under the shadow of a
great fear which followed them, until when the worn-out vehicle could
go no further, but halted helplessly on a lonely highway remote as it
seemed from any habitation, my friend confessed that he was weak
even as a new-born babe and could not walk a hundred yards to
save his life. Yet he is a strong man who had never been in a doctor's
hands since childhood.

His weakness, the twist of pain about his mouth, the weariness in his
eyes, scared us then. The Philosopher, who had not yet begun to feel
in his bones the heat of the old tropical fever which afterwards made
him toss at nights and call out strange words, shook his head and
spoke with the enormous gravity which gives an air of prophecy and
awful wisdom to a man whose sense of humour and ironic wit have
often twisted me into painful knots of mirth. But there was no glint of
humour in the Philosopher's eyes when he stared at the greyness of
the Strategist.

"The pace has been too hot," he said. "We seem to forget that there's
a limit to the strain we can put on the human machine. It's not only
the physical fatigue. It's the continual output of nervous energy. All
this misery, all that damn thing over there"--he waved his paw at the
darkening hills beyond which was a great hostile army--"the sight of
all these refugees spilt out of their cities and homes as though a great
hand had tipped up the earth, is beginning to tell on us, my lads. We
are spending our reserve force, and we are just about whacked!"

Yet we went on, mixed up always in refugee rushes, in masses of
troops moving forward to the front or backwards in retreat, getting
brief glimpses of the real happenings behind the screen of secrecy,
meeting the men who could tell us the hidden truth, and more than
once escaping, by the nick of time only, from a death-trap into which
we had tumbled unwittingly, not knowing the whereabouts of the
enemy, nor his way of advance.


7


In the early days of the war, the first stampede which overwhelmed
us had a touch of comedy unless one's imagination were shocked by
the panic of great crowds, in which always and for whatever cause
there is something degrading to the dignity of human nature. It was
the panic rush of the world's tourists suddenly trapped by war in the
pleasure haunts of Europe. They had come out to France,
Switzerland, Italy and Egypt with well-lined purses, for the most part,
and with the absolute conviction not disturbed by any shadow of
doubt, that their ways would be made smooth by Cook's guides, hotel
managers, British and American consuls, and foreigners of all classes
eager to bow before them, to show them the sights, to carry their
baggage, to lick, if need be, their boots. They had money, they
belonged to the modern aristocracy of the well-to-do. Was not Europe
their garden of pleasure, providing for them, in return for the price of a
season ticket, old monuments, famous pictures, sunsets over Swiss
mountains, historic buildings starred by Baedeker, peculiar customs
of aborigines, haunts of vice to be viewed with a sense of virtue, and
good hotels in which there was a tendency to over-eat?

The pleasure of these rich Americans and comfortable English
tourists was suddenly destroyed by the thunderbolt of war. They were
startled to find that strong laws were hastily enacted against them and
put in force with extraordinary brutality. Massed under the name of
étrangers--they had always looked upon the natives as the only
foreigners--they were ordered to leave certain countries and certain
cities within twenty-four hours, otherwise they would be interned in
concentration camps under armed guards for the duration of the war.
But to leave these countries and cities they had to be provided with a
passport--hardly an American among them had such a document--
and with a laisser-passer to be obtained from the police and
countersigned by military authorities, after strict interrogation.

The comedy began on the first day of mobilization, and developed
into real tragedy as the days slipped by. For although at first there
was something a little ludicrous in the plight of the well-to-do, brought
down with a crash to the level of the masses and loaded with paper
money which was as worthless as Turkish bonds, so that the
millionaire was for the time being no richer than the beggar, pity
stirred in one at the sight of real suffering and anguish of mind.

Outside the commissariats de police in Paris and provincial towns of
France, like Dijon and Lyons, and in the ports of Calais, Boulogne
and Dieppe, there were great crowds of these tourists lined up in
queue and waiting wearily through the hours until their turn should
come to be measured with their backs to the wall and to be
scrutinized by'police officers, sullen after a prolonged stream of
entreaty and expostulation, for the colour of their eyes and hair, the
shape of their noses and chins, and the "distinctive marks" of their
physical beauty or ugliness.

"I guess I'll never come to this Europe again!" said an American lady
who had been waiting for five hours in a side street in Paris for this
ordeal. "It's a cruel shame to treat American citizens as though they
were thieves and rogues. I wonder the President of the United States
don't make a protest about it. Are people here so ignorant they don't
even know the name of Josiah K. Schultz, of Boston, Massachusetts?"

The commissary's clerk inside the building was quite unmoved by the
name of Josiah K. Schultz, of Boston, Massachusetts. It held no
magic for him, and he seemed to think that the lady-wife of that
distinguished man might be a German spy with American papers. He
kept her waiting, deliberately, though she had waited for five hours in
the street outside.


8


The railway time-tables ceased to have a meaning after the first hour
of mobilization. Bradshaw became a lie and civil passengers were
only allowed on the rare trains which ran without notice at any hour of
the day or night, at the discretion of military officers, according to the
temporary freedom of the line from troop trains and supply trains.
Those tourist crowds suffered intolerable things, which I shared with
them, though I was a different kind of traveller. I remember one such
scene at Dijon, typical of many others. Because only one train was
starting on that day to the capital, and the time of it was utterly
unknown to the railway officials, three or four hundred people had to
wait hour after hour, for half a night, penned up in a waiting-room,
which became foul with the breath and heat of so many people. In
vain did they appeal to be let out on to the platform where there would
be more air and space. A sentry with fixed bayonet stood with his
back to them and barred the way. Old ladies sat down in despair on
their baggage, wedged between legs straddled across their bags. A
delicate woman near me swooned in the stifling atmosphere. I had
watched her grow whiter and whiter and heard the faintness of her
sighs, so that when she swayed I grasped her by the arm and held
her up until her husband relieved me of her weight. A Frenchwoman
had a baby at her breast. It cried with an unceasing wail. Other
babies were crying; and young girls, with sensitive nerves, were
exasperated by this wailing misery and the sickening smell which
pervaded this closed room.

When the train came in, the door was opened and there was a wild
rush for the carriages, without the English watchword of "women and
children first." Thrust on one side by sharp elbows, I and my two
friends struggled at last into the corridor, and for nineteen hours sat
there on the sharp edges of our upturned trunks, fixed rigidly between
the bodies of other travellers. To the left of us was a French peasant,
a big, quiet man, with a bovine gift of patience and utterly taciturn.
After the first five minutes I suspected that somewhere concealed
about his person was a ripe cheese. There was a real terror in the
malodorous vapours which exhaled from him. In a stealthy way they
crept down the length of the corridor, so that other people, far away,
flung open windows and thrust out heads, in spite of the night air with
a bite of frost in it. I dozed uneasily with horrid dreams as I sat on
three inches of hard box, with my head jogging sideways. Always I
was conscious of the evil smell about me, but when the peasant was
still I was able to suffer' it, because of sheer weariness, which
deadened my senses. It was when he moved, disturbing invisible
layers of air, that I awakened horribly.


10


For the nice people of the world whom fate had pampered, there was
a cruelty in this mode of travel. Hunger, with its sharp tooth, assailed
some of them for the first time. We stopped at wayside stations--still
more often between the stations--but American millionaires and
English aristocrats were stupefied to find that not all their money
could buy a sandwich. Most of the buffets had been cleaned out by
the army passing to the front. Thirst, intolerable and choking, was a
greater pain in those hot dog-days and in those tedious interminable
journeys.

Yet it is only fair to say that on the whole those tourists chased across
the Continent by the advancing spectre of war, behaved with pluck
and patience. Some of them had suffered grievous loss. From Bale
and Geneva to Paris and Boulogne the railways were littered with
their abandoned luggage, too bulky to be loaded into overcrowded
trains. On the roads of France were broken-down motor-cars which
had cost large sums of money in New York and London. But because
war's stupendous evil makes all other things seem trivial, and the gifts
of liberty and life are more precious than wealth or luxury, so these
rich folk in misfortune fraternized cheerfully in the discussion of their
strange adventures and shared the last drop of hot tea in a Thermos
flask with the generous instincts of shipwrecked people dividing their
rations on a desert isle.


11


This flight of the pleasure-seekers was the first revelation of the way
in which war would hurt the non-combatant and sacrifice his business
or his comfort to its supreme purpose. Fame was merely foolishness
when caught in the trap of martial law. I saw a man of European
reputation flourish his card before railway officials, to be thrust back
by the butt end of a rifle, No money could buy a seat in a railway
carriage already crowded to suffocation. No threat to write a letter to
the Times would avail an old-fashioned Englishman when his train
was shunted for hours on to a side line to make way for troop trains,
passing, passing, through the day and night. Nations were at war,
and whatever stood in the way of the war's machine would be
trampled underfoot or thrust on one side with brutal indifference. Their
fame did not matter nor their struggles to escape from a closing net.
Neither the beauty of women nor the weakness of children nor the
importance of the world's great somebodies mattered a jot. Nothing
mattered except fighting-men, and guns, and food for guns and men.


12


The French soldiers who were being sent towards the unknown front
--not knowing their own destination and forbidden to ask--had
recovered from the shock of the sudden call to the colours and the
tragedy of their hurried partings from wives, and sweethearts, and old
mothers, who are always dearest to Frenchmen's hearts. The thrill of
a nation's excitement brought a sparkle to their eyes and a flush to
their cheeks. The inherent gaiety of the French race rose triumphant
above the gloom and doubt which had preceded the declaration of
war. Would they never tire of singing the Marseillaise? Would all this
laughter which came in gusts through the open doors of cattle trucks
and the windows of third-class carriages change into the moan of the
wounded at their journey's end? It was hard to look forward to that
inevitable fate as I watched them pass. They had tied flowers to the
handles of their trains and twisted garlands round the bars. There
were posies in their kepis, and bouquets were pinned by the plump
hands of peasant girls to the jackets of the soldiers of the line,
gunners, cuirassiers, dragoons, and fusiliers marins. Between the
chorus of the Marseillaise came snatches of songs learnt in the
cabarets of Montmartre and the cafés chantants of provincial towns.
They swarmed like bees--in blue coats and red trousers--upon those
enormous troop trains which passed through Gournai and Pontoise,
Rouen and Amiens. Rows of them, grinning down under peaks at
freakish angles, dangled their legs over as they squatted on the roofs
of the wooden trucks. They hung on to the iron ladders of the guards'
vans. Sometimes six of them would be installed on the ledge behind
the funnel of the engine, with their russet faces to the wind. In the
argot of Paris slums, or in the dialects of seaport towns, they hurled
chaff at comrades waiting on the platforms with stacked arms, and
made outrageous love to girls who ran by the side of their trains with
laughing eyes and saucy tongues and a last farewell of "Bonne
chance, mes petits! Bonne chance et toujours la victoire!" At every
wayside halt artists were at work with white chalk drawing grotesque
faces on the carriage doors below which they scrawled inscriptions
referring to the death of "William," and banquets in Berlin, and
invitations for free trips to the Rhine. In exchange for a few English
cigarettes, too few for such trainloads, they gave me ovations of
enthusiasm, as though I stood for England.

"Vive l'Angleterre! Vos soldats, ou sont ils, camarade?" Where were
the English soldiers? It was always that question which sprang to their
lips. But for a little while I could not answer. It was strange. There was
no news of the crossing of the Expeditionary Force to France. In the
French and English newspapers no word was said about any British
soldiers on French soil. Was there some unaccountable delay, or
were we fulfilling our bond privately, a great drama being played
behind the scenes, like the secret war?


13


Then just for a moment the veil was lifted and Lord Kitchener allowed
the British people to know that their soldiers had landed on the other
side. Even then we who knew more than that were not allowed to
mention the places to which they had gone. Never mind. They were
here. We heard quite suddenly the familiar accents of English
Tommies in provincial towns of France, and came unexpectedly upon
khalfi-clad battalions marching and singing along the country roads.
For the first time there rang out in France the foolish ballad which has
become by a queer freak the war song of the British Army: "It's a long
way to Tipperary," learnt with comical accent by French peasants and
French girls, who, in those early days, in the first fine thrill of
enthusiasm, sang it emotionally as though it were a hymn, holding all
their love for England, all their hope of England's help, all their
admiration of these clean-shaven boys going to war in France in a
sporting spirit as though it were a great game. I went back to Paris for
a day when General French arrived, and even now in remembrance I
hear those shouts of "Vive l'Angleterre!" which followed the motor-car
in which our General made his triumphant progress. The shopgirls of
Paris threw flowers from the windows as the car passed. Dense
crowds of citizens thronged the narrow street of the Faubourg St.
Honoré, and waited patiently for hours outside the Embassy to catch
one glimpse of the strong, stern, thoughtful face of the man who had
come with his legions to assist France in the great hour of need. They
talked to each other about the inflexibility of his character, about the
massive jaw which, they said, would bite off Germany's head. They
cheered in the English manner, with a "Heep! heep! hooray!"--when
they caught sight for the first time of the khaki uniforms of English
officers on the steps of the Ministry of War. The arrival of English
troops here was red wine to the hearts of the French people. It
seemed to them the great guarantee of victory. "With England
marching side by side with us," they said, "we shall soon be in Berlin!"


14


A train-load of Royal Engineers came into one of the stations where I
happened to be waiting (my memory of those days is filled with weary
hours on station platforms). It was the first time I was able to talk to
British Tommies in France, and to shake their hands, and to shout
out "Good luck!" to them. It was curious how strong my emotion was
at seeing those laughing fellows and hearing the cockney accent of
their tongues. They looked so fine and clean. Some of them were
making their toilet in the cattle trucks brushing their hair as though for,
a picnic party, shaving before little mirrors tacked up on the planks.
Others, crowding at the open doorways of the trucks, shouted with
laughter at the French soldiers and peasants, who grabbed at their
hands and jabbered enthusiastic words of welcome.

"Funny lingo, Bill!" said one of the men. "Can't make out a bit of it. But
they mean well, I guess!"

It was impossible to doubt that they meant well, these soldiers of
France greeting their comrades of England. One man behaved like a
buffoon, or as though he had lost his wits. Grasping the hand of a
young engineer he danced round him, shouting "Camarade!
camarade!" in a joyous sing-song which was ridiculous, and yet
touching in its simplicity and faith. It was no wonder, I thought, that the
French people believed in victory now that the British had come. A
Jingo pride took possession of me. These Tommies of ours were the
finest soldiers in the world! They went to war with glad hearts. They
didn't care a damn for old Von Kluck and all his hordes. They would
fight like heroes, these clean-limbed chaps, who looked upon war as
a great game. Further along the train my two friends, the Philosopher
and the Strategist, were in deep conversation with different groups. I
heard gusts of laughter from the truck-load of men looking down on
the Philosopher. He had discovered a man from Wapping, I think,
and was talking in the accent of Stratford-atte-Bow to boys from that
familiar district of his youth. The Strategist had met the engineers in
many camps in England. They were surprised at his knowledge of
their business. And what were we doing out here? Newspaper
correspondents? Ah, there would be things to write about! When the
train passed out, with waving hands from every carriage, with
laughing faces caught already by the sun of France, with farewell
shouts of "Good luck, boys!" and "Bonne chance, camarades!" three
Englishmen turned away silently and could not speak for a minute or
two. Why did the Philosopher blink his eyes in such a funny way, as
though they smarted at specks of dust? And why did the Strategist
look so grave all of a sudden, as he stood staring after the train, with
his cap in his hand, so that the sunlight gleamed on his silver-grey
hair?


15


So the British Army had come to France, and a strange chapter was
being written in the history of the world, contrasting amazingly with
former chronicles. English battalions bivouacked by old French
houses which had looked down upon scenes of revolution in 1789,
and in the shadow of its churches which rang for French victories or
tolled for French defeats when Napoleon's generals were fighting
English regiments exactly one hundred years ago. In seaport villages
and towns which smell of tar and nets and absinthe and stale wine I
saw horses stabled in every inn-yard; streets were littered with straw,
and English soldiers sauntered about within certain strict boundaries,
studying picture postcards and giving the "glad eye" to any little
French girl who peeped at them through barred windows. Only
officers of high rank knew where they were bound. The men, devoid
of all curiosity, were satisfied with the general knowledge that they
were "on the continong," and well on the way to "have a smack at the
Germans." There was the rattle and rumble of English guns down
country highways. Long lines of khaki-clad men, like a writhing brown
snake when seen from afar, moved slowly along winding roads,
through cornfields where the harvest was cut and stacked, or down
long avenues of poplars, interminably straight, or through quaint old
towns and villages with whitewashed houses and overhanging
gables, and high stone steps leading to barns and dormer-chambers.
Some of those little provincial towns have hardly changed since
D'Artagnan and his Musketeers rode on their way to great adventures
in the days of Richelieu and Mazarin. And the spirit of D'Artagnan was
still bred in them, in the France of Poincaré, for they are the dwelling-
places of young men in the cuirassiers and the chasseurs who had
been chasing Uhlans through the passes of the Vosges, capturing
outposts even though the odds were seven to one.

The English officers and men will never have to complain of their
welcome in France. It was overwhelming--even a little intoxicating to
young soldiers. As they marched through the towns peasant girls ran
along the ranks with great bouquets of wild flowers, which they thrust
into the soldiers' arms. In every market square where the regiments
halted for a rest there was free wine for any thirsty throat, and soldier
boys from Scotland or England had their brown hands kissed by girls
who were eager for hero worship and had fallen in love with these
clean-shaven lads and their smiling grey eyes. In those early days
there seemed no evil in the worship of the women nor in the hearts of
the men who marched to the song of "Tipperary." Every man in khaki
could claim a hero's homage for himself on any road in France, at
any street corner of an old French town. It was some time before the
romance wore off, and the realities of human nature, where good is
mixed with evil and blackguardism marches in the same regiment
with clean-hearted men, destroyed some of the illusions of the French
and demanded an iron discipline from military police and made poor
peasant girls repent of their abandonment in the first ecstasy of their
joyous welcome.


16


Not yet did the brutalities of the war spoil the picture painted in khaki
tones upon the green background of the French countryside. From
my notebook I transcribe one of the word pictures which I wrote at the
time. It is touched with the emotion of those days, and is true to the
facts which followed:

"The weather has been magnificent. It has been no hardship to sleep
out in the roads and fields at night. A harvest moon floods the country
with silver light and glints upon the stacked bayonets of this British
Army in France when the men lie down beneath their coats, with their
haversacks as pillows. Each sleeping figure is touched softly by those
silver rays while the sentries pace up and down upon the outskirts of
the camp. Some of the days have been intensely hot, but the British
Tommy unfastens his coat and leaves his shirt open at the chest, and
with the sun bronzing his face to a deeper, richer tint, marches on,
singing a cockney ballad as though he were on the road to
Weybridge or Woking. They are young fellows, many of them--
beardless boys who have not yet been hard-bitten by a long
campaign and have not received their baptism of fire. Before they
have been many days in the fields of France they will not look so
fresh and smart. Those grey eyes of theirs will be haunted by the
memory of battlefields at night, when the stretcher-bearers are
searching for the wounded who lie among the dead. Not yet do these
boys know the real meaning of war. But they belong to the same
breed of men who a hundred years ago fought with Wellington in the
Peninsula. There is no possible need to doubt that they will maintain
the old traditions of their regiments and add new records to their
colours. Before this war is finished these soldiers of ours, who are
singing on their way, in dapper suits of khaki, will be all tattered and
torn, with straw tied round their feet, with stubby beards on their chins,
with the grime of gunpowder and dust and grease and mud and
blood upon their hands and faces. They will have lost the freshness
of their youth: but those who remain will have gained--can we doubt
it?--the reward of stubborn courage and unfailing valour."


17


Not many days after these words were written, I came upon a scene
which fulfilled them, too quickly. At a French junction there was a
shout of command in English, and I saw a body of men in khaki, with
Red Cross armlets, run across a platform to an incoming train from
the north, with stretchers and drinking bottles. A party of English
soldiers had arrived from a battle at a place called Mons. With French
passengers from another train, I was kept back by soldiers with fixed
bayonets, but through the hedge of steel I saw a number of
"Tommies" with bandaged heads and limbs descending from the
troop train. Some of them hung limp between their nurses. Their
faces, so fresh when I had first seen them on the way out, had
become grey and muddy, and were streaked with blood. Their khaki
uniforms were torn and cut. One poor boy moaned pitiably as they
carried him away on a stretcher. They were the first fruits of this
unnatural harvesting, lopped and maimed by a cruel reaper. I stared
at them with a kind of sickness, more agonized than afterwards when
I saw more frightful things. It came as a queer, silly shock to me then
to realize that in this secret war for which I was searching men were
really being smashed and killed, and that out of the mystery of it, out
of the distant terror from which great multitudes were fleeing, out of
the black shadow creeping across the sunlit hills of France, where the
enemy, whom no fugitives had seen, was advancing like a moving
tide, there should come these English boys, crippled and broken,
from an unknown battle. I was able to speak to one of them, wounded
only in the hand, but there was no time for more than a question or
two and an answer which hardly gave me definite knowledge.

"We got it in the neck!" said the sergeant of the R.F.A. He repeated
the words as if they held all truth. "We got it in the neck!" "Where?" I
asked.

He waved his wounded hand northwards, and said: "Mons."

"Do you mean we were beaten? In retreat?" He shrugged his
shoulders.

"We gave 'em what for. Oh, yes, they had to pay right enough. But
they were too much for us. Came on like lice... swarming... Couldn't
kill enough... Then we got it in the neck... Lost a good few men...
Gord, I've never seen such work! South Africa? No more than child's
play to this 'ere game!"

He gave a queer kind of grin, with no mirth in his eyes, and went
away with the other wounded men.

Mons? It was the first I had heard of a battle there And our men were
having a hard time. The enemy were too much for us. Was it a
retreat? Perhaps a rout?


18


The Philosopher answered these unspoken questions.

"You always get the gloomy view from wounded men. I dare say it's
not an easy thing to stop those blighters, but I've faith in the justice of
God. The Great Power ain't going to let Prussian militarism win out.
It's going to be smashed because of its essential rottenness. It's all
right, laddie!"

The Strategist was studying his map, and working out military
possibilities.

"Mons. I expect our next line of defence will be Le Cateau and
Cambrai. If we're hard pressed we shall hear something about St.
Quentin, too. It's quite on the cards we shall have to fall back, but I
hope to Heaven in good order and with sound lines of communication."

"It's frightful!" I said. "We are seeing nothing of all this. Nothing!
If only we could get near it!"


19


It was some time before we heard the guns, but not long before we
saw the effects of war, in blood, anguish, and tears.

The French newspapers, telling little of the truth, giving barely one
single fact to a page full of heroic sentiment, had not let us guess
that, beyond the frontiers of France, the enemy was doing frightful
damage, with a rapidity and ruthlessness which, after the check at
Liège, was a tremendous menace to the Allied armies. I understood
these things better, in a stark nakedness of truth, when I found myself
caught in the tumult of a nation in flight.

I have already touched upon one tide of panic--the stampede of the
pleasure-seekers. That was a mere jest lacking all but the touch of
cruelty which gives a spice to so many of life's witticisms; but the
second tide, overflowing in wave after wave of human misery,
reached great heights of tragedy which submerged all common
griefs. From that day in August until many months of war had passed
I was seldom out of sight of this ruin of Belgium.

I went into the heart of it, into the welter of blood and wreckage, and
stood, expecting death, in the very process of its deadly torture.
Week after week, month after month, I walked and talked with
Belgian fugitives, and drifted in that stream of exiled people, and
watched them in the far places of their flight, where they were
encamped in settled hopelessness, asking nothing of the fate which
had dealt them such foul blows, expecting nothing. But I still
remember my first impressions of war's cruelty to that simple people
who had desired to live in peace and had no quarrel with any Power.
It was in a kind of stupor that I saw the vanguard of this nation in
retreat, a legion of poor old women whose white hairs were wild in this
whirl of human derelicts, whose decent black clothes were rumpled
and torn and fouled in the struggle for life; with Flemish mothers
clasping babies at their breasts and fierce-eyed as wild animals
because of the terror in their hearts for those tiny buds of life; with
small children scared out of the divine security of childhood by this
abandonment of homes which had seemed the world to them, and
terrorized by an unknown horror which lurked in the name of
Germany; with men of all classes and all ages, intellectuals and
peasants, stout bourgeois, whose overload of flesh was a burden to
their flight, thin students whose book-tired eyes were filled with a
dazed bewilderment, men of former wealth and dignity reduced to
beggary and humiliation; with school-girls whose innocence of life's
realities was suddenly thrust face to face with things ugly and
obscene, and cruel as hell.


20


I think it is impossible to convey to those who did not see this exodus
of the Belgian people the meaning and misery of it. Even in the midst
of it I had a strange idea at first that it was only a fantasy and that
such things do not happen. Afterwards I became so used to it all that
I came to think the world must always have been like this, with people
always in flight, families and crowds of families drifting about
aimlessly, from town to town, getting into trains just because they
started somewhere for somewhere else, sitting for hours on bundles
which contained all their worldly goods saved from the wreckage of
ancient homes, losing their children on the roadside, and not fretting
very much, and finding other children, whom they adopted as their
own; never washing on that wandering, so that delicate women who
had once been perfumed with fine scents were dirty as gipsies and
unashamed of draggled dresses and dirty hands; eating when they
found a meal of charity, sleeping in railway sidings, coalsheds, and
derelict trains shunted on to grass-covered lines; careless as pariah
dogs of what the future held in store now that they had lost all things
in the past.


21


On the railway sidings near Calais there was one sight that revealed
the defeat of a nation more even than these crowds of refugees.
Hundreds of Belgian engines had been rushed over the frontier to
France to escape from being used in the enemy's service. These
derelict things stood there in long rows with a dismal look of
lifelessness and abandonment, and as I looked at them I knew that
though the remnants of the Belgian army might be fighting in its last
ditch and holding out at Antwerp against the siege guns of the
Germans, there could be no hope of prolonged resistance against
overwhelming armies. These engines, which should have been used
for Belgian transport, for men and food and guns, were out of action,
and dead symbols of a nation's ruin.


22


For the first time I saw Belgian soldiers in France, and although they
were in small number compared with the great army of retreat which,
after the fall of Antwerp, I saw marching into Dunkirk, their weariness
and listlessness told a tale of woe. At first sight there was something
comical in the aspect of these top-hatted soldiers. They reminded me
of battalions of London cabbies who had ravaged the dustbins for
discarded "toppers." Their double-breasted coats had just the cut of
those of the ancient jehus who used to sit aloft on decrepit "growlers."
Other bodies of Belgian soldiers wore ludicrous little képis with
immense eye-shades, mostly broken or hanging limp in a dejected
way. In times of peace I should have laughed at the look of them. But
now there was nothing humorous about these haggard, dirty men
from Ghent who had borne the first shock of the German attack. They
seemed stupefied for lack of sleep, or dazed after the noise of battle.
I asked some of them where they were going, but they shook their
heads and answered gloomily:

"We don't know. We know nothing, except that our Belgium is
destroyed. What is the news?"


23


There was no news--beyond what one could glean from the
incoherent tales of Belgian refugees. The French newspapers still
contained vague and cheerful bulletins about their own military
situation, and filled the rest of their meagre space with eloquent
praise of les braves petits Belges. The war was still hidden behind
impenetrable walls of silence. Gradually, however, as I dodged about
the western side of France, from the middle to the end of August, it
became clear to me, and to my two friends, the Philosopher and the
Strategist, who each in his way of wisdom confirmed my worst
suspicions, that the situation for both the French and the British
armies was enormously grave. In spite of the difficulty of approaching
the war zone--at that time there was no certain knowledge as to the
line of front--we were seeing things which could not be concealed by
any censorship. We saw, too clearly for any doubt, that the war zone
was approaching us, steadily and rapidly. The shadow of its looming
terror crept across the fields of France, though they lay all golden in
the sunlight of the harvest month.


24


After the struggling tides of fugitive tourists, and overlapping the
waves of Belgian refugees, there came new streams of panic-stricken
people, and this time they were French. They came from the northern
towns--Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Armentières, and from scores of
villages further south which had seemed utterly safe and aloof from
hostile armies which, with faith in official communiqués issued by the
French Ministry of War, we believed to be still checked beyond the
French frontier in Belgium. Lille? Was Lille threatened by the Kaiser's
troops? It had been evacuated? No, that could not be true, unless
treachery had been at work, Lille could hold out, surely, at least as
long as Liège! Had we not read long articles by the military experts of
the French Press describing the strength of that town and the
impregnable position of its forts? Yet here were refugees from Lille
who had heard the roar of German guns, and brought incredible
stories of French troops in retreat, and spoke the name of a French
general with bitter scorn, and the old cry of "Nous sommes trahis!"

The refugees from the north were in as pitiable a state as those who
had preceded them from Belgium. More pitiable, because when they
reached such ports as Calais or Boulogne or Havre, the hotels and
lodging-houses were overcrowded from attic to cellars, the buffets
had been swept clear of food, and committees of relief were already
distracted with the overwhelming needs of a Belgian invasion.


25


I remember a day and night in Boulogne. The narrow streets--evil with
odours brought forth by a hot sun, were filled with surging crowds
which became denser as new trains arrived from Calais and Dunkirk
and junctions on northern lines. The people carried with them the
salvage of their homes, wrapped up in blankets, sheets, towels and
bits of ragged paper. Parcels of grotesque shapes, containing
copper pots, frying pans, clocks, crockery and all kinds of
domestic utensils or treasured ornaments, bulged on the pavements
and quaysides, where whole families sat encamped. Stalwart
mothers of Normandy and Picardy trudged through the streets with
children clinging to their skirts, with babies in their arms and with big
French loaves--the commissariat of these journeys of despair--
cuddled to their bosoms with the babes. Old grandfathers and
grandmothers, who looked as though they had never left their native
villages before, came hand in hand, with shaking heads and watery
eyes, bewildered by all this turmoil of humanity which had been thrust
out, like themselves, from its familiar ways of life. Well-to-do
bourgeois, shot with frayed nerves, exhausted by an excess of
emotion and fatigue, searched for lodgings, anywhere and at any
price, jostled by armies of peasants, shaggy-haired, in clumping
sabots, with bundles on their backs, who were wandering on the
same quest for the sake of the women and children dragging wearily
in their wake. I heard a woman cry out words of surrender: "Je n'en
peux plus!" She was spent and could go no further, but halted
suddenly, dumped down her bundles and her babies and, leaning
against a sun-baked wall, thrust the back of a rough hand across her
forehead, with a moan of spiritual pain.

"Dieu! ... C'est trop! c'est trop!"

All day long these scenes went on, until I could bear them no longer,
but went indoors to the room which made me feel a selfish monster
because I shared it with only two friends. Boulogne became quiet in
the darkness. Perhaps by some miracle all those homeless ones had
found a shelter. ... I awakened out of a drowsy sleep to hear the
tramp of innumerable feet. A new army of fugitives had come into the
town, I heard voices murmuring below my window, arguing, pleading.
There was a banging at doors down the street.

"C'est impossible! Il n'y a pas de place! Il y a une foule qui dort en
plein air. Voyez! voyez!"

The night porter slammed his own door in a rage. Perhaps there was
pity in his heart as well as rage, but what can a man do when people
demand admittance to an hotel where there are already six people in
the bathroom and sixty on the floor of the salon, and stiff bodies
wrapped in blankets, like corpses in eternal sleep, lying about in the
corridors?

"There are crowds of people sleeping in the open air," he said, and
when I leaned out of the window, staring into the darkness of the
night and breathing in the cool air which had an autumn touch, I saw
dimly on the pavement below huddled figures in the doorways and
under the shelter of the eaves. A baby wailed with a thin cry. A
woman's voice whimpered just below my window, and a man spoke
to her.

"C'est la guerre!"

The words came up to me as though to answer the question in my
own mind as to why such things should be.

"C'est la guerre!"

Yes, it was war; with its brutality against women and children, its
horrible stupidity, its senseless overthrow of all life's decencies, and
comforts, and security. The non-combatants were not to be spared,
though they had not asked for war, and hated it.




Chapter IV
The Way Of Retreat



1


Ominous things were happening behind the screen. Good God! was
France to see another année terrible, a second edition of 1870, with
the same old tale of unreadiness, corruption in high quarters,
breakdown of organization, and national humiliation after irreparable
disasters?

The very vagueness of the official communiqués and their word-
jugglings to give a rose colour to black shadows advancing rapidly
over the spirit of France suggested horrible uncertainties to those
who were groping in search of plain truth. But not all the severity of
the censorship, with its strangle-grip upon the truth-tellers, could hide
certain frightful facts. All these refugees pouring down from the north
could not be silenced, though none of their tales appeared in print.
They came with the news that Lille was invested, that the German
tide was rolling upon Armentières, Roubaix, Tourcoing and Cambrai,
that the French and English were in hard retreat. The enemy's
cavalry was spreading out in a great fan, with outposts of Uhlans
riding into villages where old French peasants had not dreamed of
being near the line of battle until, raising their heads from potato fields
or staring across the stacked corn, they had seen the pointed
casques and the flash of the sun on German carbines.

There were refugees who had seen the beginning of battles, taking
flight before the end of them. I met some from Le Cateau, who had
stared speechlessly at familiar hills over which came without warning
great forces of foreign soldiers. The English had come first, in clouds
of dust which powdered their uniforms and whitened their sun-baked
faces. They seemed in desperate hurry and scratched up mounds of
loose earth, like children building sand castles, and jumped down into
wayside ditches which they used as cover, and lay on their stomachs
in the beetroot fields. They were cheerful enough, and laughed as
they littered the countryside with beef tins, and smoked cigarettes
incessantly, as they lay scorched under the glare of the sun, with their
rifles handy. Their guns were swung round with their muzzles nosing
towards the rising ground from which these English soldiers had
come. It seemed as though they were playing games of make
believe, for the fun of the thing. The French peasants had stood
round grinning at these English boys who could not understand a
word of French, but chattered cheerfully all the time in their own
strange language. War seemed very far away. The birds were singing
in a shrill chorus. Golden flowerlets spangled the green slopes. The
sun lay warm upon the hillside, and painted black shadows beneath
the full foliage of the trees. It was the harvest peace which, these
peasants had known all the years of their lives. Then suddenly the
click of rifle bolts, a rapid change in the attitude of the English soldier
boys, who stared northwards where the downs rose and fell in soft
billows, made the French peasants j gaze in that direction, shading
their eyes from the hot sun. What was that grey shadow moving?
What were those little glints and flashes in the greyness of it? What
were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over
the slopes? Thousands and scores of thousands of--men, and
horses and guns!

"Les Anglais? Toujours les Anglais?" An English officer laughed, in a
queer way, without any mirth in his eyes.

"Les Allemands, mon vieux. Messieurs les Boches!"

"L'enemi? Non--pas possible!"

It only seemed possible that it was the enemy when from that army of
ants on the hillsides there came forth little puffs of white smoke, and
little stabbing flames, and when, quite soon, some of those English
boys lay in a huddled way over their rifles, with their sunburned faces
on the warm earth. The harvest peace was broken by the roar of
guns and the rip of bullets. Into the blue of the sky rose clouds of
greenish smoke. Pieces of jagged steel, like flying scythes, sliced the
trees on the roadside. The beetroot fields spurted up earth, and great
holes were being dug by unseen ploughs. Then, across the distant
slopes behind the smoke clouds and the burst of flame came, and
came, a countless army, moving down towards those British soldiers.
So the peasants had fled with a great fear.


2


There was an extraordinary quietude in some of the port towns of
northern France. At first I could not understand the meaning of it
when I went from Calais to Boulogne, and then to Havre. In Calais I
saw small bodies of troops moving out of the town early in the
morning, so that afterwards there was not a soldier to be seen about
the streets. In Boulogne the same thing happened, quietly, and
without any bugle calls or demonstrations. Not only had all the
soldiers gone, but they were followed by the police, whom I saw
marching away in battalions, each man carrying a little bundle, like
the refugees who carried all their worldly goods with them, wrapped in
a blanket or a pocket-handkerchief, according to the haste of their
flight. Down on the quay there were no custom-house officers to
inspect the baggage of the few travellers who had come across the
Channel and now landed on the deserted siding, bewildered because
there were no porters to clamour for their trunks and no douane to
utter the familiar ritual of "Avez-vous quelque-chose à declarer?
Tabac? Cigarettes?" For the first time in living memory, perhaps in
the history of the port, the Douane of Boulogne had abandoned its
office. What did it all mean? Why were the streets so deserted as
though the town had been stricken with the plague?

There was a look of plague in the faces of the few fishermen and
harbour folk who stood in groups at the street corners. There was a
haggard fear in their eyes and they talked in low voices, as though
discussing some doom that had come upon them. Even the houses
had a plaguy aspect, with shuttered windows and barred doors. The
town, which had resounded to the tramp of British regiments and to
the tune of "Tipperary," these streets through which had surged a tide
of fugitives, with wave after wave of struggling crowds, had become a
silent place, with only a few shadows creeping through the darkness
of that evening in war, and whispering a fear.

The truth came to me as a shock. The ports of France had been
abandoned. They lay open to the enemy, and if any Uhlans came
riding in, or a German officer in a motorcar with three soldiers to
represent an army, Calais and Boulogne would be surrendered
without a shot.

Looking back upon those days the thing seems inconceivable.
Months afterwards the enemy tried to fight its way to Calais and failed
after desperate attacks which cost the lives of thousands of German
soldiers and a stubborn defence which, more than once, was almost
pierced and broken. "The Fight for Calais" is a chapter of history
which for the Germans is written in blood. It is amazing to remember
that in the last days of August Calais was offered as a free gift, with
Boulogne and Dieppe to follow, if they cared to come for them.

Even Havre was to be abandoned as the British base. It was only a
little while since enormous stores had been dumped here for the
provisioning and equipment of our Expeditionary Force. Now I saw a
great packing up. "K." had issued an amazing order which made
certain young gentlemen of the A.S.C. whistle between their teeth
and say rather quietly: "Ye gods! things must be looking a bit blue up
there." The new base was to be much further south, at St. Nazaire, to
which the last tin of bully beef or Maconochie was to be consigned,
without delay. Yes, things were looking very "blue," just then.


3


One may afford now to write about mistakes, even the mistakes of
our French Allies, who have redeemed them all by a national heroism
beyond the highest words of praise, and by a fine struggle for
efficiency and organization which were lamentably lacking in the early
days of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the
outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the
miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off
her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an
enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the
splendid things in the world's history which wipe out all rankling
criticism.

Yet then, before the transformation, the days were full of torture for
those who knew something of the truth. By what fatal microbe of folly
had the French generals been tempted towards that adventure in
Alsace? Sentiment, overwhelming common sense, had sent the
finest troops in France to the frontiers of the "lost provinces," so that
Paris might have its day of ecstasy round the statue of Quand-Même.
While the Germans were smashing their way through Belgium,
checked only a little while at Liège and giving a clear warning of the
road by which they would come to France, the French active army
was massed in the east from Luxembourg to Nancy and wasting the
strength which should have been used to bar the northern roads, in
pressing forward to Mulhouse and Altkirch. It gave Georges Scott the
subject of a beautiful allegory in L'Illustration--that French soldier
clasping the Alsatian girl rescued from the German grip. It gave
Parisian journalists, gagged about all other aspects of the war zone, a
chance of heroic writing, filled with the emotion of old heartaches now
changed to joy. Only the indiscretion of a deputy hinted for a moment
at a bad reverse at Mulhouse, when a regiment recruited from the
South, broke and fled under the fire of German guns because they
were unsupported by their own artillery. "Two generals have been
cashiered." "Some of the officers have been shot." Tragic rumours
leaked into Paris, spoiling the dream of an irresistible advance.

So far, however, neither Paris nor the French public as a whole had
any inkling of graver things than this. They did not know--how could
they know anything of this secret war?--that on all parts of the front
the French armies' were falling back before the German invasion
which bore down upon them in five great columns of overwhelming
strength; and that on the extreme left, nearest to Paris, the French
army was miserably weak, made up for the most part of old
Territorials who were never meant to be in the first line of defence,
and of African regiments who had never seen shell-fire, so that the
main German attack could only be held back by a little British army
which had just set foot on the soil of France.

Everywhere, from east to west, the French were yielding before the
terrific onslaught of the German legions, who came on in close
formation, reckless of their losses, but always advancing, over the
bodies of their dead, with masses of light artillery against which the
French gunners, with all their skill and courage, could not hold
ground. By a series of strange adventures, which took me into the
vortex of the French retreat, into the midst of confused movements of
troops rushed up to various points of menace and into the tide of
wounded which came streaming back from the fighting lines, I was
able to write the first account which gave any clear idea of the general
situation--sharing this chance with the Philosopher and the Strategist
who were my fellow travellers--and, by good luck again, the censor
was kind to me in England. French officers and soldiers with
bandaged heads and limbs told me their stories, while their wounds
were still wet, and while their clothes still reeked of the smoke of
battle. Women who had fled with empty hands from little châteaux on
the hillsides of France, with empty hearts too because they had no
hope for husbands still fighting in the inferno, described to me the
scenes which still made them pant like wild animals caught after a
chase. And with my own eyes I saw the unforgettable drama of the
French army in retreat, blowing up bridges on its way, shifting to new
lines of defence, awaiting with its guns ready for a new stage of the
enemy's advance.

Out of a wild confusion of impressions, the tumult of these scenes,
the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies and imaginings of
men and women drunk with the excitement of this time, I sorted out
some clear threads of fact and with the aid of the Strategist, who
spread out his maps on wayside banks, blotting out the wild flowers,
or on the marble-topped tables outside fly-blown estaminets in village
streets, tracked out the line of the German advance and saw the peril
of the French.

From one of my dispatches I transcribe a narrative which records one
of the most bloody battles in the first phase of the war. Written to the
jolt of a troop train, in which wounded men hugged their bandaged
hands, it tells how five thousand Frenchmen did their best to check a
German army corps.


4


August 29

It was nearly a fortnight ago that the Germans concentrated their
heaviest forces upon Namur, and began to press southwards and
over the Meuse Valley. After the battle of Dinant the French army,
among whom, at this point, were the 2nd and the 7th Corps, were
heavily outnumbered at the time, and had to fall back gradually in
order to gain time for reinforcements to come up to their support. The
French artillery was up on the wooded heights above the river, and
swept the German regiments with a storm of fire as they advanced.
On the right bank the French infantry was entrenched, supported by
field guns and mitrailleuses, and did very deadly work before leaping
from the trenches which they occupied and taking up position in new
trenches further back, which they held with great tenacity. In justice to
the Germans, it must be said that they were heroic in their courage.
They were reckless of their lives, and the valley of the Meuse was
choked with their corpses. The river itself was strewn with dead
bodies of men and horses, and literally ran red with blood. The most
tremendous fighting took place for the possession of the bridges, but
the French engineers blew them up one after the other as they retired
southwards. No fewer than thirty-three bridges were destroyed in this
way before they could be seized by the German advance guard. The
fighting was extended for a considerable distance on either side of
the Meuse, and many engagements took place between the French
and German cavalry and regiments working away from the main
armies.

There was, for instance, a memorable encounter at Merville which is
one of the most heroic episodes of the war. Five thousand French
soldiers of all arms, with quick-firers, engaged twenty thousand
German infantry. In spite of being outnumbered in this way, the
French dash and "bite," as they call it, was so splendid that they beat
back the enemy from point to point in a fight lasting for twelve hours,
inflicting a tremendous punishment, and suffering very few losses on
their own side. A German officer captured in this engagement
expressed his unbounded admiration for the valour of the French
troops, which he described as "superb." It was only for fear of getting
too far out of touch with the main forces that the gallant five thousand
desisted from their irresistible attack, and retired, with a large number
of German helmets as trophies of their victorious action.
Nevertheless, in accordance with the general plan which had been
decided upon by the French generals in view of the superior numbers
pressing upon them, the French troops retreated and the Germans
succeeded in forcing their way steadily down the Meuse as far as
Mézières, divided by a bridge from Charleville on the other side of the
river. This is in the neighbourhood of Sedan, and in the hollow or trou
as it is called which led to the great disaster of 1870, when the French
army was caught in a trap, and threatened with annihilation by the
Germans, who had taken possession of the surrounding heights.
There was to be no repetition of that tragedy. The French were
determined that this time the position would be reversed.

On Monday, August 24, the town of Charleville was evacuated, most
of its civilians were sent away to join the wanderers who had had to
leave their homes, and the French troops took up magnificent
positions commanding the town and the three bridges dividing it from
Mézières. Mitrailleuses were hidden in the abandoned houses, and
as a disagreeable shock to any German who might escape their fire
was a number of the enemy's guns--no fewer than ninety-five of
them--which had been captured and disabled by the French troops in
the series of battles down the river from Namur. The German
outposts reached Charleville on Tuesday, August 25. They were
allowed to ride quietly across the bridges into the apparently deserted
town. Then suddenly their line of retreat was cut off. The three
bridges were blown up by contact mines, and the mitrailleuses hidden
in the houses were played on to the German cavalry across the
streets, killing them in a frightful slaughter. It was for a little while a
sheer massacre in that town of white houses with pretty gardens
where flowers were blooming under the brilliant sunshine of a glorious
summer day.

But the Germans fought with extraordinary tenacity, regardless of the
heaped bodies of their comrades, and utterly reckless of their own
lives. They, too, had brought quick-firers across the bridges and,
taking cover behind some of the houses, trained their guns upon
those from which the French gunners were firing their last shots.
There was no way of escape for those heroic men who voluntarily
sacrificed themselves in the service of their country, and it is probable
that every man died, because at such a time the Germans are not in
the habit of giving quarter. When the main German advance came
down the valley the French artillery on the heights raked them with a
terrific fire in which they suffered heavy losses, the forefront of the
column being mowed down. But under this storm of fire they
proceeded with incredible coolness to their pontoon bridges across
the river, and although hundreds of men died on the banks they
succeeded in their endeavour while their guns searched the hills with
shells and forced the French gunners to retire from their positions.
The occupation of Charleville was a German victory, but it was also a
German graveyard.

After this historic episode in what had been an unending battle, the
main body of the French troops withdrew before the Germans, who
were now pouring down the valley, and retired to new ground.


5


Meanwhile, on the western side of the battle line, the French army
was holding a crescent from Abbeville, round the south of Amiens,
and the situation was not a happy one in view of the rapid advance of
the enemy under General Von Kluck, before whom the British troops
were already in continual battle.

I shall not soon forget a dreadful night near Amiens, when I saw
beaten and broken men coming back from the firing lines, and the
death-carts passing down the roads. The whole day had been
exciting and unnerving. The roads along which I had passed were
filled with soldiers marching towards an enemy which was rapidly
drawing close upon them, for whom they seemed but ill-prepared--
and by civilians stampeding with wild rumours that the Uhlans were
close upon them.

They were not very far wrong. At Picquigny, they were less than four
miles distant--a small patrol of outposts belonging to the squadrons
which were sweeping out in a fan through the northern towns and
villages of France.

As I passed, French Territorials were hastily digging trenches close to
the railway line. Reports came from stations further along that the line
might be cut at any moment. A train crowded with French and Belgian
fugitives had come to a dead halt. The children were playing on the
banks--with that divine carelessness and innocence which made
one's heart ache for them in this beastly business of war--and their
fathers and mothers, whose worldly goods had been packed into
baskets and brown paper parcels--the poor relics of all that had been
theirs--wondered whether after all their sufferings and struggles they
would reach the town of Amiens and find safety there.

It was obvious to me that there was a thrill of uneasiness in the
military machine operating in the district. Troops were being hurried
up in a north-westerly direction. A regiment of Algerians came
swinging along the road. The sight of the Turcos put some heart into
the fugitives. Those brown faces were laughing like children at the
prospect of a fight. They waved their hands with the curious Arab
gesture of salute, and shuffled along merrily with their rifles slung
behind their backs. Military motor-cars carrying little parties of French
officers swept down the roads, and then there were no more
battalions but only stragglers, and hurrying fugitives driving along in
farmers' carts, packed with household goods, in two-wheeled gigs,
overburdened with women and children, riding on bicycles, with
parcels tied to the saddles, or trudging wearily and anxiously along,
away from the fear where the blood-red sun was setting over France.
It was pitiful to see the children clinging to the women's skirts along
that road of panic, and pitiful but fine, to see the courage of those
women. Then night fell and darkness came across the fields of
France, and through the darkness many grim shadows of war,
looming up against one's soul.

There was une affaire des patrouilles--what the British soldier calls a
"scrap"--along the road at Albert, between Amiens and Cambrai. A
party of German Uhlans, spreading out from a strong force at
Cambrai itself, had been engaged by the French Territorials, and after
some sharp fighting had retired, leaving several dead horses in the
dust and a few huddled forms from which the French soldiers had
taken burnished helmets and trophies to their women folk.

That was on Friday night of August 28. The real fighting was taking
place fifteen kilometres further along the road, at a place called
Bapeaume. All day on Friday there was very heavy fighting here on
the left centre, and a victory was announced by the French Ministry of
War.

I did not see the victory. I saw only the retreat of some of the French
forces engaged in the battle.

It was a few minutes before midnight on that Friday, when they came
back along the road to Amiens, crawling back slowly in a long, dismal
trail, with ambulance wagons laden with dead and dying, with hay-
carts piled high with saddles and accoutrements upon which there
lay, immobile, like men already dead, spent and exhausted soldiers.
They passed through crowds of silent people--the citizens of Amiens--
who only whispered as they stared at this procession in the darkness.
A cuirassier with his head bent upon his chest stumbled forward,
leading a horse too weak and tired to bear him. There were many
other men leading their poor beasts in this way; and infantry soldiers,
some of them with bandaged heads, clung on to the backs of the
carts and wagons, and seemed to be asleep as they shuffled by. The
light from the roadside lamps gleamed upon blanched faces and
glazed eyes--flashed now and then into the caverns of canvas-
covered carts where twisted, bandaged men lay huddled on the
straw. Not a groan came from those carts. There was no shout of
"Vive la France!" from the crowd of citizens who are not silent as a
rule when their soldiers pass.

Every one knew it was a retreat, and the knowledge was colder than
the mist of night. The carts, carrying the quick and the dead, rumbled
by in a long convoy, the drooping heads of the soldiers turned neither
to the right nor to the left for any greeting with old friends; there was a
hugger-mugger of uniforms on provision carts and ambulances. It
was a part of the wreckage and wastage of the war, and to the
onlooker, exaggerating unconsciously the importance of the things
close at hand and visible, it seemed terrible in its significance, and an
ominous reminder of 1870, when through Amiens there came the
dismal tramp of beaten men. Really this was the inevitable part of a
serious battle, and not necessarily the retreat from a great disaster.

I turned away from it, rather sick at heart. It is not a pleasant thing to
see men walking like living corpses, or as though drugged with
fatigue. It is heartrending to see poor beasts stumbling forward at
every step at the very last gasp of their strength until they fall never to
rise again.

But more pitiful even than this drift back from Bapeaume were the
scenes which followed immediately as I turned back into the town.
Thousands of boys had been called out to the colours, and had been
brought up from the country to be sent forward to the second lines of
defence. They were the reservists of the 1914 class, and many of
them were shouting and singing, though here and there a white-faced
boy tried to hide his tears as women from the crowd ran to embrace
him. The Marseillaise, the hymn of faith, rang out a little raggedly, but
bravely all the same. The lads--"poor children" they were called by a
white-haired man who watched them--were keeping up the valour of
their hearts by noisy demonstrations; but having seen the death-carts
pass through the darkness between lines of silent and dejected
onlookers, I could not bear to look into the faces of those little ones of
France who were following their fathers to the guns. Once again I had
to turn away to blot out the pictures of war in the velvety darkness of
the night.

Early next morning there was a thrill of anxiety in Amiens itself.
Reports had come through that the railway line had been cut between
Boulogne and Abbeville. There had been mysterious movements of
regiments from the town barracks. They had moved out of Amiens,
and there was a strange quietude in the streets, hardly a man in
uniform to be seen in places which had been filled with soldiers the
day before. I think only a few people realized the actual significance
of all this. Only a few--the friends of officers or the friends of
officers' friends--had heard that Amiens itself was to be evacuated.

To these people it seemed incredible and horrible--an admission that
France was being beaten to her knees. How could they believe the
theory of an optimist among them that it was a part of a great plan to
secure the safety of France? How could they realize that the town
itself would be saved from possible bombardment by this withdrawal
of the troops to positions which would draw the Germans into the
open? They only knew that they were undefended, and presently they
found that the civilian trains were being suspended, and that there
would be no way of escape. It was in the last train that by a stroke of
luck I escaped from Amiens. Shortly afterwards the tunnel leading to
the junction was blown up by the French engineers, and the beautiful
city of Amiens was cut off from all communication with the outer
world.

It was on the last train that I realized to the full of its bitterness the
brutality of war as it bludgeons the heart of the non-combatant. In the
carriage with me were French ladies and children who had been
hunted about the country in the endeavour to escape the zone of
military operations. Their husbands were fighting for France, and they
could not tell whether they were alive or dead. They had been without
any solid food for several days, and the nerves of those poor women
were tried to the uttermost, not by any fear for their own sakes, but for
the sake of the little ones who were all they could save from the
wreckage of their lives, all yet enough if they could save them to the
end. One lady whose house had been burnt by the Germans had
walked over twenty miles with a small boy and girl.

For a little while, when she told me her story she wept passionately,
yet only for a few minutes. For the sake of her handsome boy, who
had a hero's courage, and for the tiny girl who clung to her, she
resisted this breakdown and conquered herself.

"That is the real meaning of war, almost the worst tragedy of it" (so I
wrote at the time). "The soldier suffers less than the women and the
non-combatants. His agony perhaps is sharper, but the wound of the
spirit is hardest to bear."

So it seemed to me then, before I had seen greater ghastliness. I was
surprised also by the cheerfulness of some of our wounded soldiers.
They were the "light cases," and had the pluck to laugh at their pain.
Yet even they had had a dreadful time. It is almost true to say that the
only rest they had was when they were carried into the ambulance
cart or the field-hospital. The incessant marching, forwards and
backwards, to new positions in the blazing sun was more awful to
bear than the actual fighting under the hideous fire of the German
guns. They were kept on the move constantly, except for the briefest
lulls--when officers and men dropped, like brown leaves from autumn
trees, on each side of the road, so utterly exhausted that they were
almost senseless, and had to be dragged up out of their short sleep
when once again they tramped on to a new line, to scratch up a few
earthworks, to fire a few rounds before the bugle sounded the cease
fire and another strategical retirement.


6


On September 2 the Germans had reached Creil and Senlis--staining
their honour in these two places by unnecessary cruelty--and were no
further than thirty miles from Paris, so that the shock of their guns
might be heard as vague vibrations in the capital.

To the population of Paris, and to all civilians in France, it seemed a
stupendous disaster, this rapid incredible advance of that great
military machine of death which nothing, so far, had been able to
stop--not even the unflinching courage and the utter recklessness of
life with which the Allies flung themselves against it. Yet with an
optimism which I could hardly justify, I, who had seen the soldiers of
France, was still confident that, so far from all being lost, there was
hope of victory which might turn the German advance.

I had seen the superb courage of French regiments rushing up to
support their left wing, and the magnificent confidence of men who
after the horrors of the battlefields, and with the full consciousness
that they were always retiring, still, said: "We shall win. We are
leading the enemy to its destruction. In a little while they will be in a
death-trap from which there is no escape for them."

"This spirit," I wrote in my dispatch, "must win in the end. It is
impossible that it should be beaten in the long run. And the splendour
of this French courage, in the face of what looks like defeat, is
equalled at least by the calm and dogged assurance of our English
troops."

They repeated the same words to me over and over again--those
wounded men, those outposts at points of peril, those battalions who
went marching on to another fight, without sleep, without rest,
knowing the foe they had to meet.

"We are all right. You can call it a retreat if you like. But we are
retreating in good order and keeping our end up."

Retiring in good order I It had been more than that. They had retired
before a million of men swarming across the country like a vast ant-
heap on the move, with a valour that had gained for the British and
French forces a deathless glory. Such a thing has never been done
before in the history of warfare. It would have seemed incredible and
impossible to military experts, who know the meaning of such fighting,
and the frightful difficulty of keeping an army together in such
circumstances.


7


When I escaped from Amiens before the tunnel was broken up and
the Germans entered into possession of the town--on August 28--the
front of the allied armies was in a crescent from Abbeville by the
wooded heights south of Amiens, and thence in an irregular line to
the south of Mézières. The British forces under Sir John French were
on the left centre, supporting the heavy thrust forward of the German
right wing.

On Saturday afternoon fighting was resumed along the whole line.
The German vanguard had by this time been supported by fresh
army corps, which had been brought from Belgium. At least a million
men were on the move, pressing upon the allied forces with a ferocity
of attack which has never been equalled. Their cavalry swept across
a great tract of country, squadron by squadron, like the mounted
hordes of Attila, but armed with the deadly weapons of modern
warfare. Their artillery was in enormous numbers, and their columns
advanced under the cover of it, not like an army but rather like a
moving nation. It did not move, however, with equal pressure at all
parts of the line. It formed itself into a battering ram with a pointed
end, and this point was thrust at the heart of the English wing with its
base at St. Quentin, and advanced divisions at Péronne and Ham. It
was impossible to resist this onslaught. If the British forces had stood
against it they would have been crushed and broken. Our gunners
were magnificent, and shelled the advancing German columns so
that the dead lay heaped up along the way which was leading down
to Paris, But, as one of them told me, "It made no manner of
difference. As soon as we had smashed one lot another followed,
column after column, and by sheer weight of numbers we could do
nothing to check them."

The railway was destroyed and the bridges blown up on the main line
from Amiens to Paris, and on the branch lines from Dieppe. After this
precaution the British forces fell back, fighting all the time, as far as
Compiègne. The line of the Allies was now in the shape of a V, the
Germans thrusting their main attack deep into the angle.

General d'Amade, the most popular of French generals owing to his
exploits in Morocco, had established his staff at Aumale, holding the
extreme left of the allied armies. Some of his reserves held the hills
running east and west at Beau vais, and they were in touch with Sir
John French's cavalry along the road to Amiens.

This position remained until Monday, or rather had completed itself by
that date, the retirement of the troops being maintained with masterly
skill and without any undue haste.

Meanwhile the French troops were sustaining a terrific attack on their
centre by the German left centre, which culminated at Guise, on the
River Oise, to the north-east of St. Quentin, where the river, which
runs between beautiful meadows, was choked with corpses and red
with blood.

From an eye-witness of this great battle who escaped with a slight
wound--an officer of an infantry regiment--I learned that the German
onslaught had been repelled by the work of the French gunners,
followed by a series of bayonet and cavalry charges.

"The Germans," he said, "had the élite of their army engaged against
us, including the 10th Army Corps and the Imperial Guard. But the
heroism of our troops was sublime. Every man knew that the safety
of France depended upon him, and was ready to sacrifice his life, if
need be, with a joyful enthusiasm. They not only resisted the enemy's
attack but took the offensive, and, in spite of their overpowering
numbers, gave them a tremendous punishment. They had to recoil
before our guns, which swept their ranks, and their columns were
broken and routed. Hundreds of them were bayoneted, and hundreds
more hurled into the river, while the whole front of battle was outlined
by the dead and dying men whom they had to abandon. Certainly
their losses were enormous, and when I fell the German retreat was
in full swing, and for the time being we could claim a real victory."
Nevertheless the inevitable happened. Owing to the vast reserves
the enemy brought up fresh divisions, and the French were
compelled to fall back upon Laon and La Fère.

On Tuesday the German skirmishers with light artillery were coming
southwards to Beauvais, and the sound of their field guns greeted my
ears in this town, which I shall always remember with unpleasant
recollections, in spite of its old-world beauty and the loveliness of the
scene in which it is set.

Beauvais lies directly between Amiens and Paris, and it seemed to
me that it was the right place to be in order to get into touch with the
French army barring the way to the capital. As a matter of fact it
seemed to be the wrong place from all points of view.


8


I might have suspected that something was wrong by the strange
look on the face of a friendly French peasant whom I met at Gournay.
He had described to me in a very vivid way the disposition of the
French troops on the neighbouring hills who had disappeared in the
undulation below the sky-line, but when I mentioned that I was on the
way to Beauvais he suddenly raised his head and looked at me in a
queer, startled way which puzzled me. I remember that look when I
began to approach the town. Down the road came small parties of
peasants with fear in their eyes. Some of them were in farm carts,
and they shouted to tired horses and put them to a stumbling gallop.
Women with blanched faces, carrying children in their arms, trudged
along the dusty highway, and it was clear that these people were
afraid of something behind them--something in the direction of
Beauvais. There were not many of them, and when they had passed
the countryside was strangely and uncannily quiet. There was only
the sound of singing birds above the fields which were flooded with
the golden light of the setting sun.

Then I came into the town. An intense silence brooded there, among
the narrow little streets below the old Norman church--a white jewel
on the rising ground beyond. Almost every house was shuttered, with
blind eyes, but here and there I looked through an open window into
deserted rooms. No human face returned my gaze. It was an
abandoned town, emptied of all its people, who had fled with fear in
their eyes like those peasants along the roadway.

But presently I saw a human form. It was the figure of a French
dragoon, with his carbine slung behind his back. He was standing by
the side of a number of gunpowder bags. A little further away were
groups of soldiers at work by two bridges--one over a stream and one
over a road. They were working very calmly, and I could see what
they were doing. They were mining the bridges to blow them up at a
given signal. As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with
broken bottles and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and
carefully made.

It was a queer experience. It was obvious that there was a very grim
business being done in Beauvais, and that the soldiers were waiting
for something to happen. At the railway station I quickly learnt the
truth. The Germans were only a few miles away in great force. At any
moment they might come down, smashing everything in their way,
and killing every human being along that road. The station master, a
brave old type, and one or two porters, had determined to stay on to
the last. "Nous sommes ici," he said, as though the Germans would
have to reckon with him. But he was emphatic in his request for me to
leave Beauvais if another train could be got away, which was very
uncertain. As a matter of fact, after a mauvais quart d'heure, I was
put into a train which had been shunted into a siding and left
Beauvais with the sound of the German guns in my ears.

Sitting in darkness and shaken like peas in a pod because of
defective brakes, we skirted the German army, and by a twist in the
line almost ran into the enemy's country; but we rushed through the
night, and the engine-driver laughed and put his oily hand up to the
salute when I stepped out to the platform of an unknown station.

"The Germans won't have us for dinner after all," he said. "It was a
little risky all the same!"


9


The station was Creil, the headquarters, at that time, of the British
forces. It was crowded with French soldiers, and they were soon
telling me their experience of the hard fighting in which they had been
engaged.

They were dirty, unshaven, dusty from head to foot, scorched by the
heat of the August sun, in tattered uniforms, and broken boots. But
they were beautiful men for all their dirt; and the laughing courage,
the quiet confidence, the un-bragging simplicity with which they
assured me that the Germans would soon be caught in a death-trap
and sent to their destruction, filled me with an admiration which I
cannot express in words. All the odds were against them; they had
fought the hardest of all actions along the way of retreat; they knew
and told me that the enemy were fighting at Senlis, within ten miles of
the Parisian fortifications, but they had an absolute faith in the
ultimate success of their allied arms.

One of the French soldiers gave me his diary to read. In spite of his
dirty uniform, his brown unwashed hands and the blond unkempt
beard which disguised fine features and a delicate mouth, it was clear
to see that he was a man of good breeding and education.

"It may amuse you," he said. "You see, I have been busy as a
destroyer."

It was a record of the blowing up of bridges, and the words had been
scribbled into a small note-book on the way of retreat. In its brevity
this narrative of a sergeant of sappers is more eloquent than long
descriptions in polished prose. One passage in it seemed to me
almost incredible; the lines which tell of a German aviator who took a
tiny child with him on his mission of death. But a man like this, whose
steel-blue eyes looked into mine with such fine frankness, would not
put a lie into his note-book, and I believed him. I reproduce the
document now as I copied it away from the gaze of a French officer
who suspected this breach of regulations:

August 25. Started for St. Quentin and arrived in evening. Our section
set out again next morning for a point twelve kilometres behind, at
Montescourt-Lezeroulles, in order to mine a bridge. We worked all the
night and returned to St. Quentin, where we did reconnaissance
work.

August 27. Germans signalled and station of St. Quentin evacuated.

We were directed to maintain order among the crowd who wished to
go away. It was a very sad spectacle, all the women and children
weeping and not enough trains to save them.

At last we go away, and destroy line and station of Essigny-le-Grand
and at Montescourt, where we destroy bridge already mined.

Arrive in afternoon at Tergnier. Sleep there, and set out on afternoon
of 28th for Chauny and Noyon.

August 29 (morning). We receive order to go back to Tergnier, the
Germans having succeeded in piercing British lines. We pass
Montescourt, and arrive Jussy, where the bridge of the canal being
blown up, we hold up Germans momentarily. Coming from Tergnier,
we were ordered to destroy bridges and stations of the line, which is
main line to Paris.

Work in the evening to sound of cannon. It is pitiable to see the
miserable people on the road with their boxes and children.

In the afternoon set out for Chauny, in direction of Compiègne, where
we arrive in the evening. All along the line were scattered the poor
people. We have twelve on our waggon, and let them eat our food.
We had our own provisions, and we gave them to these people.

August 30 (Sunday). Stationed at Compiègne awaiting orders. One
hears more clearly the sound of the cannon. After the news this
morning I write a line. It appears that the Germans have been
destroyed at St. Quentin.

To-day we have assisted at a duel between a biplane and an
aeroplane. I had nearest me the German aeroplane, which fell in the
English lines. The officer in charge with it had with him a child of six
years old, who was also a German. They were only wounded.

After St. Quentin were with the English troops under the orders of the
English Headquarters Staff.

The rumours which tell of German defeats must be false, because
the English troops retire, and we evacuate Longuart, where we
destroy the station and the railway lines.


10


The retreat of the British army--it is amazing to think that there were
only 45,000 men who had tried to stem the German avalanche--was
developing into a run. Only some wild fluke of chance (the pious
patriot sees God's hand at work, while the cynic sees only the
inefficiency of the German Staff) saved it from becoming a bloody
rout. It is too soon even now to write the details of it. Only when
scores of officers have written their reminiscences shall we have the
full story of those last days of August, when a little army which was
exhausted after many battles staggered hard away from the menace
of enormous odds seeking to envelop it. It was called a "retirement in
good order." It was hardly that when the Commander-in-Chief had to
make a hurried flight with a mounted escort, when the Adjutant-
General's department, busy in the château of a French village,
suddenly awakened to the knowledge that it had been forgotten and
left behind (I heard a personal story of the escape that followed the
awakening), and when companies, battalions, and regiments lost
touch with each other, were bewildered in dark woods and unknown
roads, and were shelled unexpectedly by an enemy of whose
whereabouts they had now no definite knowledge. The German net of
iron was drawing tighter. In a few hours it might close round and
make escape impossible. General Allenby's division of cavalry had a
gallop for life, when the outposts came in with reports of a great
encircling movement of German horse, so that there was not a
moment to lose if a great disaster were to be averted. It was Allenby
himself who led his retreat at the head of his division by the side of a
French guide carrying a lantern.

For twenty miles our cavalry urged on their tired horses through the
night, and along the sides of the roads came a struggling mass of
automobiles, motor-cycles, and motor-wagons, carrying engineers,
telegraphists and men of the Army Service Corps. Ambulances
crammed with wounded who had been picked up hurriedly from the
churches and barns which had been used as hospitals, joined the
stampede, and for many poor lads whose heads had been broken by
the German shells and whose flesh was on fire with frightful wounds,
this night-ride was a highway of torture which ended in eternal rest.

All the way the cavalry and the convoys were followed by the enemy,
and there were moments when it seemed inevitable that the strength
of the horses would give out and that the retreating force would be
surrounded. But as we know now, the enemy was exhausted also.
Their pursuit was a chase by blown horses and puffed men. They
called a halt and breathed heavily, at the very time when a last gallop
and a hard fight would have given them their prize--the flower of the
British army.

On that last stage of the retreat we lost less men than any text-book
of war would have given as a credible number in such conditions.
Many who were wounded as they tramped through woods splintered
by bursting shells and ripped with bullets, bandaged themselves as
best they could and limped on, or were carried by loyal comrades
who would not leave a pal in the lurch. Others who lost their way or
lay down in sheer exhaustion, cursing the Germans and not caring if
they came, straggled back later--weeks later--by devious routes to
Rouen or Paris, after a wandering life in French villages, where the
peasants fed them and nursed them so that they were in no hurry to
leave. It was the time when the temptation to desert seized men with
a devilish attraction. They had escaped from such hells at Charleroi
and Cambrai and Le Cateau. Boys who had never heard the roar of
guns before except in mimic warfare had crouched and cowered
beneath a tempest of shells, waiting, terrified, for death. Death had
not touched them. By some miracle they had dodged it, with dead
men horribly mutilated on either side of them, so that blood had
slopped about their feet and they had jerked back from shapeless
masses of flesh--of men or horses--sick with the stench of it, cold
with the horror of it. Was it any wonder that some of these young men
who had laughed on the way to Waterloo Station, and held their
heads high in the admiring gaze of London crowds, sure of their own
heroism, slunk now in the backyards of French farmhouses, hid
behind hedges when men in khaki passed, and told wild, incoherent
tales, when cornered at last by some cold-eyed officer in some town
of France to which they had blundered? It was the coward's chance,
and I for one can hardly bring myself to blame the poor devil I met
one day in Rouen, stuttering out lies, to save his skin, or the two
gunners, disguised in civil clothes, who begged from me near
Amiens, or any of the half-starved stragglers who had "lost" their
regiments and did not go to find them. Some of them were shot and
deserved their fate, according to the rules of war and the stern justice
of men who know no fear. But in this war there are not many men
who have not known moments of cold terror, when all their pride of
manhood oozed away and left them cowards, sick with horror at all
the frightfulness. Out of such knowledge pity comes.

It was pity and a sense of impending tragedy which took hold of me in
Creil and on the way to Paris when I was confronted with the
confusion of the British retreat, and, what seemed its inevitable
consequences, the siege and fall of the French capital.


11


I reached Paris in the middle of the night on September 2 and saw
extraordinary scenes. It had become known during the day that
German outposts had reached Senlis and Chantilly, and that Paris
was no longer the seat of Government. Quietly and without a word of
warning the French Ministry had stolen away, after a Cabinet meeting
at which there had been both rage and tears, and after a frantic
packing up of papers in Government offices. This abandonment
came as a paralysing shock to the citizens of Paris and was an
outward and visible sign that the worst thing might happen--a new
siege of Paris, with greater guns than those which girdled it in the
terrible year.

A rumour had come that the people were to be given five days' notice
to leave their houses within the zone of fortifications, and to add to
the menace of impending horrors an aeroplane had dropped bombs
upon the Gare de l'Est that afternoon. There was a wild rush to get
away from the capital, and the railway stations were great camps of
fugitives, in which the richest and the poorest citizens were mingled,
with their women and children. The tragedy deepened when it was
heard that most of the lines to the coast had been cut and that the
only remaining line to Dieppe would probably be destroyed during the
next few hours. From the crowds which had been waiting all day for a
chance to get to the guichets in the rear of other and greater crowds,
there rose a murmur which seemed to me like a great sigh from
stricken hearts. There were many old men and women there who
knew what a siege of Paris meant. To younger people they told the
tale of it now--the old familiar tale--with shaking heads and trembling
forefingers. "Starvation!" "We ate rats, if we were lucky." "They would
not hesitate to smash up Notre Dame." "It is not for my sake I would
go. But the little ones! Those poor innocents!"

They did not make much noise in those crowds. There was no loud
sound of panic. No woman's voice shrieked or wailed above the
murmurs of voices. There was no fighting for the station platforms
barred against them all. A few women wept quietly, mopping their
eyes. Perhaps they wept for sheer weariness after sitting encamped
for hours on their baggage. Most of the men had a haggard look and
kept repeating the stale old word, "Incroyable!" in a dazed and dismal
way. Sadness as well as fear was revealed in the spirit of those
fugitives, a sadness that Paris, Paris the beautiful, should be in
danger of destruction, and that all her hopes of victory had ended in
this defeat.

Among all these civilians were soldiers of many regiments and of two
nations--Turcos and Zouaves, chasseurs and infantry, regulars and
Highland British. Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor
among the crying babies and weary-eyed women. Many of them were
drinking and drunk. They clinked glasses and pledged each other in
French and English and broadest Scotch, with a "Hell to the Kaiser!"
and "à bas Guillaume!" A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road
stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of
a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled
the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed
that he would never have left England for such a bloody game if he
had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his
blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace. The French
soldier greeted these sentiments with a "Bravo, mon vieux!" not
understanding a word of them, and the drunkard swayed and fell
across the marble-topped table, amid a crash of broken glass.

"Serve him damn well right!" said a sergeant to whom I had been
talking. Like many other English soldiers here who had been fighting
for ten days in retreat, he had kept his head, and his heart.

"We've been at it night and day," he said. "The only rest from fighting
was when we were marching with the beggars after us."

He spoke of the German army as "a blighted nation on the move."

"You can't mow that down. We kill 'em and kill 'em, and still they
come on. They seem to have an endless line of fresh men. Directly
we check 'em in one attack a fresh attack develops. It's impossible to
hold up such a mass of men. Can't be done, nohow!"

This man, severely wounded, was so much master of himself, so
strong in common sense that he was able to get the right perspective
about the general situation.

"It's not right to say we've met with disaster," he remarked. "Truth's
truth. We've suffered pretty badly--perhaps twelve per cent, of a
battalion knocked out. But what's that? You've got to expect it
nowadays. 'Taint a picnic. Besides, what if a battalion was cut up--
wiped clean out, if you like? That don't mean defeat. While one
regiment suffered another got off light."

And by the words of that sergeant of the Essex Regiment I was
helped to see the truth of what had happened. He took the same
view as many officers and men to whom I had spoken, and by
weighing up the evidence, in the light of all that I had seen and heard,
and with the assistance of my friend the Philosopher--whose wisdom
shone bright after a glass of Dubonnet and the arsenic pill which lifted
him out of the gulfs of the black devil doubt to heights of splendid
optimism based upon unerring logic--I was able to send a dispatch to
England which cheered it after a day of anguish.


12


Because I also was eager to reach the coast--not to escape from the
advancing Germans, for I had determined that I would do desperate
things to get back for the siege of Paris, if history had to be written
that way--but because I must find a boat to carry a dispatch across
the Channel, I waited with the crowd of fugitives, struggled with them
for a seat in the train which left at dawn and endured another of those
journeys when discomfort mocked at sleep, until sheer exhaustion
made one doze for a minute of unconsciousness from which one
awakened with a cricked neck and cramped limbs, to a reality of
tragic things.

We went by a tortuous route, round Paris towards the west, and at
every station the carriages were besieged by people trying to escape.

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, laissez-moi entrer!"

"J'ai trois enfants, messieurs! Ayez un peu de pitié!" "Cré nom de
Dieu, c'est le dernier train! Et j'ai peur pour les petits. Nous sommes
tous dans le même cas, n'est-ce-pas?"

But entreaties, piteous words, the exhibition of frightened children and
wailing babes could not make a place in carriages already packed to
bursting-point. It was impossible to get one more human being inside.

"C'est impossible! C'est absolument impossible! Regardez! On ne
peut pas faire plus de place, Madame!"

I was tempted sometimes to yield up my place. It seemed a coward
thing to sit there jammed between two peasants while a white-faced
woman with a child in her arms begged for a little pity and--a little
room. But I had a message for the English people. They, too, were in
anguish because the enemy had come so close to Paris in pursuit of
a little army which seemed to have been wiped out behind the screen
of secrecy through which only vague and awful rumours came. I sat
still, shamefaced, scribbling my message hour after hour, not daring
to look in the face of those women who turned away in a kind of
sullen sadness after their pitiful entreaties.

Enormous herds of cattle were being driven into Paris. For miles the
roads were thronged with them, and down other roads away from
Paris families were trekking to far fields, with their household goods
piled into bullock carts, pony carts, and wheelbarrows.

At Pontoise there was another shock, for people whose nerves were
frayed by fright. Two batteries of artillery were stationed by the line,
and a regiment of infantry was hiding in the hollows of the grass
slopes. Out of a nightmare dream not more fantastic than my waking
hours so that there seemed no dividing line between illusion and
reality, I opened my eyes to see those faces in the grass, bronzed
bearded faces with anxious eyes, below a hedge of rifle barrels
slanted towards the north. The Philosopher had jerked out of slumber
into a wakefulness like mine. He rubbed his eyes and then sat bolt
upright, with a tense searching look, as though trying to pierce to the
truth of things by a violence of staring.

"It doesn't look good," he said. "Those chaps in the grass seem to
expect something--something nasty!"

The Strategist had a map on his knees, which overlapped his fellow
passenger's on either side.

"If the beggars cut the line here it closes the way of escape from
Paris. It would be good business from their point of view."

I was sorry my message to .the English people might never be read
by them. Perhaps after all they would get on very well without it, and
my paper would appoint another correspondent to succeed a man
swallowed up somewhere inside the German lines. It would be a
queer adventure. I conjured up an imaginary conversation in bad
German with an officer in a pointed casque. Undoubtedly he would
have the best of the argument. There would be a little white wall,
perhaps...

One of the enemy's aeroplanes flew above our heads, circled round
and then disappeared. It dropped no bombs and was satisfied with its
reconnaissance. The whistle of the train shrieked out, and there was
a cheer from the French gunners as we went away to safety, leaving
them behind at the post of peril.

After all my message went to Fleet Street and filled a number of
columns, read over the coffee cups by a number of English families,
who said perhaps: "I wonder if he really knows anything, or if it is all
made up. Those newspaper men..."

Those newspaper men did not get much rest in their quest for truth,
not caring much, if the truth may be told, for what the English public
chose to think or not to think, but eager to see more of the great
drama and to plunge again into its amazing vortex.

Almost before the fugitives who had come with us had found time to
smell the sea we were back again along the road to Paris, fretful to be
there before it was closed by a hostile army and a ring of fire.


13


There are people who say that Paris showed no sign of panic when
the Germans were at their gates. "The calmness with which Paris
awaits the siege is amazing," wrote one of my confrères, and he
added this phrase: "There is no sign of panic." He was right if by
panic one meant a noisy fear, of crowds rushing wildly about tearing
out handfuls of their hair, and shrieking in a delirium of terror. No,
there was no clamour of despair in Paris when the enemy came close
to its gates. But if by panic one may mean a great fear spreading
rapidly among great multitudes of people, infectious as a fell disease
so that men ordinarily brave felt gripped with a sudden chill at the
heart, and searched desperately for a way of escape from the
advancing peril, then Paris was panic-stricken.

I have written many words about the courage of Paris, courage as
fine and noble as anything in history, and in a later chapter of this
book I hope to reveal the strength as well as the weakness in the soul
of Paris. But if there is any truth in my pen it must describe that
exodus by one and a half millions of people who, under the impulse of
a great fear--what else was it?--fled by any means and any road from
the capital which they love better than any city in the world because
their homes are there and their pride and all that has given beauty to
their ideals.

In those few days before the menace passed the railway stations
were stormed and stormed again, throughout the day and night, by
enormous crowds such as I had seen on that night of September 2.
Because so many bridges had been blown up and so many lines cut
on the way to Calais and Boulogne, in order to hamper the enemy's
advance, and because what had remained were being used for the
transport of troops, it was utterly impossible to provide trains for these
people. Southwards the way was easier, though from that direction
also regiments of French soldiers were being rushed up to the danger
zone. The railway officials under the pressure of this tremendous
strain, did their best to hurl out the population of Paris, somehow and
anyhow. For military reasons the need was urgent, The less mouths
to feed the better in a besieged city. So when all the passenger trains
had been used, cattle trucks were put together and into them,
thanking God, tumbled fine ladies of France, careless of the filth
which stained their silk frocks, and rich Americans who had travelled
far to Paris for the sake of safety, who offered great bribes to any
man who would yield his place between wooden boards for a way out
again, and bourgeois families who had shut up shops from the Rue
de la Paix to the Place Pigalle, heedless for once of loss or ruin, but
desperate to get beyond the range of German shells and the horrors
of a beleaguered city.

There were tragic individuals in these crowds. I could only guess at
some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the
eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding
their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements--they came blinking
out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures
let loose by an earthquake--and of young students who had
eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art
which had been overthrown by war's brutality. All classes and types of
life in Paris were mixed up in this retreat, and among them were men
I knew, so that I needed no guesswork for their stories. For weeks
some of them had been working under nervous pressure, keeping "a
stiff upper lip" as it is called to all rumours of impending tragedy. But
the contagion of fear had caught them in a secret way, and suddenly
their nerves had snapped, and they too had abandoned courage and
ideals of duty, slinking, as though afraid of daylight, to stations more
closely sieged than Paris would be. Pitiful wrecks of men, and victims
of this ruthless war in which the non-combatants have suffered even
more sometimes than the fighting men. The neuroticism of the age
was exaggerated by writing men--we have seen the spirit of the old
blood strong and keen--but neurasthenia is not a myth, and God
knows it was found out and made a torture to many men and women
in the city of Paris, when the Great Fear came--closing in with a
narrowing circle until it seemed to clutch at the throats of those
miserable beings.

There were thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who
would not wait for the trains. Along the southern road which goes
down to Tours there were sixty unbroken miles of them. They went in
every kind of vehicle--taxi-cabs for which rich people had paid
fabulous prices, motor-cars which had escaped the military
requisition, farmers' carts laden with several families and piles of
household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the
point of death, because of the weight of the people who had crowded
behind, pony traps, governess carts, and innumerable cycles.

But for the most part the people were on foot, and they trudged along,
bravely at first, quite gay, some of them, on the first stage of the
march; mothers carrying their babies, fathers hoisting children to their
shoulders, families stepping out together. They were of all classes,
rank and fortune being annihilated by this common tragedy. Elegant
women, whose beauty is known in the Paris salons, whose frivolity
perhaps in the past was the main purpose of their lives, were now on
a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs, and with the
midinettes of Montmartre--and their courage did not fail them so
quickly.

It was a tragic road. At every mile of it there were people who had
fainted on the wayside, and poor old people who could go no further
but sat down on the banks below the hedges weeping silently or
bidding the younger ones go forward and leave them to their fate.

Young women who had stepped out so jauntily at first were footsore
and lame, so that they limped along with lines of pain about their lips
and eyes. Many of the taxi-cabs, bought at great prices, and many of
the motor-cars had broken down and had been abandoned by their
owners, who had decided to walk.

Farmers' carts had jolted into ditches and had lost their wheels.
Wheelbarrows, too heavy to trundle, had been tilted up, with all their
household goods spilt into the roadway, and the children had been
carried further, until at last darkness came, and their only shelter was
a haystack in a field under the harvest moon.

I entered Paris again from the south-west, after crossing the Seine
where it makes a loop to the north-west beyond the forts of St.
Germain and St. Denis. The way seemed open to the enemy. Always
obsessed with the idea that the Germans would come from the east--
the almost fatal error of the French General Staff, Paris had been
girdled with forts on that side, from those of Ecouen and
Montmorency by the distant ramparts of Chelles and Champigny to
those of Sucy and Villeneuve--the outer lines of a triple cordon. But
on the western side there was next to nothing, and it was a sign to me
of the utter unreadiness of France that now at the eleventh hour
when I passed thousands of men were digging trenches in the roads
and fields with frantic haste, and throwing up earthworks along the
banks of the Seine. Great God! that such work should not have been
done weeks before and not left like this to a day when the enemy's
guns were rumbling through Creil and smashing back the allied
armies in retreat!

It was a pitiful thing to see the deserted houses of the Paris suburbs.
It was as though a plague had killed every human being save those
who had fled in frantic haste. Those little villas on the riverside, so
coquette in their prettiness, built as love nests and summer-houses,
were all shuttered and silent Roses were blowing in their gardens, full-
blown because no woman's hand had been to pick them, and spilling
their petals on the garden paths. The creeper was crimsoning on the
walls and the grass plots were like velvet carpeting, so soft and
deeply green. But there were signs of disorder, of some hurried
transmigration. Packing-cases littered the trim lawns and cardboard
boxes had been flung about. In one small bower I saw a child's
perambulator, where two wax dolls sat staring up at the abandoned
house. Their faces had become blotchy in the dew of night, and their
little maman with her pigtail had left them to their fate. In another
garden a woman's parasol and flower-trimmed hat lay on a rustic seat
with an open book beside them. I imagined a lady of France called
suddenly away from an old romance of false sentiment by the visit of
grim reality--the first sound of the enemy's guns, faint but terrible to
startled ears.

"Les Allemands sont tout près!"

Some harsh voice had broken into the quietude of the garden on the
Seine, and the open book, with the sunshade and the hat, had been
forgotten in the flight.

Yet there was one human figure here on the banks of the Seine
reassuring in this solitude which was haunted by the shadow of fear.
It was a fisherman. A middle-aged man with a straw hat on the back
of his head and a big pair of spectacles on the end of his nose, he
held out his long rod with a steady hand and waited for a bite, in an
attitude of supreme indifference to Germans, guns, hatred, tears and
all the miserable stupidities of people who do not fish. He was at
peace with the world on this day of splendour, with a golden sun and
a blue sky, and black shadows flung across the water from the tree
trunks. He stood there, a simple fisherman, as a protest against the
failure of civilization and the cowardice in the hearts of men. I lifted my
hat to him.

Close to Paris, too, in little market gardens and poor plots of land,
women stooped over their cabbages, and old men tended the fruits of
the earth. On one patch a peasant girl stood with her hands on her
hips staring at her fowls, which were struggling and clucking for the
grain she had flung down to them. There was a smile about her lips.
She seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the feathered crowd.
Did she know the Germans were coming to Paris? If so, she was not
afraid.

How quiet it was in the great city! How strangely and deadly quiet!
The heels of my two companions, and my own, made a click-clack
down the pavements, as though we were walking through silent halls.
Could this be Paris--this city of shuttered shops and barred windows
and deserted avenues? There were no treasures displayed in the
Rue de la Paix. Not a diamond glinted behind the window panes.
Indeed, there were no windows visible, but only iron sheeting, drawn
down like the lids of dead men's eyes.

In the Avenue de l'Opéra no Teutonic tout approached us with the old
familiar words, "Want a guide, sir?" "Lovely ladies, sir!" The lovely
ladies had gone. The guides had gone. Life had gone out of Paris.

It was early in the morning, and we were faint for lack of sleep and
food.

"My kingdom for a carriage," said the Philosopher, in a voice that
seemed to come from the virgin forests of the Madeira in which he
had once lost hold of all familiar things in life, as now in Paris.

A very old cab crawled into view, with a knock-kneed horse which
staggered aimlessly about the empty streets, and with an old cocher
who looked about him as though doubtful as to his whereabouts in
this deserted city.

He started violently when we hailed him, and stared at us as
nightmare creatures in a bad dream after an absinthe orgy. I had to
repeat an address three times before he understood.

"Hôtel St. James... Écoutez donc, mon vieux!"

He clacked his whip with an awakening to life.

"Allez!" he shouted to his bag of bones.

Our arrival at the Hotel St. James was a sensation, not without alarm.
I believe the concierge and his wife believed the Germans had come
when they heard the outrageous noise of our horse's hoofs
thundering into the awful silence of their courtyard. The manager, and
the assistant manager, and the head waiter, and the head waiter's
wife, and the chambermaid, and the cook, greeted us with the
surprise of people who behold an apparition.

"The hotel has shut up. Everybody has fled! We are quite alone
here!"

I was glad to have added a little item of history to that old mansion
where the Duc de Noailles lived, where Lafayette was married, and
where Marie Antoinette saw old ghost faces--the dead faces of
laughing girls--when she passed on her way to the scaffold. It was a
queer incident in its story when three English journalists opened it
after the great flight from Paris.

Early that morning, after a snatch of sleep, we three friends walked
up the Avenue des Champs Ëlysées and back again from the Arc de
Triomphe. The autumn foliage was beginning to fall, and so
wonderfully quiet was the scene that almost one might have heard a
leaf rustle to the ground. Not a child scampered under the trees or
chased a comrade round the Petit Guignol. No women with twinkling
needles sat on the stone seats. No black-haired student fondled the
hand of a pretty couturière. No honest bourgeois with a fat stomach
walked slowly along the pathway meditating upon the mystery of life
which made some men millionaires. Not a single carriage nor any
kind of vehicle, except one solitary bicycle, came down the road
where on normal days there is a crowd of light-wheeled traffic.

The Philosopher was silent, thinking tremendous things, with his
sallow face transfigured by some spiritual emotion. It was when we
passed the Palais des Beaux-Arts that he stood still and raised two
fingers to the blue sky, like a priest blessing a kneeling multitude.

"Thanks be to the Great Power!" he said, with the solemn piety of an
infidel who knows God only as the spirit is revealed on lonely waters
and above uprising seas, and in the life of flowers and beasts, and in
the rare pity of men.

We did not laugh at him. Only those who have known Paris and loved
her beauty can understand the thrill that came to us on that morning
in September when we had expected to hear the roar of great guns
around her, and to see the beginning of a ghastly destruction. Paris
was still safe! By some kind of miracle the enemy had not yet touched
her beauty nor tramped into her streets. How sharp and clear were all
the buildings under that cloudless sky! Spears of light flashed from
the brazen-winged horses above Alexander's bridge, and the dome
of the Invalides was a golden crown above a snow-white palace. The
Seine poured in a burnished stream beneath all the bridges and far
away beyond the houses and the island trees, and all the picture of
Paris etched by a master-hand through long centuries of time the
towers of Notre Dame were faintly pencilled in the blue screen of sky.
Oh, fair dream-city, in which the highest passions of the spirit have
found a dwelling-place--with the rankest weeds of vice--in which so
many human hearts have suffered and strived and starved for
beauty's sake, in which always there have lived laughter and agony
and tears, where Liberty was cherished as well as murdered, and
where Love has redeemed a thousand crimes, I, though an
Englishman, found tears in my eyes because on that day of history
your beauty was still unspoilt.




Chapter V
The Turn Of The Tide



1


The Germans were baulked of Paris. Even now, looking back on
those days, I sometimes wonder why they made that sudden swerve
to the south-east, missing their great objective. It was for Paris that
they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an
incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and
Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiègne, flinging away human life
as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris--
Paris the great and beautiful--seemed to be within their grasp, and
the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the
French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a
dread proof of German power.

As I have said, all the north-west corner of France was denuded of
troops, with the exception of some poor Territorials, ill-trained and ill-
equipped, and never meant to withstand the crush of Imperial troops
advancing in hordes with masses of artillery, so that they fled like
panic-stricken sheep. The forts of Paris on the western side would not
have held out for half a day against the German guns. All that
feverish activity of trench work was but a pitiable exhibition of an
unprepared defence. The enemy would have swept over them like
a rolling tide. The little British army was still holding together, but it
had lost heavily and was winded after its rapid retreat. The army of
Paris was waiting to fight and would have fought to the death, but
without support from other army corps still a day's journey distant,
its peril would have been great, and if the enemy's right wing had
been hurled with full force against it at the critical moment it might
have been crushed and annihilated. Von Kluck had twenty-four hours
in his favour. If he had been swift to use them before Joffre could
have hurried up his regiments to the rescue, German boots might
have tramped down through the Place de la République to the Place
de la Concorde, and German horses might have been stabled in the
Palais des Beaux-Arts. I am sure of that, because I saw the beginning
of demoralization, the first signs of an enormous tragedy, creeping
closer to an expectant city.

In spite of the optimism of French officers and men, an optimism as
strong as religious faith, I believe now, searching back to facts, that it
was not justified by the military situation. It was justified only by the
miracle that followed faith. Von Kluck does not seem to have known
that the French army was in desperate need of those twenty-four
hours which he gave them by his hesitation. If he had come straight
on for Paris with the same rapidity as his men had marched in earlier
stages and with the same resolve to smash through regardless of
cost, the city would have been his and France would have reeled
under the blow. The psychological effect of the capital being in the
enemy's hands would have been worth more to them at this stage of
the war than the annihilation of an army corps. It would have been a
moral debacle for the French people, who had been buoyed up with
false news and false hopes until their Government had fled to
Bordeaux, realizing the gravity of the peril. The Terrible Year would
have seemed no worse than this swift invasion of Paris, and the
temperament of the nation, in spite of the renewal of its youth, had
not changed enough to resist this calamity with utter stoicism. I know
the arguments of the strategists, who point out that Von Kluck could
not afford to undertake the risk of entering Paris while an undefeated
army remained on his flank. They are obvious arguments, thoroughly
sound to men who play for safety, but all records of great captains of
war prove that at a decisive moment they abandon the safe and
obvious game for a master-stroke of audacity, counting the risks and
taking them, and striking terror into the hearts of their enemy by the
very shock of their contempt for caution. Von Kluck could have
entered and held Paris with twenty thousand men. That seems to me
beyond dispute by anyone who knows the facts. With the mass of
men at his disposal he could have driven a wedge between Paris and
the French armies of the left and centre, and any attempt on their part
to pierce his line and cut his communications would have been
hampered by the deadly peril of finding themselves outflanked by the
German centre swinging down from the north in a western curve, with
its point directed also upon Paris. The whole aspect of the war would
have been changed, and there would have been great strategical
movements perilous to both sides, instead of the siege war of the
trenches in which both sides played for safety and established for
many months a position bordering upon stalemate.

The psychological effect upon the German army if Paris had been
taken would have been great in moral value to them as in moral loss
to the French. Their spirits would have been exalted as much as the
French spirits would have drooped, and even in modern war victory is
secured as much by temperamental qualities as by shell-fire and big
guns.

The Headquarters Staff of the German army decided otherwise.
Scared by the possibility of having their left wing smashed back to the
west between Paris and the sea, with their communications cut, they
swung round steadily to the south-east and drove their famous
wedge-like formation southwards, with the purpose of dividing the
allied forces of the West from the French centre. The exact position
then was this: Their own right struck down to the south-east of Paris,
through Château Thierry to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre and beyond; and
another strong column forced the French to evacuate Rheims and fall
back in a south-westerly direction. It was not without skill, this sudden
change of plan, and it is clear that the German Staff believed it
possible to defeat the French centre and left centre and then to come
back with a smashing blow against the army of Paris and the
"contemptible" British. But two great factors in the case were
overlooked. One was the value of time, and the other was the sudden
revival in the spirit of the French army now that Paris might still be
saved. They gave time--no more than that precious twenty-four
hours--to General Joffre and his advisers to repair by one supreme
and splendid effort all the grievous errors of the war's first chapter.
While they were hesitating and changing their line of front, a new and
tremendous activity was taking place on the French side, and Joffre,
by a real stroke of genius which proves him to be a great general in
spite of the first mistakes, for which he was perhaps not responsible,
prepared a blow which was to strike his enemy shrewdly.


2


I had the great fortune of seeing something of that rush to the rescue
which gave hope that perhaps, after all, the tragedy which had
seemed so inevitable--the capture of the world's finest city--might not
be fulfilled.

This great movement was directed from the west, the south, and the
east, and continued without pause by day and night.

In stations about Paris I saw regiment after regiment entraining--men
from the southern provinces speaking the patois of the south, men
from the eastern departments whom I had seen a month before, at
the beginning of the war, at Chalons, and Epernay and Nancy, and
men from the southwest and centre of France in the garrisons along
the Loire.

They were all in splendid spirits, strangely undaunted by the rapidity
of the German advance. "Fear nothing, my little one," said a dirty
unshaven gentleman with the laughing eyes of d'Artagnan, "we shall
bite their heads off. These brutal 'Boches' are going to put
themselves in a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last."

The railway carriages were garlanded with flowers of the fields. The
men wore posies in their képis. In white chalk they had scrawled
legends upon the cattle-trucks in which they travelled. "À mort
Guillaume!" "Vive la Gloire!" "Les Français ne se rendent jamais!"
Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the
Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards. Their blue coats
with the turned-back flaps were war-worn and flaked with the dust of
long marches. Their red trousers were sloppy and stained.

But they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their
spirits was good to see. A friend of mine was not ashamed to say that
he had tears at least as high as his throat when he stood among
them and clasped some of those brown hands. There was a thrill not
to be recaptured in the emotion of those early days of war. Afterwards
the monotony of it all sat heavily upon one's soul.

They were very proud, those French soldiers, of fighting side by side
with their old foes the British, now after long centuries of strife, from
Edward the Black Prince to Wellington, their brothers-in-arms upon
the battlefields; and because I am English they offered me their
cigarettes and made me one of them.

In modern war it is only masses of men that matter, moved by a
common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and
I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move, rapidly, in
vast numbers, and in the right direction--to support the French lines
which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town,
whom I had followed in their retirement back and back, with the British
always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the
outskirts of Paris itself.

Only this could save Paris--the rapid strengthening of the Allied front
by enormous reserves strong enough to hold back the arrow-shaped
battering-ram of the enemy's right.

All our British reserves had been rushed up to the front from Havre
and Rouen. There was only one deduction to be drawn from this
great swift movement. The French and British lines had been
supported by every available battalion to save Paris from its menace
of destruction, to meet the weight of the enemy's metal by a force
strong enough to resist its mass.


3


One of the most dramatic incidents of the war was the transport of the
army of Paris to the fighting line--in taxi-cabs. There were 2000 of
these cabs in Paris, and on this day of September 1 they
disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them, just as the
earth had swallowed one of them not long before when the floods had
sapped the streets. A sudden order from General Gallièni, the Military
Governor of Paris, had been issued to each driver, who immediately
ignored the upraised hands of would-be passengers and the shouts
of people desperate to get to one of the railway stations with
household goods and a hope of escape. At the depots the drivers
knew that upon the strength of their tyres and the power of their
engines depended the safety of Paris and perhaps the life of France.
It was an extraordinary incident in the history of modern war. Five
soldiers were loaded into each cab, four inside and one next to the
driver, with their rifles and kit crammed in between them. In one
journey twenty thousand men were taken on the road to Meaux. It
was a triumph of mobility, and when in future the Parisian is tempted
to curse those red vehicles which dash about the streets to the
danger of all pedestrians who forget that death has to be dodged by
never-failing vigilance, his righteous wrath will be softened, perhaps,
by the remembrance that these were the chariots of General
Manoury's army before the battle of Meaux, which turned the tide of
war and flung back the enemy in retreat..


4


It will be to the lasting credit of General Joffre and the French Staff
that after six weeks of disorder owing to the unreadiness of their army
and their grievous errors in the disposition of the available troops,
they recovered themselves in a supreme effort and by a brilliant
stroke of strategy took the enemy completely by surprise and dealt
him a staggering blow. The German Headquarters Staff--the brains of
the greatest military machine in Europe--sublimely arrogant in their
belief that they had an exclusive knowledge of the whole science of
war and that the allied armies were poor blunderers without
intelligence and without organization, utterly incapable of resisting the
military genius of the German race, found themselves foiled and out-
manuvred at the very moment when the prize of victory seemed to
be within their grasp.

For the first time since the beginning of their advance into French
territory they were confronted with something like equal numbers, and
they were brought to a halt at once. This arrest, shocking to their self-
confidence, was found to be more than a mere check easily
overpowered by bringing up more battalions. General von Kluck
realized that the French had gathered together a formidable mass of
men ready to be flung upon his right flank. Their guns were already
beginning to open fire with frightful effect upon his advanced
columns. The pressure of French regiments marching steadily and
swiftly from the south-east and south-west after weeks of retirement,
was forcing in his outposts, chasing back his cavalry and revealing a
strong and resolute offensive. On September 4 and 5 there was
heavy fighting on the German left and centre, to the south of the
Marne and the west of the Ourcq. While General von Kluck was
endeavouring to resist the thrust of the French and British troops who
were massing their guns with great strength on his right, General von
Bulow's left wing, with the Saxon army and the Prince of
Wurtemberg's army, made desperate attempts to break the French
centre by violent attacks to the north of Sezanne and Vitry-le-
François. For two days the Germans tested the full measure of the
strength opposed to them, but failed in smashing through any part of
the French line, so that the Allies, successful in holding their ground
against the full weight of the enemy, gained time for the supports to
reach them and then developed a complete and general attack.

Von Kluck found that his troops were yielding. The French mordant
was too much for Prussians as well as Saxons, who in many villages
of France and in the hollows of the downs were heavily punished by
the Anglo-French artillery, and routed by bayonet charges thrust
home with incredible ferocity. The German Headquarters Staff,
receiving these reports from all parts of the line, must have had many
moral shocks, undermining their pride and racking their nerves.
Perhaps one day we shall read the history of those councils of war
between the German generals, when men who had been confident of
victory began to be haunted by doubt, hiding their fears even from
themselves until they were forced to a gloomy recognition of grave
perils. Some of these men must have wept and others cursed, while
Von Kluck decided to play again for safety, and issued an order for
retreat. Retreat! What would the Emperor say in Berlin where he
waited for the prize of Paris and heard that it had slipped from his
grasp? How could they explain the meaning of that retreat to the
people at home, expecting loot from the Louvre and souvenirs from
Paris shops?

Some of the officers thought these things--I have read their letters--
but General von Kluck must have had only one dominating and
absorbing thought, more important even than an Emperor's anger.
"Gott im Himmel, shall I get this army back to a stronger line or shall I
risk all on a fight in the open, against those French and British guns
and almost equal odds?" The failure of the German centre was the
gravest disaster, and threatened von Kluck with the menace of an
enveloping movement by the Allied troops which might lead to his
destruction, with the flower of the Imperial troops. Away back there on
the Aisne were impregnable positions tempting to hard-pressed men.
Leaving nothing to chance, the Germans had prepared them already
in case of retreat, though it had not been dreamed of then as more
than a fantastic possibility. The fortune of war itself as well as
cautious judgment pointed back to the Aisne for safety. The allied
armies were closing up, increasing in strength of men and guns as
the hours passed. In a day or two it might be too late to reach the
strongholds of the hills.


5


So the retreat of the German right wing which had cut like a knife
through northern France until its edge was blunted by a wall of steel,
began on September 5 and increased in momentum as the allied
troops followed hard upon the enemy's heels. The great mass of the
German left swung backwards in a steady and orderly way, not losing
many men and not demoralized by this amazing turn in Fortune's
wheel. "It is frightfully disappointing," wrote a German officer whose
letter was found afterwards on his dead body. "We believed that we
should enter Paris in triumph and to turn away from it is a bitter thing
for the men. But I trust our chiefs and I know that it is only a
strategical retirement. Paris will still be ours."

Truly it was a strategical retirement and not a "rout," as it was called
by the English Press Bureau. But all retirements are costly when the
enemy follows close, and the rearguard of Von Kluck's army was in a
terrible plight and suffered heavy losses. The French light artillery
opened fire in a running pursuit, advancing their guns from position to
position with very brief halts, during which the famous soixante-quinze
flung out shells upon bodies of troops at close range--so that they fell
like wheat cut to pieces in a hailstorm. The British gunners were
pushing forward, less impetuously but with a steady persistence, to
the west of the River Ourcq, and after all their hardships; losses, and
fatigues, the men who had been tired of retreating were heartened
now that their turn had come to give chase.

Episodes that seem as incredible as a boy's romance of war took
place in those first days of September when the German right rolled
back in a retreating tide. On one of those days an English regiment
marched along a dusty road for miles with another body of men
tramping at the same pace on a parallel road, in the same white dust
which cloaked their uniforms--not of English khaki, but made in
Germany. Hundreds of German soldiers, exhausted by this forced
march in the heat, without food or water, fell out, took to the cover of
woods, and remained there for weeks, in parties of six or eight,
making their way to lonely farmhouses where they demanded food
with rifles levelled at frightened peasants, taking pot-shots at English
soldiers who had fallen out in the same way, and hiding in thickets
until they were hunted out by battues of soldiers long after the first
great battle of the Marne. It was the time for strange adventures when
even civilians wandering in the wake of battle found themselves
covered by the weapons of men who cared nothing for human life,
whether it was their own or another's, and when small battalions of
French or English, led by daring officers, fought separate battles in
isolated villages, held by small bodies of the enemy, cut off from the
main army but savagely determined to fight to the death.

Out of the experiences of those few days many curious chapters of
history will be written by regimental officers and men. I have heard
scores of stories of that kind, told while the thrill of them still
flushed the cheeks of the narrators, and when the wounds they
had gained in these fields of France were still stabbed with
red-hot needles of pain, so that a man's laughter would be checked
by a quivering sigh and his lips parched by a great thirst.


6


Because of its vivid interest and its fine candour, I will give one such
story. It was told to me by a young officer of Zouaves who had been
in the thickest of the fighting to the east of Paris. He had come out of
action with a piece of shell in his left arm, and his uniform was
splashed with the blood of his wound. I wish I could write it in his
soldierly French words;--so simple and direct, yet emotional at times
with the eloquence of a man who speaks of the horrors which have
scorched his eyes and of the fear that for a little while robbed him of
all courage and of the great tragedy of this beastly business of war
which puts truth upon the lips of men.

I wish also I could convey to my readers' minds the portrait of that
young man with his candid brown eyes, his little black moustache, his
black stubble of beard, as I saw him in the rags and tatters of his
Zouave dress, concealed a little beneath his long grey-blue cape of a
German Uhlan, whom he had killed with his sword.

When he described his experience he puffed at a long German pipe
which he had found in the pocket of the cape, and laughed now and
then at this trophy, of which he was immensely proud.

"For four days previous to Monday, September 7," he said, "we were
engaged in clearing out the German 'boches' from all the villages on
the left bank of the Ourcq, which they had occupied in order to protect
the flank of their right wing."

"Unfortunately for us the English heavy artillery, which would have
smashed the beggars to bits, had not yet come up to help us,
although we expected them with some anxiety, as the big business
events began as soon as we drove the outposts back to their main
lines."

"However, we were quite equal to the preliminary task, and heartened
by the news of the ammunition convoy which had been turned into a
very pretty firework display by 'Soixante-dix Pau.' My Zouaves--as
you see I belong to the First Division, which has a reputation to keep
up--n'est-ce pas?--were in splendid form."

"They were just like athletes who want to be first off the mark, or
rather perhaps I should say like bloodhounds on the scent."

"Still, just to encourage them a little, don't you know, I pulled out my
revolver, showed it to my little ones, and said very gently that the first
man who hesitated to advance under the fire of the German guns
would be a dead man before he took a step to the rear. (In every
regiment there are one or two men who want encouraging in this
way.) Of course, they all laughed at me. They wanted to get near
those German guns, and nearer still to the gunners. That was before
they knew the exact meaning of shell-fire. Well, they did good things,
those Zouaves of mine. But it wasn't pleasant work. We fought from
village to village, very close fighting, so that sometimes we could look
into our enemy's eyes. The Moroccans were with us, the native
troops, unlike my boys who are Frenchmen, and they were like
demons with their bayonet work."

"Several of the villages were set on fire by the Germans before they
retired from them, and soon great columns of smoke with pillars of
flame and clouds of flying sparks rose up into the blue sky, and made
a picture of hell there. For really it was hell on earth.

"Our gunners were shelling the Germans from pillar to post, as it
were, and strewing the ground with their dead. It was across and
among these dead bodies that we infantry had to charge. They lay
about in heaps, masses of bleeding flesh. It made me sick, even in
the excitement of it all."

"The enemy's quickfirers were marvellous. I am bound to say we did
not get it all our own way. They always manuvre them in the same
style, and very clever it is. First of all they mask them with infantry.
Then when the French charge they reveal them and put us to the test
under the most withering fire. It is almost impossible to stand against
it, and in this case we had to retire after each rush for about 250
metres."

"Then quick as lightning the Germans got their mitrailleuses across
the ground which we had yielded to them, and waited for us to come
on again; when they repeated the same operation."

"I can tell you it was pretty trying to the nerves, but my Zouaves were
very steady in spite of fairly heavy losses."

"In a village named Penchard there was some very sharp fighting,
and some of our artillery were posted hereabouts. Presently a
German aeroplane came overhead circling round in reconnaissance.
But it was out for more than that. Suddenly it began to drop bombs,
and whether by design or otherwise--they have no manners, these
fellows--they exploded in the middle of a field hospital. One of my
friends, a young doctor, was wounded in the left arm by a bullet from
one of these bombs, though I don't know what other casualties there
were. But the inevitable happened. Shortly after the disappearance of
the aeroplane the German shells searched the position, and found it
with unpleasant accuracy. It is always the same. The German
aeroplanes are really wonderful in the way they search out the
positions of our guns. We always know that within half an hour of a-n
observation by aeroplane the shells will begin to fall above the
gunners unless they have altered their position. It was so in this
fighting round Meaux yesterday.

"For some days this rat-hunting among the villages on the left bank of
the Ourcq went on all the time, and we were not very happy. The truth
was that we had no water for ourselves, and were four days thirsty. It
was really terrible, for the heat was terrific during the day, and some
of us were almost mad with thirst. Our tongues were blistered and
swollen, our eyes had a silly kind of look in them, and at night we had
horrid dreams. It was, I assure you, an intolerable agony."

"But we did our best for the horses. I have said we were four days
without drink. That was because we used our last water for the poor
beasts. A gentleman has to do that--you will agree?--and the French
soldier is not a barbarian. Even then the horses had to go without a
drop of water for two days, and I'm not ashamed to say that I wept
salt tears to see the sufferings of those poor innocent creatures, who
did not understand the meaning of all this bloody business and who
wondered at our cruelty."

"The nights were dreadful. All around us were burning villages, the
dear hamlets of France, and at every faint puff of wind the sparks
floated about them like falling stars. But other fires were burning.
Under the cover of the darkness the Germans had collected their
dead and had piled them into great heaps and had covered them with
straw and paraffin. Then they had set a torch to these funeral pyres."

"Carrion crows were about in the dawn that followed. Not many of
them, but they came flopping about the dead bodies, and the living,
with hungry beaks. One of my own comrades lay very badly
wounded, and when he wakened out of his unconsciousness one of
these beastly birds was sitting on his chest waiting for him to die. That
is war!"

"Yet there are other things in war. Fine and splendid things. It was
magnificent to see your English gunners come up. They were rather
late in the field. They did not appear until midday on September 7,
when the big battle was going on, and when we were doing our best
to push back the German right wing. They came up just as if they
were on the parade ground, marvellously cool, very chic fellows,
superb in their manner of handling their guns. It was heavy artillery,
and we badly wanted it. And nothing could budge your men, though
the German shell-fire was very hot."

"That is the way with your British gunners. They are different from the
French, who are always best when they are moving forward, but do
not like to stay in one position. But when your men have taken up
their ground, nothing can move them. Nothing on earth!"

"And yet the German shells were terrifying. I confess to you that there
were times when my nerves were absolutely gone. I crouched down
with my men--we were in open formation--and ducked my head at the
sound of the bursting 'obus' and trembled in every limb as though I
had a fit of ague. God rebuked me for the bombast with which I had
spoken to my men."

"One hears the zip-zip of the bullets, the boom of the great guns, the
tang of our sharp French artillery, and in all this infernal experience of
noise and stench, the screams of dying horses and men joined with
the fury of the gun-fire, and rose shrill above it. No man may boast of
his courage. Dear God, there were moments when I was a coward
with all of them!"

"But one gets used to it, as to all things. My ague did not last long.
Soon I was cheering and shouting again. We cleared the enemy out
of the village of Bregy, and that was where I fell wounded in the arm
pretty badly, by a bit of shell. I bled like a stuck pig, as you can see,
but when I came to myself again a brother officer told me that things
were going on well, and that we had rolled back the German right.
That was better than a bandage to me. I felt very well again, in spite
of my weakness."

"It is the beginning of the end. The Germans are on the run. They are
exhausted and demoralized. Their pride has been broken. They are
short of ammunition. They know that their plans have failed. Now that
we have them on the move nothing will save them. This war is going
to finish quicker than people thought. I believe that in a few days the
enemy will be broken, and that we shall have nothing more to do than
kill them as they fight back in retreat."

That is the story without any re-touching of my own, of the young
lieutenant of Zouaves whom I met after the battle of Meaux, with the
blood still splashed upon his uniform.

It is a human story, giving the experience of only one individual in a
great battle, but clearly enough there emerges from it the truth of that
great operation which did irreparable damage to the German right
wing in its plan of campaign. The optimism with which this officer
ended his tale makes one smile a little now, though in a pitiful way.
The words in which he prophesied a quick finish to the war were
spoken in September 1914, before the agony of the winter campaign,
the awful monotony of that siege warfare, and the tides of blood that
came in the spring of another year.


7


The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of
men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads
down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony
fields strewn already with the débris of fighting, on through villages
where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and
blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part
of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of
beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on grass
nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight.
Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver. No horrors lurked in
the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming
undertone of nature's organists. Little French towns stood white on
the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch
roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest,
peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys
and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and
women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old
familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church
clocks, without any terror in their hearts. War had been declared, but
it seemed remote in its actual cruelty. There was only the faint thrill of
unaccustomed drama in the scenes which passed through these
village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a
squadron of light blue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who
grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy. It is
true that in some of these villages mothers of France had clasped
their sons to their bosoms and wept a little over their nestling heads
and wept still more in loneliness when the boys had gone away. The
shadow of the war had crept into all these villages of France, but
outwardly they were still at peace and untroubled by the far-off peril.
Nature was indifferent to the stupid ways of men. Her beauty had the
ripeness of the full-blown summer and the somnolence of golden
days when the woods are very still in the shimmering heat and not a
grass-blade moves except when a cricket stirs it with its chirruping.

Now, along the line of the retreat, nature itself was fouled and the old
dwelling-places of peace were wrecked. Fighting their way back the
enemy had burned many villages, or had defended them against a
withering fire from the pursuing troops, so that their blackened
stumps of timber, and charred, broken walls, with heaps of ashes
which were once farmhouses and barns, remained as witnesses of
the horror that had passed. Along the roadways were the bodies of
dead horses. Swarms of flies were black upon them, browsing on
their putrefying flesh, from which a stench came poisoning the air and
rising above the scent of flowers and the sweet smell of hay in
eddying waves of abominable odour. In villages where there had
been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers
and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramée and Chevreville, the whitewashed
cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the
German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet
charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house
had escaped. It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage. A café
restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other
aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact. Here and
there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a
street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled
over by the hand of a petulant child. In other villages it was difficult
to believe that war had passed that way. It was rather as though a
plague had driven their inhabitants to flight. The houses were still
shuttered as when the bourgeoisie and peasant had fled at the first
news of the German advance. It was only by the intense solitude and
silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation,
only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark mass of
unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts
and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.

Spent cartridges lay about, and fragments of shell, and here and
there shells which had failed to burst until they buried their nozzles in
the earth.

French peasants prowled about for these trophies, though legally
they had no right to them, as they came under the penalties attached
to loot. In many of the cottages which were used by the German
officers there were signs of a hasty evacuation. Capes and leather
pouches still lay about on chairs and bedsteads. Half finished letters,
written to women in the Fatherland who will never read those words,
had been trampled under heel by hurrying boots.

I saw similar scenes in Turkey when the victorious Bulgarians
marched after the retreating Turks. I never dreamed then that such
scenes would happen in France in the wake of a German retreat. It is
a little thing, like one of those unfinished letters from a soldier to his
wife, which overwhelms one with pity for all the tragedy of war.

"Meine liebe Frau." Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for
the scrap of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I
picked up in the Forest of Compiègne She would wait week after
week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those
weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word
which would make her say, "Gott sei dank!" as she knelt by the
bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had
gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last. I
found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down
that I could only read a word or two in German script. They fluttered
about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British
soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields.

Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer
into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could
only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded,
by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned
villages. Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the
effects of shell-fire on living men. I was still groping towards the heart
of the business and wandering in its backyards.

I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September.
By that time the enemy's retreat had finished and the German army
under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in
the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were
vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against
entrenched positions.

All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields
still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines,
stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon
and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the
greatest battles in history had continued.

As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crépy-en-Valois,
which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on
through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and
stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and
British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the
north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked
the air with thunderous reverberations.

Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In
those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature--the spirit of
these woods and hills--listened with strained ears and a frightened
hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the
firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills
were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague,
distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the
enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they
could not find the range of our own artillery.

Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along
rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the
deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a
percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void
spaces. These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy
pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the
marshlands of the Aisne--the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged
all pieces in the French or British lines. With that marvellous foresight
which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been
embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while
their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris. The
Germans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for
themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops
had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which
was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way
back.

I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange
companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such
a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the
guns. My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.

His ordinary profession is that of a garde champêtre, or village
policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with
the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side. With
other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the
line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near
Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to
burn the German corpses.

His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting
in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield,
as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then
pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left
upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could
my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those
brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.

I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly
piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy's dead who
were awaiting their funeral pyres.

My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond
the abandoned village of Levignen.

"See there," he said; "they take some time to burn."

He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a gardener pointing to a bonfire
of autumn leaves.

But there in line with his forefinger rose a heavy rolling smoke,
sluggish in the rain under a leaden sky, and I knew that those leaves
yonder had fallen from the great tree of human life, and this bonfire
was made from an unnatural harvesting.

The French and British dead were laid in the same graves--"Are they
not brothers?" asked the man with the spade--and as soon as the
peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods
they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth
among which I wandered, as heroes' wreaths. But no such honour
was paid to the enemy, and with a little petrol and straw they were put
to the flames until only their charred ashes, windswept and wet with
heavy rain, marked the place of their death.

It is the justice of men. It makes no difference. But as I stood and
watched these smoky fires, between the beauty of great woods
stretching away to the far hills, and close to a village which seemed a
picture of human peace, with its old church-tower and red-brown
roofs, I was filled with pity at all this misery and needless death which
has flung its horror across the fair fields of France.

What was the sense of it? Why, in God's name, or the devil's, were
men killing each other like this on the fields of France, so that human
life was of no more value than that of vermin slaughtered ruthlessly?
Each one of the German corpses whose flesh was roasting under
those oily clouds of smoke had been a young man with bright hopes,
and a gift of laughter, and some instincts of love in his heart. At least
he had two eyes and a nose, and other features common to the
brotherhood of man. Was there really the mark of the beast upon him
so that he should be killed at sight, without pity? I wondered if in that
roasting mass of human flesh were any of the men who had been
kind to me in Germany--the young poet whose wife had plucked
roses for me in her garden, and touched them with her lips and said,
"Take them to England with my love"; or the big Bavarian professor
who had shared his food with me in the hills above Adrianople; or any
of the Leipzig students who had clinked glasses with me in the beer-
halls.

It was Germany's guilt--this war. Well, I could not read all the secrets
of our Foreign Office for twenty years or more to know with what tact
or tactlessness, with what honesty or charity, or with what arrogance
or indifference our statesmen had dealt with Germany's claims or
Germany's aspirations. But at least I knew, as I watched those
smouldering death-fires, that no individual corpse among them could
be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and that
not a soul hovering above that mass of meat could be made
responsible at the judgment seat of God. They had obeyed orders,
they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed, as
we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies
of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had
been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen,
playing one race against another as we play with pawns in a game of
chess. The old witchcraft was better than this new witchcraft, and not
so fraudulent in its power of duping the ignorant masses.

My guide had no such sentiment. As he led me through a fringe of
forest land he told me his own adventures, and heaped curses upon
the enemy.

He had killed one of them with his own hand. As he was walking on
the edge of a wood a Solitary Uhlan came riding over the fields,
below the crest of a little hill. He was one of the outposts of the strong
force in Crépy-en-Valois, and had lost his way to that town. He
demanded guidance, and to point his remarks pricked his lance at the
chest of the garde champêtre.

But the peasant had been a soldier, and he held a revolver in the side
pocket of his jacket. He answered civilly, but shot through his pocket
and killed the man at the end of the lance. The Uhlan fell from his
horse, and the peasant seized his lance and carbine as souvenirs of
a happy moment.

But the moment was brief. A second later and the peasant was sick
with fear for what he had done. If it should be discovered that he, a
civilian, had killed a German soldier, every living thing in his village
would be put to the sword--and among those living things were his
wife and little ones.

He dragged his trophies into the forest, and lay in hiding there for two
days until the enemy had passed.

Afterwards I saw the lance--it reached from the floor to the ceiling of
his cottage--and for years to come in the village of Rouville it will be
the centre-piece of a thrilling tale.

Other peasants joined my friendly gravedigger, and one of them--the
giant of his village--told me of his own escape from death. He was
acting as the guide of four British officers through a part of the forest.
Presently they stopped to study their maps; and it was only the guide
who saw at the other end of the glade a patrol of German cavalry.
Before he could call out a warning they had unslung their carbines
and fired. The British officers fell dead without a cry, and the peasant
fell like a dead man also, rolling into a ditch, unwounded but
paralysed with fear. They did not bother about him--that little German
patrol. They rode off laughing, as though amused with this jest of
death.

There have been many jests like that--though I see no mirth in them--
and I could fill this chapter with the stories I have heard of this kind
of death coming quite quickly in woods and fields where peasants
raised their heads for a moment to find that the enemy was near. It is
these isolated episodes among the homesteads of France, and in
quiet villages girdled by silent woods, which seemed to reveal the
spirit of war more even than the ceaseless fighting on the battle front
with its long lists of casualties.

On that Sunday I saw the trail of this great spirit of evil down many
roads.

I walked not only among the dead, but, what affected me with a more
curious emotion, through villages where a few living people wrung
their hands amidst the ruins of their homes.

Even in Crépy-en-Valois, which had suffered less than other towns
through which the enemy had passed, I saw a wilful, wanton, stupid
destruction of men--no worse I think than other men, but with their
passions let loose and unrestrained. They had entered all the
abandoned houses, and had found some evil pleasure in smashing
chairs and tables and lampshades and babies' perambulators, and
the cheap but precious ornaments of little homes. They had made a
pigsty of many a neat little cottage, and it seemed as though an
earthquake had heaped everything together into a shapeless,
senseless litter. They entered a musical instrument shop, and
diverted themselves, naturally enough, with gramophones and
mouth-organs and trumpets and violins. But, unnaturally, with just a
devilish mirth, they had then smashed all these things into twisted
metal and broken strings. In one cottage an old man and woman,
among the few inhabitants who remained, told me their story.

They are Alsatians, and speak German, and with the craftiness which
accompanies the simplicity of the French peasant, made the most of
this lucky chance. Nine German soldiers were quartered upon them,
and each man demanded and obtained nine eggs for the meal, which
he washed down with the peasant's wine. Afterwards, they stole
everything they could find, and with their comrades swept the shops
clean of shirts, boots, groceries, and everything they could lay their
hands on. They even took the hearses out of an undertaker's yard
and filled them with loot. Before they left Crépy-en-Valois, they fired
deliberately, I was told, upon Red Cross ambulances containing
French wounded.

Yet it was curious that the old Alsatian husband who told me some of
these things had amusement rather than hatred in his voice when he
described the German visit before their quick retreat from the
advancing British. He cackled with laughter at the remembrance of a
moment of craftiness when he crept out of his back door and wrote a
German sentence on his front door in white chalk. It was to the effect
that the inhabitants of his house were honest folk--gute leute--who
were to be left in peace... He laughed in a high old man's treble at this
wily trick. He laughed again, until the tears came into his eyes, when
he took me to a field where the French and British had blown up 3000
German shells abandoned by the enemy at the time of their retreat.
The field was strewn with great jagged pieces of metal, and to the old
Alsatian it seemed a huge joke that the Germans had had to leave
behind so much "food for the guns." After all it was not a bad joke as
far as we are concerned.

On that Sunday in September I saw many things which helped me to
understand the meaning of war, and yet afterwards became vague
memories of blurred impressions, half obliterated by later pictures. I
remember that I saw the movements of regiments moving up to
support the lines of the Allies, and the carrying up of heavy guns for
the great battle which had now reached its sixth day, and the passing,
passing, of Red Cross trains bringing back the wounded from that
terrible front between Vic and Noyon, where the trenches were being
filled and refilled with dead and wounded, and regiments of tired men
struggled forward with heroic endurance to take their place under the
fire of those shells which had already put their souls to the test of
courage beyond anything that might be demanded, in reason, from
the strongest heart.

And through the mud and the water-pools, through the wet bracken
and undergrowth, in a countryside swept by heavy rainstorms, I went
tramping with the gravedigger, along the way of the German retreat,
seeing almost in its nakedness the black ravage of war and its foul
litter.

Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted
telegraph wires. At various places great water-tanks and reservoirs
had been toppled over and smashed as though some diabolical
power had made cockshies of them. I peered down upon the broken
bridge of a railway line, and stumbled across uprooted rails torn from
their sleepers and hurled about the track.

My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had
buried a French cuirassier who had been shot as he kept a lonely
guard at the edge of a wood.

He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and
British. The graves were everywhere--mile after mile, on the slopes of
the hills and in the fields and the valleys, though still on the
battleground my friend had work to do.

I picked up bullets from shrapnels. They are scattered like peas for
fifteen miles between Betz and Mortefontaine, and thicker still along
the road to Vic. The jagged pieces of shell cut my boots. I carried one
of the German helmets for which the peasants were searching
among cabbages and turnips. And always in my ears was the deep
rumble of the guns, those great booming thunder-blows, speaking
from afar and with awful significance of the great battle, which
seemed to be deciding the destiny of our civilization and the new life
of nations which was to come perhaps out of all this death.




Chapter VI
Invasion



1


Before this year has ended England will know something of what war
means. In English country towns there will be many familiar faces
missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts.
Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will
understand the misery of war and its brutalities. But in spite of all our
national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national
sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign
battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to
realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and
Belgium. They will not know the meaning of invasion.

It is a great luck to be born in an island. The girdle of sea is a
safeguard which gives a sense of security to the whole psychology of
a race, and for that reason there is a gulf of ignorance about the
terrors of war which, happily, may never be bridged by the collective
imagination of English and Scottish people. A continental nation,
divided by a few hills, a river, or a line on the map, from another race
with other instincts and ideals, is haunted throughout its history by a
sense of peril. Even in times of profound peace, the thought is there,
in the background, with a continual menace. It shapes the character
of a people and enters into all their political and educational progress.
To keep on friendly terms with a powerful next-door neighbour, or to
build defensive works high enough to make hostility a safe game, is
the lifework of its statesmen and its politicians. Great crises and
agitations shake the nation convulsively when cowardice or treachery
or laziness has allowed that boundary wall to crumble or has made a
breach in it. The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due
to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to
a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French
corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against
them.

The necessity of conscription is obvious beyond argument to a
continental people still cherishing old traditions of nationality, and the
military training which is compulsory for all young men of average
health, not only shapes the bodies of their lads, but also shapes their
minds, so that their outlook upon life is largely different from that of an
island people protected by the sea. They know that they have been
born of women for one primary object--to fight when the time comes
in, defence of the Fatherland, to make one more human brick in the
great wall of blood and spirit dividing their country and race from
some other country and race. At least that is the lesson taught them
from first to last in the schools and in the national assemblies, and
there are only a few minds which are able to see another way of life
when the walls of division may be removed and when the fear of a
next-door neighbour may be replaced by friendship and common
interests.

The difference between the intellectual instincts of an island people
and that of a continental race was the cause of the slow way in which
England groped her way to an understanding of the present war, so
that words of scorn and sarcasm, a thousand mean tricks of
recruiting sergeants in high office, and a thousand taunts had to be
used to whip up the young men of Great Britain, and induce them to
join the Army. Their hearths and homes were not in immediate
danger. They could not see any reasonable prospect of danger upon
English soil. Their women were safe. Their property, bought on the
hire system out of hard-earned wages, was not, they thought, in the
least likely to be smashed into small bits or carried off as loot. They
could not conceive the idea of jerry-built walls which enshrined all the
treasures of their life suddenly falling with a crash like a house of
cards, and burying their babies. The British Expeditionary Force
which they were asked to join was after all only a sporting party going
out to foreign fields for a great adventure.


2


In France there were no such illusions. As soon as war was imminent
the people thought of their frontiers, and prayed God in divers ways
that the steel hedges there were strong enough to keep back the
hostile armies until the general call to the colours had been
answered. Every able-bodied man in France was ready, whatever the
cowardice in his heart, to fling himself upon the frontier to keep out,
with his own body, the inrushing tide of German troops. The memory
of 1870 had taught them the meaning of Invasion.

I saw the meaning of it during the first months of the war, when I
wandered about France. In the north, nearest to the enemy, and
along the eastern frontier, it was a great fear which spread like a
plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's
troops. It made the bravest men grow pale when they thought of their
women and children. It made the most callous man pitiful when he
saw those women with their little ones and old people, whose place
was by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger
and weariness, or pleading for places in cattle-trucks already
overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about un-lighted towns at
night for any kind of lodging, and then, finding none, sleeping on the
doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of
overhanging gables.

For months, in every part of France there were thousands of
husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of
families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of
retreats from a brutal soldiery. They had disappeared into the
maelstrom of fugitives--wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old
grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent
for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French
newspapers there were long lists of inquiries.

"M. Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can
inform him of the whereabouts of his wife, Suzanne, and of his two
little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Armentières."

"Mme. Tardieu would be profoundly grateful for information about her
daughter, Mme. des Rochers, who fled from the destroyed town of
Albert on October 10, with her four children."

Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line,
and wondering whether any of these missing people were among
those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled
among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns
of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley
below the hills where German guns were vomiting their shrapnel.

Imagine such a case in England. A man leaves his office in London
and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are
waiting supper for him. At Weybridge the train comes to a dead-halt.
The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back to say that
the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy. It is reported that
Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded. Families
flying from Guildford describe the bombardment of the town. A part of
it is in flames. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been
killed. Most of the others have fled.

The man who was going home to supper wants to set out to find his
wife and children. His friends hold him back in spite of his struggles.
"You are mad!" they shout. "Mad!"... He has no supper at home that
night. His supper and his home have been burnt to cinders. For
weeks he advertises in the papers for the whereabouts of his wife
and babes. Nobody can tell him. He does not know whether they are
dead or alive.

There were thousands of such cases in France. I have seen this
tragedy--a man weeping for his wife and children swallowed up into
the unknown after the destruction of Fives, near Lille. A new-born
babe was expected. On the first day of life it would receive a baptism
of fire. Who could tell this distracted man whether the mother or child
were alive?


3


There were many villages in France around Lille and Armentières,
Amiens and Arras, and over a wide stretch of country in Artois and
Picardy, where, in spite of all weariness, women who lay down beside
their sleeping babes could find no sleep for themselves. For who
could say what the night would bring forth? Perhaps a patrol of
Uhlans, who shot peasants like rabbits as they ran across the fields,
and who demanded wine, and more wine, until in the madness of
drink they began to burn and destroy for mere lust of ruin. So it was at
Senlis, at Sermaize, and in many villages in the region through which
I passed.

It was never possible to tell the enemy's next move. His cavalry came
riding swiftly far from the main lines of the hostile troops, and owing to
the reticence of official news, the inhabitants of a town or village
found themselves engulfed in the tide of battle before they guessed
their danger. They were trapped by the sudden tearing-up of railway
lines and blowing-up of bridges, as I was nearly trapped one day
when the Germans cut a line a few hundred yards away from my
train.

Yet the terror was as great when no Germans were seen, and no
shells heard. It was enough that they were coming. They had been
reported--often falsely--across distant hills. So the exodus began and,
with perambulators laden with bread and apples, in any kind of
vehicle--even in a hearse--drawn by poor beasts too bad for army
requisitions, ladies of quality left their châteaux and drove in the
throng with peasant women from whitewashed cottages. Often in a
little while both the château and the cottage were buried in the same
heap of ruins.

In a week or two, the enemy was beaten back from some of these
places, and then the most hardy of the townsfolk returned "home." I
saw some of them going home-at Senlis, at Sermaize, and other
places. They came back doubtful of what they would find, but soon
they stood stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were
once their house. They did not weep, but just stared in a dazed way.
They picked over the ashes and found burnt bits of former treasures--
the baby's cot, the old grandfather's chair, the parlour clock. Or they
went into houses still standing neat and perfect, and found that some
insanity of rage had smashed up all their household, as though
baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. The chest of
drawers had been looted or its contents tumbled out upon the floor.
Broken glasses, bottles, jugs, were mixed up with a shattered violin,
the medals of a grandfather who fought in '70, the children's broken
toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I saw many of such
houses after the coming and going of the German soldiers.

Even for a correspondent in search of a vantage-ground from which
he might see something of this war, with a reasonable chance of
being able to tell the story afterwards, the situation in France during
those early days was somewhat perilous.

It is all very well to advance towards the fighting lines when the
enemy is opposed by allied forces in a known position, but it is a quite
different thing to wander about a countryside with only the vaguest
idea of the direction in which the enemy may appear, and with the
disagreeable thought that he may turn up suddenly round the corner
after cutting off one's line of retreat. That was my experience on more
than one day of adventure when I went wandering with those two
friends of mine, whom I have alluded to as the Strategist and the
Philosopher. Not all the strategy of the one or the philosophy of the
other could save us from unpleasant moments when we blundered
close to the lines of an unexpected enemy.

That was our experience on an early day in October, when we
decided to go to Béthune, which seemed an interesting place in the
war-zone.

It may seem strange in England that railway trains should still be
running in the ordinary way, according to the time-tables of peace, in
these directions, and that civilians should have been allowed to take
their tickets without any hint as to the danger at the journey's end. But
in spite of the horror of invasion, French railway officials showed an
extraordinary sang-froid and maintained their service, even when
they knew that their lines might be cut, and their stations captured,
within an hour or two. Ignorance also helped their courage and, not
knowing the whereabouts of the enemy even as well as I did, they ran
their trains to places already threatened by advancing squadrons.

On this October day, for example, there was no sign of surprise on
the part of the buxom lady behind the guichet of the booking-office
when I asked for a ticket to Béthune, although there had been heavy
fighting in that district only a few hours before, at the end of a great
battle extending over several days.

In the train itself were several commercial gentlemen, on their way to
Lille, by way of the junction at Arques, where they had to change; and
with two or three French soldiers, and a lady entirely calm and self-
possessed, they discussed the possibility of getting into a city round
which the German cavalry were reported to be sweeping in a great
tide. Another man who entered into conversation with me was going
to Béthune. He had a wife and family there and hoped they were
safe. It was only by a sudden thoughtfulness in his eyes that I could
guess that behind that hope was a secret fear, which he did not
express even to himself. We might have been a little party of people
travelling, say, between Surbiton and Weybridge on an autumn
afternoon, when the golf-ball flies across the links. Not one of them
showed the least sign of anxiety, the least consciousness of peril
close at hand.

Looking out of the carriage window I saw that trenches had been dug
in all the adjacent fields, and that new trenches were being made
hastily but efficiently by gangs of soldiers, who had taken off their blue
coats for once, and were toiling cheerily at their task. In all the
villages we passed were battalions of infantry guarding the railway
bridges and level crossings. Patrols of cavalry rode slowly down
the roads. Here and there some of them were dismounted, with
their horses tethered, and from behind the cover of farmhouses
or haystacks, looked across the country, with their carbines slung
across their shoulders, as though waiting for any Uhlans that might
appear that way.

All around us was the noise of guns, firing in great salvoes across the
hills, ten miles or more away. Suddenly, as we approached the
junction at Arques, there was an explosion which sounded very close
to us; and the train came to a dead stop on grinding brakes.

"What's that?" asked a man in the carriage, sharply.

I thrust my head out of the carriage window and saw that all along the
train other faces were staring out. The guard was running down the
platform. The station-master was shouting to the engine-driver. In a
moment or two we began to back, and kept travelling backwards until
we were out of the station... The line had just been blown up beyond
Arques by a party of Uhlans, and we were able to thank our stars that
we had stopped in time. We could get no nearer to Béthune, over
which next day the tide of war had rolled. I wondered what had
happened to the wife and children of the man who was in the carriage
with me.

At Aire-sur-Lys there were groups of women and children who, like so
many others in those days, had abandoned their houses and left all
they had in the world save a few bundles of clothes and baskets of
food. I asked them what they would do when the food was finished.

"There will always be a little charity, m'sieur," said one woman, "and
at least my children are safe."

After the first terror of the invasion those women were calm and
showed astounding courage and resignation.

It was more than pitiful to see the refugees on the roads from
Hazebrouck. There was a constant stream of them in those two
cross-currents, and they came driving slowly along in bakers' carts
and butchers' carts, with covered hoods, in farm carts loaded up with
several families or trudging along with perambulators and
wheelbarrows. The women were weary. Many of them had babies in
their arms. The elder children held on to their mother's skirts or
tramped along together, hand in hand. But there was no trace of
tears. I heard no wailing cry. Some of them seemed utterly indifferent
to this retreat from home. They had gone beyond the need of tears.

From one of these women, a lady named Mme. Duterque, who had
left Arras with a small boy and girl, I heard the story of her
experiences in the bombarded town. There were hundreds of women
who had similar stories, but this one is typical enough of all those
individual experiences of women who quite suddenly, and almost
without warning, found themselves victims of the Invasion.

She was in her dressing-room in one of the old houses of the Grande
Place in Arras, when at half-past nine in the morning the first shell
burst over the town very close to her own dwelling-place. For days
there had been distant firing on the heights round Arras, but now this
shell came with a different, closer, more terrible sound.

"It seemed to annihilate me for a moment," said Mme. Duterque. "It
stunned all my senses with a frightful shock. A few moments later I
recovered myself and thought anxiously of my little girl who had gone
to school as usual a few streets away. I was overjoyed when she
came trotting home, quite unafraid, although by this time the shells
were falling in various parts of the town."

On the previous night Mme. Duterque had already made preparations
in case the town should be bombarded. Her house, like most of the
old houses in Arras, had a great cellar, with a vaulted roof, almost as
strong as a castle dungeon. She had stocked it with a supply of
sardines and bread and other provisions, and as soon as she had
her little daughter safe indoors again she took her children and the
nurse down to this subterranean hiding-place, where there was
greater safety. The cave, as she called it, was dimly lighted with a
paraffin lamp, and was very damp and chilly, but it was good to be
there in this hiding-place, for at regular intervals she could hear the
terrible buzzing noises of a shell, like some gigantic hornet, followed
by its exploding boom; and then, more awful still, the crash of a
neighbouring house falling into ruins.

"Strange to say," said Mme. Duterque, "after my first shock I had no
sense of fear, and listened only with an intense interest to the noise of
these shells, estimating their distance by their sound. I could tell quite
easily when they were close overhead, and when they fell in another
part of the town, and it seemed to me that I could almost tell which of
my friends' houses had been hit. My children, too, were strangely
fearless. They seemed to think it an exciting adventure to be here in
the great cellar, making picnic meals by the light of a dim lamp. My
little boy amused himself by playing canes (hop-scotch), and my
daughter was very cheerful. Still, after a little while we suffered. I had
forgotten to bring down water or wine, and we also craved for
something more comforting than cold sardines. In spite of the noise
of houses falling into ruins--and at any moment mine might fall above
my head--I went upstairs and began to cook some macaroni. I had to
retreat in a hurry, as a shell burst quite close to my house, and for a
moment I thought that I should be buried under my own roof. But I
went up again in one of the intervals of silence, found the macaroni
cooked to a turn and even ventured to peep out of doors. There I saw
a dreadful sight. The whole of the Grande Place was littered with
broken roofs and shattered walls, and several of the houses were
burning furiously. From other parts of the town there came up great
volumes of smoke and the red glare of flames."

For three days Mme. Duterque kept to her cellar. Unknown to herself,
her husband, who had come from Boulogne to rescue her, was
watching the battle from one of the heights outside the town, which he
was forbidden to enter by the soldiers. On a Thursday morning she
resolved to leave the shelter of her underground vault. News had
been brought to her by a daring neighbour that the Germans had
worked round by the railway station and might enter the town.

"I had no fear of German shells," she said, "but I had a great fear of
German officers and soldiers. Imagine my fate if I had been caught by
them, with my little daughter. For the first time I was filled with a
horrible fear, and I decided to fly from Arras at all costs."

With her children and the nurse, she made her way through the
streets, above which the shells were still crashing, and glanced with
horror at all the destruction about her. The Hôtel de Ville was
practically destroyed, though at that time the famous belfry still stood
erect above the ruined town, chiming out the hours of this tragedy.

Mme. Duterque told me her story with great simplicity and without any
self-consciousness of her fine courage. She was only one of those
thousands of women in France who, with a spiritual courage beyond
one's understanding, endured the horrors of this war. It was good to
talk with them, and I was left wondering at such a spirit.

It was with many of these fugitives that I made my way back. Away in
the neighbourhood of Hazebrouck the guns were still booming, and
across the fields the outposts of French cavalry were waiting for the
enemy.


4


It was better for women and children to be in Arras under continual
shell-fire than in some of those villages along the valleys of the Marne
and the Meuse and in the Department of the Seine, through which
the Germans passed on their first march across the French frontier.
It was a nicer thing to be killed by a clean piece of shell than to suffer
the foulness of men whose passions had been unleashed by drink
and the devil and the madness of the first experience of war, and by
fear which made them cruel as beasts.

I think fear was at the heart of a good deal of those atrocious Bets by
which the German troops stained the honour of their race in the first
phases of the war. Advancing into a hostile country, among a people
whom they knew to be reckless in courage and of a proud spirit, the
generals and high officers were obsessed with the thought of peasant
warfare, rifle-shots from windows, murders of soldiers billeted in
farms, spies everywhere, and the peril of franc-tireurs, goading their
troops on the march. Their text-books had told them that all this was
to be expected from the French people and could only be stamped
out by ruthlessness. The proclamations posted on the walls of
invaded towns reveal fear as well as cruelty. The mayor and
prominent citizens were to surrender themselves as hostages. If any
German soldier were killed, terrible reprisals would be exacted. If
there were any attempt on the part of the citizens to convey
information to the French troops, or to disobey the regulations of the
German commander, their houses would be burned and their
property seized, and their lives would pay the forfeit. These bald-
headed officers in pointed helmets, so scowling behind their
spectacles, had fear in their hearts and concealed it by cruelty.

When such official proclamations were posted up on the walls of
French villages, it is no wonder that the subordinate officers and their
men were nervous of the dangers suggested in those documents,
and found perhaps without any conscious dishonesty clear proof of
civilian plots against them. A shot rang out down a village street. "The
peasants are firing on us!" shouted a German soldier of neurotic
temperament. "Shoot them at sight!" said an officer who had learnt
his lesson of ruthlessness. "Burn these wasps out! Lieber Gott, we
will teach them a pretty lesson!"

They had all the material for teaching the pretty lessons of war--
inflammable tablets which would make a house blaze in less than five
minutes after they had been strewn about the floors and touched by a
lighted match (I have a few specimens of the stuff)--incendiary bombs
which worked even more rapidly, torches for setting fire to old barns
and thatched roofs. In the wonderful equipment of the German army
in the field this material of destruction had not been forgotten and it
was used in many little towns and villages where German soldiers
heard real or imaginary shots, suspected betrayal from any toothless
old peasant, and found themselves in the grip of fear because these
Frenchwomen, these old men of the farm and the workshop, and
even the children, stared at them as they passed with contemptuous
eyes and kept an uncomfortable silence even when spoken to with
cheerful Teuton greetings, and did not hide the loathing of their souls.
All this silence of village people, all these black looks seemed to
German soldiers like an evil spell about them. It got upon their nerves
and made them angry. They had come to enjoy the fruits of victory in
France, or at best the fruits of life before death came. So these
women would not smile, eh? Nor give their kisses nor their love with
amiability? Well, a German soldier would have his kisses even
though he had to hold a shrieking woman to his lips. He would take
his love even though he had to kill the creature who refused it. These
Frenchwomen were not so austere as a rule in times of peace. If they
would not be fondled they should be forced. Herr Gott! they should
know their masters.


5


At the little town of Rebais in the department of Seine-et-Marne there
was a pretty Frenchwoman who kept a grocer's shop and did not
care for the way in which some German soldiers made free with her
biscuits and sweetmeats. She was a proud and fearless young
woman, and when the soldiers grinned at her and tried to put their
arms about her she struck them and called them unpleasant names
and drew an open knife. So she wanted her lesson? Well, she had a
soft white neck, and if they could not put their arms about it they
would put a rope round it and hang her with her pride. But she was
strong and quick as well as proud. She cut their rope with her knife
and fought like a wild thing. So they slashed at her with their fists and
bruised all her beauty by the time one of their officers came in and
ordered them away. No one would court her after the lesson they had
given her.

At Saint-Denis-en-Rebais, on September 7, an Uhlan who was eager
for a woman's love saw another pretty woman who tried to hide from
him. There was a mother-in-law with her, and a little son, eight years
of age. But in war-time one has to make haste to seize one's victim or
one's loot. Death is waiting round the corner. Under the cover of his
rifle--he had a restless finger on the trigger--the Uhlan bade the
woman strip herself before him. She had not the pride or the courage
of the other woman. She did not want to die, because of that small
boy who stared with horror in his eyes. The mother-in-law clasped the
child close and hid those wide staring eyes in her skirts, and turned
her own face away from a scene of bestial violence, moaning to the
sound of her daughter's cries.


6


At the town of Coulommiers on September 6 a German soldier came
to the door of a small house where a woman and her husband were
sitting with two children, trying to hide their fear of this invasion
of German troops. It was half-past nine in the evening and almost
dark, except for a glow in the sky. The soldier was like a shadow on
the threshold until he came in, and they saw a queer light in his eyes.
He was very courteous, though rather gruff in his speech. He asked
the husband to go outside in the street to find one of his comrades.
The man, afraid to refuse, left the room on this errand, but before he
had gone far heard piercing cries. It was his wife's voice, screaming in
terror. He rushed back again and saw the German soldier struggling
with his wife. Hearing her husband's shout of rage, the soldier turned,
seized his rifle, and clubbed the man into an adjoining room, where
he stayed with the two little children who had fled there, trying to
soothe them in their fright and listening, with madness in his brain, to
his wife's agony through the open door a yard away. The husband
was a coward, it seems. But supposing he had flung himself upon the
soldier and strangled him, or cut his throat? We know what would
have happened in the Village of Coulommiers.


7


On September 7 ten German horsemen rode into the farm of
Lamermont, in the commune of Lisle-en-Barrois. They were in good
humour, and having drunk plenty of fresh milk, left the farmhouse in a
friendly way. Shortly after their departure, when Farmer Elly and his
friend, the sieur Javelot, breathed more easily and thanked God
because the danger had passed, some rifle-shots rang out.
Somewhere or other a dreadful thing was happening. A new danger
came to the farm at Lamermont, with thirty men of a different patrol,
who did not ask for milk but blood. They accused the farm people of
having killed a German soldier, and in spite of the protests of the two
men, who had been sitting quietly in the kitchen, they were shot in the
yard.


8


At Triaucourt the Germans were irritated by the behaviour of a young
girl named Mlle. Hélène Procès, who was bold enough to lodge a
complaint to one of their officers about a soldier who had tried to
make love to her in the German way. It was a fine thing if German
soldiers were to be punished for a little sport like that in time of war!
"Burn them out!" said one of the men. On a cold autumn night a
bonfire would warm things up a little. ... It was the house of M. Jules
Gaude which started the bonfire. It blazed so quickly after the torch
had touched his thatch that he had to leap through the flames to save
himself, and as he ran the soldiers shot him dead. When the houses
were burning the Germans had a great game shooting at the people
who rushed about the streets. A boy of seventeen, named George
Lecourtier, was killed as he thrust his way through the flames. A
gentleman named Alfred Lallemand--his name ought to have saved
him--was chased by some soldiers when he fled for refuge to the
kitchen of his fellow-citizen Tautelier, and shot there on his
hearthside. His friend had three bullet-wounds in the hand with which
he had tried to protect the hunted man. Mlle. Procès, the young girl
who had made the complaint which led to this trouble, fled into the
garden with her mother and her grandmother and an aunt named
Mile. Mennehard, who was eighty-one years old. The girl was able to
climb over the hedge into the neighbour's garden, where she hid
among the cabbages like a frightened kitten. But the old people could
not go so fast, and as they tried to climb the hedge they were shot
down by flying bullets. The curé of the village crept out into the
darkness to find the bodies of those ladies, who had been his friends.
With both hands he scooped up the scattered brains of Mile.
Mennehard, the poor old dame of eighty-one, and afterwards brought
her body back into her house, where he wept at this death and
destruction which had made a hell of his little village in which peace
had reigned so long.

And while he wept merry music played, and its lively notes rattled out
into the quiet night from an open window quite close to where dead
bodies lay. The German soldiers enjoyed themselves that night in
Triaucourt. Like so many Neros on a smaller scale, they played and
sang while flames leapt up on either side of them. Thirty-five houses
in this village were burnt to cinders after their old timbers had blazed
fiercely with flying sparks which sparkled above the helmets of
drunken soldiery. An old man of seventy named Jean Lecourtier, and
a baby who had been only two months in this strange world of ours
were roasted to death in the furnace of the village. A farmer named
Igier, hearing the stampede of his cattle, tried to save these poor
beasts, but he had to run the gauntlet of soldiers who shot at him as
he stumbled through the smoke, missing him only by a hair's-breadth,
so that he escaped as by a miracle, with five holes in his clothes. The
village priest, Père Viller, leaving the body of his old friend, went with
the courage of despair to the Duke of Wurtemberg, who had his
lodging near by, and complained to him passionately of all these
outrages. The Duke of Wurtemberg shrugged his shoulders. "Que
voulez-vous?" he said. "We have bad soldiers, like you have!"


9


At Montmirail a man named François Fontaine lived with his widowed
daughter, Mme. Naudé, and his little grandchild Juliette. A German
noncommissioned officer demanded lodging at the house, and on the
night of September 5, when all was quiet, he came undressed into
the young widow's room and, seizing her roughly, tried to drag her
into his own chamber. She cried and struggled so that her father
came running to her, trembling with fear and rage. The Unter-qffizier
seems to have given some signal, perhaps by the blowing of a
whistle. It is certain that immediately after the old man had left his
room fifteen or twenty German soldiers burst into the house and
dragged him out into the street, where they shot him dead. At that
moment the child Juliette opened her bedroom window, looking out
into the darkness at this shadow scene. It was not Romeo but Death
who called this little Juliette. A bullet hit her in the stomach, and
twenty-four hours later she died in agony.

I need not add to these stories, nor plunge deeper into the vile
obscenity of all those crimes which in the months of August and
September set hell loose in the beautiful old villages of France along
a front of five hundred miles. The facts are monotonous in the
repetition of their horror, and one's imagination is not helped but
stupefied by long records of outrages upon defenceless women, with
indiscriminate shooting down village streets, with unarmed peasants
killed as they trudged across their fields or burned in their own
homesteads, with false accusations against innocent villagers, so that
hostages were collected and shot in groups as a punishment for
alleged attacks upon German soldiers, with old French châteaux
looted of all their treasures by German officers in search of souvenirs
and trophies of victory for their womenfolk, and with drunken orgies in
which men of decent breeding became mere animals inflamed with
lust.


10


The memory of those things has burnt deep into the brains of the
French people, so deep that in some cases there is the fire of
madness there.

In a small château in France an English friend of mine serving with a
volunteer ambulance column with the French troops on the Meuse
was sitting at ease one night with some of his comrades and fellow-
countrymen. The conversation turned to England, because April was
there, and after ten months of war the thoughts of these men yearned
back to their homes. They spoke of their mothers and wives and
children. One man had a pretty daughter, and read a piece of her
latest letter, and laughed at her gay little jests and her descriptions of
the old pony and the dogs and the antics of a black kitten. Other men
gave themselves away and revealed the sentiment which as a rule
Englishmen hide. In the room was a French officer, who sat very still,
listening to these stories. The candles were burning dim on the table
when he spoke at last in a strange, hard voice:

"It is good for you Englishmen when you go back home. Those who
are not killed out here will be very happy to see their women again.
You do not want to die, because of that. ... If I were to go home now,
gentlemen, I should not be happy. I should find my wife and my
daughter both expecting babies whose fathers are German soldiers...
England has not suffered invasion."


11


The most complete destruction I saw in France was in Champagne,
when I walked through places which had been the villages of
Sermaize, Heiltz-le-Maurupt, Blesmes, and Huiron. Sermaize was
utterly wiped out. As far as I could see, not one house was left
standing. Not one wall was spared. It was laid flat upon the earth, with
only a few charred chimney-stacks sticking out of the piles of bricks
and cinders. Strange, piteous relics of pretty dwelling-places lay about
in the litter, signifying that men and women with some love for the arts
of life had lived here in decent comfort. A notice-board of a hotel
which had given hospitality to many travellers before it became a
blazing furnace lay sideways on a mass of broken bricks with a
legend so frightfully ironical that I laughed among the ruins:
"Chauffage central"--the system of "central heating" invented by
Germans in this war had been too hot for the hotel, and had burnt it to
a wreck of ashes. Half a dozen peasants stood in one of the
"streets"--marked by a line of rubbish-heaps which had once been
their homes. Some of them had waited until the first shells came over
their chimney-pots before they fled. Several of their friends, not so
lucky in timing their escape, had been crushed to death by the falling
houses. But it was not shell-fire which did the work. The Germans
strewed the cottages with their black inflammable tablets, which had
been made for such cases, and set their torches to the window-
curtains before marching away to make other bonfires on their road of
retreat. Sermaize became a street of fire, and from each of its houses
flames shot out like scarlet snakes, biting through the heavy pall of
smoke. Peasants hiding in ditches a mile away stared at the furnace
in which all their household goods were being consumed. Something
of their own life seemed to be burning there, leaving the dust and
ashes of old hopes and happiness.

"That was mine," said one of the peasants, pointing to a few square
yards of wreckage. "I took my woman home across the threshold that
was there. She was a fine girl, with hair like gold, Monsieur. Now her
hair has gone quite white, during these recent weeks. That's what war
does for women. There are many like that hereabouts, white-haired
before their time."

I saw some of those white-haired women in Blesmes and Huiron and
other scrap-heaps of German ruthlessness. They wandered in a
disconsolate way about the ruins, watching rather hopelessly the
building of wooden huts by a number of English "Quakers" who had
come here to put up shelters for these homeless people of France.
They were doing good work--one of the most beautiful works of
charity which had been called out of this war, and giving a new
meaning to their name of the Society of Friends. But though they
were handy in the use of the wood given them by the French
Government for this purpose, not all their industry nor all their
friendliness could bring back the beauty of these old-world villages of
Champagne, built centuries ago by men of art and craft, and chiselled
by Time itself, so that the stones told tales of history to the villagers.
It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church,
through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof
whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting
carcase. A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway
before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God
for the blessings of each day. His hands were clenched behind his
bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat
and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church
with immense sadness in his eyes.

There was an old château near Huiron in which a noble family of
France had lived through centuries of war and revolution. It had many
pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking
a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where
ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great
yesterday of history. When I passed it, after the Germans had gone
that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of
mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The
gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the
cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion.
A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the
château of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed,
murderously, by outrageous hands.

In one of these villages of Champagne--I think it was at Blesmes--I
saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of
the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow,
God knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this
place of desolation.

It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully,
falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin. While
the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected
the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet. The children of many
generations had dabbled their hands in its basin. Pretty girls had
peeped into their own bright eyes mirrored there. On summer days
the village folk had sauntered about this symbol of grace and beauty.
Now it was as though I had discovered a white Venus in the dust-
heap of a burying-place.


12


The great horror of Invasion did not reach only a few villages in
France and blanch the hair of only a few poor women. During the
long months of this stationary war there was a long black line on all
the maps, printed day after day with depressing repetition in all the
newspapers of the world. But I wonder how many people understood
the meaning of that black line marking the length of the German front
through France, and saw in their mind's eye the blackness of all
those burnt and shattered villages, for ten miles in width, on that
border-line of the war trail? I wonder how many people, searching for
news of heroic bayonet charges or for thrilling stories of how Private
John Smith kept an army corps at bay, single-handed, with a smile on
his face, saw even faintly and from afar the flight of all the fugitives
from that stricken zone, the terror of women and children trapped in
its hell-fire, and the hideous obscenity of that long track across the
fields of France, where dead bodies lay rotting in the rain and sun and
the homesteads of a simple people lay in heaps from Artois to
Lorraine?

Along the valley of the Aisne and of the Vesle the spirit of destruction
established its kingdom. It was a valley of death. In the official reports
only a few villages were mentioned by name, according to their
strategical importance, but there were hundreds of hamlets,
unrecorded in dispatches, which were struck by death and became
the charnel-houses of bones and ruins.

In the single district of Vie-sur-Aisne, the little communities of
Saconin, Pernant, Ambleny, and Ressons--beautiful spots in old days
of peace, where Nature displayed all her graciousness along the
winding river and where Time itself seemed to slumber--French
soldiers stared upon broken roofs, shattered walls, and trampled
gardens, upon the twisted iron of ploughs and the broken woodwork
of farmers' carts, and all the litter of war's ruthless damage. Week
after week, turn and turn about, German, French, and British shells
crashed over these places, making dust and ashes of them.
Peasants who clung to their cots, hid in their cellars and at last fled,
described all this in a sentence or two when I questioned them. They
had no grievance even against fate--their own misery was swallowed
up in that of their neighbours; each family knew a worse case than its
own, and so, with a shake of the head, they said there were many
who suffered these things.

Shopkeepers and peasants of Celles, of Conde, of Attichy, along the
way to Berry-au-Bac and from Billy to Sermoise, all those who have
now fled from the Valley of the Vesle and the valley of the Aisne had
just the same story to tell--monotonous, yet awful because of its
tragedy. It was their fate to be along the line of death. One old fellow
who came from Vailly had lived for two months in a continual
cannonade. He had seen his little town taken and retaken ten times in
turn by the French and the Germans.

When I heard of this eye-witness I thought: "Here is a man who has a
marvellous story to tell. If all he has seen, all the horrors and heroism
of great engagements were written down, just as he describes them
in his peasant speech, it would make an historic document to be read
by future generations."

But what did he answer to eager questions about his experience? He
was hard of hearing and, with a hand making a cup for his right ear,
stared at me a little dazed. He said at last, "It was difficult to get to
sleep."

That was all he had to say about it, and many of these peasants were
like him, repeating some trivial detail of their experience, the loss of a
dog or the damage to an old teapot, as though that eclipsed all other
suffering. But little by little, if one had the patience, one could get
wider glimpses of the truth. Another old man from the village of Soupir
told a more vivid tale. His dwelling-place sheltered some of the
Germans when they traversed the district. The inhabitants of Soupir,
he said, were divided into two groups. Able-bodied prisoners were
sent off to Germany, and women and children who were carried off in
the retreat were afterwards allowed to go back, but not until several
poor little creatures had been killed, and pretty girls subjected to
gross indignities by brutal soldiers. Upon entering Soupir the French
troops found in cellars where they had concealed themselves thirty
people who had gone raving mad and who cried and pleaded to
remain so that they could still hear the shells and gibber at death.
"War is so bracing to a nation," says the philosopher. "War purges
peoples of their vanities." If there is a devil--and there must be many
old-time sceptics who believe now not in one but in a hundred
thousand devils--how the old rogue must chuckle at such words!


13


It was astounding to any student of psychology wandering in the war
zone to see how many of the peasants of France clung to their
houses, in spite of all their terror of German shells and German
soldiers. When in the first month of 1915 the enemy suddenly
swarmed over the ridges of Cuffies and Crouy, to the north of
Soissons, and with overwhelming numbers smashed the French
back across the Aisne at a time, when the rising of the river had
broken many pontoon bridges, so that the way of escape was almost
cut off, they drove out crowds of peasant folk who had remained
along this fifteen miles of front until actually shelled out in that last
attack which put the ruins of their houses into the hands of the
Germans. As long as three months before Crouy itself had been a
target for the enemy's guns, so that hardly a cottage was standing
with solid walls.

Nevertheless, with that homing instinct which is the strongest emotion
in the heart of the French peasant, many of the inhabitants had been
living an underground life in their cellars, obtaining food from French
soldiers and cowering close together as shells came shrieking
overhead, and as the shattered buildings collapsed into greater ruin.

So it was in Rheims and Arras and other towns which were not
spared in spite of the glories of an architecture which can never be
rebuilt in beauty. Only a few days before writing these lines, I stood on
the edge of the greatest battlefield in France and from an observation
post perched like an eyrie in a tree above the valley, looked across to
the cathedral of Rheims, that shrine of history, where the bones of
kings lie, and where every stone speaks of saints and heroes and a
thousand years of worship. The German shells were still falling about
it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke.
For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war.
Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells and monstrous marmites
had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or
two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always
killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two,
always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. Nevertheless, there
were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not
leave their city. They lived in cellars, into which they had dragged their
beds and stores, and when the shell fire slackened they emerged,
came out into the light of day, looked around at the new damage, and
went about their daily business until cleared underground again by
another storm of death. There were two old ladies with an elderly
daughter who used to sit at table in the salle-à-manger of a hotel in
Paris a week or two ago. I saw them arrive one day, and watched the
placid faces of these stately old dames in black silk with little lace
caps on their white hair. It was hardly possible to believe that for three
months they had lived in a cellar at Rheims, listening through the day
and night to the cannonading of the city, and to the rushing of the
shells above their own house.

Yet I think that even in a cellar those old women of France preserved
their dignity, and in spite of dirty hands (for water was very scarce)
ate their meagre rations with a stately grace.


14


More miserable and less armed with courage were the people of
France who lived in cities held by the enemy and secure from shell-
fire--in Lille, and St. Quentin, and other towns of the North, where the
Germans paraded in their pointed casques. For the most part in
these great centres of population the enemy behaved well. Order was
maintained among the soldiers with ruthless severity by German
officers in high command. There were none of the wild and obscene
acts which disgraced the German army in its first advance to and its
retreat from the Marne. No torch bearers and tablet scatterers were
let loose in the streets. On the contrary any German soldier
misbehaving himself by looting, raping, or drunken beastliness found
a quick death against a white wall. But to the French citizens it was a
daily agony to see those crowds of hostile troops in their streets and
houses, to listen to their German speech, to obey the orders of
generals who had fought their way through Northern France across
the bodies of French soldiers, smashing, burning, killing along the
bloody track of war. These citizens of the captured soil of France
knew bitterness of invasion more poignantly than those who hid in
cellars under shell-fire. Their bodies were unwounded, but their spirits
bled in agony. By official placards posted on the walls they read of
German victories and French defeats. In the restaurants and cafés,
and in their own houses, they had to serve men who were engaged in
slaughtering their kinsfolk. It was difficult to be patient with those
swaggering young officers who gave the glad eye to girls whose
sweethearts lay dead somewhere between the French and German
trenches.

From a lady who had been seven months in St. Quentin, I heard the
story of how invasion came suddenly and took possession of the
people. The arrival of the German troops was an utter surprise to the
population, who had had no previous warning. Most of the French
infantry had left the town, and there remained only a few
detachments, and some English and Scottish soldiers who had lost
their way in the great retreat, or who were lying wounded in the
hospitals. The enemy came into the town at 4 P.M. on August 28,
having completely surrounded it, so that they entered from every
direction. The civil population, panic-stricken, remained for the most
part in their houses, staring through their windows at the columns of
dusty, sun-baked men who came down the streets. Some of the
British soldiers, caught in this trap, decided to fight to the death, which
they knew was inevitable. Several English and Scottish soldiers fired
at the Germans as they advanced into the chief square and were
instantly shot. One man, a tall young soldier, stationed himself at the
corner of the Place du Huit Octobre, and with extraordinary coolness
and rapidity fired shot after shot, so that several German soldiers
were killed or wounded. The enemy brought up a machine gun and
used it against this one man who tried to stop an army. He fell riddled
with bullets, and was blown to pieces as he lay.

On the whole the Germans behaved well at St. Quentin. Their rule
was stern but just, and although the civil population had been put on
rations of black bread, they got enough and it was not, after all, so
bad. As one of the most important bases of the German army in
France, the town was continually filled with troops of every regiment,
who stayed a little while and then passed on. Meanwhile the
permanent troops in occupation of the town settled down and made
themselves thoroughly at home. They established many of their own
shops--bakeries, tailoring establishments, and groceries; and in
consequence of the lack of discipline and decency which prevailed in
some of the cafés and restaurants, these places were conducted by
German officers, who acted as censors of morals and professors of
propriety.

Astounding as it seems, there were Frenchwomen in St. Quentin who
sold themselves for German money and gave their kisses for a price
to men who had ravaged France and killed the sons of France. Such
outrageous scenes took place, that the German order to close some
of the cafés was hailed as a boon by the decent citizens, who saw the
women expelled by order of the German commandant with enormous
thankfulness.

It is strange that the Huns, as they are called, should have been so
strict in moral discipline. Many of them were not so austere in the
villages when they let their passions loose and behaved like drunken
demons or satyrs with flaming torches. There is a riddle in the
psychology of all these contrasts between the iron discipline and
perfect organization by which all outrage was repressed in the large
towns occupied for any length of time by German troops, and the
lawlessness and rapine of the same race in villages through which
they passed hurriedly, giving themselves just time enough to wreak a
cruel ferocity upon unoffending people. Riddle as it is, it holds
perhaps the key to the mystery of the German character and to their
ideal of war. Whenever there was time to establish discipline, the men
were well behaved, and did not dare to disobey the orders of their
chiefs. It was only when special orders for "frightfulness" had been
issued, or when officers in subordinate command let their men get out
of hand, or led the way to devilry by their own viciousness of action,
that the rank and file of the enemy's army committed its brutalities.

Even now, after all that I have seen in the ruined villages in France, I
cannot bring myself to believe that the German race is distinguished
from all other peoples in Europe by the mark of the beast, or that
'they are the exclusive possession of the devil. The prisoners I have
spoken to, the blue-eyed Saxons and plump Bavarians with whom I
travelled for awhile after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, seemed to me
uncommonly like the yokels of our own Somersetshire and
Devonshire. Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I
saw no sign of fiendish lusts and cruelties. In normal moods they are
a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness
perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an
arrogance towards their womenfolk which is not tolerable to
Englishmen, unless they have revolted from the older courtesies of
English life because the Suffragettes have challenged their authority.

It was in abnormal moods that they committed their atrocities, for in
the hot sun of the first September of the war their blood was
overheated, and in the first intoxication of their march through France,
drunk with the thrill of butcher's work as well as with French wine,
brought back suddenly to the primitive lusts of nature by the spirit of
war, which strips men naked of all refinements and decent veils, they
became for a time savages, with no other restraint than that of Red
Indians on the warpath. They belonged to an Army of Invasion,
marching through hostile territory, and the soul of war robbed the
individual of his own separate soul and put a spell of madness on
him, so that his eyes were bloodshot and his senses inflamed with
lust. In the Peninsular War young Englishmen from decent villages in
quiet countrysides, with pious mothers praying for them at home in
grey old churches, and with pretty sisters engaged in hero-worship,
were bewitched by the same spell of wizardry and did foul and
frightful things which afterwards made them dream of nights and
wake in a cold sweat of shame and horror. There are many young
Germans who will wake out of such dreams when they get back to
Dusseldorf and Bingen-am-Rhein, searching back in their hearts to
find a denial of the deeds which have become incredible after their
awakening from the nightmare. For a little while they had been caught
up in the soul of war and their heroism had been spoilt by obscenity,
and their ideals debased by bestial acts. They will have only one
excuse to their recaptured souls: "It was War." It is the excuse which
man has made through all the ages of his history for the bloody thing
which, in all those ages, has made him a liar to his faith and a traitor
to the gentle gods.




Chapter VII
The Last Stand Of The Belgians



1


During the first two and a half months of the war I was a wanderer in
France, covering many hundreds of miles in zig-zag journeys
between Nancy and the west coast, always on the move, backwards
and forwards, between the lines of the French and British armies, and
watching with a tireless though somewhat haggard interest the drama
of a great people engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the
most formidable army in the world. I had been in the midst of
populations in flight, armies in retreat, and tremendous movements of
troops hurled forward to new points of strategical importance. Now
and again I had come in touch with the British army and had seen
something of the men who had fought their way down from Mons to
Meaux, but for the most part my experience had been with the
French, and it was the spirit of France which I had done my best to
interpret to the English people.

Now I was to see war, more closely and intimately than before, in
another nation; and I stood with homage in my heart before the spirit
of Belgium and that heroic people who, when I came upon them, had
lost all but the last patch of territory, but still fought, almost alone, a
tenacious, bloody and unending battle against the Power which had
laid low their cities, mangled their ancient beauties, and changed their
little land of peaceful industry into a muck-heap of slaughter and
destruction.

Even in France I had this vision of the ruin of a nation, and saw its
victims scattered. Since that day when I came upon the first trainload
of Belgian soldiers near Calais, weary as lame dogs after their retreat,
I had seen an interminable procession of fugitives from that stricken
country and heard from them the tale of Alost, Louvain, Termonde
and other towns where only horror dwelt above incinerated stones
and scraps of human flesh. The fall of Antwerp resounded into
France, and its surrender after words of false hope that it would never
fall shook the soul of the French people with a great dismay. It was
idle to disguise the importance of this German victory at the time
when France, with every nerve strained and with England by her side,
could hardly stem back the tide of those overflowing armies which
had been thrust across the Marne but now pressed westward
towards Calais with a smashing strength. The capture of Antwerp
would liberate large numbers of the enemy's best troops. Already,
within a day of this disaster to the Allied armies, squadrons of
German cavalry swept across the frontiers into France, forcing their
way rapidly through Lille and Armentières towards Béthune and La
Bassée, cutting lines which had already been cut and then repaired,
and striking terror into French villages which had so far escaped from
these hussars of death. As a journalist, thwarted at every turn by the
increasing severity of military orders for correspondent catching, the
truth was not to be told at any cost. I had suspected the doom of
Antwerp some days before its fate was sealed, and I struck northward
to get as near as possible to the Belgian frontier. The nearest I could
get was Dunkirk, and I came in time to see amazing scenes in that
port of France. They were scenes which, even now as I write months
afterwards, stir me with pity and bring back to my imagination an
immense tragedy of history.


2


The town of Dunkirk, from which I went out to many adventures in the
heart of war, so that for me it will always hold a great memory, was on
that day in October a place of wild chaos, filled with the murmur of
enormous crowds, and with the steady tramp of innumerable feet
which beat out a tragic march. Those weary footsteps thumping the
pavements and the cobble-stones, made a noise like the surging of
waves on a pebble beach--a queer, muffled, shuffling sound, with a
rhythm in it which stupefied one's senses if one listened to it long. I
think something of this agony of a people in flight passed into my own
body and brain that day. Some sickness of the soul took possession
of me, so that I felt faint and overcome by black dejection. There was
a physical evil among those vast crowds of Belgians who had come
on foot, or in any kind of vehicle, down the big, straight roads which
led to France, and now struggled down towards the docks, where
thousands were encamped. From their weariness and inevitable
dirtiness, from the sweat of their bodies, and the tears that had dried
upon their cheeks, from the dust and squalor of bedraggled clothes,
there came to one's nostrils a sickening odour. It was the stench of a
nation's agony. Poor people of despair! There was something
obscene and hideous in your miserable condition. Standing
among your women and children, and your old grandfathers and
grandmothers, I was ashamed of looking with watchful and observant
eyes. There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair
dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that
they were like the drabs of the slums and stews. There were young
girls who had been sheltered in convent schools, now submerged in
the great crowd of fugitives, so utterly without the comforts of life that
the common decencies of civilization could not be regarded, but gave
way to the unconcealed necessities of human nature. Peasant
women, squatting on the dock-sides, fed their babes as they wept
over them and wailed like stricken creatures. Children with scared
eyes, as though they had been left alone in the horror of darkness,
searched piteously for parents who had been separated from them in
the struggle for a train or in the surgings of the crowds. Young fathers
of families shouted hoarsely for women who could not be found. Old
women, with shaking heads and trembling hands, raised shrill voices
in the vain hope that they might hear an answering call from sons or
daughters. Like people who had escaped from an earthquake to
some seashore where by chance a boat might come for them all,
these Belgian families struggled to the port of Dunkirk and waited
desperately for rescue. They were in a worse plight than shipwrecked
people, for no ship of good hope could take them home again.
Behind them the country lay in dust and flames, with hostile armies
encamped among the ruins of their towns.

For a little while I left these crowds and escaped to the quiet
sanctuary of a restaurant in the centre of the town. I remember that
some English officers came in and stared at me from their table with
hard eyes, suspicious of me as a spy, or, worse still, as a journalist.
In those days, having to dodge arrest at every turn, I had a most
unpatriotic hatred of those British officers whose stern eyes gimletted
my soul. They seemed to me so like the Prussian at his worst.
Afterwards, getting behind this mask of harness, by the magic of
official papers, I abandoned my dislike and saw only the virtue of our
men. I remember also that I ate at table opposite a pretty girl, with a
wanton's heart, who prattled to me, because I was an Englishman, as
though no war had come to make a mockery of love-in-idleness. I
stood up from the table, upsetting a glass so that it broke at the stem.
Outside the restaurant was the tramp of another multitude. But the
rhythm of those feet was different from the noise I had heard all day.
It was sharper and more marked. I guessed at once that many
soldiers were passing by, and that upon striding to the door I should
see another tragedy. From the doorway I watched an army in retreat.
It was the army of Antwerp marching into Dunkirk. I took off my hat
and watched with bared head.

They were but broken regiments, marching disorderly for the most
part, yet here and there were little bodies of men keeping step, with
shouldered rifles, in fine, grim pride. The municipal guards came by,
shoulder to shoulder, as on parade, but they were followed by long
convoys of mounted men on stumbling horses, who came with heaps
of disorderly salvage piled on to dusty wagons. Saddles and bridles
and bits, the uniforms of many regiments flung out hurriedly from
barrack cupboards; rifles, swords, and boots were heaped on to beds
of straw, and upon the top of them lay men exhausted to the point of
death, so that their heads flopped and lolled as the carts came jolting
through the streets. Armoured cars with mitrailleuses, motor-cars
slashed and plugged by German bullets, forage carts and
ambulances, struggled by in a tide of traffic between bodies of foot-
soldiers slouching along without any pride, but dazed with weariness.
Their uniforms were powdered with the dust of the roads, their faces
were blanched and haggard for lack of food and sleep. Some of them
had a delirious look and they stared about them with rolling eyes in
which there was a gleam of madness. Many of these men were
wounded, and spattered with their blood. Their bandages were
stained with scarlet splotches, and some of them were so weak that
they left their ranks and sat in doorways, or on the kerb-stones, with
their heads drooping sideways. Many another man, footsore and
lame, trudged along on one boot and a bandaged sock, with the
other boot slung to his rifle barrel.

Riding alone between two patrols of mounted men was a small boy
on a high horse. He was a fair-haired lad of twelve or so, in a Belgian
uniform, with a tasselled cap over one ear, and as he passed the
Dunquerquoises clapped hands and called out: "Bravo! Bravo!" He
took the ovation with a grin and held his head high.

The cafés in this part of France were crowded with Belgian officers of
all grades. I had never seen so many generals together or such a
medley of uniforms. They saluted each other solemnly, and there
were emotional greetings between friends and brothers who had not
seen each other after weeks of fighting in different parts of the lines,
in this city across the border. Most of the officers were fine, sturdy,
young fellows of stouter physique than the French among whom I
had been roving. But others had the student look and stared
mournfully from gold-rimmed spectacles. There were many middle-
aged men among them who wore military uniforms, but without a
soldier's ease or swagger. When Germany tore up that "scrap of
paper" which guaranteed the integrity of Belgium, every patriotic man
there volunteered for the defence of his country and shouldered a
rifle, though he had never fired a blank cartridge, and put on some
kind of uniform, though he had never drilled in a barrack square.
Lawyers and merchants, schoolmasters and poets, actors and
singers, farmers and peasants, rushed to take up arms, and when
the vanguards of the German army struck across the frontier they
found themselves confronted not only by the small regular army of
Belgium, but by the whole nation. Even the women helped to dig the
trenches at Liège, and poured boiling water over Uhlans who came
riding into Belgian villages. It was the rising of a whole people which
led to so much ruthlessness and savage cruelty. The German
generals were afraid of a nation of franc-tireurs, where every man or
boy who could hold a gun shot at the sight of a pointed helmet. Those
high officers to whom war is a science without any human emotion or
pity in its rules, were determined to stamp out this irregular fighting by
blood and fire, and "frightfulness" became the order of the day. I
have heard English officers uphold these methods and use the same
excuse for all those massacres which has been put forward by the
enemy themselves. "War is war... One cannot make war with
rosewater... The franc-tireur has to be shot at sight. A civil population
using arms against an invading army must be taught a bloody lesson.
If ever we get into Germany we may have to face the same trouble,
so it is no use shouting words of horror." War is war, and hell is hell.
Let us for the moment leave it at that, as I left it in the streets of
Dunkirk, where the volunteer army of Belgium and their garrison
troops had come in retreat after heroic resistance against
overwhelming odds, in which their courage without science was no
match for the greatest death machine in Europe, controlled by
experts highly trained in the business of arms.





That night I went for a journey in a train of tragedy I was glad to get
into the train. Here, travelling through the clean air of a quiet night, I
might forget for a little while the senseless cruelties of this war, and
turn my eyes away from the suffering of individuals smashed by its
monstrous injustice.

But the long train was packed tight with refugees. There was only
room for me in the corridor if I kept my elbows close, tightly wedged
against the door. Others tried to clamber in, implored piteously for a
little space, when there was no space. The train jerked forward on
uneasy brakes, leaving a crowd behind.

Turning my head and half my body round, I could see into two of the
lighted carriages behind me, as I stood in the corridor. They were
overfilled with various types of these Belgian people whom I had
been watching all day--the fugitives of a ravaged country. For a little
while in this French train they were out of the hurly-burly of their
flight. For the first time since the shells burst over Antwerp they
had a little quietude and rest.

I glanced at their faces, as they sat back with their eyes closed. There
was a young Belgian priest there, with a fair, clean-shaven face. He
wore top boots splashed with mud, and only a silver cross at his
breast showed his office. He had fallen asleep with a smile about his
lips. But presently he awakened with a start, and suddenly there
came into his eyes a look of indescribable horror... He had
remembered.

There was an old lady next to him. The light from the carriage lamp
glinted upon her silver hair, and gave a Rembrandt touch to a fair old
Flemish face. She was looking at the priest, and her lips moved as
though in pity. Once or twice she glanced at her dirty hands, at her
draggled dress, and then sighed, before bending her head, and
dozing into forgetfulness.

A young Flemish mother cuddled close to a small boy with flaxen hair,
whose blue eyes stared solemnly in front of him with an old man's
gravity of vision. She touched the child's hair with her lips, pressed
him closer, seemed eager to feel his living form, as though nothing
mattered now that she had him safe.

On the opposite seat were two Belgian officers--an elderly man with a
white moustache and grizzled eyebrows under his high képi and a
young man in a tasselled forage cap, like a boy-student. They both
sat in a limp, dejected way. There was defeat and despair in their
attitude It was only when the younger man shifted his right leg with a
sudden grimace of pain that I saw he was wounded.

Here in these two carriages through which I could glimpse were a few
souls holding in their memory all the sorrow and suffering of poor,
stricken Belgium. Upon this long train were a thousand other men
and women in the same plight and with the same grief.

Next to me in the corridor was a young man with a pale beard and
moustache and fine delicate features. He had an air of distinction,
and his clothes suggested a man of some wealth and standing. I
spoke to him, a few commonplace sentences, and found, as I had
guessed, that he was a Belgian refugee.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

He smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders slightly.

"Anywhere. What does it matter? I have lost everything. One place is
as good as another for a ruined man."

He did not speak emotionally. There was no thrill of despair in his
voice. It was as though he were telling me that he had lost his watch.

"That is my mother over there," he said presently, glancing towards
the old lady with the silver hair. "Our house has been burnt by the
Germans and all our property was destroyed. We have nothing left.
May I have a light for this cigarette?"

One young soldier explained the reasons for the Belgian debacle.
They seemed convincing:

"I fought all the way from Liège to Antwerp. But it was always the
same. When we killed one German, five appeared in his place. When
we killed a hundred, a thousand followed. It was all no use. We had to
retreat and retreat. That is demoralizing."

"England is very kind to the refugees," said another man. "We shall
never forget these things."

The train stopped at wayside stations. Sometimes we got down to
stamp our feet. Always there were crowds of Belgian refugees on the
platforms--shadow figures in the darkness or silhouetted in the light of
the station lamps. They were encamped there with their bundles and
their babies.

On the railway lines were many trains, shunted into sidings. They
belonged to the Belgian State Railways, and had been brought over
the frontier away from German hands--hundreds of them. In their
carriages little families of refugees had made their homes. They are
still living in them, hanging their washing from the windows, cooking
their meals in these narrow rooms. They have settled down as
though the rest of their lives is to be spent in a siding. We heard their
voices, speaking Flemish, as our train passed on. One woman was
singing her child to sleep with a sweet old lullaby. In my train there
was singing also. A party of four young Frenchmen came in, forcing
their way hilariously into a corridor which seemed packed to the last
inch of space. I learnt the words of the refrain which they sang at
every station:

A bas Guillaume!
C'est un filou
II faut le pendre
Il faut le pendre
La corde à son cou!

The young Fleming with a pale beard and moustache smiled as he
glanced at the Frenchmen.

"They have had better luck," he said. "We bore the first brunt."

I left the train and the friends I had made. We parted with an "Au
revoir" and a "Good luck!" When I went down to the station the next
morning I learnt that a train of refugees had been in collision at La
Marquise, near Boulogne. Forty people had been killed and sixty
injured.

After their escape from the horrors of Antwerp the people on this train
of tragedy had been struck again by a blow from the clenched fist of
fate.


4


I went back to Dunkirk again and stayed there for some days in the
hope of getting a pass which would allow me to cross the Belgian
frontier and enter the zone of battle. Even to get out of the railway
station into this fortified town required diplomacy bordering upon
dishonesty, for since the retreat of the Belgian army of volunteers,
Dunkirk had an expectation of a siege and bombardment and no
civilian strangers were allowed to enter. Fortunately I was enabled to
mention a great name, with the implied and utterly untruthful
suggestion that its influence extended to my humble person, so that a
French gentleman with a yard-long bayonet withdrew himself from the
station doorway and allowed me to pass with my two friends.

It struck me then, as it has a thousand times since the war began,
how all precautions must fail to keep out a spy who has a little tact
and some audacity. My two friends and I were provided with
worthless passes which failed to comply with official regulations. We
had no authorized business in Dunkirk, and if our real profession had
been known we should have been arrested by the nearest French or
British officer, sent down to British headquarters under armed guard
and, after very unpleasant experiences as criminals of a dangerous
and objectionable type, expelled from France with nasty words on our
passports. Yet in spite of spy-mania and a hundred methods of spy-
catching, we who were classed with spies--passed all barriers and
saw all the secrets of the town's defence. If instead of being a mild
and inoffensive Englishman I had been a fierce and patriotic German,
I might have brought away a mass of military information of the
utmost value to General von Kluck; or, if out for blood, I might have
killed some very distinguished officers before dying as a faithful son
of the Fatherland. No sentries at the door of the Hôtel des Arcades, in
the Place Jean-Bart, challenged three strangers of shabby and
hungry look when they passed through in search of food. Waiters
scurrying about with dishes and plates did not look askance at them
when they strolled into a dining-room crowded with French and British
staff officers. At the far end of the room was a great general--drinking
croûte-au-pot with the simple appetite of a French poilu--who would
have been a splendid mark for anyone careless of his own life and
upholding the law of frightfulness as a divine sanction for
assassination. It was "Soixante-dix Pau," and I was glad to see that
brave old man who had fought through the terrible year of 1870, and
had been en retraite in Paris when, after forty-four years, France was
again menaced by German armies. Left "on the shelf" for a little while,
and eating his heart out in this inactivity while his country was
bleeding from the first wounds of war, he had been called back to
repair the fatal blunders in Alsace. He had shown a cool judgment
and a masterly touch. From Alsace, after a reorganization of the
French plan of attack, he came to the left centre and took part in the
councils of war, where General Joffre was glad of this shrewd old
comrade and gallant heart. He was given an advisory position, un-
hampered by the details of a divisional command, and now it seemed
to me that his presence in Dunkirk hinted at grave possibilities in this
fortified town. He had not come merely to enjoy a good luncheon at
the Hôtel des Arcades.

The civilian inhabitants of Dunkirk were beginning to feel alarmed.
They knew that only the last remnant of the active Belgian army stood
between their great port and the enemy's lines. Now that Antwerp had
fallen they were beginning to lose faith in their girdle of forts and in
their garrison artillery. The German guns had assumed a mythical
and monstrous significance in the popular imagination. It seemed that
they could smash the strongest defences with their far-reaching
thunderbolts. There was no outward panic in the town and the
citizens hid their fears under a mask of contempt for the "sacrés
Boches." But on some faces--of people who had no fear of death
except for those they loved--it was a thin mask, which crumbled and
let through terroi when across the dykes and ramparts the rumours
came that the German army was smashing forward, and closer.

The old landlady of the small hotel in which I stayed had laughed very
heartily with her hands upon her bulging stays when a young Belgian
officer flirted in a comical way with her two pretty daughters--a blonde
and a brunette, whose real beauty and freshness and simplicity
redeemed the squalor of their kitchen.

But presently she grabbed me by the arm, closing the door with the
other hand.

"Monsieur, I am an old fool of a woman, because I have those two
beauties there. It is not of myself that I am afraid. If I could strangle a
German and wring his neck, I would let the rest cut me into bits. But
those girls of mine--those two roses! I can't let them take risks! You
understand--those Germans are a dirty race. Tell me, is it time for us
to go?"

I could not tell her if it were time to go. With two such girls I think I
should have fled, panic-stricken. And yet I did not believe the
Germans would find Dunkirk an easy place to take. I had been round
its fortifications, and had seen the details of elaborate works which
even against German guns might prove impregnable. Outside the
outer forts the ground was bare and flat, so that not a rabbit could
scuttle across without being seen and shot. Sandbag entrenchments
and earthworks, not made recently, because grass had clothed them,
afforded splendid cover for the French batteries. Bomb-proof shelters
were dotted about the fields, and for miles away, as far as the Belgian
frontier, were lines of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. To
the eye of a man not skilled in military science all these signs of a
strong defence were comforting. And yet I think they were known to
be valueless if the enemy broke through along the road to Dunkirk.

A cheerful priest whom I met across an iron bridge told me the secret
of Dunkirk's real defences.

"We have just to turn on a tap or two," he said, laughing at the
simplicity of the operation, "and all those fields for miles will be
flooded within an hour or two. Look, that low-lying land is under water
already. The enemy's guns would sink in it."

He pointed away to the south-west, and I saw that many of the fields
were all moist and marshy, as though after torrential rain. Nearer to
us, on the dry land, a body of soldiers marched up and down, drilling
industriously.

The priest pointed to them.

"They fought untrained, those Belgian boys. Next time they will fight
with greater discipline. But not with greater courage, Monsieur! I lift
my hat to the heroic spirit of brave little Belgium, which as long as
history tells a splendid tale, will be remembered. May God bless
Belgium and heal its wounds!"

He took off his broad black hat and stood bareheaded, with a great
wind blowing his soutane, gazing at those Belgian soldiers who, after
the exhaustion of retreat, gathered themselves into rank again and
drilled so that they might fight once more for the little kingdom they
had lost.

A few days later I saw how Belgians were still fighting on their own
soil, miserable but magnificent, sick at heart but dauntless in spirit.



5

It was in Calais, to which I had gone back for a day or two, that I
found my chance to get into the firing lines in Belgium. I was sitting at
an open window with my two friends when I saw a lady's face in the
street. The last time I had seen it was in an old English mansion, filled
with many gallant and gentle ghosts of history, and with laughing girls
who went scampering out to a game of tennis on the lawn below the
terrace from which a scent of roses and climbing plants was wafted
up on the drowsy air of an English summer. It was strange to see one
of those girls in Calais, where such a different game was being
played. She had a gravity in her eyes which I had not seen before in
England, and yet, afterwards, I heard her laughter ring out within a
little distance of bursting shells. She had a motor-car and a pass to
the Belgian front, and a good, nature which gave me a free seat,
provided I was "jolly quick." I was so quick that, with a few things
scrambled into a handbag, I was ready in two shakes of a jiffy,
whatever that may be, and had only time to give a hasty grip to the
hands of the two friends who had gone along many roads with me in
this adventure of war, watching its amazing dramas. The Philosopher
and the Strategist are but shadows in this book, but though I left them
on the kerbstone, I took with me the memory of a comradeship which
had been good to have.


6


The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept
into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and
his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few
kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the
Yser canal and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude,
Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of
Belgian soil. I drove into the Grande Place and saw the beauty of this
old Flemish square, typical of a hundred others, not less quaint and
with not less dignity, which had been smashed to pieces by German
guns. Three great buildings dominated its architecture--the Town Hall,
with a fine stately façade, and two ancient churches, with massive
brick towers, overshadowing the narrow old houses and timber-front
shops with stepped gables and wrought-iron signs. For three
centuries or more time had slept here, and no change of modern life
had altered the character of this place, where merchant princes had
dwelt around the market. If there had been peace here in that velvety
twilight which filled the square when I first passed through it, I should
have expected to see grave burghers in furred hoods pacing across
the cobble stones to the Hôtel de Ville, and the florid-faced knights
whom Franz Hals loved to paint, quaffing wine inside the Hotel de la
Couronne, and perhaps a young king in exile known as the Merry
Monarch smiling with a roguish eye at some fair-haired Flemish
wench as he leaned on the arm of my lord of Rochester on his way to
his lodging on the other side of the way. But here was no peace. It
was a backyard of war, and there was the rumble of guns over the
stones, and a litter of war's munitions under the church wall.
Armoured cars were parked in the centre of the square, a corps of
military cyclists had propped their machines against gun wagons and
forage carts, out of the black shadows under high walls poked the
snouts of guns, wafts of scented hay came from carts with their
shafts down in the gutters, sentries with bayonets which caught the
light of old lanterns paced up and down below the Town Hall steps,
Belgian soldiers caked in the mud of the trenches slouched wearily in
the side streets, and staff officers in motor-cars with glaring headlights
and shrieking horns threaded their way between the wagons and the
guns. From beyond the town dull shocks of noise grumbled, like
distant thunder-claps, and through the tremulous dusk of the sky
there came an irregular repetition of faint flashes.

As the twilight deepened and the shadows merged into a general
darkness I could see candles being lit through the bull's-eye windows
of small shops, and the rank smell of paraffin lamps came from
vaulted cellars, into which one descended by steps from the roadway,
where soldiers were drinking cups of coffee or cheap wine in a
flickering light which etched Rembrandt pictures upon one's vision.

A number of staff officers came down the steps of the Town Hall and
stood at the foot of the steps as though waiting for some one. They
had not long to wait, for presently a very tall soldier came out to join
them. For a moment he stood under the portico lighting a cigarette,
and the flare of his match put a glamour upon his face. It was the
King of the Belgians, distinguished only by his height from the simple
soldiers who stood around him, and as he came down the steps he
had the dignity of his own manhood but no outward sign of royalty. I
could hardly see his face then, but afterwards in the daylight I saw
him pass down the lines of some of his heroic regiments and saw his
gravity and the sadness of his eyes, and his extreme simplicity... The
first time I had seen him was in a hall in Brussels, when he opened
the Great Exhibition in royal state, in the presence of many princes
and ministers and all his Court. Even then it seemed to me he had a
look of sadness--it may have been no more than shyness--as though
the shadow of some approaching tragedy touched his spirit. I spoke
of it at the time to a friend of mine and he smiled at the foolishness of
the remark.

Here in Furnes his personality was touched with a kind of sanctity
because his kingship of the last piece of Belgian soil symbolized all
the ruin and desolation of his poor country and all the heroism of its
resistance against an overpowering enemy and all the sorrows of
those scattered people who still gave him loyalty. Men of Republican
instincts paid a homage in their hearts to this young king, sanctified
by sorrow and crowned with martyrdom. Living plainly as a simple
soldier, sharing the rations, the hardships and the dangers of his
men, visiting them in their trenches and in their field-hospitals,
steeling his nerves to the sight of bloody things and his heart to the
grim task of fighting to the last ditch of Belgian ground, he seemed to
be the type of early kingship, as it was idealized by poets and
minstrels, when those who were anointed by the Church dedicated
their souls to the service of the people and their swords to justice. He
stood in this modern world and in this modern war as the supreme
type of the Hero, and mythical stories are already making a legend of
his chivalrous acts and virtue, showing that in spite of all our
incredulities and disillusions hero-worship is still a natural instinct in
the minds of men.


7


I had a job to do on my first night in Furnes, and earned a dinner, for
a change, by honest work. The staff of an English hospital with a
mobile column attached to the Belgian cavalry for picking up the
wounded on the field, had come into the town before dusk with a
convoy of ambulances and motorcars. They established themselves
in an old convent with large courtyards and many rooms, and they
worked hurriedly as long as light would allow, and afterwards in
darkness, to get things ready for their tasks next day, when many
wounded were expected. This party of doctors and nurses, stretcher-
bearers and chauffeurs, had done splendid work in Belgium. Many of
them were in the siege of Antwerp, where they stayed until the
wounded had to be taken away in a hurry; and others, even more
daring, had retreated from town to town, a few kilometres in advance
of the hostile troops. I had met some of the party in Malo-les-Bains,
where they had reassembled before coming to Fumes, and I had
been puzzled by them. In the "flying column," as they called their
convoy of ambulances, were several ladies very practically dressed in
khaki coats and breeches, and very girlish in appearance and
manners. They did not seem to me at first sight the type of woman to
be useful on a battlefield or in a field-hospital. I should have expected
them to faint at the sight of blood, and to swoon at the bursting of a
shell. Some of them at least were too pretty, I thought, to play about
in fields of war among men and horses smashed to pulp. It was only
later that I saw their usefulness and marvelled at the spiritual courage
of these young women, who seemed not only careless of shell-fire
but almost unconscious of its menace, and who, with more nervous
strength than that of many men, gave first-aid to the wounded without
shuddering at sights of agony which might turn a strong man sick.

It is not an easy task to settle down into a new hospital, especially in
time of war not far from the enemy's lines, and as a volunteer in the
work I was able to make myself useful by lending a hand with
mattresses and beds and heavy cases of medical material. It was a
strange experience, as far as I was concerned, and sometimes
seemed a little unreal as, with a bed on my head, I staggered across
dark courtyards, or with my arms full of lint and dressings. I groped
my way down the long, unlighted corridors of a Flemish convent.
Nurses chivvied about with little squeals of laughter as they bumped
into each other out of the shadow world, but not losing their heads or
their hands, with so much work to do. Framed in one or other of the
innumerable doorways stood a Belgian nun, with a white face, staring
out upon those flitting shadows. The young doctors had flung their
coats off and were handling the heaviest stuff like dock labourers at
trade union rates, though with more agility. I made friends with them
on the other side of cases too heavy for one man to handle--with a
golden-haired, blue-eyed boy from Bart's (I think), who made the
most preposterous jokes in the darkness, so that I laughed and
nearly dropped my end of the box (I saw him in the days to come
doing heroic and untiring work in the operating theatre), and with
another young surgeon whose keen, grave face lighted up
marvellously when an ironical smile caught fire in his brooding eyes,
and with other men in this hospital and ambulance column who will be
remembered in Belgium as fine and fearless men. With the
superintendent of the commissariat department--an Italian lady with a
pretty sense of humour and a devil-may-care courage which she
inherited from Stuart ancestors--I went on a shopping expedition into
the black gulfs of Fumes, stumbling into holes and jerking up against
invisible gun-wagons, but bringing back triumphantly some fat bacon
and, more precious still, some boxes of tallow candles, of great worth
in a town which had lost its gas.

I lighted dozens of these candles, like an acolyte in a Catholic church,
setting them in their own grease on window-sills and ledges of the
long corridors, so that the work of moving might go on more steadily.
But there was a wind blowing, and at the bang of distant doors out
went one candle after another, and nurses carrying other candles and
shielding the little flames with careful hands cried in laughing dismay
as they were puffed out by malicious draughts.

There was chaos in the kitchen, but out of it came order and a good
meal, served in the convent refectory, where the flickering light of
candles in beer-bottles sheltered from the wind, gleamed upon holy
pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Madonna and Child and glinted
upon a silver crucifix where the Man of Sorrows looked down upon a
supper party of men and women who, whatever their creed or faith or
unbelief, had dedicated themselves to relieve a suffering humanity
with a Christian chivalry--which did not prevent the blue-eyed boy
from making most pagan puns, or the company in general from
laughing as though war were all a jest.

Having helped to wash up--the young surgeons fell into queue before
the washtubs--I went out into the courtyard again. Horses were
stabled there, guarded by a man who read a book by the rays of an
old lantern, which was a little oasis of light in this desert of darkness.
The horses were listening. Every now and then they jerked their
heads up in a frightened way. From a few miles away came the boom
of great guns, and the black sky quivered with tremulous bars of light
as shell after shell burst somewhere over the heads of men waiting
for death. With one of the doctors, two of the nurses, and a man who
led the way, I climbed up to a high room in the convent roof. Through
a dormer window we looked out across the flat country beyond
Furnes and saw, a few miles away, the lines of battle. Some village
was burning there, a steady torch under a heavy cloud of smoke
made rosy and beautiful as a great flower over the scarlet flames.
Shells were bursting with bouquets of light and then scattered stars
into the sky. Short, sharp stabs revealed a Belgian battery, and very
clearly we could hear the roll of field guns, followed by enormous
concussions of heavy artillery.

"There will be work to do to-morrow!" said one of the nurses. Work
came before it was expected in the morning Quite early some Belgian
ambulances came up to the great gate of the convent loaded with
wounded. A few beds were made ready for them and they were
brought in by the stretcher-bearers and dressers. Some of them
could stagger in alone, with the help of a strong arm, but others were
at the point of death as they lay rigid on their stretchers, wet with
blood. For the first time I felt the weight of a man who lies
unconscious, and strained my stomach as I helped to carry these
poor Belgian soldiers. And for the first time I had round my neck the
arm of a man who finds each footstep a torturing effort, and who after
a pace or two halts and groans, and loses the strength of his legs, so
that all his weight hangs upon that clinging arm. Several times I nearly
let these soldiers fall, so great was the burden weighing down my
shoulders. It was only by a kind of prayer that I could hold them up
and guide them to the great room where stretchers were laid out for
lack of beds.

In a little while the great hall where I had helped to sort out packages
was a hospital ward where doctors and nurses worked very quietly
and from which there came faint groans of anguish, horrible in their
significance. Already it was filled with that stench of blood and dirt and
iodoform which afterwards used to sicken me as I helped to carry in
the wounded or carry out the dead.


8


In the courtyard the flying column was getting ready to set out in
search of other wounded men, not yet rescued from the firing line.
The officer in command was a young Belgian gentleman, Lieutenant
de Broqueville, the son of the Belgian Prime Minister, and a man of
knightly valour. He was arranging the order of the day with Dr. Munro,
who had organized the ambulance convoy, leading it through a series
of amazing adventures and misadventures--not yet to be written in
history--to this halting-place at Furnes. Three ladies in field kit stood
by their cars waiting for the day's commands, and there were four
stretcher-bearers, of whom I was the newest recruit. Among them
was an American journalist named Gleeson, who had put aside his
pen for a while to do manual work in fields of agony, proving himself
to be a man of calm and qifiet courage, always ready to take great
risks in order to bring in a stricken soldier. I came to know him as a
good comrade, and in this page greet him again.

The story of the adventure which we went out to meet that day was
written in the night that followed it, as I lay on straw with a candle by
my side, and because it was written with the emotion of a great
experience still thrilling in my brain and with its impressions
undimmed by any later pictures of the war I will give it here again as it
first appeared in the columns of the Daily Chronicle, suppressing only
a name or two because those whom I wished to honour hated my
publicity.


9


We set out before noon, winding our way through the streets of
Furnes, which were still crowded with soldiers and wagons. In the
Town Hall square we passed through a mass of people who
surrounded a body of 150 German prisoners who had just been
brought in from the front. It was a cheering sight for Belgians who had
been so long in retreat before an overpowering enemy. It was a sign
that the tide of fortune was changing. Presently we were out in open
country, by the side of the Yser Canal. It seemed very peaceful and
quiet. Even the guns were silent now, and the flat landscape, with its
long, straight lines of poplars between the low-lying fields, had a spirit
of tranquillity in the morning sunlight. It seemed impossible to believe
that only a few kilometres away great armies were ranged against
each other in a death-struggle. But only for a little while. The spirit of
war was forced upon our imagination by scenes upon the roadside. A
squadron of Belgian cavalry rode by on tired horses. The men were
dirty in the service of war, and haggard after long privations in the
field. Yet they looked hard and resolute, and saluted us with smiles as
we passed. Some of them shouted out a question: "Anglais?" They
seemed surprised and glad to see British ambulances on their way to
the front. Belgian infantrymen trudged with slung rifles along the
roads of the villages through which we passed. At one of our halts,
while we waited for instructions from the Belgian headquarters, a
group of these soldiers sat in the parlour of an inn singing a love-song
in chorus. One young officer swayed up and down in a rhythmic
dance, waving his cigarette. He had been wounded in the arm, and
knew the horror of the trenches; but for a little while he forgot, and
was very gay because he was alive.

Our trouble was to know where to go. The righting on the previous
night had covered a wide area, but a good many of the wounded had
been brought back. Where the wounded still lay the enemy's shell-fire
was so heavy that the Belgian ambulances could get nowhere near.
Lieutenant de Broqueville was earnestly requested not to lead his little
column into unnecessary risks, especially as it was difficult to know
the exact position of the enemy until reports came in from the field
officers.

It was astonishing--as it is always in war--to find how soldiers quite
near to the front are in utter ignorance of the course of a great battle.
Many of the officers and men with whom we talked could not tell us
where the allied forces were, nor where the enemy was in position,
nor whether the heavy fighting during the last day and night had been
to the advantage of the Allies or the Germans. They believed, but
were not sure, that the enemy had been driven back many kilometres
between Nieuport and Dixmude.

At last, after many discussions and many halts, we received our
orders. We were asked to get into the town of Dixmude, where there
were many wounded.

It was about sixteen kilometres away from Furnes, and about half that
distance from where we had halted for lunch. Not very far away, it will
be seen, yet, as we went along the road, nearer to the sound of great
guns which for the last hour or two had been firing incessantly again,
we passed many women and children. It had only just occurred to
them that death was round the corner, and that there was no more
security in those little stone or plaster houses of theirs, which in time
of peace had been safe homes against all the evils of life. It had
come to their knowledge, very slowly, that they were of no more
protection than tissue paper under a rain of lead. So they were now
leaving for a place at longer range. Poor old grandmothers in black
bonnets and skirts trudged under the lines of poplars, with younger
women who clasped their babes tight in one hand while with the other
they carried heavy bundles of household goods. They did not walk
very fast. They did not seem very much afraid. They had a kind of
patient misery in their look. Along the road came some more German
prisoners, marching rapidly between mounted guards. Many of them
were wounded, and all of them had a wild, famished, terror-stricken
look. I caught the savage glare of their eyes as they stared into my
car. There was something beast-like and terrible in their gaze like that
of hunted animals caught in a trap.

At a turn in the road the battle lay before us, and we were in the zone
of fire. Away across the fields was a line of villages, with the town of
Dixmude a little to the right of us, perhaps two kilometres away. From
each little town smoke was rising in separate columns, which met at
the top in a great pall of smoke, as a heavy black cloud cresting
above the light on the horizon line. At every moment this blackness
was brightened by puffs of electric blue, extraordinarily vivid, as shells
burst in the air. Then the colour gradually faded out, and the smoke
darkened and became part of the pall. From the mass of houses in
each town came jabs of flame, following the explosions which
sounded with terrific, thudding shocks.

Upon a line of fifteen kilometres there was an incessant cannonade
and in every town there was a hell. The furthest villages were already
alight. I watched how the flames rose, and became great glowing
furnaces, terribly beautiful. Quite close to us--only a kilometre away
across the fields to the left--there were Belgian batteries at work, and
rifle-fire from many trenches. We were between two fires, and the
Belgian and German shells came screeching across our heads. The
enemy's shells were dropping close to us, ploughing up the fields with
great pits. We could hear them burst and scatter, and could see them
burrow. In front of us on the road lay a dreadful barrier, which brought
us to a halt. An enemy's shell had fallen right on top of an ammunition
convoy. Four horses had been blown to pieces, and lay strewn
across the road. The ammunition wagon had been broken into
fragments, and smashed and burnt to cinders by the explosion of its
own shells. A Belgian soldier lay dead, cut in half by a great fragment
of steel. Further along the road were two other dead horses in pools
of blood. It was a horrible and sickening sight from which one turned
away shuddering with a cold sweat. But we had to pass after some of
this dead flesh had been dragged away. Further down the road we
had left two of the cars in charge of the three ladies. They were to
wait there until we brought back some of the wounded, whom they
would take from us so that we could fetch some more out of
Dixmude. The two ambulances came on with our light car,
commanded by Lieutenant de Broqueville and Dr. Munro. Mr.
Gleeson asked me to help him on the other end of his own stretcher.

I think I may say that none of us quite guessed what was in store for
us. At least I did not guess that we had been asked to go into the
open mouth of Death. I had only a vague idea that Dixmude would be
just a little worse than the place at which we now halted for final
instructions as to the geography of the town.

It was a place which made me feel suddenly cold, in spite of a little
sweat which made my hands moist.

It was a halt between a group of cottages, where Belgian soldiers
were huddled close to the walls under the timber beams of the barns.
Several of the cottages were already smashed by shell-fire. There
was a great gaping hole through one of the roofs. The roadway was
strewn with bricks and plaster, and every now and then a group of
men scattered as shrapnel bullets came pattering down. We were in
an inferno of noise. It seemed as though we stood in the midst of the
guns within sight of each other's muzzles. I was deafened and a little
dazed, but very clear in the head, so that my thoughts seemed
extraordinarily vivid. I was thinking, among other things, of how soon I
should be struck by one of those flying bullets, like the men who lay
moaning inside the doorway of one of the cottages. On a calculation
of chances it could not be long.

The Belgian official in charge of this company was very courteous
and smiling. It was only by a sudden catch of the breath between his
words that one guessed at the excitement of his brain. He explained
to us, at what seemed to me needless length, the ease with which we
could get into Dixmude, where there were many wounded. He drew a
map of the streets, so that we could find the way to the Hôtel de Ville,
where some of them lay. We thanked him, and told the chauiîeurs to
move on. I was in one of the ambulances and Gleeson sat behind me
in the narrow space between the stretchers. Over my shoulder he
talked in a quiet voice of the job that lay before us. I was glad of that
quiet voice, so placid in its courage.

We went forward at what seemed to me a crawl, though I think it was
a fair pace. The shells were bursting round us now on all sides.
Shrapnel bullets sprayed the earth about us. It appeared to me an
odd thing that we were still alive.

Then we came into Dixmude. It was a fair-sized town, with many
beautiful buildings, and fine old houses in the Flemish style--so I was
told. When I saw it for the first time it was a place of death and horror.
The streets through which we passed were utterly deserted and
wrecked from end to end as though by an earthquake. Incessant
explosions of shell-fire crashed down upon the walls which still stood.
Great gashes opened in the walls, which then toppled and fell. A roof
came tumbling down with an appalling clatter. Like a house of cards
blown down by a puff of wind a little shop suddenly collapsed into a
mass of ruins. Here and there, further into the town, we saw living
figures. They ran swiftly for a moment and then disappeared into dark
caverns under toppling porticoes. They were Belgian soldiers.

We were now in a side street leading into the Town Hall square. It
seemed impossible to pass owing to the wreckage strewn across the
road.

"Try to take it," said Dr. Munro, who was sitting beside the chauffeur.

We took it, bumping over the high débris, and then swept round into
the square. It was a spacious place, with the Town Hall at one side of
it, or what was left of the Town Hall. There was only the splendid shell
of it left, sufficient for us to see the skeleton of a noble building which
had once been the pride of Flemish craftsmen. Even as we turned
towards it parts of it were falling upon the ruins already on the ground.
I saw a great pillar lean forward and then topple down. A mass of
masonry crashed down from the portico. Some stiff, dark forms lay
among the fallen stones. They were dead soldiers. I hardly glanced at
them, for we were in search of living men. The cars were brought to a
halt outside the building and we all climbed down. I lighted a cigarette,
and I noticed two of the other men fumble for matches for the same
purpose. We wanted something to steady us. There was never a
moment when shell-fire was not bursting in that square about us. The
shrapnel bullets whipped the stones. The enemy was making a target
of the Hôtel de Ville, and dropping their shells with dreadful exactitude
on either side of it. I glanced towards a flaring furnace to the right of
the building. There was a wonderful glow at the heart of it. Yet it did
not give me any warmth at that moment.

Dr. Munro and Lieutenant de Broqueville mounted the steps of the
Town Hall, followed by another brancardier and myself. Gleeson was
already taking down a stretcher. He had a little smile about his lips.

A French officer and two men stood under the broken archway of the
entrance between the fallen pillars and masonry. A yard away from
them lay a dead soldier--a handsome young man with clear-cut
features turned upwards to the gaping roof. A stream of blood was
coagulating round his head, but did not touch the beauty of his face.
Another dead man lay huddled up quite close, and his face was
hidden.

"Are there any wounded here, sir?" asked our young lieutenant.

The other officer spoke excitedly. He was a brave man, but could not
hide the terror of his soul because he had been standing so long
waiting for death which stood beside him but did not touch him. It
appeared from his words that there were several wounded men
among the dead, down in the cellar. He would be obliged to us if we
could rescue them. We stood on some steps looking down into that
cellar. It was a dark hole--illumined dimly by a lantern, I think. I caught
sight of a little heap of huddled bodies. Two soldiers still unwounded,
dragged three of them out, handed them up, delivered them to us.
The work of getting those three men into the first ambulance seemed
to us interminable. It was really no more than fifteen to twenty
minutes, while they were being arranged.

During that time Dr. Munro was moving about the square in a dreamy
sort of way, like a poet meditating on love or flowers in May.
Lieutenant de Broqueville was making inquiries about other wounded
in other houses. I lent a hand to one of the stretcher-bearers. What
others were doing I don't know, except that Gleeson's calm face
made a clear-cut image on my brain. I had lost consciousness of
myself. Something outside myself, as it seemed, was talking now that
there was no way of escape, that it was monstrous to suppose that all
these bursting shells would not smash the ambulances to bits and
finish the agony of the wounded, and that death is very hideous. I
remember thinking also how ridiculous it is for men to kill each other
like this, and to make such hells.

Then Lieutenant de Broqueville spoke a word of command. "The first
ambulance must now get back."

I was with the first ambulance, in Gleeson's company. We had a full
load of wounded men--and we were loitering. I put my head outside
the cover and gave the word to the chauffeur. As I did so a shrapnel
bullet came past my head, and, striking a piece of ironwork, flattened
out and fell at my feet. I picked it up and put it in my pocket--though
God alone knows why, for I was not in search of souvenirs. So we
started with the first ambulance, through those frightful streets again,
and out into the road to the country.

"Very hot," said one of the men. I think it was the chauffeur.
Somebody else asked if we should get through with luck.

Nobody answered the question. The wounded men with us were very
quiet. I thought they were dead. There was only the incessant
cannonade and the crashing of buildings. Mitrailleuses were at work
now spitting out bullets. It was a worse sound than the shells. It
seemed more deadly in its rattle. I stared back behind the car and
saw the other ambulance in our wake. I did not see the motor-car.
Along the country road the fields were still being ploughed by shell,
which burst over our heads. We came to a halt again at the place
where the soldiers were crouched under the cottage walls. There
were few walls now, and inside some of the remaining cottages many
wounded men. Their own comrades were giving them first aid, and
wiping the blood out of their eyes. We managed to take some of
these on board. They were less quiet than the others we had, and
groaned in a heartrending way.

And then, a little later, we made a painful discovery. Lieutenant de
Broqueville, our gallant young leader, was missing. By some horrible
mischance he had not taken his place in either of the ambulances or
the motor-car. None of us had the least idea what had happened to
him. We had all imagined that he had scrambled up like the rest of
us, after giving the order to get away. We looked at each other in
dismay. There was only one thing to do, to get back in search of him.
Even in the half-hour since we had left the town Dixmude had burst
into flames and was a great blazing torch. If young de Broqueville
were left in that furnace he would not have a chance of life.

It was Gleeson and another stretcher-bearer who with great gallantry
volunteered to go back and search for our leader. They took the light
car and sped back towards the burning town.

The ambulances went on with their cargo of wounded, and I was left
in a car with one of the ladies while Dr. Munro was ministering to a
man on the point of death. It was the girl whom I had seen on the
lawn of an old English house in the days before the war. She was
very worried about the fate of de Broqueville, and anxious beyond
words as to what would befall the three friends who were now
missing. We drove back along the road towards Dixmude, and
rescued another wounded man left in a wayside cottage. By this time
there were five towns blazing in the darkness, and in spite of the
awful suspense which we were now suffering, we could not help
staring at the fiendish splendour of that sight. Dr. Munro joined us
again, and after a consultation we decided to get as near Dixmude as
we could, in ease our friends had to come out without their car or
wounded.

The enemy's bombardment was now terrific. All its guns were
concentrated upon Dixmude and the surrounding trenches. In the
darkness close under a stable wall I stood listening to the great
crashes for an hour, when I had not expected such a grace of life.
Inside the stable, soldiers were sleeping in the straw, careless that
any moment a shell might burst through upon them and give them
unwaking sleep. The hour seemed a night. Then we saw the gleam of
headlights, and an English voice called out.

Our two friends had come back. They had gone to the entry of
Dixmude, but could get no further owing to the flames and shells.
They, too, had waited for an hour, but had not found de Broqueville. It
seemed certain that he was dead, and very sorrowfully, as there was
nothing to be done, we drove back to Furnes.

At the gate of the convent were some Belgian ambulances which had
come from another part of the front with their wounded. I helped to
carry one of them in, and strained my shoulders with the weight of the
stretcher. Another wounded man put his arm round my neck, and
then, with a dreadful cry, collapsed, so that I had to hold him in a
strong grip. A third man, horribly smashed about the head, walked
almost unaided into the operating-room. Gleeson and I led him, with
just a touch on his arm. Next morning he lay dead on a little pile of
straw in a quiet corner of the courtyard.

I sat down to a supper which I had not expected to eat. There was a
strange excitement in my body, which trembled a little after the day's
adventures. It seemed very strange to be sitting down to table with
cheerful faces about me. But some of the faces were not cheerful.
Those of us who knew of the disappearance of de Broqueville sat
silently over our soup.

Then suddenly there was a sharp exclamation of surprise--of sheer
amazement--and Lieutenant de Broqueville came walking briskly
forward, alive and well. ... It seemed a miracle.

It was hardly less than that. For several hours after our departure
from Dixmude he had remained in that inferno. He had missed us
when he went down into the cellars to haul out another wounded
man, forgetting that he had given us the order to start. There he had
remained with the buildings crashing all around him until the enemy's
fire had died down a little. He succeeded in rescuing his wounded, for
whom he found room in a Belgian ambulance outside the town, and
walked back along the road to Furnes. So we gripped his hands and
were thankful for his escape.


10


Early next morning I went into Dixmude again with some of the men
belonging to the "flying column." It was more than probable that there
were still a number of wounded men there, if any of them were left
alive after that night of horror when they lay in cellars or under the
poor shelter of broken walls. Perhaps also there were men but lately
wounded, for before the dawn had come some of the Belgian infantry
had been sent into the outlying streets with mitrailleuses, and on the
opposite side German infantry were in possession of other streets or
of other ruins, so that bullets were ripping across the mangled town.
The artillery was fairly quiet. Only a few shells were bursting over the
Belgian lines--enough to keep the air rumbling with irregular
thunderclaps. But as we approached the corner where we had waited
for news of de Broqueville one of these shells burst very close to us
and ploughed up a big hole in a field across the roadside ditch. We
drove more swiftly with empty cars and came into the streets of
Dixmude. They were sheets of fire, burning without flame but with a
steady glow of embers. They were but cracked shells of houses,
unroofed and swept clean of their floors and furniture, so that all but
the bare walls and a few charred beams had been consumed by the
devouring appetite of fire. Now and again one of the beams broke
and fell with a crash into the glowing heart of the furnace, which had
once been a Flemish house, raising a fountain of sparks.

Further into the town, however, there stood, by the odd freakishness
of an artillery bombardment, complete houses hardly touched by
shells and, very neat and prim, between masses of shapeless ruins.
One street into which I drove was so undamaged that I could hardly
believe my eyes, having looked back the night before to one great
torch which men called "Dixmude." Nevertheless some of its window-
frames had bulged with heat, and panes of glass fell with a splintering
noise on to the stone pavement. As I passed a hail of shrapnel was
suddenly flung upon the wall on one side of the street and the bullets
played at marbles in the roadway. In this street some soldiers were
grouped about two wounded men, one of them only lightly touched,
the other--a French marine--at the point of death, lying very still in a
huddled way with a clay-coloured face smeared with blood. We
picked them up and put them into one of the ambulances, the dying
man groaning a little as we strapped him on the stretcher.

The Belgian soldiers who had come into the town at dawn stood
about our ambulances as though our company gave them a little
comfort. They did not speak much, but had grave wistful eyes like
men tired of all this misery about them but unable to escape from it.
They were young men with a stubble of fair hair on their faces and
many days' dirt.

"Vous êtes très aimable," said one of them when I handed him a
cigarette, which he took with a trembling hand. Then he stared up the
street as another shower of shrapnel swept it, and said in a hasty
way, "C'est l'enfer... Pour trois mois je reste sous feu. C'est trop,
n'est-ce pas?"

But there was no time for conversation about war and the effects of
war upon the souls of men. The German guns were beginning to
speak again, and unless we made haste we might not rescue the
wounded men.

"Are there many blessés here?" asked our leader.

One of the soldiers pointed to a house which had a tavern sign above
it.

"They've been taken inside," he said. "I helped to carry them." We
dodged the litter in the roadway, where, to my amazement, two old
ladies were searching in the rubbish-heaps for the relics of their
houses. They had stayed in Dixmude during this terrible
bombardment, hidden in some cellar, and now had emerged, in their
respectable black gowns, to see what damage had been done. They
seemed to be looking for something in particular--some little object
not easy to find among these heaps of calcined stones and twisted
bars of iron. One old woman shook her head sadly as though to say,
"Dear me, I can't see it anywhere." I wondered if they were looking for
some family photograph--or for some child's cinders. It might have
been one or the other, for many of these Belgian peasants had
reached a point of tragedy when death is of no more importance than
any trivial loss. The earth and sky had opened, swallowing up all their
little world in a devilish destruction. They had lost the proportions of
everyday life in the madness of things.

In the tavern there was a Belgian doctor with a few soldiers to help
him, and a dozen wounded in the straw which had been put down on
the tiled floor. Another wounded man was sitting on a chair, and the
doctor was bandaging up a leg which looked like a piece of raw meat
at which dogs had been gnawing. Something in the straw moved and
gave a frightful groan. A boy soldier with his back propped against the
wall had his knees up to his chin and his face in his grimy hands
through which tears trickled. There was a soppy bandage about his
head. Two men close to where I stood lay stiff and stark, as though
quite dead, but when I bent down to them I heard their hard breathing
and the snuffle of their nostrils. The others more lightly wounded
watched us like animals, without curiosity but with a horrible sort of
patience in their eyes, which seemed to say, "Nothing matters...
Neither hunger nor thirst nor pain. We are living but our spirit is dead."

The doctor did not want us to take away his wounded at once. The
German shells were coming heavily again, on the outskirts of the
town through which we had to pass on our way out. An officer had
just come in to say they were firing at the level crossing to prevent the
Belgian ambulances from coming through. It would be better to wait a
while before going back again. It was foolish to take unnecessary
risks.

I admit frankly that I was anxious to go as quickly as possible with
these wounded A shell burst over the houses on the opposite side of
the street. When I stood outside watching two soldiers who had been
sent further down to bring in two other wounded men who lay in a
house there, I saw them dodge into a doorway for cover as another
hail of shrapnel whipped the stones about them. Afterwards they
made an erratic course down the street like drunken men, and
presently I saw them staggering back again with their wounded
comrades, who had their arms about the necks of their rescuers. I
went out to aid them, but did not like the psychology of this street,
where death was teasing the footsteps of men, yapping at their heels.

I helped to pack up one of the ambulances and went back to Furnes
sitting next to the driver, but twisted round so that I could hold one of
the stretcher poles which wanted to jolt out of its strap so that the
man lying with a dead weight on the canvas would come down with a
smash upon the body of the man beneath.

"Ca y est," said my driver friend, very cheerfully. He was a gentleman
volunteer with his own ambulance and looked like a seafaring man in
his round yachting cap and blue jersey. He did not speak much
French, I fancy, but I loved to hear him say that "Ca y est," when he
raised a stretcher in his hefty arms and packed a piece of bleeding
flesh into the top of his car with infinite care lest he should give a jolt
to broken bones.

One of the men behind us had his leg smashed in two places. As we
went over roads with great stones and the rubbish of ruined houses
he cried out again and again in a voice of anguish:

"Pas si vite! Pour l'amour de Dieu... Pas si vite!"

Not so quickly. But when we came out of the burnt streets towards
the level crossing of the railway it seemed best to go quickly. Shells
were falling in the fields quite close to us. One of them dug a deep
hole in the road twenty yards ahead of us. Another burst close
behind. Instinctively I yearned for speed. I wanted to rush along that
road and get beyond the range of fire. But the driver in the blue
jersey, hearing that awful cry behind him, slowed down and crawled
along.

"Poor devil," he said. "I can imagine what it feels like when two bits of
broken bone get rubbing together. Every jolt and jar must give him
hell."

He went slower still, at a funeral pace, and looking back into the
ambulance said "Ça y est, mon vieux... Bon courage!"

Afterwards, this very gallant gentleman was wounded himself, and lay
in one of the ambulances which he had often led towards adventure,
with a jagged piece of steel in his leg, and two bones rasping together
at every jolt. But when he was lifted up, he stifled a groan and gave
his old cheerful cry of "Ca y est!"


11


During the two days that followed the convent at Furnes was
overcrowded with the wounded. All day long and late into the night
they were brought back by the Belgian ambulances from the zone of
fire, and hardly an hour passed without a bang at the great wooden
gates in the courtyard which were flung open to let in another tide of
human wreckage.

The Belgians were still holding their last remaining ground--it did not
amount to more than a few fields and villages between the French
frontier and Dixmude--with a gallant resistance which belongs without
question to the heroic things of history. During these late days in
October, still fighting almost alone, for there were no British soldiers to
help them and only a few French batteries with two regiments of
French marines, they regained some of their soil and beat back the
enemy from positions to which it had advanced. In spite of the most
formidable attacks made by the German troops along the coastline
between Westende and Ostende, and in a crescent sweeping round
Dixmude for about thirty kilometres, those Belgian soldiers, tired out
by months of fighting with decimated regiments and with but the poor
remnant of a disorganized army, not only stood firm, but inflicted
heavy losses upon the enemy and captured four hundred prisoners.
For a few hours the Germans succeeded in crossing the Yser,
threatening a general advance upon the Belgian line. Before Nieuport
their trenches were only fifty metres away from those of the Belgians,
and on the night of October 22 they charged eight times with the
bayonet in order to force their way through.

Each assault failed against the Belgian infantry, who stayed in their
trenches in spite of the blood that eddied about their feet and the
corpses that lay around them. Living and dead made a rampart which
the Germans could not break. With an incessant rattle of mitrailleuses
and rifle-fire, the Belgians mowed down the German troops as they
advanced in solid ranks, so that on each of those eight times the
enemy's attack was broken and destroyed. They fell like the leaves
which were then being scattered by the autumn wind and their bodies
were strewn between the trenches. Some of them were the bodies of
very young men--poor boys of sixteen and seventeen from German
high schools and universities who were the sons of noble and well-to-
do families, had been accepted as volunteers by Prussian war-lords
ruthless of human life in their desperate gamble with fate. Some of
these lads were brought to the hospitals in Furnes, badly wounded.
One of them carried into the convent courtyard smiled as he lay on
his stretcher and spoke imperfect French very politely to
Englishwomen who bent over him, piteous as girls who see a
wounded bird. He seemed glad to be let off slightly with only a wound
in his foot which would make him limp for life; very glad to be out of all
the horror of those trenches on the German side of the Yser. One
could hardly call this boy an "enemy." He was just a poor innocent
caught up by a devilish power, and dropped when of no more use as
an instrument of death. The pity that stirs one in the presence of one
of these broken creatures does not come to one on the field of battle,
where there is no single individuality, but only a grim conflict ol
unseen powers, as inhuman as thunderbolts, or as the destructive
terror of the old nature gods. The enemy, then, fills one with a hatred
based on fear. One rejoices to see a shell burst over his batteries and
is glad at the thought of the death that came to him of that puff of
smoke. But I found that no such animosity stirs one in the presence
of the individual enemy or among crowds of their prisoners. One only
wonders at the frightfulness of the crime which makes men kill each
other without a purpose of their own, but at the dictate of powers far
removed from their own knowledge and interests in life.


12


That courtyard in the convent at Furnes will always haunt my mind as
the scene of a grim drama. Sometimes, standing there alone, in the
darkness, by the side of an ambulance, I used to look up at the stars
and wonder what God might think of all this work if there were any
truth in old faiths. A pretty mess we mortals made of life! I might
almost have laughed at the irony of it all, except that my laughter
would have choked in my throat and turned me sick. They were
beasts, and worse than beasts, to maim and mutilate each other like
this, having no real hatred in their hearts for each other, but only a
stupid perplexity that they should be hurled in masses against each
other's ranks, to slash and shoot and burn in obedience to orders by
people who were their greatest enemies--Ministers of State, with cold
and calculating brains, high inhuman officers who studied battlefields
as greater chessboards. So I--a little black ant in a shadow on the
earth under the eternal sky--used to think like this, and to stop
thinking these silly irritating thoughts turned to the job in hand, which
generally was to take up one end of a stretcher laden with a bloody
man, or to give my shoulder to a tall soldier who leaned upon it and
stumbled forward to an open door which led to the operating-table
and an empty bed, where he might die if his luck were out.

The courtyard was always full of stir and bustle in the hours when the
ambulance convoys came in with their cargoes of men rescued from
the firing zone. The headlights of the cars thrust shafts of blinding
light into the darkness as they steered round in the steep and narrow
road which led to the convent gates between two high thick walls, and
then, with a grinding and panting, came inside to halt beside cars
already at a standstill. The cockney voices of the chauffeurs called to
each other.

"Blast yer, Bill... Carn't yer give a bit of elber room? Gord almighty,
'ow d'yer think I can get in there?"

Women came out into the yard, their white caps touched by the light
of their lanterns, and women's voices spoke quietly.

"Have you got many this time?" "We can hardly find an inch of
room." "It's awful having to use stretchers for beds." "There were
six deaths this afternoon."

Then would follow a silence or a whispering of stretcher-bearers,
telling their adventures to a girl in khaki breeches, standing with one
hand in her jacket pocket, and with the little flare of a cigarette
glowing upon her cheek and hair.

"All safe? ... That was luck!"

"O mon Dieu! O, cré nom! O! O!"

It was a man's voice crying in agony, rising to a shuddering, blood-
curdling scream:

"O Jésus! O! O!"

One could not deafen one's ears against that note of human agony. It
pierced into one's soul. One could only stand gripping one's hands in
this torture chamber, with darkness between high walls, and with
shadows making awful noises out of the gulfs of blackness.

The cries of the wounded men died down and whimpered out into a
dull faint moaning.

A laugh came chuckling behind an ambulance.

"Hot? ... I should think it was! But we picked the men up and crossed
the bridge all right... The shells were falling on every side of us. ... I
was pretty scared, you bet... It's a bit too thick, you know!"

Silence again. Then a voice speaking quietly across the yard:

"Anyone to lend a hand? There's a body to be carried out."

I helped to carry out the body, as every one helped to do any small
work if he had his hands free at the moment. It was the saving of
one's sanity and self-respect. Yet to me, more sensitive perhaps than
it is good to be, it was a moral test almost greater than my strength of
will to enter that large room where the wounded lay, and to approach
a dead man through a lane of dying. (So many of them died after a
night in our guest-house. Not all the skill of surgeons could patch up
some of those bodies, torn open with ghastly wounds from German
shells.) The smell of wet and muddy clothes, coagulated blood and
gangrened limbs, of iodine and chloroform, sickness and sweat of
agony, made a stench which struck one's senses with a foul blow. I
used to try and close my nostrils to it, holding my breath lest I should
vomit. I used to try to keep my eyes upon the ground, to avoid the
sight of those smashed faces, and blinded eyes, and tattered bodies,
lying each side of me in the hospital cots, or in the stretchers set upon
the floor between them. I tried to shut my eyes to the sounds in this
room, the hideous snuffle of men drawing their last breaths, the long-
drawn moans of men in devilish pain, the ravings of fever-stricken
men crying like little children--"Maman! O Maman!"--or repeating over
and over again some angry protest against a distant comrade.

But sights and sounds and smells forced themselves upon one's
senses. I had to look and to listen and to breathe in the odour of
death and corruption. For hours afterwards I would be haunted with
the death face of some young man, lying half-naked on his bed while
nurses dressed his horrible wounds. What waste of men! What
disfigurement of the beauty that belongs to youth! Bearded soldier
faces lay here in a tranquillity that told of coming death. They had
been such strong and sturdy men, tilling their Flemish fields, and
living with a quiet faith in their hearts. Now they were dying before
their time, conscious, some of them, that death was near, so that
weak tears dropped upon their beards, and in their eyes was a great
fear and anguish.

"Je ne veux pas mourir!" said one of them. "O ma pauvre femme! Je
ne veux pas mourir!"

He did not wish to die... but in the morning he was dead.

The corpse that I had to carry out lay pinned up in a sheet. The work
had been very neatly done by the nurse. She whispered to me as I
stood on one side of the bed, with a friend on the other side.

"Be careful. ... He might fall in half."

I thought over these words as I put my hands under the warm body
and helped to lift its weight on to the stretcher. Yes, some of the shell
wounds were rather big. One could hardly sew a man together again
with bits of cotton... It was only afterwards, when I had helped to put
the stretcher in a separate room on the other side of the courtyard,
that a curious trembling took possession of me for a moment... The
horror of it all! Were the virtues which were supposed to come from
war, "the binding strength of nations," "the cleansing of corruption,"
all the falsities of men who make excuses for this monstrous crime,
worth the price that was being paid in pain and tears and death? It is
only the people who sit at home who write these things. When one is
in the midst of war false heroics are blown out of one's soul by all its
din and tumult of human agony. One learns that courage itself exists,
in most cases, as the pride in the heart of men very much afraid--a
pride which makes them hide their fear. They do not become more
virtuous in war, but only reveal the virtue that is in them. The most
heroic courage which came into the courtyard at Furnes was not that
of the stretcher-bearers who went out under fire, but that of the
doctors and nurses who tended the wounded, toiling ceaselessly in
the muck of blood, amidst all those sights and sounds. My spirit
bowed before them as I watched them at work. I was proud if I could
carry soup to any of them when they came into the refectory for a
hurried meal, or if I could wash a plate clean so that they might fill it
with a piece of meat from the kitchen stew. I would have cleaned their
boots for them if it had been worth while cleaning boots to tramp the
filthy yard.

"It's not surgery!" said one of the young surgeons, coming out of the
operating-theatre and washing his hands at the kitchen sink; "it's
butchery!"

He told me that he had never seen such wounds or imagined them,
and as for the conditions in which he worked--he raised his hands
and laughed at the awfulness of them, because it is best to laugh
when there is no remedy. There was a scarcity of dressings, of
instruments, of sterilizers. The place was so crowded that there was
hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was
nothing but hacking and sewing.

"I'm used to blood," said the young surgeon. "It's some years now
since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and
then handling living tissue. You know how it's done--by gradual
stages until a student no longer wants to faint at the sight of raw flesh,
but regards it as so much material for scientific work. But this!"--he
looked towards the room into which the wounded came--"It's getting
on my nerves a little. It's the sense of wanton destruction that makes
one loathe it, the utter senselessness of it all, the waste of such good
stuff. War is a hellish game and I'm so sorry for all the poor Belgians
who are getting it in the neck. They didn't ask for it!"

The wooden gates opened to let in another ambulance full of Belgian
wounded, and the young surgeon nodded to me with a smile.

"Another little lot! I must get back into the slaughterhouse. So long!"

I helped out one of the "sitting-up" cases--a young man with a wound
in his chest, who put his arm about my neck and said, "Merci! Merci!"
with a fine courtesy, until suddenly he went limp, so that I had to hold
him with all my strength, while he vomited blood down my coat. I had
to get help to carry him indoors.

And yet there was laughter in the convent where so many men lay
wounded. It was only by gaiety and the quick capture of any jest that
those doctors and nurses and ambulance girls could keep their
nerves steady. So in the refectory, when they sat down for a meal,
there was an endless fire of raillery, and the blue-eyed boy with the
blond hair used to crow like Peter Pan and speak a wonderful mixture
of French and English, and play the jester gallantly. There would be
processions of plate-bearers to the kitchen next door, where a
splendid Englishwoman--one of those fine square-faced, brown-eyed,
cheerful souls--had been toiling all day in the heat of oven and stoves
to cook enough food for fifty-five hungry people who could not wait for
their meals. There was a scramble between two doctors for the last
potatoes, and a duel between one of them and myself in the slicing
up of roast beef or boiled mutton, and amorous advances to the lady
cook for a tit-bit in the baking-pan. There never was such a kitchen,
and a County Council inspector would have reported on it in lurid
terms. The sink was used as a wash-place by surgeons, chauffeurs,
and stretcher-bearers. Nurses would come through with bloody rags
from the ward, which was only an open door away. Lightly wounded
men, covered with Yser mud, would sit at a side table, eating the
remnants of other people's meals. Above the sizzling of sausages
and the clatter of plates one could hear the moaning of the wounded
and the incessant monologue of the fever-stricken. And yet it is
curious I look back upon that convent kitchen as a place of gaiety,
holding many memories of comradeship, and as a little sanctuary from
the misery of war. I was a scullion in it, at odd hours of the day and
night when I was not following the ambulance wagons to the field, or
helping to clean the courtyard or doing queer little jobs which some
one had to do.

"I want you to dig a hole and help me to bury an arm," said one of the
nurses. "Do you mind?"

I spent another hour helping a lady to hang up blankets, not very well
washed, because they were still stained with blood, and not very
sanitary, because the line was above a pile of straw upon which men
had died. There were many rubbish heaps in the courtyard near
which it was not wise to linger, and always propped against the walls
were stretchers soppy with blood, or with great dark stains upon them
where blood had dried. It was like the courtyard of a shambles, this
old convent enclosure, and indeed it was exactly that, except that the
animals were not killed outright, but lingered in their pain.


13


Early each morning the ambulances started on their way to the zone
of fire, where always one might go gleaning in the harvest fields of
war. The direction was given us, with the password of the day, by
young de Broqueville, who received the latest reports from the
Belgian headquarters staff. As a rule there was not much choice. It
lay somewhere between the roads to Nieuport on the coast, and
inland, to Pervyse, Dixmude, St. Georges, or Ramscapelle where the
Belgian and German lines formed a crescent down to Ypres.

The centre of that half-circle girdled by the guns was an astounding
and terrible panorama, traced in its outline by the black fumes of
shell-fire above the stabbing flashes of the batteries. Over Nieuport
there was a canopy of smoke, intensely black, but broken every
moment by blue glares of light as a shell burst and rent the
blackness. Villages were burning on many points of the crescent,
some of them smouldering drowsily, others blazing fiercely like
beacon fires.

Dixmude was still alight at either end, but the fires seemed to have
burnt down at its centre. Beyond, on the other horn of the crescent,
were five flaming torches, which marked what were once the neat
little villages of a happy Belgium. It was in the centre of this
battleground, and the roads about me had been churned up by shells
and strewn with shrapnel bullets. Close to me in a field, under the
cover of a little wood, were some Belgian batteries. They were firing
with a machine-like regularity, and every minute came the heavy bark
of the gun, followed by the swish of the shell, as it flew in a high arc
and then smashed over the German lines. It was curious to calculate
the length of time between the flash and the explosion. Further away
some naval guns belonging to the French marines were getting the
range of the enemy's positions, and they gave a new note of music to
this infernal orchestra. It was a deep, sullen crash, with a tremendous
menace in its tone. The enemy's shells were bursting incessantly,
and at very close range, so that at times they seemed only a few
yards away. The Germans had many great howitzers, and the burst
of the shell was followed by enormous clouds which hung heavily in
the air for ten minutes or more. It was these shells which dug great
holes in the ground deep enough for a cart to be buried. Their moral
effect was awful, and one's soul was a shuddering coward before
them.

The roads were encumbered with long convoys of provisions for the
troops, ambulances, Red Cross motor-cars, gun-wagons, and farm
carts. Two regiments of Belgian cavalry--the chasseurs à cheval--
were dismounted and bivouacked with their horses drawn up in single
line along the roadway for half a mile or more. The men were splendid
fellows, hardened by the long campaign, and amazingly careless of
shells. They wore a variety of uniforms, for they were but the
gathered remnants of the Belgian cavalry division which had fought
from the beginning of the war. I was surprised to see their horses in
such good condition, in spite of a long ordeal which had so steadied
their nerves that they paid not the slightest heed to the turmoil of the
guns.

Near the line of battle, through outlying villages and past broken
farms, companies of Belgian infantry were huddled under cover out of
the way of shrapnel bullets if they could get the shelter of a doorway
or the safer side of a brick wall. I stared into their faces and saw how
dead they looked. It seemed as if their vital spark had already been
put out by the storm of battle. Their eyes were sunken and quite
expressionless. For week after week, night after night, they had been
exposed to shell-fire, and something had died within them--perhaps
the desire to live. Every now and then some of them would duck their
heads as a shell burst within fifty or a hundred yards of them, and I
saw then that fear could still live in the hearts of men who had
become accustomed to the constant chance of death. For fear exists
with the highest valour, and its psychological effect is not unknown to
heroes who have the courage to confess the truth.


14


"If any man says he is not afraid of shell-fire," said one of the bravest
men I have ever met--and at that moment we were watching how the
enemy's shrapnel was ploughing up the earth on either side of the
road on which we stood--"he is a liar!" There are very few men in this
war who make any such pretence. On the contrary, most of the
French, Belgian, and English soldiers with whom I have had wayside
conversations since the war began, find a kind of painful pleasure in
the candid confession of their fears.

"It is now three days since I have been frightened," said a young
English officer, who, I fancy, was never scared in his life before he
came out to see these battlefields of terror.

"I was paralysed with a cold and horrible fear when I was ordered
to advance with my men over open ground under the enemy's
shrapnel," said a French officer with the steady brown eyes of a man
who in ordinary tests of courage would smile at the risk of death.

But this shell-fire is not an ordinary test of courage. Courage is
annihilated in the face of it. Something else takes its place--a
philosophy of fatalism, sometimes an utter boredom with the way in
which death plays the fool with men, threatening but failing to kill; in
most cases a strange extinction of all emotions and sensations, so
that men who have been long under shell-fire have a peculiar rigidity
of the nervous system, as if something has been killed inside them,
though outwardly they are still alive and untouched.

The old style of courage, when man had pride and confidence in his
own strength and valour against other men, when he was on an
equality with his enemy in arms and intelligence, has almost gone. It
has quite gone when he is called upon to advance or hold the ground
in face of the enemy's artillery. For all human qualities are of no avail
against those death-machines. What are quickness of wit, the
strength of a man's right arm, the heroic fibre of his heart, his cunning
in warfare, when he is opposed by an enemy's batteries which belch
out bursting shells with frightful precision and regularity? What is the
most courageous man to do in such an hour? Can he stand erect
and fearless under a sky which is raining down jagged pieces of
steel? Can he adopt the pose of an Adelphi hero, with a scornful
smile on his lips, when a yard away from him a hole large enough to
bury a taxicab is torn out of the earth, and when the building against
which he has been standing is suddenly knocked into a ridiculous
ruin?

It is impossible to exaggerate the monstrous horror of the shell-fire,
as I knew when I stood in the midst of it, watching its effect upon the
men around me, and analysing my own psychological sensations with
a morbid interest. I was very much afraid--day after day I faced that
musis and hated it--but there were all sorts of other sensations
besides fear which worked a change in me. I was conscious of great
physical discomfort which reacted upon my brain. The noises were
even more distressing to me than the risk of death. It was terrifying in
its tumult. The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport,
Dixmude, Pervyse, and other towns and villages, forming a crescent,
with its left curve sweeping away from the coast. One could see the
stabbing flashes from some of the enemy's guns and a loud and
unceasing roar came from them with regular rolls of thunderous noise
interrupted by sudden and terrific shocks, which shattered into one's
brain and shook one's body with a kind of disintegrating tumult. High
above this deep-toned concussion came the cry of the shells--that
long carrying buzz--like a monstrous, angry bee rushing away from a
burning hive--which rises into a shrill singing note before ending and
bursting into the final boom which scatters death.

But more awful was the noise of our own guns. At Nieuport I stood
only a few hundred yards away from the warships lying off the coast.
Each shell which they sent across the dunes was like one of Jove's
thunderbolts, and made one's body and soul quake with the agony of
its noise. The vibration was so great that it made my skull ache as
though it had been hammered. Long afterwards I found myself
trembling with those waves of vibrating sounds. Worse still, because
sharper and more piercingly staccato, was my experience close to a
battery of French cent-vingt. Each shell was fired with a hard metallic
crack, which seemed to knock a hole into my ear-drums. I suffered
intolerably from the noise, yet--so easy it is to laugh in the midst of
pain---I laughed aloud when a friend of mine, passing the battery in
his motor-car, raised his hand to one of the gunners, and said, "Un
moment, s'il vous plaît!" It was like asking Jove to stop his
thunderbolts.

Some people get accustomed to the noise, but others never. Every
time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me,
a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrank and ducked his head with an
expression of agonized horror. He confessed to me that it "knocked
his nerves to pieces." Three such men out of six or seven had to be
invalided home in one week. One of them had a crise de nerfs, which
nearly killed him. Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them.
Intellectually they were brave men and coerced themselves into
joining many perilous adventures. It was the intolerable strain upon
the nervous system that made wrecks of them. Some men are
attacked with a kind of madness in the presence of shells. It is what a
French friend of mine called la folie des obus. It is a kind of spiritual
exultation which makes them lose self-consciousness and be caught
up, as it were, in the delirium of those crashing, screaming things. In
the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced
about aimlessly with a dreamy look in his eyes. I am sure he had not
the slightest idea where he was or what he was doing. I believe he
was "outside himself," to use a good old-fashioned phrase. And at
Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their
wounded through a storm of shells, one man who had shown a
strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car, and
said: "I must go back, I must go back! Those shells call to me." He
went back and has never been heard of again.

Greater than one's fear, more overmastering in one's interest is this
shell-fire. It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting
near bodies of troops, to see the shells kicking up the earth, now in
this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing
its shape and falling into ruins; to see how death takes its toll in an
indiscriminate way--smashing a human being into pulp a few yards
away and leaving oneself alive, or scattering a roadway with bits of
raw flesh which a moment ago was a team of horses, or whipping the
stones about a farmhouse with shrapnel bullets which spit about the
crouching figures of soldiers who stare at these pellets out of sunken
eyes. One's interest holds one in the firing zone with a grip from which
one's intelligence cannot escape whatever may be one's cowardice.
It is the most satisfying thrill of horror in the world. How foolish this
death is! How it picks and chooses, taking a man here and leaving a
man there by just a hair's-breadth of difference. It is like looking into
hell and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human
bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and
burning them in the furnace-fires of shell-stricken towns, and in a
devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood.

There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero. Beautiful
and terrible were the fires of those Belgian towns which I watched
under a star-strewn sky. There was a pure golden glow, as of liquid
metal, beneath the smoke columns and the leaping tongues of flame.
And many colours were used to paint this picture of war, for the
enemy used shells with different coloured fumes, by which I was told
they studied the effect of their fire. Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel,
which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a
smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue. Then from
the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and
heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white. One's mind
is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness,
with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have
described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself,
bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.

Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire,
sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like
men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen
colour of death. They tremble as through anguish. They are dazed
and stupid for a time. But they go back. That is the marvel of it. They
go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day. There is
no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used
perhaps--gods know--to belong to warfare when men were matched
against men, and not against unapproachable artillery. This is their
courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even
divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it
comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the
thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know
the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that
infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to
the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue!
tue!

It was at night that I used to see the full splendour of the war's infernal
beauty. After a long day in the fields travelling back in the repeated
journeys to the station of Fortem, where the lightly wounded men
used to be put on a steam tramway for transport to the Belgian
hospitals, the ambulances would gather their last load and go
homeward to Furnes. It was quite dark then, and towards nine o'clock
the enemy's artillery would slacken fire, only the heavy guns sending
out long-range shots. But five towns or more were blazing fiercely in
the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their
furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be
touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway
stood like ghostly sentinels. Now and again, above one of the burning
towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with
their fires and would smash them into smaller fuel.

As I watched the flames, I knew that each one of those poor burning
towns was the ruin of something more than bricks and mortar. It was
the ruin of a people's ideals, fulfilled throughout centuries of quiet
progress in arts and crafts. It was the shattering of all those things for
which they praised God in their churches--the good gifts of home-life,
the security of the family, the impregnable stronghold, as it seemed,
of prosperity built by labour and thrift now utterly destroyed.


15


I motored over to Nieuport-les-Bains, the seaside resort of the town of
Nieuport itself, which is a little way from the coast. It was one of those
Belgian watering-places much beloved by the Germans before their
guns knocked it to bits--a row of red-brick villas with a few pretentious
hotels utterly uncharacteristic of the Flemish style of architecture,
lining a promenade and built upon the edge of dreary and
monotonous sand-dunes. On this day the place and its neighbourhood
were utterly and terribly desolate. The only human beings I passed
on my car were two seamen of the British Navy, who were fixing
up a wireless apparatus on the edge of the sand. They stared at
our ambulances curiously, and one of them gave me a prolonged
and strenuous wink, as though to say, "A fine old game, mate,
this bloody war!" Beyond, the sea was very calm, like liquid lead,
and a slight haze hung over it, putting a gauzy veil about a line of
British and French monitors which lay close to the coast. Not a soul
could be seen along the promenade of Nieuport-les-Bains, but the
body of a man--a French marine--whose soul had gone in flight upon
the great adventure of eternity, lay at the end of it with his sightless
eyes staring up to the grey sky. Presently I was surprised to see an
elderly civilian and a small boy come out of one of the houses. The
man told me he was the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, "but," he
added, with a gloomy smile, "I have no guests at this moment In a
little while, perhaps my hotel will have gone also." He pointed to a
deep hole ploughed up an hour ago by a German "Jack Johnson." It
was deep enough to bury a taxicab.

For some time, as I paced up and down the promenade, there was
no answer to the mighty voices of the naval guns firing from some
British warships lying along the coast. Nor did any answer come for
some time to a French battery snugly placed in a hollow of the dunes,
screened by a few trees. I listened to the overwhelming concussion of
each shot from the ships, wondering at the mighty flight of the shell,
which travelled through the air with the noise of an express train
rushing through a tunnel. It was curious that no answer came! Surely
the German batteries beyond the river would reply to that deadly
cannonade.

I had not long to wait for the inevitable response. It came with a
shriek, and a puff of bluish smoke, as the German shrapnel burst a
hundred yards from where I stood. It was followed by several shells
which dropped into the dunes, not far from the French battery of cent-
vingt. Another knocked off the gable of a villa.

I had been pacing up and down under the shelter of a red-brick wall
leading into the courtyard of a temporary hospital, and presently,
acting upon orders from Lieutenant de Broqueville, I ran my car up
the road with a Belgian medical officer to a place where some
wounded men were lying. When I came back again the red-brick wall
had fallen into a heap. The Belgian officer described the climate as
"quite unhealthy," as I went away with two men dripping blood on the
floor of the car. They had been brought across the ferry, further on,
where the Belgian trenches were being strewn with shrapnel. Another
little crowd of wounded men was there. Many of them had been
huddled up all night, wet to the skin, with their wounds undressed,
and without any kind of creature comfort. Their condition had reached
the ultimate bounds of misery, and with two of these poor fellows I
went away to fetch hot coffee for the others, so that at last they might
get a little warmth if they had strength enough to drink... That
evening, after a long day in the fields of death, and when I came back
from the village where men lay waiting for rescue or the last escape, I
looked across to Nieuport-les-Bains. There were quivering flames
above it and shells were bursting over it with pretty little puffs of
smoke which rested in the opalescent sky. I thought of the proprietor
of the Grand Hotel, and wondered if he had insured his house against
"Jack Johnsons."


16


Early next morning I paid a visit to the outskirts of Nieuport town,
inland. It was impossible to get further than the outskirts at that time,
because in the centre houses were falling and flames were licking
each other across the roadways. It was even difficult for our
ambulances to get so far, because we had to pass over a bridge to
which the enemy's guns were paying great attention. Several of their
thunderbolts fell with a hiss into the water of the canal where some
Belgian soldiers were building a bridge of boats. It was just an odd
chance that our ambulance could get across without being touched,
but we took the chance and dodged between two shell-bursts. On the
other side, on the outlying streets, there was a litter of bricks and
broken glass, and a number of stricken men lay huddled in the
parlour of a small house to which they had been carried. One man
was holding his head to keep his brains from spilling, and the others
lay tangled amidst upturned chairs and cottage furniture. There was
the photograph of a family group on the mantelpiece, between cheap
vases which had been the pride, perhaps, of this cottage home. On
one of the walls was a picture of Christ with a bleeding heart.

I remember that at Nieuport there was a young Belgian doctor who
had established himself at a dangerous post within range of the
enemy's guns, and close to a stream of wounded who came pouring
into the little house which he had made into his field hospital. He had
collected also about twenty old men and women who had been
unable to get away when the first shells fell. Without any kind of help
he gave first aid to men horribly torn by the pieces of flying shell, and
for three days and nights worked very calmly and fearlessly, careless
of the death which menaced his own life.

Here he was found by the British column of field ambulances, who
took away the old people and relieved him of the last batch of
blessés. They told the story of that doctor over the supper-table that
night, and hoped he would be remembered by his own people.


17


There were picnic parties on the Belgian roadsides. Looking back
now upon those luncheon hours, with khaki ambulances as shelters
from the shrewd wind that came across the marshes, I marvel at the
contrast between their gaiety and the brooding horror in the
surrounding scene. Bottles of wine were produced and no man
thought of blood when he drank its redness, though the smell of
blood reeked from the stretchers in the cars. There were hunks of
good Flemish cheese with' fresh bread and butter, and it was
extraordinary what appetites we had, though guns were booming a
couple of kilometres away and the enemy was smashing the last
strongholds of the Belgians. The women in their field kit, so feminine
though it included breeches, gave a grace to those wayside halts,
and gave to dirty men the chance of little courtesies which brought
back civilization to their thoughts, even though life had gone back to
primitive things with just life and death, hunger and thirst, love and
courage, as the laws of existence. The man who had a corkscrew
could command respect. A lady with gold-spun hair could gnaw a
chicken bone without any loss of beauty. The chauffeurs munched
solidly, making cockney jokes out of full mouths and abolishing all
distinctions of caste by their comradeship in great adventures when
their courage, their cool nerve, their fine endurance at the wheel, and
their skill in taking heavy ambulances down muddy roads with
skidding wheels, saved many men's lives and won a heartfelt praise.
Little groups of Belgian soldiers came up wistfully and lingered round
us as though liking the sight of us, and the sound of our English
speech, and the gallantry of those girls who went into the firing-lines
to rescue their wounded.

"They are wonderful, your English ladies," said a bearded man. He
hesitated a moment and then asked timidly: "Do you think I might
shake hands with one of them?"

I arranged the little matter, and he trudged off with a flush on his
cheeks as though he had been in the presence of a queen, and
graciously received.

The Belgian officers were eager to be presented to these ladies and
paid them handsome compliments. I think the presence of these
young women with their hypodermic syringes and first-aid bandages,
and their skill in driving heavy motor-cars, and their spiritual disregard
of danger, gave a sense of comfort and tenderness to those men
who had been long absent from their women-folk and long-suffering
in the bleak and ugly cruelty of war. There was no false sentiment, no
disguised gallantry, in the homage of the Belgians to those ladies. It
was the simple, chivalrous respect of soldiers to dauntless women
who had come to help them when they were struck down and needed
pity.

Women, with whom for a little while I could call myself comrade, I
think of you now and marvel at you! The call of the wild had brought
some of you out to those fields of death. The need of more
excitement than modern life gives in time of peace, even the chance
to forget, had been the motives with which two or three of you, I think,
came upon these scenes of history, taking all risks recklessly, playing
a man's part with a feminine pluck, glad of this liberty, far from the
conventions of the civilized code, yet giving no hint of scandal to
sharp-eared gossip. But most of you had no other thought than that
of pity and helpfulness, and with a little flame of faith in your hearts
you bore the weight of bleeding men, and eased their pain when it
was too intolerable. No soldiers in the armies of the Allies have better
right to wear the decorations which a king of sorrow gave you for your
gallantry in action.


18


The Germans were still trying to smash their way through the lines
held by the Belgians, with French support. They were making
tremendous attacks at different places, searching for the breaking-
point by which they could force their way to Furnes and on to Dunkirk.
It was difficult to know whether they were succeeding or failing. It is
difficult to know anything on a modern battlefield where men holding
one village are ignorant of what is happening in the next, and where
all the sections of an army seem involved in a bewildering chaos, out
of touch with each other, waiting for orders which do not seem to
come, moving forward for no apparent reason, retiring for other
reasons hard to find, or resting, without firing a shot, in places
searched by the enemy's fire.

The enemy had built eight pontoon bridges over the Yser canal, but
all of them had been destroyed. This was a good piece of news. But
against it was the heavy loss of a Belgian company holding another
bridge further down the river. At Dixmude the Belgians held the outer
streets. Outside there had been heavy trench fighting. The enemy
had charged several times with the bayonet, but had been raked
back by the mitrailleuses.

Things were going on rather well at most parts of the line.

The French batteries were getting the range every time, and their
gunners were guessing at heaps of German dead. The Belgian
infantry was holding firm. Their cavalry was out of action for the time,
trying to keep warm on the roadsides.

That was all the truth that I could get out of a tangle of confused
details. All through another day I watched the business of battle--a
strange, mysterious thing in which one fails to find any controlling
brain. Regiments came out of the trenches and wandered back,
caked with clay, haggard for lack of sleep, with a glint of hunger in
their eyes. Guns passed along the roads with ammunition wagons,
whose axles shrieked over the stones. For an hour a Belgian battery
kept plugging shots towards the enemy's lines. The artillerymen were
leisurely at their work, handling their shells with interludes of
conversation. At luncheon time they lay about behind the guns
smoking cigarettes, and I was glad, for each of their shots seemed to
wreck my own brain. At a neighbouring village things were more
lively. The enemy was turning his fire this way. A captive balloon had
signalled the position, and shrapnels were bursting close. One shell
tore up a great hole near the railway line.

Shell after shell fell upon one dung-heap--mistaken perhaps for a
company of men. Shrapnel bullets pattered into the roadway, a piece
of jagged shell fell with a clatter.

My own chauffeur--a young man of very cool nerve and the best
driver I have known--picked it up with a grin, and then dropped it, with
a sharp cry. It was almost red-hot. The flames of the enemy's
batteries could be seen stabbing through a fringe of trees, perhaps
two kilometres away, by Pervyse. Their shells were making puff-balls
of smoke over neighbouring farms, and for miles round I could see
the clouds stretching out into long, thin wisps. The air throbbed with
horrible concussions, the dull full boom of big guns, the sharp
staccato of the smaller shell, and the high singing note of it as it came
soaring overhead. Gradually one began to realize the boredom of
battle, to acquire some of that fantastic indifference to the chance of
death which enables the soldiers to stir their soup without an upward
glance at a skyful of jagged steel. Only now and then the old question
came to one, "This--or the next?"

It was only the adventure of searching out the wounded that broke
the monotony for the Belgian ambulance men. At first they were not
hard to find--they were crowded upon the straw in cottage parlours,
cleared of all but the cheap vases on the mantelshelf and family
photographs tacked upon walls that had not been built for the bloody
mess of tragedy which they now enclosed. On their bodies they bore
the signs of the tremendous accuracy of the enemy's artillery, and by
their number, increasing during the day, one could guess at the tragic
endurance of the Belgian infantry in the ring of iron which was closing
upon them; drawing just a little nearer by half a village or half a road
as the hours passed. The ambulances carried them away to the
station of Fortem, where those who could still sit up were packed into
a steam tram, and where the stretcher-cases were taken to the civil
hospital at Furnes by motor transport. But in outlying farmsteads in
the zone of fire, and in isolated cottages which had been struck by a
chance shot, were other wounded men difficult to get. It was work for
scouting cars, and too dangerous for ambulances.

Some volunteers made several journeys down the open roads to
places not exactly suitable for dalliance. Lieutenant de Broqueville
called upon me for this purpose several times because I had a fast
little car. I was glad of the honour, though when he pointed to a
distant roof where a wounded man was reported to be lying, it looked
to me a long, long way in the zone of fire. Two houses blown to
pieces by the side of a ditch showed that the enemy's shells were
dropping close, and it was a test of nerves to drive deliberately
through the flat fields with sharp, stabbing flashes on their frontiers,
and right into the middle of an infernal tumult of guns.

It was in the darkness that I went back to Furnes again, with the last
of the wounded--a French corporal, who groaned in anguish at every
jolt in the road, and then was silent with his head flopping sideways in
a way that frightened me. Several times I called back to him,
"Courage, mon vieux! ... Comment allez vous?" But he made no
answer and there were times when I thought I had a dead man
behind me. A biting wind was blowing, and I leaned over his seat to
put a blanket over him. But it always blew off that dead-grey face and
blood-stained body. Once he groaned, and I was glad to hear the
sound and to know that he was still alive. Another man trudging along
the highway, using his rifle as a crutch, called out. He spoke the word
blessé, and I stopped to take him up and sped on again, glancing to
right and left at the villages on fire, at the quick flashes of Belgian and
German artillery signalling death to each other in the night. The
straight trees rushed by like tall, hurrying ghosts. For most of the way
we drove without our head-lights through tunnels of darkness.
"Queer, isn't it?" said my driver, and it was his only comment on this
adventure in the strangest drama of his life.


19


That night the wind came howling across the flat fields into Furnes
and a rain-storm broke in fierce gusts upon the convent walls. In this
old building with many corridors and innumerable windows, panes of
glass rattled and window-sashes creaked and doors banged like
thunderclaps. It was impossible to keep a candle alight down any of
the passages unless it were protected in a lantern, and a cold mist
crept into the house, stealthily striking one with a clammy chill. I
stayed up most of the night in the kitchen, having volunteered to
stoke the fires and fill hot-water bottles for the wounded. Most of the
nurses had gone to bed utterly exhausted. Only two or three of them
remained in the wards with one of the doctors. Every now and then
the outer bell would jangle, and I would hear the wheels of an
ambulance crunching into the courtyard.

"Blessés!" said a woman who was watching the fires with me.

But we could not take in another blessé as there were no more beds
or bed-spaces, and after despairing conversations Belgian
ambulance officers at the front door of the convent went elsewhere.
The house became very quiet except for the noise of the wind and
the rain. In the scullery where I sat by the stoves which were in my
charge, I could only hear one voice speaking. It was speaking two
rooms away, in a long, incessant monologue of madness. Now and
again a white-faced nurse came out for newly-filled water-bottles, and
while I scalded my fingers with screws which would not fit and with
boiling water poured into narrow necks, she told me about a French
officer who was dying.

"He wants his wife so badly. He would die quite happily if he could
only see her for a minute. But she is in Paris, and he will be dead
before the morning comes... I have written a letter for him, and he
kissed it before I wrote his wife's address. He keeps calling out her
name."

The scullery was warm and cosy, in spite of all the draughts. Sitting
back in a wooden chair, I nearly fell asleep, because I had had a long
day in the fields and fatigue threatened to overwhelm me. But I
wakened with a start when a door opened, letting in a sudden blast of
cold air and the noise of the beating rain, and then banged with
violence. I seemed to hear footsteps coming across the kitchen floor,
and, with an eerie feeling of some new presence in the convent, I
strode out of the scullery. A queer little figure startled me. It was
a girl in man's clothes, except for a white cap on her head,
tight-fitting above her eyes. She was dripping wet and caked in
slimy mud, and she faltered forward a little and spoke in French.

"I am very wet. And so tired and hungry! If I could sleep here, on the
floor, and dry myself a little-----"

"Who are you?" I asked. There seemed something uncanny in this
little figure coming out of the wild night.

It appeared that she was one of two Belgian girls who since the
beginning of the war had acted as infirmières with the Belgian troops,
giving the first aid in the trenches, carrying hot soup to them, and
living with them under fire. She seemed hardly more than a child, and
spoke childishly in a pitiful way, while she twisted the corner of her
jacket so that water came out and made a pool about her on the
boards. She dried herself in front of the fire and ate--ravenously--
some food which had been left on a side-table, and then lay down in
a corner of the refectory, falling into the deepest sleep as soon as her
head had touched the mattress. She did not wake next morning,
though fifty-five people made a clatter at the breakfast-table, and at
four in the afternoon she was still sleeping, like a sick child, with her
head drooping over the mattress.


20


That day, owing to the heavy rain in the night, the roads were slimy
with mud, so that the cars skidded almost over the brim of the dykes.
There was more movement among the troops, less sitting about for
orders. Officers were riding up and down the roads, and wheeling into
little groups for quick discussion. Something was happening--
something more than the ding-dong slam of the guns. A regiment of
Belgian infantry came plodding through the mud, covered with whitish
clay even to their top-hats. They were earth-men, with the blanched
look of creatures who live below ground. The news was whispered
about that the enemy was breaking through along one of the roads
between Nieuport and Fumes. Then the report came through that
they had smashed their way to Wulpen.

"We hope to hold them," said an officer, "but Fumes is in danger. It
will be necessary to clear out."

In consequence of this report, it was necessary to be quick in the
search for the wounded who had been struck down in the night. The
medical men were resolute not to go until they had taken in all that
could be removed in time. A little crowd of them were in a small villa
along the road. They were wet to the skin and quite famished, without
food or drink. A car went back for hot coffee and bread. There was
another group of wounded in the church of Oudecapelle.

They were bad cases, and lay still upon the straw. I shall never forget
the picture of that church with its painted statues huddled together
and toppled down. St. Antony of Padua and St. Sebastian were there
in the straw, and crude pictures of saints on the walls stared down
upon those bodies lying so quiet on the floor. It was the house of
God, but it was filled with the cruelty of life, and those statues seemed
to mock at men's faith.

In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by
the people. They had packed a few things into bundles and made
ready to leave their homes. In the convent where I had helped to
wash up and to fill the part of odd-job man when I was not out with
the "flying column," the doctors and nurses were already loading the
ambulances with all their cases. The last of the wounded was sent
away to a place of safety. He was a man with a sabre-cut on his
head, who for four days had lain quite still, with a grave Oriental face,
which seemed in the tranquillity of death.

A group of nuns pleaded to be taken with the doctors and nurses.
They could help in the wards or in the kitchen--if only they might go
and escape the peril of the German soldiery.

I went across the square to my own room in the Hôtel de la
Couronne, and put a few things together. A friend of mine who helped
me told the story of a life--the mistakes that had nearly ruined it, the
adventures of a heart. A queer conversation at a time when the
enemy was coming down the road. The guns were very loud over
Wulpen way. They seemed to be coming closer. Yet there was no
panic. There was even laughter in the courtyard of the hospital, where
the doctors tossed blankets, mattresses, food stores and stoves into
the motor ambulances. They were in no hurry to go. It was not the
first or the second time they had to evacuate a house menaced by
the enemy. They had made a habit of it, and were not to be flurried. I
helped the blue-eyed boy to lift the great stoves. They were "some"
weight, as an American would say, and both the blue-eyed boy and
myself were plastered with soot, so that we looked like sweeps calling
round for orders. I lifted packing-cases which would have paralysed
me in times of peace and scouted round for some of the thousand
and one things which could not be left behind without a tragedy. But
at last the order was given to start, and the procession of motor-cars
started out for Poperinghe, twenty-five kilometres to the south. Little
by little the sound of the guns died away, and the cars passed
through quiet fields where French troops bivouacked round their
camp fires. I remember that we passed a regiment of Moroccans half-
way to Poperinghe, and I looked back from the car to watch them
pacing up and down between their fires, which glowed upon their red
cloaks and white robes and their grave, bearded Arab faces. They
looked miserably cold as the wind flapped their loose garments, but
about these men in the muddy field there was a sombre dignity which
took one's imagination back to the day when the Saracens held
European soil.


21


It was dark when we reached Poperinghe and halted our cars in the
square outside the Town Hall, among a crowd of other motor-cars,
naval lorries, mitrailleuses, and wagons. Groups of British soldiers
stood about smoking cigarettes and staring at us curiously through
the gloom as though not quite sure what to make of us. And indeed
we must have looked an odd party, for some of us were in khaki and
some of us in civilian clothes with Belgian caps, and among the
crowd of nurses was a carriage-load of nuns, huddled up in their
black cloaks. Warning of our arrival in Poperinghe should have been
notified to the municipal authorities, so that they might find lodgings
for us; and the Queen of the Belgians had indeed sent through a
message to that effect, But there seemed to be some trouble about
finding a roof under which to lay our heads, and an hour went by in
the square while the lady in charge of the domesticity department
interviewed the mayor, cajoled the corporation, and inspected
convents down side streets. She came back at last with a little
hopelessness in her eyes.

"Goodness knows where we can go! There doesn't seem room for a
mouse in Poperinghe, and meanwhile the poor nurses are dying of
hunger. We must get into some kind of shelter."

I was commissioned to find at least a temporary abode and to search
around for food; not at all an easy task in a dark town where I had
never been before and crowded with the troops of three nations. I
was also made the shepherd of all these sheep, who were
commanded to keep their eyes upon me and not to go astray but to
follow where I led. It was a most ridiculous position for a London
journalist of a shy and retiring nature, especially as some of the
nurses were getting out of hand and indulging in private adventures.
One of them, a most buxom and jolly soul, who, as she confided to
me, "didn't care a damn," had established friendly relations with a
naval lieutenant, and I had great trouble in dragging her away from
his engaging conversation. Others had discovered a shop where hot
coffee was being served to British soldiers who were willing to share it
with attractive ladies. A pretty shepherd I looked when half my flock
had gone astray!

Then one of the chauffeurs had something like an apoplectic stroke in
the street--the effect of a nervous crisis after a day under shell-fire--
and with two friendly "Tommies" I helped to drag him into the Town
Hall. He was a very stout young man, with well-developed muscles,
and having lain for some time in a state of coma, he suddenly
became delirious and tried to fight me. I disposed of him in a
backyard, where he gradually recovered, and then I set out again in
search of my sheep. After scouting about Poperinghe in the
darkness, I discovered a beer tavern with a fair-sized room in which
the party might be packed with care, and then, like a pocket patriarch
with the children of Israel, I led my ladies on foot to the place of
sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend
mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head
from the glamour of the pewter pots. The others crowded in anyhow
and said in a dreadful chorus, like Katherine in "The Taming of the
Shrew," "We want our supper!"

A brilliant inspiration came to me. As there were British troops in
Poperinghe, there must also be British rations, and I had glorious
visions of Maconochie and army biscuits. Out into the dark streets
again I went with my little car, and after wayside conversations with
British soldiers who knew nothing but their own job, found at last the
officer in charge of the commissariat. He was a tall fellow and rather
haughty in the style of a British officer confronted abruptly with an
unusual request. He wanted to know who the devil I was, not liking
my civilian clothes and suspecting a German spy. But he became
sympathetic when I told him, quite dishonestly, that I was in charge of
a British field ambulance under the Belgian Government, which had
been forced to evacuate Fumes as the enemy had broken through
the Belgian lines. I expressed my gratitude for his kindness, which I
was sure he would show, in providing fifty-five army rations for fifty-
five doctors and nurses devilishly hungry and utterly destitute. After
some hesitation he consented to give me a "chit," and turning to a
sergeant who had been my guide down a dark street, said: "Take this
officer to the depot and see that he gets everything he wants." It was
a little triumph not to be appreciated by readers who do not know the
humiliations experienced by correspondents in time of war.

A few minutes later the officer came padding down the street after
me, and I expected instant arrest and solitary confinement to the end
of the war. But he was out for information.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, very politely, "but would you mind
giving me a sketch of the military situation round your part?"

I gave him an outline of the affair which had caused the Belgian
headquarters staff to shift from Furnes, and though it was, I fancy,
slightly over-coloured, he was very much obliged... So, gloriously, I
drove back to the beer-tavern with the fifty-five army rations which
were enough to feed fifty-five starving people for a week, and was
received with cheers. That night, conscious of good deeds, I laid
down in the straw of a school-house which had been turned into a
barracks, and by the light of several candle-ends, scribbled a long
dispatch, which became a very short one when the British censor had
worked his will with it.


22


After all, the ambulance column did not have to stay in Poperinghe,
but went back to their old quarters, with doctors, nurses and nuns,
and all their properties. The enemy had not followed up its
advantages, and the Belgian troops, aided by French marines and
other French troops who now arrived in greater numbers, thrust them
back and barred the way to Dunkirk. The waters of the Yser had
helped to turn the tide of war. The sluice-gates were opened and
flooded the surrounding fields, so that the enemy's artillery was
bogged and could not move.

For a little while the air in all that region between Furnes and Nieuport,
Dixmude and Pervyse, was cleansed of the odour and fume of battle.
But there were other causes of the German withdrawal after one day,
at least, when it seemed that nothing short of miraculous aid could
hold them from a swift advance along the coast. The chief cause was
to be found at Ypres, where the British army sustained repeated and
most desperate onslaughts. Ypres was now the storm centre in a ten-
days' battle of guns, which was beyond all doubt the most ferocious
and bloody episode in the first year of war on the Western side of
operations. Repeatedly, after being checked in their attacks by a
slaughter which almost annihilated entire regiments, the Germans
endeavoured to repair their shattered strength by bringing up every
available man and gun for another bout of blood. We know now that it
was one of the most awful conflicts in which humanity has ever
agonized. Heroism shone through it on both sides. The resistance
and nerve strength of the British troops were almost superhuman;
and in spite of losses which might have demoralized any army,
however splendid in valour, they fought on with that dogged spirit
which filled the trenches at Badajoz and held the lines of Torres
Vedras, a hundred years before, when the British race seemed to be
stronger than its modern generation.

There were hours when all seemed lost, when it was impossible to
bring up reserves to fill the gaps in our bleeding battalions, when so
many dead and wounded lay about and so few remained to serve the
guns and hold the trenches that another attack pushed home would
have swept through our lines and broken us to bits. The cooks and
the commissariat men took their places in the trenches, and every
man who could hold a rifle fired that day for England's sake, though
England did not know her peril.

But the German losses were enormous also, and during those ten
days they sacrificed themselves with a kind of Oriental valour, such
as heaped the fields of Omdurman with Soudanese. The Kaiser was
the new Mahdi for whom men died in masses, going with fatalistic
resignation to inevitable death. After a lull for burning and burial, for
the refilling of great gaps in regiments and divisions, the enemy
moved against us with new masses, but again death awaited them, in
spite of all their guns, and the British held their ground.

They held their ground with superb and dauntless valour, and out of
the general horror of it all there emerges the fine, bright chivalry of
young officers and men who did amazing deeds, which read like fairy
tales, even when they are told soberly in official dispatches. In this
slaughter field the individual still found a chance now and then of
personal prowess, and not all his human qualities had been
annihilated or stupefied by the overwhelming power of artillery.


23


The town of Ypres was added to the list of other Belgian towns like
those in which I saw the ruin of a nation.

It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and
women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had
fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks
and shattered glass. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the
outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between,
furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out
into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.

The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent
treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and
battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of
broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted
iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered
for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the
tale of this tragedy.

On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock
of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with
leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.

The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding,
or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or
whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all
this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which
they will never find the right words.

Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax
one of the dogs to come with them. "Might have brought us luck,"
they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast. But it slunk back into the
ruin of its master's house, distrustful of men who did things not
belonging to the code of beasts.


24


Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said. Yet in a general
way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres masses of
men did not fight so much as stand until they died.

"We just wait for death," said a Belgian officer one night, "and wonder
if it doesn't reach us out of all this storm of shells. It is a war without
soul or adventure. In the early days, when I scoured the country with
a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it. Any audacity we
had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment. The individual
counted."

"But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do--infantry,
cavalry, scouts? It is the gun that does all the business heaving out
shells, delivering death in a merciless way. It is guns, with men as
targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees
around us by a storm of hail. Our men are falling like the leaves, and
the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on
either side. One week of death is followed by another week of death.
The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on
again. It is appalling."

The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon
who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch
of wounded--a thousand of them--were lying on the straw. "It is
appalling," he said. "The destruction of this shell-fire is making a
shambles of human bodies. How can we cope with it? What can we
do with such a butchery?"

Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early
dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell
and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields,
men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.

Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places
which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was
killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey
mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.

It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by
a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more
difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and
perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed
that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the
country between Dixmude and Nieuport. There was a strange silence
behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines,
were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards
the region round Ypres.

Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they
seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again,
and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells,
firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.

Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet
located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something--soldiers
or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.

Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the
convent, and one smashed into the Hôtel de la Noble Rose, going
straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a
bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the
room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.

French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found
themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had
previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive
developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude
was retaken by the Germans.

As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy.
They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled
with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an
archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a
litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.

If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their
destruction of this fine old Flemish town.

But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust
back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who
had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have
made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground
which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many
thousands of dead and wounded.

The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the
lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the
offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the
weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.


25


The character of the fighting in this part of Flanders entered into the
monotone of the winter campaign and, though the censorship was
blamed for scarcity of news, there was really nothing to conceal in the
way of heroic charges by cavalry, dashing bayonet attacks, or rapid
counter-movements by infantry in mass. Such things for which public
imagination craved were not happening.

What did happen was a howling gale shrieking across the dunes, and
swirling up the sands into blinding clouds, and tearing across the flat
marshlands as though all the invisible gods of the old ghost world
were racing in their chariots.

In the trenches along the Yser men crouched down close to the moist
mud to shelter themselves from a wind which was harder to dodge
than shrapnel shells. It lashed them with a fierce cruelty. In spite of all
the woollen comforters and knitted vests made by women's hands at
home, the wind found its way through to the bones and marrow of the
soldiers so that they were numbed. At night it was an agony of cold,
preventing sleep, even if men could sleep while shells were searching
for them with a cry of death.

The gunners dug pits for themselves, and when they ceased fire for a
time crawled to shelter, smoking through little outlets in the damp
blankets in which they had wrapped their heads and shoulders. They
tied bundles of straw round their legs to keep out the cold and packed
old newspapers inside their chests as breast-plates, and tried to keep
themselves warm, at least in imagination.

There was no battlefield in the old idea of the world. How often must
one say this to people at home who think that a modern army is
encamped in the fields with bivouac fires and bell tents? The battle
was spread over a wide area of villages and broken towns and
shattered farmhouses, and neat little homesteads yet untouched by
fire or shell. The open roads were merely highways between these
points of shelter, in which great bodies of troops were huddled--the
internal lines of communication connecting various parts of the
fighting machine.

It was rather hot, as well as cold, at Oudecapelle and Nieucapelle,
and along the line to Styvekenskerke and Lom-bardtzyde. The
enemy's batteries were hard at work again belching out an
inexhaustible supply of shells. Over there, the darkness was stabbed
by red flashes, and the sky was zigzagged by waves of vivid
splendour, which shone for a moment upon the blanched faces of
men who waited for death.

Through the darkness, along the roads, infantry tramped towards the
lines of trenches, to relieve other regiments who had endured a spell
in them. They bent their heads low, thrusting forward into the heart of
the gale, which tore at the blue coats of these Frenchmen and
plucked at their red trousers, and slashed in their faces with cruel
whips. Their side-arms jingled against the teeth of the wind, which
tried to snatch at their bayonets and to drag the rifles out of their grip.
They never raised their heads to glance at the Red Cross carts
coming back.

Some of the French officers, tramping by the side of their men,
shouted through the swish of the gale:

"Courage, mes petits!"

"II fait mauvais temps pour les sales Boches!"

In cottage parlours near the fighting lines--that is to say in the zone of
fire, which covered many villages and farmsteads, French doctors,
buttoned up to the chin in leather coats, bent over the newest
batches of wounded.

"Shut that door! Sacred name of a dog; keep the door shut! Do you
want the gale to blow us up the chimney?"

But it was necessary to open the door to bring in another stretcher
where a man lay still.

"Pardon, mon capitaine," said one of the stretcher-bearers, as the
door banged to, with a frightful clap.

Yesterday the enemy reoccupied Dixmude.

So said the official bulletin, with its incomparable brevity of eloquence.


26


For a time, during this last month in the first year of the war, I made
my headquarters at Dunkirk, where without stirring from the town
there was always a little excitement to be had. Almost every day, for
instance, a German aeroplane--one of the famous Taube flock--
would come and drop bombs by the Town Hall or the harbour, killing
a woman or two and a child, or breaking many panes of glass, but
never destroying anything of military importance (for women and
children are of no importance in time of war), although down by the
docks there were rich stores of ammunition, petrol, and material of
every kind. These birds of death came so regularly in the afternoon
that the Dunquerquoises, who love a jest, even though it is a bloody
one, instead of saying "Trois heures et demie," used to say, "Taube
et demie" and know the time.

There was a window in Dunkirk which looked upon the chief square.
In the centre of the square is the statue of Jean-Bart, the famous
captain and pirate of the seventeenth century, standing in his sea-
boots (as he once strode into the presence of the Sun-King) and with
his sword raised above his great plumed hat. I stood in the balcony of
the window looking down at the colour and movement of the life
below, and thinking at odd moments--the thought always thrust
beneath the surface of one's musings--of the unceasing slaughter of
the war not very far away across the Belgian frontier. All these people
here in the square were in some way busy with the business of death.
They were crossing these flagged stones on the way to the
shambles, or coming back from the shell-stricken towns, là bas, as
the place of blood is called, or taking out new loads of food for guns
and men, or bringing in reports to admirals and the staff, or going to
churches to pray for men who have done these jobs before, and now,
perhaps, lie still, out of it.

This square in Dunkirk contained many of the elements which go to
make up the actions and reactions of this war. It seemed to me that a
clever stage manager desiring to present to his audience the typical
characters of this military drama--leaving out the beastliness, of
course--would probably select the very people and groups upon
whom I was now looking down from the window. Motor-cars came
whirling up with French staff officers in dandy uniforms (the stains of
blood and mud would only be omitted by Mr. Willie Clarkson). In the
centre, just below the statue of Jean-Bart, was an armoured-car
which a Belgian soldier, with a white rag round his head, was
explaining to a French cuirassier whose long horse-hair queue fell
almost to his waist from his linen-covered helm. Small boys mounted
the step and peered into the wonder-box, into the mysteries of this
neat death-machine, and poked grubby fingers into bullet-holes which
had scored the armour-plates. Other soldiers--Chasseurs Alpins in
sky-blue coats, French artillery men in their dark-blue jackets, Belgian
soldiers wearing shiny top-hats with eye-shades, or dinky caps with
gold or scarlet tassels, and English Tommies in mud-coloured khaki--
strolled about the car, and nodded their heads towards it as though to
say, "That has killed off a few Germans, by the look of it. Better sport
than trench digging."

The noise of men's voices and laughter--they laugh a good deal in
war time, outside the range of shells--came up to the open window;
overpowered now and then by the gurgles and squawks of motor-
horns, like beasts giving their death-cries. With a long disintegrating
screech there came up a slate-grey box on wheels. It made a
semicircular sweep, scattering a group of people, and two young
gentlemen of the Royal Naval Air Service sprang down and shouted
"What-ho!" very cheerily to two other young gentlemen in naval
uniforms who shouted back "Cheer-o!" from the table under my
balcony.

I knew all of them, especially one of the naval airmen who flies what
he calls a motor-bus and drops bombs with sea curses upon
the heads of any German troops he can find on a morning's
reconnaissance. He rubs his hand at the thought that he has "done
in" quite a number of the "German blighters." With a little luck he
hopes to nobble a few more this afternoon. A good day's work like
this bucks him up wonderfully, he says, except when he comes down
an awful whop in the darned old motor-bus, which is all right while she
keeps going but no bloomin' use at all when she spreads her skirts in
a ploughed field and smashes her new set of stays. Oh, a bad old
vixen, that seaplane of his! Wants a lot of coaxin'.

A battery of French artillery rattled over the cobblestones. The wheels
were caked with clay, and the guns were covered with a grey dust.
They were going up Dixmude way, or along to Ramscapelle. The
men sat their horses as though they were glued to the saddles. One
of them had a loose sleeve pinned across his chest, but a strong grip
on his bridle with his left hand. The last wheels rattled round the
corner, and a little pageant, more richly coloured, came across the
stage. A number of Algerian Arabs strode through the square, with a
long swinging gait. They were wearing blue turbans above the flowing
white "haik" which fell back upon their shoulders, and the white
burnous which reached to their ankles. They were dark, bearded
men; one of them at least with the noble air of Othello, the Moor, and
with his fine dignity.

They stared up at the statue of Jean-Bart, and asked a few questions
of a French officer who walked with a shorter step beside them. It
seemed to impress their imagination, and they turned to look back at
that figure with the raised sword and the plumed hat. Three small
boys ran by their side and held out grubby little hands, which the
Arabs shook, with smiles that softened the hard outlines of their
faces.

Behind them a cavalcade rode in. They were Arab chiefs, on little
Algerian horses, with beautifully neat and clean limbs, moving with
the grace of fallow deer across the flagged stones of Dunkirk. The
bridles glistened and tinkled with silver plates. The saddles were
covered with embroidered cloths. The East came riding to the West.
These Mohammedans make a religion of fighting. It has its ritual and
its ceremony--even though shrapnel makes such a nasty mess of
men.

So I stood looking down on these living pictures of a city in the war
zone. But now and again I glanced back into the room behind the
window, and listened to the scraps of talk which came from the
lounge and the scattered chairs. There was a queer collection of
people in this room. They, too, had some kind of business in the job
of war, either to kill or to cure. Among them was a young Belgian
lieutenant who used to make a "bag" of the Germans he killed eaeh
day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost
count. Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and
dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand
wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet
cup of coffee. A young surgeon spoke some words which I heard as I
turned my head from the window.

"It's the frightful senselessness of all this waste of life which makes
one sick with horror..."

Another doctor came in with a tale from Ypres, where he had taken
his ambulances under shell-fire.

"It's monstrous," he said, "all the red tape! Because I belong to a
volunteer ambulance the officers wanted to know by what infernal
impudence I dared to touch the wounded. I had to drive forty miles to
get official permission, and could not get it then... And the wounded
were lying about everywhere, and it was utterly impossible to cope
with the numbers of them... They stand on etiquette when men are
crying out in agony! The Prussian caste isn't worse than that."

I turned and looked out of the window again. But I saw nothing of the
crowd below. I saw only a great tide of blood rising higher and higher,
and I heard, not the squawking of motor-horns, but the moans of men
in innumerable sheds, where they lie on straw waiting for the
surgeon's knife and crying out for morphia. I saw and heard, because
I had seen and heard these things before in France and Belgium.

In the room there was the touch of quiet fingers on a piano not too
bad. It was the music of deep, soft chords. A woman's voice spoke
quickly, excitedly.

"Oh! Some one can play. Ask him to play! It seems a thousand years
since I heard some music. I'm thirsty for it!"

A friend of mine who had struck the chords while standing before the
piano, sat down, and smiled a little over the notes.

"What shall it be?" he asked, and then, without waiting for the answer,
played. It was a reverie by Chopin, I think, and somehow it seemed to
cleanse our souls a little of things seen and smelt. It was so pitiful that
something broke inside my heart a moment. I thought of the last time
I had heard some music. It was in a Flemish cottage, where a young
lieutenant, a little drunk, sang a love-song among his comrades, while
a little way off men were being maimed and killed by bursting shells.

The music stopped with a slur of notes. Somebody asked, "What was
that?"

There was the echo of a dull explosion and the noise of breaking
glass. I looked out into the square again from the open window, and
saw people running in all directions.

Presently a man came into the room and spoke to one of the doctors,
without excitement.

"Another Taube. Three bombs, as usual, and several people
wounded. You'd better come. It's only round the corner."

It was always round the corner, this sudden death. Just a step or two
from any window of war.


27


Halfway through my stay at Dunkirk I made a trip to England and
back, getting a free passage in the Government ship Invicta, which
left by night to dodge the enemy's submarines, risking their floating
mines. It gave me one picture of war which is unforgettable. We were
a death-ship that night, for we carried the body of a naval officer who
had been killed on one of the monitors which I had seen in action
several times off Nieuport. With the corpse came also several
seamen, wounded by the same shell. I did not see any of them until
the Invicla lay alongside the Prince of Wales pier. Then a party of
marines brought up the officer's body on a stretcher. They bungled
the job horribly, jamming the stretcher poles in the rails of the
gangway, and, fancying myself an expert in stretcher work, for I had
had a little practice, I gave them a hand and helped to carry the
corpse to the landing-stage. It was sewn up tightly in canvas, exactly
like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated
with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who
received it.

"Where are you going to put that, Dick?"

"Oh, stow it over there, Bill!"

That was how a British hero made his home-coming.

But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to
ugly sights. It was when the wounded seamen came up from below.
The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their
white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in
Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they
looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene
creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell
had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and
each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being
blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in
ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces
were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point
like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and
walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.

After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a
hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a
man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards,
turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange
adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter
campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country
round Furnes. But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in
their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little
kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will
remain to me like a tragic song. I had been sprinkled with the blood of
Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead. I
am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men--
the remnants of an army--who, without much help from French or
English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender,
and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the
enemy from their last patch of soil. It was worth the risk of death to
see those things.




Chapter VIII
The Soul Of Paris



1


In the beginning of the war it seemed as though the soul had gone
out of Paris and that it had lost all its life.

I have already described those days of mobilization when an
enormous number of young men were suddenly called to the colours
out of all their ways of civil life, and answered that summons without
enthusiasm for war, hating the dreadful prospect of it and cursing the
nation which had forced this fate upon them. That first mobilization
lasted for twenty-one days, and every day one seemed to notice the
difference in the streets, the gradual thinning of the crowds, the
absence of young manhood, the larger proportion of women and old
fogeys among those who remained. The life of Paris was being
drained of its best blood by this vampire, war. In the Latin Quarter
most of the students went without any preliminary demonstrations in
the café d'Harcourt, or speeches from the table-tops in the cheaper
restaurants along the Boul' Miche, where in times of peace any
political crisis or intellectual drama produces a flood of fantastic
oratory from young gentlemen with black hair, burning eyes, and dirty
finger-nails. They had gone away silently, with hasty kisses to little
mistresses, who sobbed their hearts out for a night before searching
for any lovers who might be left.

In all the streets of Paris there was a shutting up of shops. Every day
put a new row of iron curtains between the window panes, until at the
end of the twelfth day the city seemed as dismal as London on a
Sunday, or as though all the shops were closed for a public funeral.
Scraps of paper were pasted on the barred-up fronts.

"Le magasin est fermé à cause de la mobilisation."
"M. Jean Cochin et quatre fils sont au front des armées."
"Tout le personel de cet établissement est mobilisé."

A personal incident brought the significance of the general
mobilization sharply to my mind. I had not realized till then how
completely the business of Paris would be brought to a standstill, and
how utterly things would be changed. Before leaving Paris for Nancy
and the eastern frontier, I left a portmanteau and a rug in a hotel
where I had become friendly with the manager and the assistant
manager, with the hall porter, the liftman, and the valet de chambre. I
had discussed the war with each of these men and from each of
them had heard the same expressions of horror and dismay. The hall
porter was a good-humoured soul, who confided to me that he had a
pretty wife and a new-born babe, who reconciled him to the
disagreeable side of a life as the servant of any stranger who might
come to the hotel with a bad temper and a light purse...

On coming back from Nancy I went to reclaim my bag and rug. But
when I entered the hotel something seemed different. At first I could
not quite understand this difference. It seemed to me for a moment
that I had come to the wrong place. I did not see the hotel porter nor
the manager and assistant manager. There was only a sharp-
featured lady sitting at the desk in loneliness, and she looked at me,
as I stared round the hall, with obvious suspicion. Very politely I
asked for my bag and rug, but the lady's air became more frigid when
I explained that I had lost the cloak-room ticket and could not
remember the number of the room I had occupied a few days before.

"Perhaps there is some means by which you could prove that you
stayed here?" said the lady.

"Certainly. I remember the hall porter. His name is Pierre, and he
comes from the Midi."

She shook her head.

"There is no hall porter, Monsieur. He has gone."

"And then the valet de chambre. His name is François. He has curly
hair and a short brown moustache."

The lady shook her head in a most decided negative.

"The present valet de chambre is a bald-headed man, and clean-
shaven, monsieur. It must have been another hotel where you
stayed."

I began to think that this must undoubtedly be the case, and yet I
remembered the geography of the hall, and the pattern of the carpet,
and the picture of Mirabeau in the National Assembly.

Then it dawned on both of us.

"Ah! Monsieur was here before August 1. Since then everyone is
mobilized. I am the manager's wife, Monsieur, and my husband is at
the front, and we have hardly any staff here now. You will describe
the shape of your bag..."


2


The French Government was afraid of the soul of Paris. Memories of
the Commune haunted the minds of men who did not understand
that the character of the Parisian has altered somewhat since 1870.
Ministers of France who had read a little history, were terribly afraid
that out of the soul of Paris would come turbulence and mob-passion,
crises de nerfs, rioting, political strife, and panics. Paris must be
handled firmly, sobered down by every possible means, kept from the
knowledge of painful facts, spoon-fed with cheerful communiqués
whatever the truth might be, guarded by strong but hidden force,
ready at a moment's notice to smash up a procession, to arrest
agitators, to quell a rebellion, and to maintain the strictest order.

Quietly, but effectively, General Galièni, the military governor of "the
entrenched camp of Paris," as it was called, proceeded to place the
city under martial law in order to strangle any rebellious spirit which
might be lurking in its hiding places. Orders and regulations were issued
in a rapid volley fire which left Paris without any of its old life or
liberty. The terrasses were withdrawn from the cafés. No longer could
the philosophic Parisian sip his petit verre and watch the drama of the
boulevards from the shady side of a marble-topped table. He must sit
indoors like an Englishman, in the darkness of his public-house, as
though ashamed of drinking in the open. Absinthe was banned by a
thunder-stroke from the Invalides, where the Military Governor had
established his headquarters, and Parisians who had acquired the
absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment which would
reduce them to physical and moral wrecks, as creatures of the drug
habit suddenly robbed of their nerve-controlling tabloids. It was an
edict welcomed by all men of self-control who knew that France had
been poisoned by this filthy liquid, but they too became a little pale
when all the cafés of Paris were closed at eight o'clock.

"Sapristi! Qu'est qu'on peut faire les soirs? On ne peut pas dormir
tout le temps! Et la guerre durera peut-être trois mois!"

To close the cafés at eight o'clock seemed a tragic infliction to the
true Parisian, for whom life only begins after that hour, when the
stupidity of the day's toil is finished and the mind is awakened to the
intellectual interests of the world, in friendly conversation, in
philosophical discussions, in heated arguments, in wit and satire.
How then could they follow the war and understand its progress if the
cafés were closed at eight o'clock? But the edict was given and Paris
obeyed, loyally and with resignation.

Other edicts followed, or arrived simultaneously like a broadside fired
into the life of the city. Public processions "with whatever patriotic
motive" were sternly prohibited. "Purveyors of false news, or of news
likely to depress the public spirit" would be dealt with by courts-martial
and punished with the utmost severity. No musical instruments were
to be played after ten o'clock at night, and orchestras were prohibited
in all restaurants. Oh, Paris, was even your laughter to be abolished,
if you had any heart for laughter while your sons were dying on the
fields of battle?

The newspaper censors had put a strangle grip upon the press, not
only upon news of war but also upon expressions of opinion. Gustave
Hervé signed his name three days a week to blank columns of
extraordinary eloquence. Georges Clemenceau had a series of
striking head-lines which had been robbed of all their text. The
intellectuals of Paris might not express an opinion save by permission
of the military censors, most of whom, strangely enough, had
German names.

The civil police under direction of the Military Governor were very
busy in Paris during the early days of the war. Throughout the twenty-
four hours, and especially in the darkness of night, the streets were
patrolled by blue-capped men on bicycles, who rode, four by four, as
silently as shadows, through every quarter of the city. They had a
startling habit of surrounding any lonely man who might be walking in
the late hours and interrogating him as to his nationality, age and
business.

Several times I was arrested in this way and never escaped the little
frousse which came to me when these dark figures closed upon me,
as they leapt from their bicycles and said with grim suspicion:

"Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!"

My pockets were bulging with papers, which I thrust hurriedly into the
lantern-light for a close-eyed scrutiny.

They were very quick to follow the trail of a stranger, and there was
no sanctuary in Paris in which he might evade them. Five minutes
after calling upon a friend in the fifth floor flat of an old mansion
at the end of a courtyard in the Rue de Rivoli, there was a sharp
tap at his door, and two men in civil clothes came into the room,
with that sleuth-hound look which belongs to stage, and French,
detectives. They forgot to remove their bowler hats, which seemed
to me to be a lamentable violation of French courtesy.

"Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!"

Again I produced bundles of papers--permis de séjour in Paris,
Amiens, Rouen, Orleans, Le Mans; laisser-passer to Boulogne,
Dieppe, Havre, Dunkirk, Aire-sur-Lys, Béthune and Hazebrouck;
British passports and papiers visés by French consuls, French police,
French generals, French mayors, and French stationmasters. But
they were hardly satisfied. One man with an ugly bulge in his side-
pocket--you have seen at Drury Lane how quickly the revolver comes
out?--suggested that the whole collection was not worth an old
railway ticket because I had failed to comply with the latest regulation
regarding a photograph on the permis de séjour... We parted,
however, with mutual confidence and an expression of satisfaction in
the Entente Cordiale.


3


One scene is clear cut in my memory, as it was revealed in a narrow
street of Paris where a corner lantern flung its rays down upon the
white faces of two men and two women. It was midnight, and I was
waiting outside the door of a newspaper office, where my assistant
was inquiring for the latest bulletins of war. For some minutes I
watched this little group with an intuition that tragedy was likely to leap
out upon them. They belonged to the apache class, as it was easy to
see by the cut of the men's trousers tucked into their boots, with a
sash round the waist, and by the velvet bonnets pulled down
sideways over their thin-featured faces and sharp jaws. The women
had shawls over their heads and high-heeled shoes under their skirts.
At the Alhambra in London the audience would have known what
dance to expect when such a group had slouched into the glamour of
the footlights. They were doing a kind of slow dance now, though
without any music except that of women's sobs and a man's sibilant
curses. The younger of the two men was horribly drunk, and it was
clear that the others were trying to drag him home before trouble
came. They swayed with him up and down, picked him up when he
fell, swiped him in the face when he tried to embrace one of the
women, and lurched with him deeper into the throat of the alley. Then
suddenly the trouble came. Four of those shadows on bicycles rode
out of the darkness and closed in.

As sharp and distinct as pistol shots two words came to my ears out
of the sudden silence and stillness which had arrested the four
people:

"Vos papiers!"

There was no "s'il vous plait" this time.

It was clear that one at least of the men--I guessed it was the
drunkard--had no papers explaining his presence in Paris, and that
he was one of the embusqués for whom the Military Governor was
searching in the poorer quarters of the city (in the richer quarters
there was not such a sharp search for certain young gentlemen of
good family who had failed to answer the call to the colours), and for
whom there was a very rapid method of punishment on the sunny
side of a white wall. Out of the silence of that night came shriek after
shriek. The two women abandoned themselves to a wild and terror-
stricken grief. One of them flung herself on to her knees, clutching at
an agent de police, clasping him with piteous and pleading hands,
until he jerked her away from him. Then she picked herself up and
leant against a wall, moaning and wailing like a wounded animal. The
drunkard was sobered enough to stand upright in the grasp of two
policemen while the third searched him. By the light of the street lamp
I saw his blanched face and sunken eyes. Two minutes later the
police led both men away, leaving the women behind, very quiet now,
sobbing in their shawls.

It was the general belief in Paris that many apaches were shot pour
encourager les autres. I cannot say that is true--the police of Paris
keep their own secrets--but I believe a front place was found for some
of them in the fighting lines. Paris lost many of its rebels, who will
never reappear in the Place Pigalle and the Avenue de Clichy on
moonless nights. Poor devils of misery! They did but make war on the
well-to-do, and with less deadly methods, as a rule, than those
encouraged in greater wars when, for trade interests also, men kill
each other with explosive bombs and wrap each other's bowels
round their bayonets and blow up whole companies of men in
trenches which have been sapped so skilfully that at the word "Fire!"
no pair of arms or legs remains to a single body and God Himself
would not know His handiwork.


4


For several months there was a spy mania in Paris, and the police,
acting under military orders, showed considerable activity in "Boche"
hunting. It was a form of chase which turned me a little sick when I
saw the captured prey, just as I used to turn sick as a boy when I saw
a rat caught in a trap and handed over to the dogs, or any other
animal run to earth. All my instincts made me hope for the escape of
the poor beast, vermin though it might be.

One day as I was sitting in the Café Napolitain on one of my brief
excursions to Paris from the turmoil in the wake of war, I heard shouts
and saw a crowd of people rushing towards a motor-car coming down
the Boulevard des Italiens. One word was repeated with a long-drawn
sibilance:

"Espion! Espion!"

The spy was between two agents de police. He was bound with cords
and his collar had been torn off, so that his neck was bare, like a man
ready for the guillotine. Somehow, the look of the man reminded me
in a flash of those old scenes in the French Revolution, when a
French aristocrat was taken in a tumbril through the streets of Paris.
He was a young man with a handsome, clear-cut face, and though he
was very white except where a trickle of blood ran down his cheek
from a gash on his forehead, he smiled disdainfully with a proud curl
of the lip. He knew he was going to his death, but he had taken the
risk of that when he stayed in Paris for the sake of his country. A
German spy! Yes, but a brave man who went rather well to his death
through the sunlit streets of Paris, with the angry murmurs of a crowd
rising in waves about him.

On the same night I saw another episode of this spy-hunting period,
and it was more curious. It happened in a famous restaurant not far
from the Comédie Française, where a number of French soldiers in a
variety of uniforms dined with their ladies before going to the front
after a day's leave from the fighting lines. Suddenly, into the buzz of
voices and above the tinkle of glasses and coffee-cups one voice
spoke in a formal way, with clear, deliberate words. I saw that it was
the manager of the restaurant addressing his clients.

"Messieurs et Mesdames,---My fellow-manager has just been
arrested on a charge of espionage. I have been forbidden to speak
more than these few words, to express my personal regret that I am
unable to give my personal attention to your needs and pleasure."

With a bow this typical French "patron"--surely not a German spy!--
turned away and retreated from the room. A look of surprise passed
over the faces of the French soldiers. The ladies raised their pencilled
eyebrows, and then--so quickly does this drama of war stale after its
first experience--continued their conversation through whiffs of
cigarette smoke.


5


But it was not of German spies that the French Government was
most afraid. Truth to tell, Paris was thronged with Germans,
naturalized a week or two before the war and by some means or
other on the best of terms with the police authorities, in spite of spy-
hunts and spy-mania, which sometimes endangered the liberty of
innocent Englishmen, and Americans more or less innocent. It was
only an accident which led to the arrest of a well-known milliner
whose afternoon-tea parties among her mannequins were attended
by many Germans with business in Paris of a private character.
When this lady covered up the Teutonic name of her firm with a Red
Cross flag and converted her showrooms into a hospital ward,
excellently supplied except with wounded men, the police did not
inquire into the case until a political scandal brought it into the
limelight of publicity.

The French Government was more afraid of the true Parisians. To
sober them down in case their spirit might lead to trouble, the streets
of Paris were kept in darkness and all places of amusement were
closed as soon as war was declared. In case riots should break forth
from secret lairs of revolutionary propaganda, squadrons of Gardes
Republicains patrolled the city by day and night, and the agents de
police were reinforced by fusiliers marins with loaded rifles, who--
simple fellows as they are--could hardly direct a stranger to the Place
de la Concorde or find their own way to the Place de la Bastille.

At all costs Paris was not to learn the truth about the war if there were
any unpleasant truths to tell. For Paris there must always be victories
and no defeats. They must not even know that in war time there were
wounded men; otherwise they might get so depressed or so enraged
that (thought the French Government) there might be the old cry of
"Nous sommes trahis!" with a lopping off of Ministers' heads and
dreadful orgies in which the streets of Paris would run red with blood.
This reason alone--so utterly unreasonable, as we now know--may
explain the farcical situation of the hospitals in Paris during the first
two months of the war. Great hotels like the Astoria, Claridge's, and
the Majestic had been turned into hospitals magnificently equipped
and over-staffed. Nothing that money could buy was left unbought, so
that these great palaces might be fully provided with all things
necessary for continual streams of wounded men. High society in
France gave away its wealth with generous enthusiasm. Whatever
faults they might have they tried to wash them clean by charity, full-
hearted and overflowing, for the wounded sons of France. Great
ladies who had been the beauties of the salons, whose gowns had
been the envy of their circles, took off their silks and chiffons and put
on the simple dress of the infirmière and volunteered to do the
humblest work, the dirty work of kitchen-wenches and scullery-girls
and bedroom-maids, so that their hands might help, by any service,
the men who had fought for France. French doctors, keen and
brilliant men who hold a surgeon's knife with a fine and delicate skill,
stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war. The best brains
of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris.

But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on
for weeks. After the battle of the Marne, when the wounded were
pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a
day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with
all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded
was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of
Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert
of beds. Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare
arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they
awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white
counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and
there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides--
women whose beauty was famous through Europe--they murmured
"Allahu akbar" in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a
Mohammedan paradise.

It was a comedy in which there was a frightful tragedy. The doctors
and surgeons standing by these empty beds, wandering through
operating-theatres magnificently appointed, asked God why their
hands were idle when so many soldiers of France were dying for lack
of help, and why Paris, the nerve-centre of all railway lines, so close
to the front, where the fields were heaped with the wreckage of the
war, should be a world away from any work of rescue. It was the
same old strain of falsity which always runs through French official
life. "Politics!" said the doctors of Paris; "those cursed politics!"

But it was fear this time. The Government was afraid of Paris, lest it
should lose its nerve, and so all trains of wounded were diverted from
the capital, wandering on long and devious journeys, side-tracked for
hours, and if any ambulances came it was at night, when they glided
through back streets under cover of darkness, afraid of being seen.

They need not have feared, those Ministers of France. Paris had
more courage than some of them, with a greater dignity and finer
faith. When the French Ministry fled to Bordeaux without having
warned the people that the enemy was at their gates, Paris remained
very quiet and gave no sign of wild terror or of panic-stricken rage.
There was no political cry or revolutionary outburst. No mob orator
sprang upon a café chair to say "Nous sommes trahis!" There was
not even a word of rebuke for those who had doctored the official
communiqués and put a false glamour of hope upon hideous facts.
Hurriedly and dejectedly over a million people of Paris fled from the
city, now that the Government had led the way of flight. They were
afraid, and there was panic in their exodus, but even that was not
hysterical, and men and women kept their heads, though they had
lost their hopes. It was rare to see a weeping woman. There was no
wailing of a people distraught. Sadly those fugitives left the city which
had been all the world to them, and the roads to the south were black
with their multitudes, having left in fear but full of courage on the road,
dejected, but even then finding a comedy in the misery of it, laughing
--as most French women will laugh in the hour of peril--even when
their suffering was greatest and when there was a heartache in their
humour.


6


After all the soul of Paris did not die, even in those dark days when so
many of its inhabitants had gone, and when, for a little while, it
seemed a deserted city. Many thousands of citizens remained,
enough to make a great population, and although for a day or two
they kept for the most part indoors, under the shadow of a fear that at
any moment they might hear the first shells come shrieking overhead,
or even the clatter of German cavalry, they quickly resumed the daily
routine of their lives, as far as it was possible at such a time. The fruit
and vegetable-stalls along the Rue St. Honoré were thronged as
usual by frugal housewives who do their shopping early, and down by
Les Halles, to which I wended my way through the older streets of
Paris, to note any change in the price of food, there were the usual
scenes of bustling activity among the baskets and the litter of the
markets. Only a man who knew Paris well could detect a difference in
the early morning crowds--the absence of many young porters who
used to carry great loads on their heads before quenching their thirst
at the Chien Qui Fume, and the presence of many young girls of the
midinette class, who in normal times lie later in bed before taking the
metro to their shops.

The shops were closed now. Great establishments like the Galeries
Lafayette had disbanded their armies of girls and even many of the
factories in the outer suburbs, like Charenton and La Villette, had
suspended work, because their mechanics and electricians and male
factory hands had been mobilized at the outset of the war. The
women of Paris were plunged into dire poverty, and thousands of
them into idleness, which makes poverty more awful. Even now I can
hardly guess how many of these women lived during the first months
of the war. There were many wives who had been utterly dependent
for the upkeep of their little homes upon men who were now earning
a sou a day as soldiers of France, with glory as a pourboire. So many
old mothers had been supported by the devotion of sons who had
denied themselves marriage, children, and the little luxuries of life in
order that out of their poor wages in Government offices they might
keep the woman to whom they owed their being. Always the greater
part of the people of Paris lives precariously on the thin edge of a
limited income, stinting and scraping, a sou here, a sou there, to
balance the week's accounts and eke out a little of that joie de vivre,
which to every Parisian is an essential need. Now by the edict of war
all life's economies had been annihilated. There were no more wages
out of which to reckon the cost of an extra meal, or out of which to
squeeze the price of a seat at a Pathé cinema. Mothers and wives
and mistresses had been abandoned to the chill comfort of national
charity, and oh, the coldness of it!

The French Government had promised to give an allowance of 1
franc 25 centimes a day to the women who were dependent on
soldier husbands. Perhaps it is possible to live on a shilling a day in
Paris, though, by Heaven, I should hate to do it. Nicely administered it
might save a woman from rapid starvation and keep her thin for quite
a time. But even this measure of relief was difficult to get. French
officials are extraordinarily punctilious over the details of their work,
and it takes them a long time to organize a system which is a
masterpiece of safeguards and regulations and subordinate clauses.
So it was with them in the first weeks of the war, and it was a pitiable
thing to watch the long queues of women waiting patiently outside the
mairies, hour after hour and sometimes day after day, to get that one
franc twenty-five which would buy their children's bread. Yet the
patience of these women never failed, and with a resignation which
had something divine in it, they excused the delays, the official
deliberations, the infinite vexations which they were made to suffer,
by that phrase which has excused everything in France: "C'est la
guerre!" Because it was war, they did not raise their voices in shrill
protest, or wave their skinny arms at imperturbable men who said,
"Attendez, s'il vous plaît!" with damnable iteration, or break the
windows of Government offices in which bewildering regulations were
drawn up in miles of red tape.

"C'est la guerre!" and the women of Paris, thinking of their men at the
front, dedicated themselves to suffering and were glad of their very
hunger pains, so that they might share the hardships of the soldiers.

By good chance, a number of large-hearted men and women, more
representative of the State than the Ministry in power, because they
had long records of public service and united all phases of intellectual
and religious activity in France, organized a system of private charity
to supplement the Government doles, and under the title of the
Secours Nationale, relieved the needs of the destitute with a prompt
and generous charity in which there was human love beyond the
skinflint justice of the State. It was the Secours Nationale which saved
Paris in those early days from some of the worst miseries of the war
and softened some of the inevitable cruelties which it inflicted upon
the women and children. Their organization of ouvroirs, or workshops
for unemployed girls, where a franc a day (not much for a long day's
labour, yet better than nothing at all) saved many midinettes from
sheer starvation.

There were hard times for the girls who had not been trained to
needlework or to the ordinary drudgeries of life, though they toil hard
enough in their own professions. To the dancing girls of Montmartre,
the singing girls of the cabarets, and the love girls of the streets, Paris
with the Germans at its gates was a city of desolation, so cold as they
wandered with questing eyes through its loneliness, so cruel to those
women of whom it has been very tolerant in days of pleasure. They
were unnecessary now to the scheme of things. Their merchandise--
tripping feet and rhythmic limbs, shrill laughter and roguish eyes,
carmined lips and pencilled lashes, singing voices and cajoleries--had
no more value, because war had taken away the men who buy these
things, and the market was closed. These commodities of life were no
more saleable than paste diamonds, spangles, artificial roses, the
vanities of fashion showrooms, the trinkets of the jeweller in the Rue
de la Paix, and the sham antiques in the Rue Mazarin. Young men,
shells, hay, linen for bandages, stretchers, splints, hypodermic
syringes were wanted in enormous quantities, but not light o' loves,
with cheap perfume on their hair, or the fairies of the footlights with all
the latest tango steps. The dance music of life had changed into a
funeral march, and the alluring rhythm of the tango had been followed
by the steady tramp of feet, in common time, to the battlefields of
France. Virtue might have hailed it as a victory. Raising her chaste
eyes, she might have cried out a prayer of thankfulness that Paris
had been cleansed of all its vice, and that war had purged a people of
its carnal weakness, and that the young manhood of the nation had
been spiritualized and made austere. Yes, it was true. War had
captured the souls and bodies of men, and under her discipline of
blood and agony men's wayward fancies, the seductions of the flesh,
the truancies of the heart were tamed and leashed.

Yet a Christian soul may pity those poor butterflies of life who had
been broken on the wheels of war. I pitied them, unashamed of this
emotion, when I saw some of them flitting through the streets of Paris
on that September eve when the city was very quiet, expecting
capture, and afterwards through the long, weary weeks of war. They
had a scared look, like pretty beasts caught in a trap. They had
hungry eyes, filled with an enormous wistfulness. Their faces were
blanched, because rouge was dear when food had to be bought
without an income, and their lips had lost their carmine flush. Outside
the Taverne Royale one day two of them spoke to me--I sat scribbling
an article for the censor to cut out. They had no cajoleries, none of
the little tricks of their trade. They spoke quite quietly and gravely.

"Are you an Englishman?"

"Yes."

"But not a soldier?"

"No. You see my clothes!"

"Have you come to Paris for pleasure? That is strange, for now there
is nothing doing in that way."

"Non, c'est vrai. Il n'y a rien à faire dans ce genre."

I asked them how they lived in war time.

One of the girls--she had a pretty delicate face and a serious way of
speech--smiled, with a sigh that seemed to come from her little high-
heeled boots.

"It is difficult to live. I was a singing girl at Montmartre. My lover is
at the war. There is no one left. It is the same with all of us. In a
little while we shall starve to death. Mais, pourquoi pas? A singing
girl's death does not matter to France, and will not spoil the joy
of her victory!"

She lifted a glass of amer picon--for the privilege of hearing the truth
she could tell me I was pleased to pay for it--and said in a kind of
whisper, "Vive la France!" and then, touching her glass with her lips:
"Vive l'Angleterre!"

The other girl leaned forward and spoke with polite and earnest
inquiry.

"Monsieur would like a little love?"

I shook my head.

"Ça ne marche pas. Je suis un homme sérieux." "It is very cheap to-
day," said the girl. "Ça ne coûte pas cher, en temps de guerre."


7


After the battle of the Marne the old vitality of Paris was gradually
restored. The people who had fled by hundreds of thousands dribbled
back steadily from England and provincial towns where they had
hated their exile and had been ashamed of their flight. They came
back to their small flats or attic room rejoicing to find all safe under a
layer of dust--shedding tears, some of them, when they saw the
children's toys, which had been left in a litter on the floor, and the
open piano with a song on the music-rack, which a girl had left as she
rose in the middle of a bar, wavering off into a cry of fear, and all the
domestic treasures which had been gathered through a life of toil and
abandoned--for ever it seemed--when the enemy was reported within
twenty miles of Paris in irresistible strength. The city had been saved.
The Germans were in full retreat. The great shadow of fear had been
lifted and the joy of a great hope thrilled through the soul of Paris, in
spite of all that death là-bas, where so many young men were making
sacrifices of their lives for France.

As the weeks passed the streets became more thronged, and the
shops began to re-open, their business conducted for the most part
by women and old people. A great hostile army was entrenched less
than sixty miles away. A ceaseless battle, always threatening the
roads to Paris, from Amiens and Soissons, Rheims and Vic-sur-
Aisne, was raging night and day, month after month. But for the
moment when the enemy retreated to the Aisne, the fear which had
been like a black pall over the spirit of Paris, lifted as though a great
wind had blown it away, and the people revealed a sane, strong spirit
of courage and confidence and patience, amazing to those who still
believed in the frivolity and nervousness and unsteady emotionalism
of the Parisian population.

Yet though normal life was outwardly resumed (inwardly all things had
changed), it was impossible to forget the war or to thrust it away from
one's imagination for more than half an hour or so of forgetfulness.
Those crowds in the streets contained multitudes of soldiers of all
regiments of France, coming and going between the base depots and
the long lines of the front. The streets were splashed with the colours
of all those uniforms--crimson of Zouaves, azure of chasseurs
d'Afrique, the dark blue of gunners, marines. Figures of romance
walked down the boulevards and took the sun in the gardens of the
Tuileries. An Arab chief in his white burnous and flowing robes
padded in soft shoes between the little crowds of cocottes who smiled
into his grave face with its dark liquid eyes and pointed beard, like
Othello the Moor. Senegalese and Turcos with rolling eyes and
wreathed smiles sat at the tables in the Café de la Paix, paying
extravagantly for their fire-water, and exalted by this luxury of life
after the muddy hell of the trenches and the humid climate which
made them cough consumptively between their gusts of laughter.
Here and there a strange uniform of unusual gorgeousness made
all men turn their heads with a "Qui est ça?" such as the full dress
uniform of a dandy flight officer of cardinal red from head to foot,
with a golden wing on his sleeve. The airman of ordinary grade had
no such magnificence, yet in his black leather jacket and blue breeches
above long boots was the hero of the streets and might claim any
woman's eyes, because he belonged to a service which holds the
great romance of the war, risking his life day after day on that miracle
of flight which has not yet staled in the imagination of the crowd,
and winging his way god-like above the enemy's lines, in the roar
of their pursuing shells.

Khaki came to Paris, too, and although it was worn by many who did
not hold the King's commission but swaggered it as something in the
Red Cross--God knows what!--the drab of its colour gave a thrill to all
those people of Paris who, at least in the first months of the war, were
stirred with an immense sentiment of gratitude because England had
come to the rescue in her hour of need, and had given her blood
generously to France, and had cemented the Entente Cordiale with
deathless ties of comradeship. "Comme ils sont chics, ces braves
anglais!" They did not soon tire of expressing their admiration for the
"chic" style of our young officers, so neat and clean-cut and
workmanlike, with their brown belts and brown boots, and khaki riding
breeches.

"Ulloh... Engleesh boy? Ahlright, eh?" The butterfly girls hovered
about them, spread their wings before those young officers from the
front and those knights of the Red Cross, tempted them with all their
wiles, and led them, too many of them, to their mistress Circe, who
put her spell upon them.

At every turn in the street, or under the trees of Paris, some queer
little episode, some startling figure from the great drama of the war
arrested the interest of a wondering spectator. A glimpse of tragedy
made one's soul shudder between two smiles at the comedy of life.
Tears and laughter chased each other through Paris in this time of
war.

"Coupé gorge, comme ça. Sale boche, mort. Sa tête, voyez. Tombé
à terre. Sang! Mains, en bain de sang. Comme ça!"

So the Turco spoke under the statue of Aphrodite in the gardens of
the Tuileries to a crowd of smiling men and girls. He had a German
officer's helmet. He described with vivid and disgusting gestures how
he had cut off the man's head--he clicked his tongue to give the
sound of it--and how he had bathed his hands in the blood of his
enemy, before carrying this trophy to his trench. He held out his
hands, staring at them, laughing at them as though they were still
crimson with German blood. ... A Frenchwoman shivered a little and
turned pale. But another woman laughed--an old creature with
toothless gums--with a shrill, harsh note.

"Sale race!" she said; "a dirty race! I should be glad to cut a German
throat!"

Outside the Invalides, motor-cars were always arriving at the
headquarters of General Galièni. French staff officers came at full
speed, with long shrieks on their motor-horns, and little crowds
gathered round the cars to question the drivers.

"Ça marche, la guerre? Il y a du progrès?"

British officers came also, with dispatches from headquarters, and
two soldiers with loaded rifles in the back seats of cars that had been
riddled with bullets and pock-marked with shrapnel.

Two of these men told their tale to me. They had left the trenches the
previous night to come on a special mission to Paris, and they
seemed to me like men who had been in some torture chamber and
suffered unforgettable and nameless horrors. Splashed with mud,
their faces powdered with a greyish clay and chilled to the bone by
the sharp shrewd wind of their night near Soissons and the motor
journey to Paris, they could hardly stand, and trembled and spoke
with chattering teeth.

"I wouldn't have missed it," said one of them, "but I don't want to go
through it again. It's absolutely infernal in those trenches, and the
enemy's shell-fire breaks one's nerves."

They were not ashamed to confess the terror that still shook them,
and wondered, like children, at the luck--the miracle of luck--which
had summoned them from their place in the firing-line to be the escort
of an officer to Paris, with safe seats in his motor-car.


8


For several weeks of the autumn while the British were at Soissons,
many of our officers and men came into Paris like this, on special
missions or on special leave, and along the boulevards one heard all
accents of the English tongue from John o' Groats to Land's End and
from Peckham Rye to Hackney Downs. The Kilties were the wonder
of Paris, and their knees were under the fire of a multitude of eyes as
they went swinging to the Gare du Nord The shopgirls of Paris
screamed with laughter at these brawny lads in "jupes," and
surrounded them with shameless mirth, while Jock grinned from ear
to ear and Sandy, more bashful, coloured to the roots of his fiery hair.
Cigarettes were showered into the hands of these soldier lads. They
could get drunk for nothing at the expense of English residents of
Paris--the jockeys from Chantilly, the bank clerks of the Imperial Club,
the bar loungers of the St. Petersbourg. The temptation was not
resisted with the courage of Christian martyrs. The Provost-Marshal
had to threaten some of his own military police with the terrors of
court-martial.

The wounded were allowed at last to come to Paris, and the
surgeons who had stood with idle hands found more than enough
work to do, and the ladies of France who had put on nurses' dresses
walked very softly and swiftly through long wards, no longer thrilled
with the beautiful sentiment of smoothing the brows of handsome
young soldiers, but thrilled by the desperate need of service, hard
and ugly and terrible, among those poor bloody men, agonizing
through the night, helpless in their pain, moaning before the rescue of
death. The faint-hearted among these women fled panic-stricken,
with blanched faces, to Nice and Monte Carlo and provincial
châteaux, where they played with less unpleasant work. But there
were not many like that. Most of them stayed, nerving themselves to
the endurance of those tragedies, finding in the weakness of their
womanhood a strange new courage, strong as steel, infinitely patient,
full of pity cleansed of all false sentiment. Many of these fine ladies of
France, in whose veins ran the blood of women who had gone very
bravely to the guillotine, were animated by the spirit of their
grandmothers and by the ghosts of French womanhood throughout
the history of their country, from Geneviève to Sister Julie, and putting
aside the frivolity of life which had been their only purpose, faced the
filth and horrors of the hospitals without a shudder and with the virtue
of nursing nuns.

Into the streets of Paris, therefore, came the convalescents and the
lightly wounded, and one-armed or one-legged officers or simple
poilus with bandaged heads and hands could be seen in any
restaurant among comrades who had not yet received their baptism
of fire, had not cried "Touché!" after the bursting of a German shell.

It was worth while to spend an evening, and a louis, at Maxim's, or at
Henry's, to see the company that came to dine there when the
German army was still entrenched within sixty miles of Paris. They
were not crowded, those places of old delight, and the gaiety had
gone from them, like the laughter of fair women who have passed
beyond the river. But through the swing doors came two by two, or in
little groups, enough people to rob these lighted rooms of loneliness.
Often it was the woman who led the man, lending him the strength of
her arm. Yet when he sat at table--this young officer of the Chasseurs
in sky-blue jacket, or this wounded Dragoon with a golden casque
and long horse-hair tail--hiding an empty sleeve against the woman's
side, or concealing the loss of a leg beneath the table cloth, it was
wonderful to see the smile that lit up his face and the absence of all
pain in it.

"Ah! comme il fait bon!"

I heard the sigh and the words come from one of these soldiers--not
an officer but a fine gentleman in his private's uniform--as he looked
round the room and let his brown eyes linger on the candle-lights and
the twinkling glasses and snow-white table-cloths. Out of the mud and
blood of the trenches, with only the loss of an arm or a leg, he had
come back to this sanctuary of civilization from which ugliness is
banished and all grim realities.

So, for this reason, other soldiers came on brief trips to Paris from the
front. They desired to taste the fine flavour of civilization in its ultra-
refinement, to dine delicately, to have the fragrance of flowers about
them, to sit in the glamour of shaded lights, to watch a woman's
beauty through the haze of cigarette-smoke, and to listen to the
music of her voice. There was always a woman by the soldier's side,
propping her chin in her hands and smiling into the depths of his
eyes. For the soul of a Frenchman demands the help of women, and
the love of women, however strong his courage or his self-reliance.
The beauty of life is to him a feminine thing, holding the spirit of
motherhood, romantic love and comradeship more intimate and
tender than between man and man. Only duty is masculine and hard.


9


The theatres and music-halls of Paris opened one by one in the
autumn of the first year of war. Some of the dancing girls and the
singing girls found their old places behind the footlights, unless they
had coughed their lungs away, or grown too pinched and plain. But
for a long time it was impossible to recapture the old spirit of these
haunts, especially in the music-halls, where ghosts passed in the
darkness of deserted promenoirs, and where a chill gave one goose-
flesh in the empty stalls,

Paris was half ashamed to go to the Folies Bergères or the
Renaissance, while away là-bas men were lying on the battlefields or
crouching in the trenches. Only when the monotony of life without
amusement became intolerable to people who have to laugh so that
they may not weep, did they wend their way to these places for an
hour or two. Even the actors and actresses and playwrights of Paris
felt the grim presence of death not far away. The old Rabelaisianism
was toned down to something like decency and at least the grosser
vulgarities of the music-hall stage were banned by common consent.

The little indecencies, the sly allusions, the candour of French
comedy remained, and often it was only stupidity which made one
laugh. Nothing on earth could have been more ridiculous than the
little lady who strutted up and down the stage, in the uniform of a
British Tommy, to the song of "Tipperary," which she rendered as a
sentimental ballad, with dramatic action. When she lay down on her
front buttons and died a dreadful death from German bullets, still
singing in a feeble voice: "Good-bye, Piccadilly; farewell, Leicester
Square," there were British officers in the boxes who laughed until
they wept, to the great astonishment of a French audience, who saw
no humour in the exhibition.

The kilted ladies of the Olympia would have brought a blush to the
cheeks of the most brazen-faced Jock from the slums of Glasgow,
though they were received with great applause by respectable
French bourgeois with elderly wives. And yet the soul of Paris, the big
thing in its soul, the spirit which leaps out to the truth and beauty of
life, was there even in Olympia, among the women with the roving
eyes, and amidst all those fooleries.

Between two comic "turns" a patriotic song would come. They were
not songs of false sentiment, like those patriotic ballads which thrill
the gods in London, but they had a strange and terrible sincerity, not
afraid of death nor of the women's broken hearts, nor of the grim
realities of war, but rising to the heights of spiritual beauty in their
cry to the courage of women and the pity of God. They sang of
the splendours of sacrifice for France and of the glory of that young
manhood which had offered its blood to the Flag. The old Roman
spirit breathed through the verses of these music-hall songs, written
perhaps by hungry poets au sixième étage, but alight with a little
flame of genius. The women who sang them were artists. Every
gesture was a studied thing. Every modulation of the voice was the
result of training and technique. But they too were stirred with a real
emotion, and as they sang something would change the audience,
some thrill would stir them, some power, of old ideals, of traditions
strong as natural instinct, of enthusiasm for their country of France,
for whom men will gladly die and women give their heart's blood,
shook them and set them on fire.


10


The people of Paris, to whom music is a necessity of life, were not
altogether starved, though orchestras had been abolished in the
restaurants. One day a well-known voice, terrific in its muscular
energy and emotional fervour, rose like a trumpet-call in a quiet
courtyard off the Rue St. Honoré. It was the voice of "Bruyant
Alexandre"--"Noisy Alexander"--who had new songs to sing about the
little soldiers of France and the German vulture and the glory of the
Tricolour. Giving part of his proceeds to the funds for the wounded,
he went from courtyard to courtyard--one could trace his progress by
vibration of tremendous sound--and other musicians followed him, so
that often when I came up the Rue Royale or along quiet streets
between the boulevards, I was tempted into the courts by the tinkle of
guitars and women's voices singing some ballad of the war with a
wonderful spirit and rhythm which set the pulses beating at a quicker
pace. In the luncheon hour crowds of midinettes surrounded the
singers, joining sometimes in the choruses, squealing with laughter at
jests in verse not to be translated in sober English prose and finding a
little moisture in their eyes after a song of sentiment which reminded
them of the price which must be paid for glory by young men for
whose homecoming they had waited through the winter and the
spring.


11


No German soldier came through the gates of Paris, and no German
guns smashed a way through the outer fortifications. But now and
then an enemy came over the gates and high above the ramparts, a
winged messenger of death, coming very swiftly through the sky,
killing a few mortals down below and then retreating into the hiding-
places behind the clouds. There were not many people who saw the
"Taube"--the German dove--make its swoop and hurl its fire-balls.
There was just a speck in the sky, a glint of metal, and the far-
humming of an aerial engine. Perhaps it was a French aviator coming
back from a reconnaissance over the enemy's lines on the Aisne, or
taking a joy ride over Paris to stretch his wings. The little shop-girls
looked up and thought how fine it would be to go riding with him, as
high as the stars--with one of those keen profiled men who have such
roguish eyes when they come to earth. Frenchmen strolling down the
boulevards glanced skywards and smiled. They were brave lads who
defended the air of Paris. No Boche would dare to poke the beak of
his engine above the housetops. But one or two men were uneasy
and stood with strained eyes. There was something peculiar about
the cut of those wings en haut. They seemed to bend back at the tips,
unlike a Blériot, with its straight spread of canvas.

"Sapristi! une Taube! ... Attention, mon vieux!" In some side streets of
Paris a hard thing hit the earth and opened it with a crash. A woman
crossing the road with a little girl--she had just slipped out of her
courtyard to buy some milk--felt the ground rise up and hit her in the
face. It was very curious. Such a thing had never happened to her
before. "Suzette?" She moaned and cried, "Suzette?" But Suzette did
not answer. The child was lying sideways, with her face against the
kerbstone. Her white frock was crimsoning with a deep and spreading
stain. Something had happened to one of her legs. It was broken and
crumpled up, like a bird's claw.

"Suzette! Ma petite! O, mon Dieu!" A policeman was bending over
little Suzette. Then he stood straight and raised a clenched fist to the
sky. "Sale Boche! ... Assassin! ... Sale cochon!" People came
running up the street and out of the courtyards. An ambulance glided
swiftly through the crowd. A little girl whose name was Suzette was
picked up from the edge of the kerbstone out of a pool of blood. Her
face lay sideways on the policeman's shoulder, as white as a
sculptured angel on a tombstone. It seemed that she would never
walk again, this little Suzette, whose footsteps had gone dancing
through the streets of Paris. It was always like that when a Taube
came. That bird of death chose women and children as its prey, and
Paris cursed the cowards who made war on their innocents.

But Paris was not afraid. The women did not stay indoors because
between one street and another they might be struck out of life,
without a second's warning. They glanced up to the sky and smiled
disdainfully. They were glad even that a Taube should come now and
then, so that they, the women of Paris, might run some risks in this
war and share its perils with their men, who every day in the trenches
là-bas, faced death for the sake of France. "Our chance of death is a
million to one," said some of them. "We should be poor things to take
fright at that!"


12


But there were other death-ships that might come sailing through the
sky on a fair night without wind or moon. The enemy tried to affright
the soul of Paris by warnings of the destruction coming to them with a
fleet of Zeppelins. But Paris scoffed. "Je m'en fiche de vos
Zeppelins!" said the spirit of Paris. As the weeks passed by and the
months, and still no Zeppelins came, the menace became a jest. The
very word of Zeppelin was heard with hilarity. There were comic
articles in the newspapers, taunting the German Count who had
made those gas-bags. There were also serious articles proving the
impossibility of a raid by airships. They would be chased by French
aviators as soon as they were sighted. They would be like the
Spanish Armada, surrounded by the little English warships, pouring
shot and shell into their unwieldy hulks. Not one would escape down
the wind.

The police of Paris, more nervous than the public, devised a system
of signals if Zeppelins were sighted. There were to be bugle-calls
throughout the city, and the message they gave would mean "lights
out!" in every part of Paris. For several nights there were rehearsals
of darkness, without the bugle-calls, and the city was plunged into
abysmal gloom, through which people who had been dining in
restaurants lost themselves in familiar streets and groped their way
with little shouts of laughter as they bumped into substantial shadows.

Paris enjoyed the adventure, the thrill of romance in the mystery of
darkness, the weird beauty of it. The Tuileries gardens, without a
single light except the faint gleams of star-dust, was an enchanted
place, with the white statues of the goddesses very vague and
tremulous in the shadow world above banks of invisible flowers which
drenched the still air with sweet perfumes. The narrow streets were
black tunnels into which Parisians plunged with an exquisite frisson of
romantic fear. High walls of darkness closed about them, and they
gazed up to the floor of heaven from enormous gulfs. A man on a
balcony au cinquième was smoking a cigarette, and as he drew the
light made a little beacon-flame, illumining his face before dying out
and leaving a blank wall of darkness. Men and women took hands
like little children playing a game of bogey-man. Lovers kissed each
other in this great hiding-place of Paris, where no prying eyes could
see. Women's laughter, whispers, swift scampers of feet, squeals of
dismay made the city murmurous. La Ville Lumière was extinguished
and became an unlighted sepulchre thronged with ghosts. But the
Zeppelins had not come, and in the morning Paris laughed at last
night's jest and said, "C'est idiot!"

But one night--a night in March--people who had stayed up late by
their firesides, talking of their sons at the front or dozing over the
Temps, heard a queer music in the streets below, like the horns of
elf-land blowing. It came closer and louder, with a strange sing-song
note in which there was something ominous.

"What is that?" said a man sitting up in an easy-chair and looking
towards a window near the Boulevard St. Germain.

The woman opposite stretched herself a little wearily. "Some drunken
soldier with a bugle. . . . Good gracious, it is one o'clock and we are
not in bed!"

The man had risen from his chair and flung the window open.

"Listen! ... They were to blow the bugles when the Zeppelins came...
Perhaps..."

There were other noises rising from the streets of Paris. Whistles
were blowing, very faintly, in far places. Firemen's bells were ringing,
persistently.

"L'alerte!" said the man. "The Zeppelins are coming!"

The lamp at the street corner was suddenly extinguished, leaving
absolute darkness.

"Fermez vos rideaux!" shouted a hoarse voice.

Footsteps went hurriedly down the pavement and then were silent.

"It is nothing!" said the woman; "a false alarm!" "Listen!"

Paris was very quiet now. The bugle-notes were as faint as far-off
bells against the wind. But there was no wind, and the air was still. It
was still except for a peculiar vibration, a low humming note, like a
great bee booming over clover fields. It became louder and the
vibration quickened, and the note was like the deep stop of an organ.
Tremendously sustained was the voice of a great engine up in the
sky, invisible. Lights were searching for it now. Great rays, like
immense white arms, stretched across the sky, trying to catch that
flying thing. They crossed each other, flying backwards and forwards,
travelled softly and cautiously across the dark vault as though groping
through every inch of it for that invisible danger. The sound of guns
shocked into the silence, with dull reports. From somewhere in Paris
a flame shot up, revealing in a quick flash groups of shadow figures
at open windows and on flat roofs.

"Look!" said the man who had a view across the Boulevard St.
Germain.

The woman drew a deep breath.

"Yes, there is one of them! ... And another! ... How fast they travel!"

There was a black smudge in the sky, blacker than the darkness. It
moved at a great rate, and the loud vibrations followed it. For a
moment or two, touched by one of the long rays of light it was
revealed--a death-ship, white from stem to stern and crossing the sky
like a streak of lightning. It went into the darkness again and its
passage could only be seen now by some little flames which seemed
to fall from it. They went out like French matches, sputtering before
they died.

In all parts of Paris there were thousands of people watching the
apparition in the sky. On the heights of the Sacré Cur inhabitants of
Montmartre gathered and thrilled to the flashing of the searchlights
and the bursting of shrapnel.

The bugle-calls bidding everybody stay indoors had brought Paris out
of bed and out of doors. The most bad-tempered people in the city
were those who had slept through the alerte, and in the morning
received the news with an incredulous "Quoi? Non, ce n'est pas
possible! Les Zeppelins sont venus? Je n'ai pas entendu le moindre
bruit!"

Some houses were smashed in the outer suburbs. A few people had
been wounded in their beds. Unexploded bombs were found in
gardens and rubbish heaps. After all, the Zeppelin raid had been a
grotesque failure in the fine art of murder, and the casualty list was so
light that Paris jeered at the death-ships which had come in the night.
Count Zeppelin was still the same old blagueur. His precious airships
were ridiculous.

A note of criticism crept into the newspapers and escaped the
censor. Where were the French aviators who had sworn to guard
Paris from such a raid? There were unpleasant rumours that these
adventurous young gentlemen had taken the night off with the ladies
of their hearts. It was stated that the telephone operator who ought to
have sent the warning to them was also making la bombe, or
sleeping away from his post. It was beyond a doubt that certain well-
known aviators had been seen in Paris restaurants until closing
time... Criticism was killed by an official denial from General Galièni,
who defended those young gentlemen under his orders, and affirmed
that each man was at the post of duty. It was a denial which caused
the scandalmongers to smile as inscrutably as Mona Lisa.


13


The shadow of war crept through every keyhole in Paris, and no man
or woman shut up in a high attic with some idea or passion could
keep out the evil genii which dominated the intellect and the
imagination, and put its cold touch upon the senses, through that
winter of agony when the best blood in France slopped into the
waterlogged trenches from Flanders to the Argonne. Yet there were
coteries in Paris which thrust the Thing away from them as much as
possible, and tried to pretend that art was still alive, and that
philosophy was untouched by these brutalities. In the Restaurant des
Beaux-Arts and other boîtes where men of ideas pander to the baser
appetites for 1 franc 50 (vin compris), old artists, old actors, sculptors
whose beards seemed powdered with the dust of their ateliers, and
littérateurs who will write you a sonnet or an epitaph, a wedding
speech, or a political manifesto in the finest style of French poesy and
prose (a little archaic in expression) assembled nightly just as in the
days of peace. Some of the youngest faces who used to be grouped
about the tables had gone, and now and then there was silence for a
second as one of the habitués would raise his glass to the memory of
a soldier of France (called to the colours on that fatal day in August)
who had fallen on the Field of Honour. The ghost of war stalked even
into the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts, but his presence was ignored as
much as might be by these long-haired Bohemians with grease-
stained clothes and unwashed hands who discussed the spirit of
Greek beauty, the essential viciousness of women, the vulgarity of
the bourgeoisie, the prose of Anatole France, the humour of Rabelais
and his successors, and other eternal controversies with a pretext of
their old fire. If the theme of war slipped in it was discussed with an
intellectual contempt, and loose-lipped old men found a frightful mirth
in the cut-throat exploits of Moroccans and Senegalese, in the bestial
orgies of drunken Boches, and in the most revolting horrors of
bayonet charges and the corps-à-corps. It was as though they
wanted to reveal the savagery of war to the last indescribable
madness of its lust. "Pah!" said an old cabotin, after one of these
word-pictures. "This war is the last spasm of the world's barbarity.
Human nature will finish with it this time. . . . Let us talk of the women
we have loved. I knew a splendid creature once--she had golden hair,
I remember--"

One of these shabby old gentlemen touched me on the arm.

"Would Monsieur care to have a little music? It is quite close here,
and very beautiful. It helps one to forget the war, and all its misery."

I accepted the invitation. I was more thirsty for music than for vin
ordinaire or cordiale Médoc. Yet I did not expect very much round the
corner of a restaurant frequented by shabby intellectuals... That was
my English stupidity.

A little group of us went through a dark courtyard lit by a high dim
lantern, touching a sculptured figure in a far recess.

"Pas de bruit," whispered a voice through the gloom.

Up four flights of wooden stairs we came to the door of a flat which
was opened by a bearded man holding a lamp.

"Soyez les bienvenus!" he said, with a strongly foreign accent.

It was queer, the contrast between the beauty of his salon into which
we went and the crudeness of the restaurant from which we had
come. It was a long room, with black wall-paper, and at the far end of
it was a shaded lamp on a grand piano. There was no other light, and
the faces of the people in the room, the head of a Greek god on a
pedestal, some little sculptured figures on an oak table, and some
portrait studies on the walls, were dim and vague until my eyes
became accustomed to this yellowish twilight. No word was spoken
as we entered, and took a chair if we could find one. None of the
company here seemed surprised at this entry of strangers--for two of
us were that--or even conscious of it. A tall, clean-shaven young man
with a fine, grave face--certainly not French--was playing the violin,
superbly; I could not see the man at the piano who touched the keys
with such tenderness. Opposite me was another young man, with the
curly hair and long, thin face of a Greek faun nursing a violoncello,
and listening with a dream in his eyes. A woman with the beauty of
some northern race sat in an oak chair with carved arms, which she
clasped tightly. I saw the sparkle of a ring on her right hand. The
stone had caught a ray from the lamp and was alive with light. Other
people with strange, interesting faces were grouped about this salon,
absorbed in that music of the violin, which played something of
spring, so lightly, so delicately, that our spirit danced to it, and joy
came into one's senses as on a sunlit day, when the wind is playing
above fields of flowers. Afterwards the cellist drew long, deep chords
from his great instrument, and his thin fingers quivered against the
thick strings, and made them sing grandly and nobly. Then the man
at the piano played alone, after five minutes of silence, in which a few
words were spoken, about some theme which would work out with
strange effects.

"I will try it," said the pianist. "It amuses me to improvise. If it would
not worry you--"

It was not wearisome. He played with a master-touch, and the room
was filled with rushing notes and crashing harmonies. For a little time
I could not guess the meaning of their theme. Then suddenly I was
aware of it. It was the tramp of arms, the roar of battle, the song of
victory and of death. Wailing voices came across fields of darkness,
and then, with the dawn, birds sang, while the dead lay still.

The musician gave a queer laugh. "Any good?"

"C'est la guerre!" said a girl by my side. She shivered a little.

They were Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes in that room, with a few
Parisians among them. Students to whom all life is expressed in
music, they went on with their work in spite of the war. But war had
touched their spirit too, with its great tragedy, and found expression in
their art. It was but one glimpse behind the scenes of Paris, in time of
war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were
drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to
Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their
studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and
scraping of palettes and adventures among books.

Even the artists' clubs had not all closed their doors, though
so many young painters were mixing blood with mud and watching
impressionistic pictures of ruined villages through the smoke of shells.
Through cigarette smoke I gazed at the oddest crowd in one of these
clubs off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Slavs with matted hair,
American girls in Futurist frocks, Italians like figures out of pre-
Raphaelite frescoes, men with monkey faces and monkey manners,
men with the faces of mediaeval saints a little debauched by devilish
temptations, filled the long bare room, spoke in strange tongues to
each other, and made love passionately in the universal language
and in dark corners provided with ragged divans. A dwarf creature
perched on a piano stool teased the keys of an untuned piano and
drew forth adorable melody, skipping the broken notes with great
agility. ... It was the same old Paris, even in time of war.


14


The artists of neutral countries who still kept to their lodgings in the
Quartier Latin and fanned the little flame of inspiration which kept
them warm though fuel is dear, could not get any publicity for their
works. There was no autumn or spring salon in the Palais des Beaux-
Arts, where every year till war came one might watch the progress of
French art according to the latest impulse of the time stirring the
emotions of men and women who claim the fullest liberties even for
their foolishness. War had killed the Cubists, and many of the
Futurists had gone to the front to see the odd effects of scarlet blood
on green grass. The Grand Palais was closed to the public. Yet there
were war pictures here, behind closed doors, and sculpture stranger
than anything conceived by Marinetti. I went to see the show, and
when I came out again into the sunlight of the gardens, I felt very
cold, and there was a queer trembling in my limbs.

The living pictures and the moving statuary in the Grand Palais
exhibited the fine arts of war as they are practised by civilized men
using explosive shells, with bombs, shrapnel, hand-grenades,
mitrailleuses, trench-mines, and other ingenious instruments by which
the ordinary designs of God may be re-drawn and re-shaped to suit
the modern tastes of men. I saw here the Spring Exhibition of the
Great War, as it is catalogued by surgeons, doctors, and scientific
experts in wounds and nerve diseases.

It was not a pretty sight, and the only thing that redeemed its ugliness
was the way in which all those medical men were devoting
themselves to the almost hopeless task of untwisting the contorted
limbs of those victims of the war spirit, and restoring the shape of
man botched by the artists of the death machines.

In the Great Hall through which in the days of peace pretty women
used to wander with raised eyebrows and little cries of "Ciel!" (even
French women revolted against the most advanced among the
Futurists), there was a number of extraordinary contrivances of a
mechanical kind which shocked one's imagination, and they were
being used by French soldiers in various uniforms and of various
grades, with twisted limbs, and paralytic gestures. One young man,
who might have been a cavalry officer, was riding a queer bicycle
which never moved off its pedestal, though its wheels revolved to the
efforts of its rider. He pedalled earnestly and industriously, though
obviously his legs had stiffened muscles, so that every movement
gave him pain. Another man, "bearded like the bard," sat with his
back to the wall clutching at two rings suspended from a machine and
connected with two weights. Monotonously and with utterly
expressionless eyes, he raised and lowered his arms a few inches or
so, in order to bring back their vitality, which had been destroyed by a
nervous shock. Many wheels were turning in that great room and
men were strapped to them, as though in some torture chamber,
devilishly contrived. In this place, however, the work was to defeat the
cruelties of War the Torturer, after it had done its worst with human
flesh.

The worst was in other rooms, where poor wrecks of men lay face
downwards in hot-air boxes, where they stayed immovable and silent
as though in their coffins, or with half their bodies submerged in
electrolysed baths. Nurses were massaging limbs which had been
maimed and smashed by shell-fire, and working with fine and delicate
patience at the rigid fingers of soldiers, some of whom had lost their
other arms, so that unless they could use their last remaining fingers,
three or four to a hand, they would be useless for any work in the
world. But most pitiable of all were the long rows of the paralysed and
the blind, who lay in the hospital ward, motionless and sightless, with
smashed faces. In the Palace of Fine Arts this statuary might have
made the stones weep.


15


At last the spring song sounded through the streets of Paris with a
pagan joy.

There was a blue sky over the city--so clear and cloudless that if any
Zeppelin came before the night, it would have been seen a mile high,
as a silver ship, translucent from stem to stern, sailing in an azure
sea. One would not be scared by one of these death-ships on such a
day as this, nor believe, until the crash came, that it would drop down
destruction upon this dream city, all aglitter in gold and white, with all
its towers and spires clean-cut against the sky.

It was hard to think of death and war; because spring had come with
its promise of life. There was a thrill of new vitality throughout the
city. I seemed to hear the sap rising in the trees along the boulevards.
Or was it only the wind plucking at invisible harp-strings, or visible
telephone wires, and playing the spring song in Parisian ears?

In the Tuileries gardens, glancing aslant the trees, I saw the first
green of the year, as the buds were burgeoning and breaking into tiny
leaves. The white statues of goddesses--a little crumbled and
weather-stained after the winter--were bathed in a pale sunshine.
Psyche stretched out her arms, still half-asleep, but waking at the call
of spring. Pomona offered her fruit to a young student, who gazed at
her with his black hat pushed to the back of his pale forehead.

Womanhood, with all her beauty carved in stone, in laughing and
tragic moods, in the first grace of girlhood, and in full maturity, stood
poised here in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seemed alive and
vibrant with this new thrill of life which was pulsing in the moist earth
and whispering through the trees, because spring had come to Paris.

There was no doubt about it. The flower girls who had been early to
les Halles came up the rue Royale one morning with baskets full of
violets, so that all the street was perfumed as though great ladies
were passing and wafting scent in their wake. Even the old cocher
who drove me down the rue Cambon had put on a new white hat. He
had heard the glad tidings, this old wrinkled man, and he clacked his
whip to let others know, and gave the glad-eye--a watery, wicked old
eye--to half a dozen midinettes who came dancing along the rue St.
Honoré. They knew without his white hat, and the clack of his whip.
The ichor of the air had got into their blood. They laughed without the
reason for a jest, and ran, in a skipping way, because there was the
spring-song in their feet.

Along the Champs Elysées there was the pathway of the sun.
Through the Arc de Triomphe there was a glamorous curtain of cloth
of gold, and arrows of light struck and broke upon the golden figures
of Alexander's Bridge. Looking back I saw the dome of the Invalides
suspended in space, like a cloud in the sky. It was painted over to
baffle the way of hostile aircraft, but the paint was wearing off, and the
gold showed through again, glinting and flashing in the air-waves.

The Seine was like molten liquid and the bridges which span it a
dozen times or more between Notre Dame and the Pont de l'Aima
were as white as snow, and unsubstantial as though they bridged the
gulfs of dreams. Even the great blocks of stone and the balks of
timber which lie on the mud banks below the Quai d'Orsay--it is where
the bodies of suicides float up and bring new tenants to the Morgue--
were touched with the beauty of this lady day, and invited an artist's
brush.

The Eiffel Tower hung a cobweb in the sky. Its wires had been thrilling
to the secrets of war, and this signal station was barricaded so that no
citizens might go near, or pass the sentries pacing there with loaded
rifles. But now it was receiving other messages, not of war. The
wireless operator with the receiver at his ears must have heard those
whispers coming from the earth: "I am spring... The earth is waking...
I am coming with the beauty of life... I am gladness and youth..."

Perhaps even the sentry pacing up and down the wooden barricade
heard the approach of some unseen presence when he stood still
that morning and peered through the morning sunlight. "Halt! who
goes there?" "A friend." "Pass, friend, and give the countersign."

The countersign was "Spring," and where the spirit of it stepped,
golden crocuses had thrust up through the warming earth, not far
from where, a night or two before, fire-balls dropped from a hostile air-
craft.

Oh, strange and tragic spring, of this year 1915! Was it possible that,
while Nature was preparing her beauty for the earth, and was busy in
the ways of life, men should be heaping her fields with death, and
drenching this fair earth with blood?

One could not forget. Even in Paris away from the sound of the guns
which had roared in my ears a week before, and away from the moan
of the wounded which had made my ears ache worse than the noise
of battle, I could not forget the tragedy of all this death which was
being piled up under the blue sky, and on fields all astir with the life of
the year.

In the Tuileries gardens the buds were green. But there were black
figures below them. The women who sat there all the afternoon,
sewing, and knitting, or with idle hands in their laps, were clothed in
widows' black. I glanced into the face of one of these figures as I
passed. She was quite a girl to whom the spring-song should have
called with a loud, clear note of joy. But her head drooped and her
eyes were steadfast as they stared at the pathway, and the sunshine
brought no colour into her white cheeks... She shivered a little, and
pulled her crêpe veil closer about her face.

Down the broad pathway between the white statues came a
procession of cripples. They wore the uniforms of the French army,
and were mostly young men in the prime of life, to whom also the
spring should have brought a sense of vital joy, of intense and
energetic life. But they dragged between their crutches while their
lopped limbs hung free. A little further off in a patch of sunshine
beyond the wall of the Jeu de Paumes, sat half a dozen soldiers of
France with loose sleeves pinned to their coats, or with only one leg
to rest upon the ground. One of them was blind and sat there with his
face to the sun, staring towards the fountain of the nymphs with
sightless eyes. Those six comrades of war were quite silent, and did
not "fight their battles o'er again." Perhaps they were sad because
they heard the spring-song, and knew that they could never step out
again to the dance-tune of youth.

And yet, strangely, there was more gladness than sadness in Paris
now that spring had come, in spite of the women in black, and the
cripples in the gardens. Once again it brought the promise of life.
"Now that the spring is here," said the old cab-driver in the white hat,
"France will soon be free and the war will soon be over."

This hopefulness that the fine weather would end the war quickly was
a splendid superstition which buoyed up many hearts in France.
Through the long, wet months of winter the women and the old
people had agonized over the misery of their soldiers in the trenches.
Now that the earth was drying again, and the rain clouds were
vanishing behind a blue sky, there was new hope, and a wonderful
optimism in the spirit of the people. "The spring will bring victory to
France" was an article of faith which comforted the soul of the little
midinette who sang on her way to the Rue Lafayette, and the French
soldier who found a wild flower growing in his trench.


16


I have written many words about the spirit of Paris in war. Yet all
these little glimpses I have given reveal only the trivial characteristics
of the city. Through all these episodes and outward facts, rising
above them to a great height of spirituality, the soul of Paris was a
white fire burning with a steady flame. I cannot describe the effect of it
upon one's senses and imagination. I was only conscious of it, so that
again and again, in the midst of the crowded boulevards, or in the dim
aisles of Notre Dame, or wandering along the left bank of the Seine, I
used to say to myself, silently or aloud: "These people are wonderful!
They hold the spirit of an unconquerable race... Nothing can smash
this city of intellect, so gay, and yet so patient in suffering, so
emotional and yet so stoical in pride and courage!"

There was weakness, and vanity, in Paris. The war had not cleansed
it of all its vice or of all its corruption, but this burning wind of love
for La Patrie touched the heart of every man and woman, and
inflamed them so that self-interest was almost consumed, and
sacrifice for the sake of France became a natural instinct. The
ugliest old hag in the markets shared this love with the most
beautiful woman of the salons; the demi-mondaine with her rouged
lips, knelt in spirit, like Mary Magdalene before the cross, and was
glad to suffer for the sake of a pure and uncarnal love, symbolized
to her by the folds of the Tricolour or by the magic of that word,
"La France!" which thrilled her soul, smirched by the traffic of the
streets. The most money-loving bourgeois, who had counted every
sou and cheated every other one, was lifted out of his meanness
and materialism and did astounding things, without a murmur,
abandoning his business to go back to the colours as a soldier of
France, and regarding the ruin of a life's ambitions without a
heartache so that France might be free.

There were embusqués in Paris-perhaps hundreds, or even
thousands of young men who searched for soft jobs which would
never take them to the firing-line, or who pleaded ill-health with the
successful influence of a family or political "pull." Let that be put down
honestly, because nothing matters save the truth. But the manhood
of Paris as a whole, after the first shudder of dismay, the first agonies
of this wrench from the safe, familiar ways of life, rose superbly to the
call of la Patrie en danger! The middle-aged fathers of families and
the younger sons marched away singing and hiding their sadness
under a mask of careless mirth. The boys of eighteen followed them
in the month of April, after nine months of war, and not a voice in
Paris was raised to protest against this last and dreadful sacrifice.
Paris cursed the stupidity of the war, cried "How long, O Lord, how
long?" as it dragged on in its misery, with accumulating sums of
death, was faint at the thought of another winter campaign, and
groaned in spirit when its streets were filled with wounded men and
black-garbed women. But though Paris suffered with the finer agonies
of the sensitive intelligence, it did not lose faith or courage, and found
the heart to laugh sometimes, in spite of all its tears.

City of beauty, built out of the dreams of great artists and great poets,
I have watched you through this time of war, walking through your
silent streets in the ordeal of most dreadful days, mingling with your
crowds when a multitude of cripples dragged their lopped limbs
thiough the sunlight, studying your moods of depression, and
hopefulness, and passionate fervour, wandering in your churches,
your theatres and your hospitals, and lingering on mild nights under
the star-strewn sky which made a vague glamour above your
darkness; and always my heart has paid a homage to the spirit which
after a thousand years of history and a thousand million crimes, still
holds the fresh virtue of ardent youth, the courage of a gallant race,
and a deathless faith in the fine, sweet, gentle things of art and life.
The Germans, however great their army, could never have captured
the soul of Paris.




Chapter IX
The Soldiers Of France



1


When in the first days of the war I saw the soldiers of France on their
way to the front, I had even then a conviction that the fighting qualities
of the nation had not degenerated in forty-four years of peace, after
the downfall in which the courage of the men had been betrayed by
the corruption of a Government. Afterwards, during many months as
a wanderer in this war, I came to know the French soldier with the
intimacy of long conversations to the sound of guns, in the first line of
trenches facing the enemy, in hospitals, where he spoke quietly while
comrades snored themselves to death, in villages smashed to pieces
by shell-fire, in troop trains overcrowded with wounded, in woods and
fields pockmarked by the holes of marmites, and in the restaurants of
Paris and provincial towns where, with an empty sleeve or one
trouser-leg dangling beneath the tablecloth, he told me his
experiences of war with a candour in which there was no
concealment of truth; and out of all these friendships and revelations
of soul the character of the soldiers of France stands before my mind
in heroic colours.

Individually, of course, the qualities of these men differ as one man
from another in any nation or class. I have seen the neurasthenic,
quivering with agony in his distress of imaginary terrors, and the man
with steady nerves, who can turn a deaf ear to the close roar of guns
and eat a hunk of bread-and-cheese with an unspoilt appetite within a
yard or two of death; I have seen the temperament of the aristocrat
and the snob in the same carriage with the sons of the soil and the
factory whose coarse speech and easy-going manners jarred upon
his daintiness. War does not entirely annihilate all distinctions of caste
even in France, where Equality is a good word, and it does not blend
all intellectual and moral qualities into one type of character, in spite
of the discipline of compulsory service and the chemical processes
which mix flesh and blood together in the crucible of a battlefield. So it
is impossible to write of the French soldier as a single figure, or to
make large generalizations about the armies of France. The coward
skulks by the side of the war. The priestly spirit in the ranks is
outraged by the obscenities of the debauchee.

Yet out of those great masses of men who have fought for France
there does emerge a certain definite character overwhelming the
details of their individual differences, and I have seen certain qualities
of temperament which belong to the majority of them, as essential
elements of the national spirit of France. The quality of their
patriotism, for example, shines very clear above all these millions of
men who have abandoned all their small self-interests for the supreme
purpose of defending France. England has her patriotism--we
give a great proof of it in blood--but it is not like that of France, not
so religious in its sentiment, not so passionate in its convictions, not
so feminine a thing. To most of these French soldiers, indeed to all
that I have talked with, the love of France is like the faith of a devout
Catholic in his church. It is not to be argued about. It holds the very
truth of life. It enshrines all the beauty of French ideals, all the rich
colour of imagination, all the poetry and music that has thrilled
through France since the beginning of our civilization, all her agonies
and tears. To the commonest soldier of France, "La Patrie" is his
great mother, with the tenderness of motherhood, the authority of
motherhood, the sanctity of motherhood, as to a Catholic the Blessed
Virgin is the mother of his soul. Perhaps as one of her children he has
been hardly dealt with, has starved and struggled and received many
whippings, but he does not lose his mother-love. The thought of
outrageous hands plucking at her garments, of hostile feet trampling
upon her, of foul attempts upon her liberty and honour, stirs him to
just that madness he would feel if his individual mother, out of whose
womb he came, were threatened in the same way. He does not like
death--he dreads the thought of it--but without questioning his soul he
springs forward to save this mother-country of his and dies upon her
bosom with a cry of "Vive la France!"


2


The French soldier, whatever his coarseness or his delicacy, needs
feminine consolation, and all his ideals and his yearnings and his self-
pity are intimately associated with the love of women, and especially
of one woman--his mother. When Napoleon, in the island of St.
Helena, used to talk about the glories of his victorious years, and then
brooded over the tragedy of his overthrow so that all his soul was
clouded with despair, he used to rouse himself after the silence which
followed those hours of self-analysis and say, "Let us talk about
women--and love." Always it is the feminine spirit in which a
Frenchman bathes his wounds. One small incident I saw a year or
two ago gave me the clue to this quality in the French character. It
was when Védrines, the famous airman, was beaten by only a few
minutes in the flight round England. Capitaine Conneau--"Beaumont,"
as he called himself--had outraced his rival and waited, with French
gallantry, to shake the hand of the adversary he had defeated on
untiring wings. A great crowd of smart men and women waited also at
Brooklands to cheer the second in the race, who in England is always
more popular than the prize-winner. But when Védrines came to earth
out of a blue sky he was savage and bitter. The loss of the prize-
money was a great tragedy to this mechanic who had staked all his
ambition on the flight. He shouted out harsh words to those who
came to cheer him, and shook them off violently when they tried to
clap him on the back. He was savagely angry. Then suddenly
something seemed to break in his spirit, and his face quivered.

"Is there any woman to embrace me?" he asked. Out of the crowd
came a pretty Frenchwoman and, understanding the man, though
she had not met him before, she held out her arms to him and raised
her face.

"Allons-donc, mon vieux!" she said. The man put his arms about her
and kissed her, while tears streamed down his face, covered in sweat
and dust. He was comforted, like a boy who had hurt himself, in his
mother's arms. It was a queer little episode--utterly impossible in the
imagination of an Englishman--but a natural thing in France.

So when a Frenchman lies dying, almost unconscious before the last
breath, it is always a woman's name that he cries out, or whispers,
though not always the name of his wife or mistress. One word is
heard again and again in the hospital wards, where the poilus lie,
those bearded fellows, so strong when they went out to the war, but
now so weak and helpless before death.

"Maman! Maman!"

It is to the bosom of motherhood that the spirit of the Frenchman
goes in that last hour.

"Oh, my dear little mamma," writes a young lieutenant of artillery, "it
would be nice to be in my own room again, where your picture hangs
over my bed looking down on the white pillows upon which you used
to make the sign of the Cross before I went to sleep. I often try to
dream myself into that bedroom again, but the cold is too intense for
dreams, and another shell comes shrieking overhead. War is nothing
but misery, after all."


3


Yet if any English reader imagines that because this thread of
sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in
the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those
men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as
hard in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was
this very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the
war, when I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now.

After a few weeks in the field these men, who had been labourers
and mechanics, clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop
assistants and railway porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of
Paris who had played the fool with pretty girls, were fined down to the
quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them--
the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours--and tested by
long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat
against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard
actions, and by their first experience of indescribable horrors, among
dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I
found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but they had
the look of knighthood, with a calm light shining in their eyes and with
resolute lips. They had no gaiety in those days, when France was in
gravest peril, and they did not find any kind of fun in this war. Out of
their baptism of fire they had come with scorched souls, knowing the
murderous quality of the business to which they were apprenticed;
but though they did not hide their loathing of it, nor the fears which
had assailed them, nor their passionate anger against the people
who had thrust this thing upon them, they showed no sign of
weakness. They were willing to die for France, though they hated
death, and in spite of the first great rush of the German legions, they
had a fine intellectual contempt of that army, which seemed to me
then unjustified, though they were right, as history now shows. Man
against man, in courage and cunning they were better than the
Germans, gun against gun they were better, in cavalry charge and in
bayonet charge they were better, and in equal number irresistible.

There was in England a hidden conviction, expressed privately in
clubs and by women over their knitting, that the French soldiers were
poor fellows as fighting men, filled with sentimentality, full of brag,
with fine words on their lips, but with no strength of courage or
endurance. British soldiers coming back wounded from the first
battles and a three weeks' rearguard action, spread abroad the tale
that "those French fellows were utterly useless and had run like rabbits
before the German advance." They knew nothing but what they had
seen in their own ditches on the fighting ground, they were sick with
horror at the monstrous character of the war, and they had a rankling
grudge against the French because they had not been supported
strongly enough during those weeks in August between Charleroi
and Compiègne.

Later the English Press, anxious, naturally enough, to throw into high
relief the exploits of our own troops in France, and getting only scraps
of news from the French lines, gave a distorted view of the general
situation, and threw the whole picture of the war out of perspective,
like the image of a man in a convex mirror. The relative importance of
the British Expedition was vastly exaggerated, not because its
particular importance was over-estimated, but because the French
operations received very scant notice. There are still people in
England who believe with a pious and passionate faith that our
soldiers sustained the entire and continual attack of the German
army, while the French looked on and thanked God for our work of
rescue. The fact that we only held a front of thirty miles, at most,
during the first nine months of war, and that the French were
successfully holding a line of five hundred miles through which the
Germans were trying to smash their way by repeated attacks of
ferocious character, never took hold of the imagination of many
honest souls at home, who thrilled with patriotic pride at the heroism
of the British troops, according to the old tradition of "How England
saved Europe."


4


Well, nothing will ever minimise our services to France. The graves of
our men will stand as records of the help we gave, paying our debt of
honour with priceless blood. But England must know what France did
in self-defence and understand the fine enduring heroism of those
armies of France which, after the first mistakes, built a wall of steel
against which the greatest fighting machine in Europe shattered itself
in vain.

Not a mile along all that five hundred miles of front was without its
battle, and not a mile there but is the grave of young Frenchmen who
fought with a martyr's faith and recklessness of life. As far back as the
last days of September 1914 I met men of the eastern frontier who
had a right already to call themselves veterans because they had
been fighting continuously for two months in innumerable
engagements--for the most part unrecorded in the public Press.

At the outset they were smart fellows, clean-shaven and even spruce
in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now the war had put its
dirt upon them and seemed to have aged them by fifteen years,
leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. They had stubble
beards upon their chins, and their cheeks were sunken and hollow,
after short rations in the trenches and sleepless nights on the
battlefields, with death as their bedfellow. Their blue coats had
changed to a dusty grey. Their scarlet trousers had deep patches of
crimson, where the blood of comrades had splashed them. They
were tattered and torn and foul with the muck and slime of their
frontier work. But they were also hard and tough for the most part--
though here and there a man coughed wheezily with bronchitis or had
the pallor of excessive fatigue--and Napoleon would not have wished
for better fighting-men.

In the wooded country of the two "Lost Provinces" there was but little
time or chance to bury the dead encumbering the hills and fields.
Even six weeks after the beginning of the war horror made a camping
ground of the regions which lay to the east of the Meurthe, between
the villages of Blamont and Badonviller, Cirey les Forges and
Arracourt, Chateau Salins and Baudrécourt. The slopes of
Hartmansweilerkopf were already washed by waves of blood which
surged round it for nine months and more, until its final capture by the
French. St. Mihiel and Les Eparges and the triangle which the
Germans had wedged between the French lines were a shambles
before the leaves had fallen from the autumn trees in the first year of
war. In the country of the Argonne men fought like wolves and began
a guerilla warfare with smaller bodies of men, fighting from wood to
wood, from village to village, the forces on each side being scattered
over a wide area in advance of their main lines. Then they dug
themselves into trenches from which they came out at night, creeping
up to each other's lines, flinging themselves upon each other with
bayonets and butt-ends, killing each other as beasts kill, without pity
and in the mad rage of terror which is the fiercest kind of courage. In
Lorraine the tide of war ebbed and flowed over the same tracts of
ground, and neither side picked up its dead or its wounded. Men lay
there alive for days and nights, bleeding slowly to death. The hot sun
glared down upon them and made them mad with thirst, so that they
drank their own urine and jabbered in wild delirium. Some of them lay
there for as long as three weeks, still alive, with gangrened limbs in
which lice crawled, so that they stank abominably.

"I cannot tell you all the things I saw," said one of the young soldiers
who talked to me on his way back from Lorraine. He had a queer look
in his eyes when he spoke those words which he tried to hide from
me by turning his head away. But he told me how the fields were
littered with dead, decomposing and swarmed with flies, lying here in
huddled postures, yet some of them so placed that their fixed eyes
seemed to be staring at the corpses near them. And he told me how
on the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers not
yet dead talked together by light of the moon, which shed its pale light
upon all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white. He
heard the murmurs of voices about him, and the groans of the dying,
rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds
and broken limbs. In that night enmity was forgotten by those who
had fought like beasts and now lay together. A French soldier gave
his water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst.
The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who
had been his enemy. "There will be no war on the other side," he
said.

Another Frenchman--who came from Montmartre--found lying within
a yard of him a Luxembourgeois whom he had known as his
chasseur in a big hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his
old acquaintance. "It is stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were
happy when we were good friends in Paris. Why should we have
been made to fight with each other?" He died with his arms round the
neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own
tears.

Round this man's neck also were clasped the arms of a German
officer when a week previously the French piou-piou went across the
field of a battle--one of the innumerable skirmishes--which had been
fought and won four days before another French retirement. The
young German had had both legs broken by a shell, and was
wounded in other places. He had strength enough to groan piteously,
but when my friend lifted him up death was near to him.

"He was all rotten," said the soldier, "and there came such a terrible
stench from him that I nearly dropped him, and vomited as I carried
him along."

I learnt something of the psychology of the French soldier from this
young infantryman with whom I travelled in a train full of wounded
soon after that night in Lorraine, when the moon had looked down on
the field of the dead and dying in which he lay with a broken leg. He
had passed through a great ordeal, so that his nerves were still torn
and quivering, and I think he was afraid of going mad at the memory
of the things he had seen and suffered, because he tried to compel
himself to talk of trivial things, such as the beauty of the flowers
growing on the railway banks and the different badges on English
uniforms. But suddenly he would go back to the tale of his fighting in
Lorraine and resume a long and rapid monologue in which little
pictures of horror flashed after each other as though his brain were a
cinematograph recording some melodrama. Queer bits of philosophy
jerked out between this narrative. "This war is only endurable
because it is for a final peace in Europe." "Men will refuse to suffer
these things again. It is the end of militarism." "If I thought that a
child of mine would have to go through all that I have suffered
during these last weeks, I would strangle him in his cradle to save him
from it."

Sometimes he spoke of France with a kind of religion in his eyes.

"Of course, I am ready to die for France. She can demand my life as
a right. I belong to her and she can do with me what she likes. It's my
duty to fight in her defence, and although I tell you all the worst of war,
monsieur, I do not mean that I am not glad to have done my part. In a
few weeks this wound of mine will be healed and I shall go back, for
the sake of France, to that Hell again. It is Hell, quand même!"

He analysed his fears with simple candour and confessed that many
times he had suffered most from imaginary terrors. After the German
retreat from Lunéville, he was put on a chain of outposts linked up
with the main French lines. It was at night, and as he stood leaning on
his rifle he saw black figures moving towards him. He raised his rifle,
and his finger trembled on the trigger. At the first shot he would
arouse the battalion nearest to him. They were sleeping, but as men
sleep who may be suddenly attacked. They would fire without further
question, and probably he would be the first to die from their bullets.
Was it the enemy? They were coming at right angles to the French
lines. The foremost were even within twenty yards of him now. His
nerves were all trembling. He broke out into a hot sweat. His eyes
straining through the darkness were shot through with pain. He had
almost an irresistible desire to fire and shout out, so as to end the
strain of suspense which racked his soul. At last he gave the
challenge, restraining himself from firing that first shot. It was well he
did so. For the advancing French troops belonged to a French
regiment changing their position under cover of darkness. If my little
friend had lost his nerve and fired too soon they would have been
shot down by their own comrades.

"It's one's imagination that gives one most trouble," he said, and I
thought of the words of an English officer, who told me one day that
"No one with an imagination ought to come out to this war." It is for
that reason--the possession of a highly developed imagination--that
so many French soldiers have suffered more acutely than their
English allies. They see the risks of war more vividly, though they
take them with great valour. They are more sensitive to the sights and
sounds of the fighting lines than the average English "Tommy," who
has a tougher temperament and does not allow his mind to brood
over blood and agony. They have the gift, also, of self-analysis and
self-expression, so that they are able to translate their emotions into
vivid words, whereas our own men are taciturn for the most part
about their side of the business and talk objectively, looking
outwards, and not inwards.


5


Some of the letters from French soldiers, scrawled in the squalor of
the trenches by men caked in filth and mud, are human documents in
which they reveal themselves with extraordinary intimacy, and in
which they put the whole truth, not disguising their terror or their
blood-lust in the savage madness of a bayonet charge, or the
heartache which comes to them when they think of the woman they
love, or the queer little emotions and sentiments which come to them
in the grim business of war. They watch the dawn, and in a line or two
put some of its beauty into their letters home. They describe with a
literary skill that comes from strong emotions the gloom and horror of
long nights near the enemy's trenches from which at any moment a
new attack may come. And yet, though they do not hide their
moments of spiritual misery or despair, there is in all these letters the
splendid courage of men who are ready for the last sacrifice and
eager for their chance of honour.

"I send this letter," writes a young Zouave, "as I sit huddled under an
earth-heap at twenty yards from a German trench, less to be envied
than a rabbit in its burrow, because when the hunter is far away it can
come out and feed at pleasure. You who live through the same
agonies, old friend, must learn and rejoice that I have been promoted
adjutant on the night of November 13 on the banks of the Yser. There
were seventy men out of 250--the rest of the company sleep for ever
round that ferryman's house which the papers have made famous...
What moral sufferings I have endured! We have now been brought to
the south of Ypres and continue this depressing life in advanced
trenches. Not a quarter of an hour's respite: shells, shrapnels, bombs
and bullets fall around us continuously. How courage has changed
with this modern war! The hero of olden times was of a special type,
who put on a fine pose and played up to the gallery because he
fought before admiring spectators. Now, apart from our night attacks,
always murderous, in which courage is not to be seen, because one
can hardly discern one's neighbour in the darkness, our valour
consists in a perfect stoicism. Just now I had a fellow killed before a
loophole. His comrades dragged him away, and with perfect quietude
replaced the man who is eternally out of action. Isn't that courage?
Isn't it courage to get the brains of one's comrade full in the face, and
then to stand on guard in the same place while suffering the extremes
of cold and dampness? ... On the night of the 13th I commanded a
section of corpses which a mitrailleuse had raked. I had the luck to
escape, and I shouted to these poor devils to make a last assault.
Then I saw what had happened and found myself with a broken rifle
and a uniform in rags and tatters. My commandant spoke to me that
night, and said: 'You had better change those clothes. You can put on
an adjutant's stripes.'"

One passage in this young Zouave's letter reveals the full misery of
the war to a Frenchman's spirit: "Our courage consists in a perfect
stoicism." It is not the kind of courage which suits his temperament,
and to sit in a trench for months, inactive, waiting for death under the
rain of shells, is the worst ordeal to which the soul of the French
soldier is asked to submit. Yet he has submitted, and held firm, along
lines of trenches, 500 miles from end to end, with a patience in
endurance which no critics of France would have believed possible
until the proof was given. Above the parapet lie the corpses of
comrades and of men who were his enemies until they became poor
clay.

"The greater number of the bodies," writes a soldier, "still lie between
the trenches, and we have been unable to withdraw them. We can
see them always, in frightful quantity, some of them intact, others torn
to bits by the shells which continue to fall upon them. The stench of
this corruption floats down upon us with foul odours. Bits of their
rotting carcases are flung into our faces and over our heads as new
shells burst and scatter them. It is like living in a charnel house where
devils are at play flinging dead men's flesh at living men, with fiendish
mockery. The smell of this corruption taints our food, and taints our
very souls, so that we are spiritually and physically sick. That is war!"
"This horrible game of war," writes another man, "goes on
passionately in our corner. In seventy-four days we have progressed
about 1200 yards. That tells you everything. Ground is gained, so to
speak, by the inch, and we all know now how much it costs to get
back a bit of free France."


6


Along the French lines Death did not rest from his harvesting
whatever the weather, and although for months there was no general
advance on either side, not a day passed without new work for the
surgeons, the stretcher-bearers, and the gravediggers. One incident
is typical of a hospital scene near the front. It was told in a letter from
a hospital nurse to a friend in Paris.

"About midday we received a wounded general, whom we made as
comfortable as possible in a little room. Although he suffered terribly,
he would submit to no special care, and only thought of the comfort of
two of his officers. By an extraordinary chance a soldier of his own
regiment was brought in a few moments later. Joy of the general, who
wanted to learn at once what had happened to his children. He asked
to see the soldier immediately:

"'Tell me--the commandant?'

"'Dead, mon général.'

"'And the captain?'

"'Dead, mon général.'

"Four times questions were asked, and four times the soldier, whose
voice became lower, made his answer of death. Then the general
lowered his head and asked no more. We saw the tears running
down his scarred old face, and we crept out of the room on tip-toe."


7


In spite of all this tragedy, the French soldier into whose soul it sank,
and who will never forget, wrote home with a gaiety which gleamed
through the sadness of his memories. There was a new series of
"Lettres de mon moulin" from a young officer of artillery keeping
guard in an old mill-house in an important position at the front. They
were addressed to his "dearest mamma," and, thoughtful of all the
pretty hands which had been knitting garments for him, he described
his endeavours to keep warm in them:

"To-night I have piled on to my respectable body a flannel waistcoat,
a flannel shirt, and a flannel belt going round three times, a jacket with
sleeves sent by mamma herself, a leather waistcoat from Aunt
Charlotte, a woollen vest which came to me from the unknown
mother of a young dragoon, a warm undercoat recently received from
my tailor, and a woollen jacket and wrap knitted by Madame P. J. So I
prepare to sleep in peace, if the Boches will kindly allow me."

The enemy did not often allow the young gentleman to sleep, and
about the windmill the shells were bursting.

They reached one Sunday morning almost as far as the little twelfth-
century church to which the young officer had stepped down from his
windmill to hear Mass in the middle of a crowd of soldiers chanting
the office, recited by a soldier, accompanied by a harmonium played
by another soldier. The windows were shattered, and a beautiful old
house next to the church lay in ruins.

The officer spent lonely hours in the windmill in charge of the
telephone exchange, from which the batteries were worked. The men
in the trenches and the gun-pits pitied his loneliness, and invented a
scheme to cheer him up. So after dark, when the cannonade
slackened, he put the receiver to his ears and listened to a Tyrolese
ballad sung by an orderly, and to the admirable imitation of a barking
dog performed by a sapper, and to a Parisian chanson delightfully
rendered by the aviator.

"Bonne nuit, maman," wrote the officer of artillery at the end of each
letter from his windmill.


8


The front did not change its outline on the map, except by
hairbreadths, for months at a stretch, yet at many points of the line
there were desperate battles, a bayonet charge now and then, and
hours of frightful slaughter, when men saw red and killed with joy.

There was a little farm near Steinbach round which a battle raged for
many days. Leading to it was a sunken road, defended by the enemy,
until one day they put up a number of non-combatants from captured
villages to prevent a French attack.

"Among them we could distinguish a woman, with her hair falling to
her shoulders and her hands tied behind her back. This new infamy
inflamed the courage of our soldiers. A company rushed forward with
fixed bayonets. The road to the farm was swept by the enemy's fire,
but nothing stopped our men. In spite of our losses we carried the
position and are masters of the farm. There was no mercy in those
moments of triumph. The ghastly business of war was done to the
uttermost."

There were ghastly things in some of the enemy's trenches. One of
the worst of them was seen in the forest of Apremont, in the district of
Woevre, where the enemy was strongly entrenched in some quarries
quite close to the French trenches which sapped their way forward to
those pits. When the guns ceased firing the French soldiers often
heard the sound of singing. But above the voices of the Germans
there came sometimes a series of piercing cries like the screeching of
an owl in a terrible plaint, followed by strange and bloodcurdling
laughter. It was the voice of a mad woman who was one of those
captured from neighbouring villages and brought into the trenches by
the Germans. One day the German soldiers carried her the length of
their own trenches. Only her head was visible above the ground. She
wore a German helmet above the wild hair which blew in wisps about
her death-white face, and it seemed like a vision of hell as she
passed shrieking with the laughter of insanity.

One turns from such horrors to the heroism of the French soldier, his
devotion to his officers, his letters to that chère maman before whom
his heartis always that of a little child, to the faith which saves men
from at least the grosser brutalities of war.


9


One of the tragic ironies of the war was that men whose lives had
been dedicated to the service of Christ, and whose hands should be
clean of blood, found themselves compelled by the law of France
(and in many cases urged by their own instincts of nationality) to
serve as soldiers in the fighting ranks. Instead of denouncing from
every pulpit the shamefulness of this butchery, which has made a
mockery of our so-called civilization and involved all humanity in its
crime, those priests and monks put themselves under discipline
which sent them into the shambles in which they must kill or be killed.
When the mobilization orders were issued, the call to the colours was
sent to young curés and abbés throughout the country, and to monks
belonging to religious orders banished by its politicians. Jesuits and
Dominicans, Franciscans and Carmelites, who had been exiled from
France for conscience' sake, hurried back at the first summons,
dispensed from that Canon Law which forbids them to shed blood,
and as Frenchmen, loving their country though it expelled them,
rallied to the flag in the hour of peril. They were Christian priests, but
they were also patriots, and Christianity is not so instinctive in its
emotion as the spirit of nationality which, by some natural law, makes
men on one side of a frontier eager to fight till death when they are
challenged by men across the boundary line, forgetting their
principles of peace and the command, "Thou shalt not kill," in their
loyalty to their own soil, crown, or national ideas. There were twenty
thousand priests in the French army, and although many of them
were acting according to their religious vocations as chaplains, or
stretcher-bearers, the great majority were serving as simple soldiers
in the ranks or as officers who had gained promotion by merit.

Although nothing may explain away the paradox that those whose
duty it seems to preach the gospel of peace and charity should be
helping to heap up the fields of Christendom with the corruption of
dead bodies, there is at least this to be said: the priest-soldier in
France has been a spiritual influence among his comrades, so that
some of them fought with nobler motives than that of blood-lust, and
went to death or victory, influenced not with hatred of fellow men, but
with a conviction that out of all that death there would come a new life
to nations, and that in killing their enemy they were killing a brutal
tyranny with its grip upon the world, and a barbarism which would
make human life a slavery. A young priest who said his prayers
before lying down on his straw mattress or in the mud of his trench,
put a check upon blasphemy, and his fellows--anti-clericals perhaps
in the old days or frank materialists--watched him curiously and were
thoughtful after their watchfulness. It was easy to see that he was
eager to give up his life as a sacrifice to the God of his faith. His
courage had something supernatural in it, and he was careless of
death. Then, again, he was the best comrade in the company. Never
a grumble came from his lips, though he was as cold and wet and
hungry as the others. He did a thousand little acts of service to his
fellow soldiers, and especially to those who were most sullen, most
brutal or most miserable. He spoke sometimes of the next life with a
cheerful certainty which made death seem less than an end of things,
and he was upborne with a strange fervour which gave a kind of glory
to the most wretched toil.

Not a week passed without some priest being cited in the Order of the
Day.

"Corporal Délabre Alphonse (priest of the diocese of Puy) and Private
Miolane Antoine (priest of the diocese of Clermont) belonging to the
292nd Regiment of Infantry, distinguished themselves throughout the
battle by an untiring gallantry and devotion, going to collect the
wounded in the line and afterwards spending their nights in assisting
the wounded and dying."

That is one notice out of hundreds which I had in official documents.

"M. l'Abbé Martin," says another, "having been wounded in the hand
by a bursting shell, remained at his post in the line of fire, prodigal in
his help to the wounded and in his consolations to the dying."

The Abbé Bertrand, vicar of St. Germain de Coulamer, was mobilized
on the outbreak of war, and for his gallantry in the field promoted
successively to the ranks of sergeant, sergeant-major, sub-
lieutenant, and lieutenant. He fell on November 4 at the battle of
Audrechy, leading his men to the assault. A few days before his
death he wrote: "I always look upon this war as an expiation, and I am
proud to be a victim." And again: "Oh, how cold the rain is, and how
severe the weather I For our faith in France I have offered God to let
me be wet and soaked to the very bones."

The story of the Abbé Armand, in the 14th battalion of the Chasseurs
Alpins, is that of a hero. A simple man, he used to open his heart to
his rough comrades, and often in the trenches, under shell-fire, he
would recite the Psalms in a clear voice so that they could hear him.
On November 17, to the south of Ypres, his company was selected to
hold a dangerous position, swept by the heavy guns of the Germans
and near the enemy's trenches. All day until the evening the priest
and his comrades stayed there, raked by a hideous shell-fire. At last
nearly all the men were killed, and on his side of the emplacement the
Abbé Armand was left with two men alive. He signalled the fact to
those below by raising three fingers, but shortly afterwards a bullet
struck him so that he fell and another hit him in the stomach. It was
impossible to send help to him at the time, and he died half an hour
later on the tumulus surrounded by the dead bodies of his comrades.
They buried him up there, and that night his loss was mourned, not
without tears, by many rough soldiers who had loved the man for his
cheeriness, and honoured him for the simple faith, which seemed to
put a glamour about the mud-stained uniform of a soldier of France.

There were scores of stories like that, and the army lists contained
the names of hundreds of these priest-soldiers decorated with the
Legion of Honour or mentioned in dispatches for gallant acts.

The character of these men was filled with the spirit of Christian faith,
though the war in which they sacrificed their lives was an outrage
against Christianity itself. The riddle of it all bewilders one's soul, and
one can only go groping in the dark of despair, glad of the little light
which comes to the trench of the battlefield, because men like these
still promise something better than hatred and blood, and look
beyond the gates of death, to peace.


10


Not all French soldiers are like these priests who were valiant with the
spirit of Christian faith. Side by side with the priest was the apache, or
the slum-dweller, or the peasant from the fields, who in conversation
was habitually and unconsciously foul. Not even the mild protest of
one of these priests could check the flow of richly imagined
blasphemies which are learnt in the barracks during the three years'
service, and in the bistros of the back streets of France from
Cherbourg to Marseilles. But, as a rule, the priest did not protest,
except by the example of keeping his own tongue clean. "What is the
use?" said one of them. "That kind of thing is second nature to the
men and, after all, it is part of my sacrifice."

Along the roads of France, swinging along to dig a new line of
trenches, or on a march from a divisional headquarters to the front,
the soldiers would begin one of their Rabelaisian songs which have
no ending, but in verse after verse roam further into the purlieus of
indecent mirth, so that, as one French officer told me, "these ballads
used to make the heather blush." After the song would come the
great game of French soldiers on the march. The humorist of the
company would remark upon the fatigued appearance of a sous-
officier near enough to hear.

"He is not in good form to-day, our little corporal. Perhaps it has
something to do with his week-end in Paris!"

Another humorist would take up the cue.

"He has a great thirst, our corporal. His first bottle of wine just whets
his whistle. At the sixth bottle he begins to think of drinking seriously!"

"He is a great amourist, too, they tell me, and very passionate in his
love-making!"

So the ball is started and goes rolling from one man to another in the
ranks, growing in audacity and wallowing along filthy ways of thought,
until the sous-officier, who had been grinning under his képi, suddenly
turns red with anger and growls out a protest.

"Taisez-vous, cochons. Foutez-moi la paix!"

All this obscenity of song and speech spoils the heroic picture a little,
and yet does not mean very much in spite of its outrageous heights
and depths. It belongs to the character of men who have faced all the
facts of life with frank eyes, and find laughter in the grossest humours
without losing altogether the finer sentiments of the heart and little
delicacies of mind which seem untarnished by the rank weeds which
grow in human nature. Laughter is one of the great needs of the
French soldier. In war he must laugh or lose all courage. So if
there is a clown in the company he may be as coarse as one of
Shakespeare's jesters as long as he be funny, and it is with the
boldness of one of Shakespeare's heroes--like Benedick--that a
young Frenchman, however noble in his blood, seizes the ball of wit
and tosses it higher. Like D'Artagnan, he is not squeamish, though a
very gallant gentleman.


11


The spirit of D'Artagnan is not dead. Along many roads of France I
have met gay fellows whose courage has the laughing quality of that
Musketeer, and his Gascon audacity which makes a jest of death itself.
In spite of all the horrors of modern warfare, with its annihilating
shell-fire and the monstrous ruthlessness of great guns, the French
soldier at his best retains that quality of youth which soars even
above the muck and misery of the trenches. The character of a
young lieutenant of artillery, who came to fill the place of a poor fellow
killed at the side of his caisson, is typical of innumerable soldiers of
France. He presented himself with a jaunty good humour, made a
little speech to his battery which set all the men laughing, and then
shook hands with them one by one. Next day he knew each man by
name, used the familiar "thee" and "thou" to them, and won their
hearts by his devil-may-care manners and the smile which came from
a heart amused by life. Everything was a joke to him. He baptized his
four guns by absurd nicknames, and had a particular affection for old
"Bumps," which had been scarred by several shells. The captain
called this young gentleman Lieutenant Mascot, because he had a
lucky way with him. He directed the aim of his guns with astounding
skill. A German battery had to shift very quickly five minutes after his
first shell had got away, and when the enemy's fire was silenced, he
would call out, "Don't chuck any more," to the telephone operator.
That was his way of ordering the cease-fire.

But Lieutenant "Mascot," one day jumped on the top of a hayrick to
direct the marksmanship of his battery, and a moment later a German
shell burst above him and scattered part of the rick in all directions. It
was a moment of anguish for the onlookers. The captain became as
pale as death, and the gunners went on plugging out shells in an
automatic way with grief-stricken faces. The telephone man put his
head out of his dugout. He stared at the broken rick. Beyond doubt
Monsieur Mascot was as dead as mutton. Suddenly, with the receiver
at his ear and transfigured, he began to shout: "Don't chuck any
more!" It was the lieutenant who had sent him the usual order. Ten
minutes later the lieutenant came back laughing gaily and, after
shaking some straw out of his muddy uniform, gave a caressing
touch to old "Bumps," who had got the enemy's range to perfection.
Then the captain embraced him.


12


The spirit of youth and the spirit of faith cannot rob war of its horrors,
nor redeem the crime in which all humanity is involved, nor check the
slaughter that goes on incessantly. But they burn with a bright light
out of the darkness, and make the killing of men less beastlike. The
soul of France has not been destroyed by this war, and no German
guns shattering the beauty of old towns and strewing the northern
fields with the bodies of beautiful young manhood could be victorious
over this nation, which, with all her faults, her incredulities and
passions, has at the core a spiritual fervour which lifts it above the
clay of life.

The soldiers of France have learnt the full range of human suffering,
so that one cannot grudge them their hours of laughter, however
coarse their mirth. There were many armies of men from Ypres to St.
Mihiel who were put to greater tasks of courage than were demanded
of the human soul in mediaeval torture chambers, and they passed
through the ordeal with a heroism which belongs to the splendid
things of history. As yet the history has been written only in brief
bulletins stating facts baldly, as when on a Saturday in March of 1915
it was stated that "In Malancourt Wood, between the Argonne and the
Meuse, the enemy sprayed one of our trenches with burning liquid so
that it had to be abandoned. The occupants were badly burnt." That
official account does not convey in any way the horror which
overwhelmed the witnesses of the new German method of attacking
trenches by drenching them with inflammatory liquid. A more detailed
narrative of this first attack by liquid fire was given by one of the
soldiers;

"It was yesterday evening, just as night fell, that it happened. The day
had been fairly calm, with the usual quantity of bursting shells
overhead, and nothing forewarned us of a German attack. Suddenly
one of my comrades shouted, 'Hallo! what is this coming down on
us? Anyone would think it was petroleum.' At that time we could not
believe the truth, but the liquid which began to spray on us was
certainly some kind of petroleum. The Germans were pumping it from
hoses. Our sub-lieutenant made us put out our pipes. But it was a
useless precaution. A few seconds later incendiary bombs began to
rain down on us and the whole trench burst into flame. It was like
being in hell. Some of the men began to scream terribly, tearing off
their clothes, trying to beat out the flames. Others were cursing and
choking in the hot vapour which stifled us. 'Oh, my Christ!' cried a
comrade of mine. 'They've blinded me!' In order to complete their
work those German bandits took advantage of our disturbance by
advancing on the trench and throwing burning torches into it. None of
us escaped that torrent of fire. We had our eyebrows and eyelashes
burnt off, and clothes were burnt in great patches and our flesh was
sizzling like roasting meat. But some of us shot through the greasy
vapour which made a cloud about us and some of those devils had to
pay for their game."

Although some of them had become harmless torches and others lay
charred to death, the trench was not abandoned until the second line
were ready to make a counter-attack, which they did with fixed
bayonets, frenzied by the shrieks which still came from the burning pit
where those comrades lay, and flinging themselves with the ferocity
of wild beasts upon the enemy, who fled after leaving three hundred
dead and wounded on the ground.


13


Along five hundred miles of front such scenes took place week after
week, month after month, from Artois to the Argonne, not always with
inflammatory liquid, but with hand grenades, bombs, stink-shells, fire
balls, smoke balls, and a storm of shrapnel. The deadly monotony of
the life in wet trenches, where men crouched in mud, cold, often
hungry, in the abyss of misery, unable to put their heads above
ground for a single second without risk of instant death, was broken
only by the attacks and counter-attacks when the order was given to
leave the trench and make one of those wild rushes for a hundred
yards or so in which the risks of death were at heavy odds against the
chances of life. Let a French soldier describe the scene:

"Two sections of infantry have crouched since morning on the edge
of a wood, waiting for the order which hurls them to the assault of that
stupid and formidable position which is made up of barbed wire in
front of the advanced trenches. Since midday the guns thunder
without cessation, sweeping the ground. The Germans answer with
great smashing blows, and it is the artillery duel which precedes
heroic work. Every one knows that when the guns are silent the brief
order which will ring out above the huddled men will hold their
promise of death. Yet those men talk quietly, and there are some of
them who in this time of danger find some poignant satisfaction,
softening their anguish, in calling up the memory of those dear beings
whom perhaps they will never see again. With my own ears I have
heard a great fair-headed lad expatiate to all his neighbours on the
pretty ways of his little daughter who is eight years old. A kind of dry
twittering interrupts his discourse. The field telegraph, fixed up in a
tree, has called the lieutenant. At the same moment the artillery fired
a few single shots and then was silent. The officer drew his watch, let
ten minutes pass, and then said, 'Get up,' in the same tranquil and
commonplace tones with which a corporal says 'attention' on parade
ground. It was the order to go forward. Every one understood and
rose up, except five men whom a nervous agony chained to their
ground. They had been demoralized by their long wait and weakened
by their yearnings for the abandoned homes, and were in the grip of
fear. The lieutenant--a reservist who had a little white in his beard--
looked at the five defaulters without anger. Then he drew, not his
sword from its scabbard, but a cigarette from its case, lighted it, and
said simply:

"'Eh bien?'

"Who can render the intonation of that 'Eh bien'? What actor could
imitate it? In that 'Eh bien?' there was neither astonishment nor
severity, nor brusque recall to duty, but rather the compassionate
emotion of an elder brother before a youngster's weakness which he
knows is only a passing mood. That 'Eh bien?'--how he put into it, this
elder of ours, so much pitiful authority, such sweetness of command,
such brotherly confidence, and also such strength of will. The five
men sprang up. And you know that we took the village after having
fought from house to house. At the angle of two alleys the lieutenant
was killed, and that is why the two notes of his 'Eh bien?' will always
echo in my heart as the fine call of an unrecorded heroism. It appears
that this war must be impersonal--it is the political formula of the time
--and it is forbidden to mention names. Eh bien? Have I named any
one?"


14


Out of the monotonous narratives of trench-warfare, stories more
horrible than the nightmare phantasies of Edgar Allen Poe, stories of
men buried alive by sapping and mining, and of men torn to bits by a
subterranean explosion which leaves one man alive amidst the litter
of his comrades' limbs so that he goes mad and laughs at the frightful
humour of death, come now and then to reveal the meaning of this
modern warfare which is hidden by censors behind decent veils. It is
a French lieutenant who tells this story, which is heroic as well as
horrid:

"We were about to tidy up a captured trench. At the barrier of sand-
bags which closed up one end of it, two sentinels kept a sharp look-
out so that we could work in peace of mind. Suddenly from a tunnel,
hidden by a fold in the ground, an avalanche of bombs was hurled
over our heads, and before we could collect our wits ten of our men
had fallen dead and wounded, all hugger-mugger. I opened my
mouth to shout a word of command when a pebble, knocked by a
piece of shell, struck me on the head and I fell, quite dazed. But my
unconsciousness only lasted a second or two. A bursting shell tore off
my left hand and I was awakened by the pain of it. When I opened
my eyes and groaned, I saw the Germans jump across the sand-
bags and invade the trench. There were twenty of them. They had no
rifles, but each man carried a sort of wicker basket filled with bombs. I
looked round to the left. All our men had fled except those who were
lying in their blood. And the Germans were coming on. Another slip or
two and they would have been on the top of me. At that moment one
of my men, wounded in the forehead, wounded in the chin, and with
his face all in a pulp of blood, sat up, snatched at a bag of hand
grenades, and shouted out:

"Arise, ye dead!"

He got on his knees, and began to fling his bombs into the crowd of
Germans. At his call, the other wounded men struggled up. Two with
broken legs grasped their rifle and opened fire. The hero with his left
arm hanging limp, grabbed a bayonet. When I stood up, with all my
senses about me now, some of the Germans were wounded and
others were scrambling out of the trench in a panic. But with his back
to the sand-bags stayed a German Unter-offizier, enormous,
sweating, apoplectic with rage, who fired two revolver shots in our
direction. The man who had first organized the defence of the trench
--the hero of that "Arise, ye dead!"--received a shot full in the throat
and fell. But the man who held the bayonet and who had dragged
himself from corpse to corpse, staggered up at four feet from the
sand-bags, missed death from two shots, and plunged his weapon
into the German's throat. The position was saved, and it was as
though the dead had really risen.


15


The French soldier, as I have said, is strangely candid in the analysis
of his emotions, and is not ashamed of confessing his fears. I
remember a young lieutenant of Dragoons who told me of the terror
which took possession of him when the enemy's shrapnel first burst
above his head.

"As every shell came whizzing past, and then burst, I ducked my
head and wondered whether it was this shell which was going to kill
me, or the next. The shrapnel bullets came singing along with a 'Tue!
Tue!' Ah, that is a bad song! But most of all I feared the rifle-shots of
an infantry attack. I could not help glancing sideways at the sound of
that 'Zip! zip! zip!' There was something menacing and deadly in it,
and one cannot dodge the death which comes with one of these little
bullets. It is horrible!"

And yet this man, who had an abscess in his leg after riding for weeks
in his saddle and who had fought every day and nearly every night for
a fortnight, was distressed because he had to retire from his
squadron for awhile until his leg healed. In five days at the most he
would go back again to hell--hating the horror of it all, fearing those
screeching shells and hissing bullets, yet preferring to die for France
rather than remain alive and inactive when his comrades were
fighting.

Imagine the life of one of these cavalrymen, as I heard it described by
many of them in the beginning of the war.

They were sent forward on a reconnaissance--a patrol of six or eight.
The enemy was known to be in the neighbourhood. It was necessary
to get into touch with him, to discover his strength, to kill some of his
outposts, and then to fall back to the division of cavalry and report the
facts. Not an easy task! It quite often happened that only one man
out of six came back to tell the tale, surprised at his own luck. The
German scouts had clever tricks.

One day near Béthune they played one of them--a favourite one. A
friend of mine led six of his dragoons towards a village where Uhlans
had been seen. They became visible at a turn of the road, and after
firing a few shots with their carbines turned tail and fled. The French
dragoons gave chase, across some fields and round the edge of a
quiet wood. Suddenly at this point the Uhlans reined in their horses
and out of the wood came the sudden shattering fire of a German
quickfirer. Fortunately it was badly aimed, and my friend with his six
dragoons was able to gallop away from that infernal machine which
had so cleverly ambushed them.

There was no rest for the cavalry in those first days of the war. The
infantry had its bivouac every day, there was rest sometimes in the
trenches, but the cavalry had to push on always upon new
adventures to check the enemy in his advance.

A young Russian officer in the French dragoons told me that he had
been fighting since the beginning of the war with never more than
three hours sleep a night and often no sleep at all. On many nights
those brief hours of rest were in beetroot fields in which the German
shrapnel had been searching for victims, and he awakened now and
then to listen to the well-known sound of that singing death before
dozing off again.

It was "Boot and saddle" at four o'clock in the morning, before the
dawn. It was cold then--a cold which made men tremble as with an
ague. A cup of black coffee was served, and a piece of bread.

The Russian officer of French dragoons, who has lived in British
Colonies, saw a vision then--a false mirage--of a British breakfast. It
was the thought of grilled bloaters, followed by ham and eggs, which
unmanned him for a moment. Ten minutes later the cavalry was
moving away. A detachment was sent forward on a mission of peril,
to guard a bridge. There was a bridge near Béthune one night
guarded by a little patrol. It was only when the last man had been
killed that the Germans made their way across.

Through the darkness these mounted men leaned forward over their
saddles, peering for the enemy, listening for any jangle of stirrup or
clink of bit. On that night there came a whisper from the cavalry
leader.

"They are coming! ... Quiet there!"

A file of dark shadows moved forward. The dragoons swung their
carbines forward. There was a volley of shots before a cry rang out.

"Cessez feu! Cessez feu!"

The cry had been heard before from German officers speaking
excellent French, but this time there was no treachery in it. The
shadows who moved forward through the night were Frenchmen
changing from one trench to another.


16


The infantryman had a hard time, too. It was true that theoretically he
might sometimes snatch a few hours of sleep in a trench or out in an
open field, but actually the coldness of the night was often an acute
agony, which kept him awake. The food question was a difficult one.
When there was heavy fighting to be done, and rapid marching, the
provisions became as theoretical as the hours of sleep.

I heard the graphic recital of a sergeant of infantry, which was typical
of many others in those early days.

His section awakened one morning near Armentières with a
famishing hunger, to find an old peasant woman coming up with a
great barrow-load of potatoes.

"These are for your breakfast, my little ones," she said. "See, I have
some faggots here. If you care to make a fire there will be roast
potatoes for you in twenty minutes."

"Madame, you are too kind," said my sergeant. He helped to make
the fire, to pack it with potatoes. He added his eloquence to that of his
comrades when the fragrant smell made his nostrils quiver. And just
as the potatoes were nearly done up came a motor cyclist with orders
that the section was to move on immediately to a place fifteen
kilometres away. It was a tragedy! There were tearful farewells to
those potatoes. Fifteen kilometres away there was a château, and a
friendly lady, and a good cook who prepared a dinner of excellent
roast beef and most admirable fried potatqes. And just as the lady
came to say "Mes amis, le diner est servi," up panted a Belgian
cyclist with the news that German cavalry was advancing in strong
force accompanied by 500 motor-cars with mitrailleuses and many
motor-cycles, and a battery of horse artillery. It was another tragedy!
And the third took place sixteen hours later, when this section of
infantry which had been marching most of that time lay down on an
open field to sleep without a supper.

Yet--"Nothing matters except the rain," said a friend of mine in the
French artillery. He shrugged his shoulders as he spoke, and an
expression of disgust came upon his bearded face. He was thinking,
perhaps, of his beloved guns which lose their mobility in the
quagmires of the fields. But the rain is bad also for men and beasts. It
takes eight days for a French overcoat to get thoroughly dry after a
bad wetting. Even the cavalryman's cloak is a poor shield against the
driving rain, and at night wet straw or a water pool in a trench is not a
pleasant kind of bed.

"War," said one of the French officers with whom I have chatted, "is
not only fighting, as some people seem to think. The physical
discomforts are more dangerous to one's health than shrapnel. And it
is--par exemple--the impossibility of changing one's linen for weeks
and weeks which saps one's moral fibre more than the risk of losing
one's head."

The risk of death is taken lightly by all these men. It is curious, indeed,
that almost every French soldier has a conviction that he will die in
battle sooner or later. In moments of imagination he sees his own
corpse lying out in the field, and is full of pity for his wife and
children. But it does not destroy his courage or his gift of gaiety
or his desire to fight for France or his sublime endurance of pain.

The wounded men who pour down from the battlefields are incredibly
patient. I have seen them stand on a wounded leg to give their places
in a railway-carriage to peasant women with their babies. They have
used their bandaged hands to lift up the baskets of refugees. They
forget their wounds in remembering their adventures, and the simple
soldier describes his combats with a vivid eloquence not to be
attained by the British Tommy, who has no gift of words.

The French soldier has something in his blood and strain which uplifts
him as a fighting man, and gives him the quality of chivalry. Peasant
or bourgeois or of patrician stock he has always the fine manners of a
gentleman, and to know him in the field is to love the humour and
temper of the man.


17


Yet there were some men in the French army, as in our own, who
showed how thin is the veneer which hides the civilized being from
the primitive savage, to whom there is a joy in killing, like the wild
animal who hunts his prey in the jungles and desert places. One such
man comes to my mind now. He was in the advanced lines near
Albert, but was always restless in the trench. As soon as darkness
came he would creep out and crawl on his belly across the swampy
ground to a deep hole dug by the explosion of a marmite quite close
to the German lines. Here he found a hiding-place from which he
could take "pot shots" at any German soldiers who under cover of
darkness left their burrows to drag in the bodies of their comrades or
to gather bits of wood with which to make a floor to their trenches.
They were quite unconscious of that man in the hole staring down the
length of his rifle, and listening intently for any sound which would
betray an enemy. Every night he shot two or three men, perfectly
patient in his long cold vigil if he could have that "luck." Then at dawn
he would crawl back again, bringing a helmet or two with him, a
cartridge belt or some other trophy as a sign of his success.

One night he shot a man who had stumbled quite close to his pit, and
some great instinct of pity for his victim stirred in him, so that he
risked a double journey over the open ground to fetch a spade with
which he buried the man. But soon afterwards he added to his "bag"
of human life. In his own trench he spoke very little and always
seemed to be waiting for the hour when he could crawl out again like
a Red Indian in search of scalps. He was the primitive man, living like
one of his ancestors of the Stone Age, except for the fire-stick with
which he was armed and the knowledge of the arts and beauties of
modern life in his hunter's head. For he was not a French Canadian
from the backwoods, or an Alpine chasseur from lonely mountains,
but a well-known lawyer from a French provincial town, with the blood
and education of a gentleman. As a queer character this man is worth
remembering by those who study the psychology of war, but he is not
typical of the soldiers of France, who in the mass have no blood-lust,
and hate butchering their fellow beings, except in their moments of
mad excitement, made up of fear as well as of rage, when to the
shout of "En avant!" they leap out of the trenches and charge a body
of Germans, stabbing and slashing with their bayonets, clubbing men
to death with the butt-ends of their rifles, and for a few minutes of
devilish intoxication, with the smell of blood in their nostrils, and with
bloodshot eyes, rejoicing in slaughter.

"We did not listen to the cries of surrender or to the beseeching
plaints of the wounded," said a French soldier, describing one of
these scenes. "We had no use for prisoners and on both sides there
was no quarter given in this Argonne wood. Better than fixed
bayonets was an unfixed bayonet grasped as a dagger. Better than
any bayonet was a bit of iron or a broken gun-stock, or a sharp knife.
In that hand-to-hand fighting there was no shooting but only the
struggling of interlaced bodies, with fists and claws grabbing for each
other's throats. I saw men use teeth and bite their enemy to death
with their jaws, gnawing at their windpipes. This is modern war in the
twentieth century--or one scene in it--and it is only afterwards, if one
escapes with life, that one is stricken with the thought of all that horror
which has debased us as low as the beasts--lower than beasts,
because we have an intelligence and a soul to teach us better
things."

The soldiers of France have an intelligence which makes them, or
most of them, revolt from the hideous work they have to do and cry
out against this infamy which has been thrust upon them by a nation
which compelled the war. Again and again, for nine months and
more, I have heard French soldiers ask the question, "Why are such
things allowed by God? What is the use of civilization if it leads to
this?" And, upon my soul, I could not answer them.


18


The mobilization of all the manhood of France, from boys of eighteen
and nineteen to men of forty-five, was a demonstration of national
unity and of a great people rising as one man in self-defence,
which to the Englishman was an astounding and overwhelming
phenomenon. Though I knew the meaning of it and it had no real
surprises for me, I could never avoid the sense of wonderment when
I met young aristocrats marching in the ranks as common soldiers,
professors, poets, priests and painters, as hairy and dirty as the
poilus who had come from the farms and the meat markets,
millionaires and the sons of millionaires driving automobiles as
military chauffeurs or as orderlies to officers upon whom they waited
respectfully, forbidden to sit at table with them in public places, and
having to "keep their place" at all times. Even now I am astonished at
a system which makes young merchants abandon their businesses
at a moment's notice to serve in the ranks, and great employers of
labour go marching with their own labourers, giving only a backward
glance at the ruin of their property and their trade. There is something
magnificent in this, but all one's admiration of a universal military
service which abolishes all distinctions of class and wealth--after all
there were not many embusqués, or privileged exemptés--need not
blind one to abuses and unnecessary hardships inflicted upon large
numbers of men.

Abuses there have been in France, as was inevitable in a system like
this, and this general call to the colours inflicted an enormous amount
of suffering upon men who would have suffered more willingly if it had
been to serve France usefully. But in thousands and hundreds of
thousands of cases there was no useful purpose served. General
Joffre had as many men as he could manage along the fighting lines.
More would have choked up his lines of communication and the
whole machinery of the war. But behind the front there were millions
of men in reserve, and behind them vast bodies of men idling in
depots, crowded into barracks, and eating their hearts out for lack of
work. They had been forced to abandon their homes and their
professions, and yet during the whole length of the war they found no
higher duty to do for France than sweep out a barrack-yard or clean
out a military latrine. It was especially hard upon the réformés--men of
delicate health who had been exempted from their military service in
their youth but who now were re-examined by the Conseil de
Revision and found "good for auxiliary service in time of war."

To the old soldiers who have done their three years a return to the
barracks is not so distressing. They know what the life is like and the
rude discipline of it does not shock them. But to the réformé, sent to
barracks for the first time at thirty-five or forty years of age, it is a
moral sacrifice which is almost unendurable. After the grief of parting
from his wife and children and the refinements of his home, he arrives
at the barracks inspired by the best sentiments, happy in the idea of
being useful to his country, of serving like other Frenchmen. But
when he has gone through the great gate, guarded by soldiers with
loaded rifles, when he has changed his civil clothes for an old and
soiled uniform, when he has found that his bed is a filthy old mattress
in a barn where hundreds of men are quartered, when he has
received for the first time certain brief and harsh orders from a sous-
officier, and finally, when he goes out again into the immense
courtyard, surrounded by high grey walls, a strange impression of
solitude takes hold of him, and he finds himself abandoned, broken
and imprisoned.

Many of these réformés are men of delicate health, suffering from
heart or chest complaints, but in these barracks there is no comfort
for the invalid. I know one of them in which nearly seven hundred
men slept together in a great garret, with only one window and a
dozen narrow skylights, so that the atmosphere was suffocating
above their rows of straw trusses, rarely changed and of
indescribable filth. But what hurts the spirits of men who have
attained good positions in civil life, who have said to this man "Go!"
and he goeth, and to that man "Come!" and he cometh, is to find their
positions reversed and to be under the orders of a corporal or
sergeant with a touch of the bully about him, happy to dominate men
more educated and more intelligent than himself. I can quote an
example of an aristocrat who, in spite of his splendid château in the
country, was mobilized as a simple soldat.

At the barracks this gentleman found that his corporal was a labourer
in the village where the old château stands. In order to amuse himself
the corporal made M. le Châtelain do all the dirtiest jobs, such as
sweeping the rooms, cleaning the staircases and the lavatories. At
the same barracks were a number of priests, including an archiprêtre,
who was about to become a bishop. Even the most ferocious anti-
clericals in the caserne had to acknowledge that these men were
excellent soldiers and good comrades. They submitted to all
inconveniences, did any task as though it were a religious duty, and
submitted to the rough life among men of foul speech with a
wonderful resignation. But that did not save them from the tyranny of
a sous-officier, who called them the hardest names his tongue could
find when they made any faux pas in their barrack drill, and swore as
terribly as those in Flanders when they did not obey his commands
with the lightning rapidity of soldiers who have nothing more to learn.

These cases could be multiplied by hundreds of thousands, and for
men of refinement there was a long torture in their barracks when
there was no mental satisfaction in useful work for France. Yet their
sacrifice has not been in vain perhaps. "They serve who only stand
and wait," and they proved by their submission to the system a loyalty
and a patriotism equal to those who went into the trenches. They, too,
who know what war means--for war is not only at the front--will come
back with a deep-rooted hatred of militarism which will make it more
difficult in future for politicians who breathe out fire and slaughter and
urge a people to take up arms for any other cause than that of self-
defence.


19


It is curious how long the song of La Marseillaise has held its power. It
has been like a leit-motif through all the drama of this war in France,
through the spirit of the French people waiting patiently for victory,
hiding their tears for the dead, consoling their wounded and their
cripples, and giving their youngest and their manhood to the God of
War. What is the magic in this tune so that if one hear it even on a
cheap piano in an auxiliary hospital, or scraped thinly on a violin in a
courtyard of Paris, it thrills one horribly? On the night of August 2,
when I travelled from Paris to Nancy, it seemed to me that France
sang La Marseillaise--the strains of it rose from every wayside station
--and that out of its graveyards across those dark hills and fields, with
a thin luminous line on the far horizon the ghosts of slain soldiers rose
to sing it to those men who were going to fight again for liberty.

Since then it has always been in my ears. I heard it that night in
Amiens when the French army was in retreat, and when all the young
men of the city, not yet called to the colours because of their youth,
escaped hurriedly on truck trains before a bridge was blown up, so
that if they stayed they would be prisoners in German hands. It was
these boys who sang it, with fresh, clear voices, joining in a fine
chorus, though not far away the soldiers of France were limping
through the night from abandoned positions:

Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes,
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Egorger nos fils, nos compagnes!
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons!

I listened to those boys' voices, and something of the history of the
song put its spell upon me then. There was the passion of old
heroism in it, of old and bloody deeds, with the wild wars of revolution
and lust for liberty. Rouget de Lisle wrote it one night at Strasburg,
when he was drunk, says the legend. But it was not the drunkenness
of wine which inspired his soul. It was the drunkenness of that year
1792, when the desire of liberty made Frenchmen mad. . . The men
of Marseilles came singing it into Paris. The Parisians heard and
caught up the strains. It marched to the victories of the Republican
armies. "We fought one against ten," wrote a French general, "but La
Marseillaise was on our side." "Send us," wrote another general, "ten
thousand men and one copy of La Marseillaise, and I will answer for
victory."

A hundred years and more have passed since then, but the tune has
not gone stale. Again and again in the Orders of the Day one read
that "the company went into action singing La Marseillaise, Lieutenant
X was still singing when, after carrying the enemy's position, he was
shot in the throat"; or "the Chasseurs Alpins climbed the ridge to the
song of La Marseillaise."

The spirit of it runs through the narrative of a French infantryman who
described an action in the Argonne, where his regiment held a village
heavily attacked by the enemy. There was street-fighting of the
fiercest kind, and hand-to-hand combats in the houses and even in
the cellars. "Blood," he wrote, "ran in the gutters like water on a rainy
day." The French soldiers were being hard pressed and reserves
came with their new regiments in the nick of time.

"Suddenly the Marseillaise rang out while the bugles of the three
regiments sounded the charge. From where we stood by the fire of
burning houses we could see the action very clearly, and never again
shall I see anything more fantastic than those thousands of red legs
charging in close ranks. The grey legs began to tremble (they do not
love the bayonet), and the Marseillaise continued with the bugles,
while bur guns vomited without a pause. Our infantry had closed with
the enemy. Not a shot now, but cold steel... Suddenly the charge
ceased its bugle-notes. They sounded instead the call to the flag. Au
drapeau! Our flag was captured! Instinctively we ceased fire,
thunderstruck. Then very loud and strong the Marseillaise rang out
above the music of the bugles, calling Au drapeau again and again."

"We saw the awful melee, the struggle to the death with that song
above all the shouting and the shrieks... You who imagine you know
La Marseillaise because you have heard it played at prize
distributions must acknowledge your error. In order to know it you
must have heard it as I have tried to tell you, when blood is flowing
and the flag of France is in danger."

To this soldier it is an intolerable thought that he should hear the
hymn of victory sung at a "prize distribution," or in a music-hall
scented with the perfume of women. But even in a music-hall in Paris,
or in a third-rate cabaret in a provincial town, the song may be heard
with all its magic. I heard it one night in such a place, where the song
was greater than the singer. French poilus were in the hall, crippled or
convalescent, after their day of battle, and with their women around
them they stood at attention while the national hymn was sung. They
knew the meaning of it, and the women knew. Some of them became
quite pale, with others faces flushed. Their eyes were grave, but with
a queer fire in them as the verses rang out. ... It seemed to me as I
stood there in this hall, filled with stale smoke and woman's scent,
that I smelt blood, and gunpowder, and heard through the music of
the Marseillaise the shouts of hoarse voices, charging with the
bayonet, the screams of wounded, and then the murmur of a
battlefield when dawn comes, lighting the tattered flags of France.


20


The soldiers of France in that strange land called là-bas had one
consolation which should have helped them a little--did help them, I
think, more than a little--to endure the almost intolerable misery of
their winter quarters at the front in one of the wettest half years within
living memory. They stood in the waterlogged trenches, shivering and
coughing, they tramped through cotton-wool mists with heavy
overcoats which had absorbed many quarts of rain, they slept at
nights in barns through which the water dripped on to puddled straw,
or in holes beneath the carts with dampness oozing through the clay
walls, or in boggy beetroot fields under a hail of shrapnel, and their
physical discomfort of coldness and humidity was harder to bear than
their fear of death or mutilation.

But throughout those months of mud and blood a spirit came to visit
them in their trenches, and though it could not cure frozen feet or put
a healing touch for men spitting blood and coughing their lungs away,
it warmed the hearts of men who otherwise would have been chilled
to a moral death. The love of women and of all those people who had
not been called upon to fight went out to those poilus at the front, in
waves of emotion which reached as far as the advanced trenches. By
millions of letters, which in spite of an almost hopeless muddle of the
postal service did at last reach the soldier, they knew that France, the
very heart of France, was full of pity and hero-worship and yearning
for them. By the gifts which came to them--after months of delay,
sometimes--not only from their own kinsfolk but from unknown
benefactors, school children, convents, societies, and all classes of
men and women, they knew that their sufferings were understood
and that throughout the country there was a great prayer going up--
from freethinkers as well as from Catholic souls--that the soldiers of
France might be blessed with victory and that they might have the
strength to endure the cruelties of war.

It may be thought that this sentiment would not comfort a man lying
on his stomach as sentinel on outpost duty, staring through the mist
and rain, and listening for the slightest sound of an approaching
enemy, or a man crouching beneath a ledge of earth, waiting for the
quiet words of En avant! which would make him scramble up and go
into a storm of shells with a fair chance of being cut to bits by flying
scythes. But in truth the sentiment that came welling up to those men
at the front was of infinite comfort and kept alight a flame in them
which no winter wind could douse. That sentinel on his stomach,
gripping a cold rifle with numbed hands, and cursing silently the fate
which had brought him to this agony, checked the fear that Avas
creeping up to his heart--was that a line of Boches stealing through
the mist?--when he thought that the women he knew, the folk in the
Normandy village, the old curé, and all the spirit of France had made
a hero of him and expected him to bear himself bravely, and in
imagination stood beside him to share his vigil. In order not to spoil
the image they had made of him, to live up to their ideals of him he
must hold on and kill these little devils of fear, and die, if need be, as
a gallant soldier of France. It would be fine to come back with a stripe
on his arm, perhaps with the military medal on his breast... But oh,
the pain in those frozen feet of his! and the coldness of this bed of
mud!

Poor devils! hundreds of them have told me their stories and at the
end of a tale of misery have said: "I do not complain, you know. It's
war, and I am glad to do my duty for the sake of France." And yet
sometimes, when they thought back, to the homes they had left, and
their old ways of civil life, they had moments of weakness in which all
the strength of their souls seemed to ebb away.

"It's fatal to think of one's life before the war," said a young
Frenchman who sat with me at the table of a little café not far from
the front. He was a rich young man, with a great business in Paris
which had been suspended on the first day of mobilization, and with a
pretty young wife who had just had her first baby. Now he was a
simple soldier, and for nine months he had not seen Paris or his
home or his pretty wife. The baby's eyes were grey-blue, it seemed,
but he had not been able to test the truth of that description.

"As a rule," he said, "one doesn't think back to one's old life. A great
gulf lies between us and the past and it is as though one had been
born again just to be a soldier in this war. The roots of our former
existence have been torn up. All one's old interests have been
buried. My wife? I hardly ever think of her. My home? Is there such a
place? It is only at night, or suddenly, sometimes, as one goes
marching with one's company that one's thoughts begin to roam back
over old grounds for a moment or two. The other fellows know what
one's silence means, and one's deafness, so that one doesn't hear a
neighbour's joke or answer his question. It gives one a horrible
heartache and one is overwhelmed with depression... Great God,
how long is this war going to last?"


21


It is only those who have been to the front in France who can realize
the life of the men there as it went on month after month--the misery of
it, the dreariness of it, the lack of any thrill except that of fear. At
the end of April in this year 1915 I went to the most desolate part
of the French front, along the battlefields of Champagne, where
after nine months of desperate fighting the guns were still at work
ceaselessly and great armies of France and Germany were still divided
from each other by a few barren meadows, a burnt wood or two, a
river bank, a few yards of trenches and a zone of Death.

It was in Champagne-Pouilleuse--mangy Champagne it is called,
because it has none of the richness of the vineyard country, but is a
great stretch of barren land through which the chalk breaks out in
bald patches. The spirit of war brooded over all this countryside, and I
passed through many ruined villages, burnt and broken by
incendiarism and shell-fire. Gradually as we approached nearer to the
front, the signs of ordinary life were left behind, and we came into a
region where all the activities of men were devoted to one
extraordinary purpose, and where they lived in strange conditions.

No civilian came this way unless as a correspondent under the
charge of a staff officer. The labourers on the roadside--carting
stones to this country of chalk--were all in uniform. No women
invaded this territory except, where, here and there, by rare chance, a
wrinkled dame drove a plough across a lonely field. No children
played about the brooks or plucked the wild flowers on the hillsides.
The inhabitants of this country were all soldiers, tanned by months of
hard weather, in war-worn clothes, dusty after marching down the
long, white roads, hard and tough in spite of a winter's misery, with
calm, resolute eyes in spite of the daily peril of death in which they
live.

They lived in a world which is as different from this known world of
ours as though they belonged to another race of men inhabiting
another planet, or to an old race far back behind the memory of the
first civilization. For in this district of Champagne, the soldiers of
France were earth-men or troglodytes, not only in the trenches, but
for miles behind the trenches. When the rains came last autumn they
were without shelter, and there were few villages on this lonely stretch
of country in which to billet them. But hère were soft, chalky ridges
and slopes in which it was not difficult to dig holes and caverns. The
troops took to picks and shovels, and very soon they built habitations
for themselves in which they have been living ever since when not in
the trenches.

I was invited into some of these subterranean parlours, and ducked
my head as I went down clay steps into dim caves where three or
four men lived in close comradeship in each of them. They had
tacked the photographs of their wives or sweethearts on the walls, to
make these places "homelike," and there was space in some of them
for wood fires, which burned with glowing embers and a smoke that
made my eyes smart, so that by the light of them these soldiers
would see the portraits of those who wait for them to come back, who
have waited so patiently and so long through the dreary months.

But now that spring had come the earth-men had emerged from their
holes to bask in the sun again, and with that love of beauty which is
instinctive in a Frenchman's heart, they were planting gardens and
shrubberies outside their chalk dwellings with allegorical designs in
cockle-shells or white stones.

"Très chic!" said the commandant to a group of soldiers proud to their
handicraft.

And chic also, though touching in its sentiment, was a little graveyard
behind a fringe of branches which mask a French battery. The
gunners were still at work plugging out shells over the enemy's lines,
from which came answering shells with the challenge of death, but
they had found time to decorate the graves of the comrades who had
been "unfortunate." They had twined wild flowers about the wooden
crosses and made borders of blossom about those mounds of earth.
It was the most beautiful cemetery in which I have ever stood with
bared head. Death was busy not far away. Great guns were speaking
in deep, reverberating tones, which gave a solemn import to the day;
but Nature was singing to a different tune.

"It is strange, is it not," said our commandant, "this contrast between
war and peace? Those cherry trees comfort one's spirit."

He was a soldier in every fibre of his being, but behind those keen,
piercing eyes of his there was the sentiment of France stirred now by
the beauty through which we passed, in spite of war. We drove for a
mile or more down a long, straight road which was an avenue of
cherry trees. They made an archway of white blossom above our
heads, and the warm sun of the day drew out their perfume. Away on
either side of us the fields were streaked with long rays of brilliant
yellow where saffron grew as though the sun had split bars of molten
metal there, and below the hillside the pear-blossom and cherry-
blossom which bloomed in deserted orchards lay white and gleaming
like snow on the Swiss peaks in summer.

"Even war is less horrible now that the sun shines," said a French
officer.

The sky was cloudlessly blue, but as I gazed up into a patch of it,
where a winged machine flew high with a humming song, five tiny
white clouds appeared quite suddenly.

"They are shelling him," said the commandant. "Pretty close too."

Invisible in the winged machine was a French aviator, reconnoitring
the German lines away over Beauséjour. Afterwards he became
visible, and I talked with him when he had landed in the aviation field,
where a number of aeroplanes stood ready for flight.

"They touched her three times," he said, pointing to his machine.
"You can see the holes where the shrapnel bullets pierced the metal
sheath."

He showed me how he worked his mitrailleuse, and then strolled
away to light a cigarette against the wind. He had done his morning
job, and had escaped death in the air by half an inch or so. But in the
afternoon he would go up again--2000 feet up above the German
guns--and thought no more of it than of just a simple duty with a little
sport to keep his spirits up.

"We are quite at home here," said one of the French officers, leading
the way through a boyau, or tunnel, to a row of underground
dwellings which had been burrowed out of the earth below a high
ridge overlooking the German positions opposite Perthes, Mesnil-lez-
Hurlus, and Beausé-jour, where there had been some of the most
ferocious fighting in the war, so that the names of those places have
been written in blood upon the history of France.

"You see we have made ourselves as comfortable as possible," said
the general, who received us at the doorway of the little hole which,
with delightful irony, he called his "palace." He is an elderly man, this
general who has held in check some of the most violent assaults of
the German army, but there was a boyish smile in his eyes and none
of the harshness of old age in the sweetness of his voice. He lived in
a hole in the earth with just a peep-hole out of which he could see the
German lines on the opposite hills and his won trenches down below.
As he spread out his maps and explained the positions of his
batteries and lines, I glanced round his room--at the truckle-bed which
filled the length of it, and the deal table over which he was bending,
and the wooden chair in which he sat to think out the problems of his
task. There was only one touch of colour in this hole in the hillside,
and it belonged to a bunch of carnations placed in a German shell
and giving out a rich odour so that some of the beauty of spring had
come into this hiding-place where an old man directed the operations
of death. "Look," said the general, pointing to the opposite lines, "here
is Crest 196, about which you gentlemen have written so much in
newspapers."

It was just a rise in the ground above the ravine which divided us
from the German ridges, but I gazed at it with a thrill, remembering
what waves of blood have washed around this hillock, and how many
heroes of France have given their lives to gain that crest. Faintly I
could see the lines of German trenches with their earthworks thrown
up along the hillsides and along the barren fields on each side of the
ravine, where French and German soldiers are very close to each
other's tunnels. From where we stood subterranean passages led to
the advanced trenches down there, and to a famous "trapeze" on the
right of the German position, forming an angle behind the enemy's
lines, so that now and again their soldiers might be seen.

"It is not often in this war that we can see our enemy unless we visit
them in their trenches, or they come to us," said the general, "but a
few days ago, when I was in the trapeze, I saw one of them stooping
down as though gathering something in his hands or tying up
his boot-laces." Those words were spoken by a man who had
commanded French troops for nine months of incessant fighting
which reveal the character of this amazing war. He was delighted
because he had seen a German soldier in the open and found it a
strange unusual thing. Not a sign of any human being could I see as I
gazed over the great battlefields of France. There was no glint of
helmets, no flash of guns, no movements of regiments, no stirring of
the earth. There was a long tract of country in which no living thing
moved: utterly desolate in its abandonment. Yet beneath the earth
here, close to us as well as far away, men crouched in holes waiting
to kill or to be killed, and all along the ridges, concealed in dug-outs or
behind the low-lying crests, great guns were firing so that their
thunder rolled across the ravines, and their smoke-clouds rested for a
little while above the batteries.

The general was pointing out a spot on Hill 196 where the Germans
still held a ridge. I could not see it very clearly, or at least the
general thought my eyes were wandering too much to the right.

"I will drop a shell there," he said, and then turned to a telephone
operator who was crouched in a hole in the wall, and gave an order to
him.

The man touched his instrument and spoke in the mouthpiece.

"C'est la batterie?"

There was a little crackling in the telephone, like twigs under a pot,
and it seemed as though a tiny voice were speaking from a great
distance.

"Now!" said the general, pointing towards the crest.

I stared intently, and a second later, after a solitary thunderstroke
from a heavy gun, I saw a shell burst and leave a soft white cloud at
the very spot indicated by the old man at my side. I wondered if a few
Germans had been killed to prove the point for my satisfaction. What
did it matter--a few more deaths to indicate a mark on the map? It
was just like sweeping a few crumbs off the table in an argument on
strategy.

In another hole to which the general took me was the officers' mess--
about as large as a suburban bathroom. At the end of the dining-table
the captain was shaving himself, and laughed with embarrassment at
our entry. But he gave me two fingers of a soapy hand and said
"Enchanté" with fine courtesy.

Outside, at the top of the tunnel, was another group of officers, who
seemed to me cheery men in spite of all the hardships of their winter
in a subterranean world. The spring had warmed their spirits, and
they laughed under the blue sky. But one of them, who stood chatting
with me, had a sudden thrill in his voice as he said, "How is Paris?"
He spoke the word again and said, "Paris!" as though it held all his
soul.


22


There was the real spirit of old-world chivalry in a château of France
which I visited two days ago. This old building, with its high gables
and pointed roofs, holds the memory of many great chapters in
French history. Attila the Hun came this way with his hordes, checked
and broken at last, as centuries later, not far away, 100,000 Germans
were checked and broken by Dumouriez and the French army of
1792 on the plain of Valmy.

A French officer pointed to a tablet on the wall of the château
commemorating that victory, and said: "Perhaps history will be
repeated here by the general whom you will see later on." He stooped
down and rubbed some dust off a stone, revealing a tracing of the
footprint of Henri IV, who once crossed this threshold, and on the way
upstairs pointed to other memorial tablets of kings and princes,
statesmen and soldiers, who had received the hospitality of this old
house.

There are many châteaux of this kind in Champagne, and in one of
them we entered a long, bare room, where a French general stood
with some of his officers, and I knew that the old spirit of France and
its traditions of chivalry have not died. This general, with a silver star
on his breast, seemed to me like one of those nobles who fought in
the wars of the sixteenth century under the Duc de Guise.

He is a man of less than fifty years of age, with a black beard and
steel-blue eyes, extraordinarily keen and piercing, and a fine poise of
the head, which gives him an air of dignity and pride, in spite of the
simplicity and charm of his manners. I sat opposite to him at table,
and in this old room, with stone walls, he seemed to me like the
central figure of some mediaeval painting. Yet there was nothing
mediaeval except the touch of chivalry and the faith of France in the
character of this general and his officers. Men of modern science and
trained in a modern school of thought, their conversation ranged over
many subjects both grave and gay, and, listening to them, I saw the
secret of Germany's failure to strike France to her knees.

With such men as these in command, with that steel-eyed general on
the watch--energy and intellectual force personified in his keen,
vivacious face--the old faults of 1870 could not happen so easily
again, and Germany counted without this renaissance of France.
These men do not minimize the strength of the German defensive,
but there is no fear in their hearts about the final issue of the war, and
they are sure of their own position along this front in Champagne.

It was to the first lines of defence along that front that I went in the
afternoon with other officers. Our way was through a wood famous in
this war because it has been the scene of heavy fighting, ending in its
brilliant capture by the French. It has another interest, because it is
one of the few places along the front--as far as I know the only place-
where troops have not entrenched themselves.

This was an impossibility, because the ground is so moist that water
is reached a few feet down. It was necessary to build shell-proof
shelters above-ground, and this was done by turning the troops into
an army of wood-cutters.

This sylvan life of the French troops here is not without its charm,
apart from the marmites which come crashing through the trees, and
shrapnel bullets which whip through the branches. The ground has
dried up during recent days, so that the long boarded paths leading to
the first lines are no longer the only way of escape from bogs and
swamps.

It might have been the scene of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as I
made my way through thickets all aglint with the first green of the
spring's foliage, treading on a carpet of white and yellow flowers and
accompanied on my way by butterflies and flying beetles.

But a tremendous noise beyond the stage would have spoilt the play.
French batteries were hard at work and their shells came rushing like
fierce birds above the trees. The sharp "tang" of the French
"Soixante-quinze" cracked out between the duller thuds of the "Cent-
vingt" and other heavy guns, and there were only brief moments of
silence between those violent explosions and the long-drawn sighs of
wind as the shells passed overhead and then burst with that final
crash which scatters death.

In one of the silences, when the wood was very still and murmurous
with humming insects, I heard a voice call. It was not a challenge of
"Qui va là?" or "Garde à vous," but the voice of spring. It called
"Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" and mocked at war.

A young officer with me was more interested in the voices of the
guns. He knew them all, even when they spoke from the enemy's
batteries, and as we walked he said alternately, "Départ.. Arrivé...
Départ... Arrivé..." as one of the French shells left and one of the
German shells arrived.

The enemy's shells came shattering across the French lines very
frequently, and sometimes as I made my way through the trees
towards the outer bastions I heard the splintering of wood not far
away.

But the soldiers near me seemed quite unconscious of any peril
overhead. Some of them were gardening and making little bowers
about their huts. Only a few sentinels were at their posts, along the
bastions built of logs and clay, behind a fringe of brushwood which
screened them from the first line of German trenches outside this
boundary of the wood.

"Don't show your head round that corner," said an officer, touching
me on the sleeve, as I caught a glimpse of bare fields and, a
thousand yards away, a red-roofed house. There was nothing much
to see--although the enemies of France were there with watchful eyes
for any movement behind our screen.

"A second is long enough for a shot in the forehead," said the officer,
"and if I were you I would take that other path. The screen has worn a
bit thin just there."

It was curious. I found it absolutely impossible to realize, without an
intellectual effort, that out of the silence of those flat fields death
would come instantly if I showed my head. But I did not try the
experiment to settle all doubts.


23


In the heart of the wood was a small house, spared by some freak of
chance by the German shells which came dropping on every side of
it. Here I took tea with the officers, who used it as their headquarters,
and never did tea taste better than on that warm spring day, though it
was served with a ladle out of a tin bowl to the music of many guns.
The officers were a cheery set who had become quite accustomed to
the menace of death which at any moment might shatter this place
and make a wreckage of its peasant furniture. The colonel sat back in
a wooden armchair, asking for news about the outer world as though
he were a shipwrecked mariner on a desert isle; but every now and
then he would listen to the sound of the shells and say, "Départ! ...
Arrivé!" just like the officer who had walked with me through the
wood.

Two of the younger officers sat on the edge of a truckle-bed beneath
the portrait of a buxom peasant woman, who was obviously the wife
of the late proprietor. Two other officers lounged against the door-
posts, entertaining the guests of the day with droll stories of death.
Another came in with the latest communiqué received by the wireless
station outside, and there was a "Bravo! bravo!" from all of us
because it had been a good day for France. They were simple
fellows, these men, and they had the manners of fine gentlemen in
spite of their mud-stained uniforms and the poverty of the cottage in
which they lived. Hardly a day passed without one of their comrades
being killed or wounded, but some officer came to take his place and
his risk, and they made him welcome to the wooden chair and his
turn of the truckle-bed. I think in that peasant's hut I saw the whole
spirit of the French army in its surrender of self-interest and its good-
humoured gallantry.

The guns were still thundering as I drove back from the wood. The
driver of the car turned to me for a moment with a smile and pointed a
few yards away.

"Did you see that shell burst then? It was pretty close."

Death was always pretty close when one reached the fighting-lines of
France.

Soldiers of France, for nearly a year of war I have been walking
among you with watchful eyes, seeing you in all your moods, of gaiety
and depression, of youthful spirits and middle-aged fatigues, and
listening to your tales of war along the roads of France, where you
have gone marching to the zone of death valiantly. I know some of
your weaknesses and the strength of the spirit that is in you, and the
sentiment that lies deep and pure in your hearts in spite of the
common clay of your peasant life or the cynical wit you learnt in Paris.
Sons of a great race, you have not forgotten the traditions of a
thousand years, which makes your history glorious with the spirit of a
keen and flashing people, which century after century has renewed
its youth out of the weariness of old vices and reached forward to
new beauties of science and art with quick intelligence.

This monstrous war has been your greatest test, straining your moral
fibre beyond even the ordeal of those days when your Republican
armies fought in rags and tatters on the frontiers and swept across
Europe to victories which drained your manhood. The debacle of
1870 was not your fault, for not all your courage could save you from
corruption and treachery, and in this new war you have risen above
your frailties with a strength and faith that have wiped out all those
memories of failure. It is good to have made friends among you, to
have clasped some of your brown hands, to have walked a little along
the roads with you. Always now the name of France will be like a
song in my heart, stirring a thousand memories of valour and fine
endurance, and of patience in this senseless business of slaughter,
which made you unwilling butchers and victims of a bloody sacrifice.
Bonne chance, soldats de France!



Chapter X
The Men In Khaki



1


When our little professional army landed on the coast of Prance there
was not one in a thousand soldiers who had more than the vaguest
idea as to why he was coming to fight the Germans or as to the
character of the fighting in which he was to be engaged. If one asked
him "Why are we at war with Germany" this regular soldier would
scratch his head, struggle to find a reasonable answer, and mutter
something about "them bloody Germans," and "giving a hand to the
Froggies." Of international politics, world-problems, Teutonic
ambitions, Slav perils, White Papers or Yellow Papers, he knew
nothing and cared nothing. As a professional soldier it was his duty to
fight anybody he was told to fight, of whatever colour he might be, or
of whatever country. For some months it had been in his mind that he
might have to do a bit of shooting in Ireland, and on the whole he was
glad that this enemy was to speak a foreign language. It made the
game seem more as it should be. What was it Blatchford had said
about the Germans? He couldn't quite remember the drift of it, except
that they had been preparing for years to have a smack at England.
Wanted to capture all our Colonies, and were building ships like
blazes. Of course our Government had been asleep as usual, and
didn't care a damn. No British Government ever did, as far as he
could remember. Anyhow, the Germans were his enemy, and the
French were our friends--which was queer--and the British army was
going to save Europe again according to its glorious traditions as
mentioned more than once by the Colonel. It had been a fine time
before saying good-bye to the wife and kids. Every man had been a
hero to his fellow citizens, who had clapped him on the back and
stood free drinks in great style. "Bring us back some German
helmets, Jock!" the girls had shouted out, "And mind your P's and
Q's with them French hussies."

It would be a bit of a change to see the Continental way of doing
things. They spoke a queer lingo, the French, but were all right. Quite
all right, judging from the newspapers, and a fellow who had gone out
as a chauffeur and had come back with fancy manners. "After you,
Monsieur. Pardonney-more." There would be some great adventures
to tell the lads when the business was over. Of course there would be
hot work, and some of the boys would never come back at all--
accidents did happen even in the best regulated wars--but with a bit
of luck there would be a great home-coming with all the bells ringing,
and crowds in the streets, and the band playing "See the conquering
hero comes," or "when Tommy comes marching home." We had
learnt a thing or two since South Africa, and the army was up to
scratch. These Germans would have to look out for themselves.


2


I think that represents fairly enough the mental attitude of the average
British soldier who came out to France into an unknown land in which
he was to do "his bit." The younger men knew nothing of the
psychological effect of shell-fire, and their imagination was not
haunted by any fear. The older men, brought back to the Colours
after a spell of civil life, judged of war according to the standards of
the South African campaign or Omdurman, and did not guess that
this war was to be a more monstrous thing, which would make that
little affair in the Transvaal seem a picnic for boys playing at the
game. Not yet had they heard the roar of Germany's massed artillery
or seen the heavens open and rain down death.

The British officer was more thoughtful, and did not reveal his
thoughts to the men. Only in quiet conversation in his own mess did
he reveal the forebodings which made his soul gloomy.

"There is no doubt the German army is the greatest fighting machine
in Europe. We might dislike some of their methods, their cast-iron
system and all that--oh, I know what the Times man said about their
last manuvres--but they have been preparing for this war for years,
and their organization is all cut and dried. How about the French?
Yes, they have plenty of pluck, and I've seen something of their
gunners--quite marvellous!--but have they got any staying power?
Are they ready? How about their politicians? I don't like the look of
things, altogether. We have joined in this infernal war--had to, of
course--but if things go wrong in France we haven't anything like an
army to tackle a job like this. . . . Not that I'm a pessimist, mind you."

No, they were not pessimists, these British officers, when they first
came out to France; and the younger men, all those lieutenants who
had come quite recently from Sandhurst and Stonyhurst, and public
schools in England, with the fine imperturbable manner of their class
and caste, hiding their boyishness under a mask of gravity, and not
giving themselves away by the slightest exuberance of speech or
gesture, but maintaining stiff upper lips under a square quarter of an
inch of fair bristles, went into this war with unemotional and
unconscious heroism. Unlike the French officer, who had just that
touch of emotionalism and self-consciousness which delights in the
hero-worship in the streets, the cheers of great crowds, the fluttering
of women's handkerchiefs, and the showering of flowers from high
balconies, these English boys had packed up their traps and gone
away from homes just as they had got back to school after the
holidays, a little glum, and serious, at the thought of work. "Good-bye,
mother."

The embrace had lasted a few seconds longer than usual. This
mother had held her son tight, and had turned a little pale. But her
voice had been steady and she had spoken familiar words of
affection and advice, just as if her boy were off to the hunting-fields,
or a polo match.

"Good-bye, darling. Do be careful, won't you? Don't take unnecessary
risks."

"Right-o! ... Back soon, I hope." That was all, in most cases. No sobs
or heartbreaks. No fine words about patriotism, and the sweetness of
death for the Mother Country, and the duty of upholding the old
traditions of the Flag. All that was taken for granted, as it had been
taken for granted when this tall fellow in brand new khaki with nice-
smelling belts of brown leather, was a bald-headed baby on a lace
pillow in a cradle, or an obstreperous boy in a big nursery. The word
patriotism is never spoken in an English household of this boy's
class. There are no solemn discourses about duty to the Mother
Country. Those things have always been taken for granted, like the
bread and butter at the breakfast table, and the common decencies
of life, and the good manners of well-bred people. When his mother
had brought a man-child into the world she knew that this first-born
would be a soldier, at some time of his life. In thousands of families it
is still the tradition. She knew also that if it were necessary, according
to the code of England, to send a punitive expedition against some
native race, or to capture a new piece of the earth for the British
Empire, this child of hers would play his part, and take the risks, just
as his father had done, and his grandfather. The boy knew also,
though he was never told. The usual thing had happened at the usual
age.

"I suppose you will soon be ready for Sandhurst, Dick?" "Yes, I
suppose so, father."


3


So when the war came these young men who had been gazetted six
months or so before went out to France as most men go to do their
job, without enthusiasm, but without faltering, in the same matter-of-
fact way as a bank clerk catches the 9.15 train to the city. But death
might be at the end of the journey? Yes. Quite likely. They would die
in the same quiet way. It was a natural incident of the job. A horrid
nuisance, of course, quite rotten, and all that, but no more to be
shirked than the risk of taking a toss over an ugly fence. It was what
this young man had been born for. It was the price he paid for his
caste.

There were some undercurrents of emotion in the British army not to
be seen on the surface. There had been private dramas in private
drawing-rooms. Some of the older men had been "churned up," as
they would say, because this sudden war had meant a leave-taking
from women, who would be in a deuce of a fix if anything happened
to certain captains and certain majors. Love affairs which had been
somewhat complicated were simplified too abruptly by a rapid
farewell, and a "God bless you, old girl. ... I hate to leave you with
such ragged ends to the whole business. But perhaps after all it's a
way out--for both of us. Eh?" The war offered a way out for all sorts of
men with complicated lives, with debts that had been rather a worry,
and with bills of folly that could not be paid at sight, and with skeletons
in the cupboard rattling their bones too loudly behind the panels. Well,
it was a case of cut and run. Between the new life and the old there
would be no bridge, across which a woman or a ghost could walk.
War is always a way of escape even though it be through the dark
valley of death.

Nothing of this private melodrama was visible among those men who
came to France. When they landed at Boulogne there was no visible
expression on faces which have' been trained to be expressionless.
At Rouen, at Le Mans, at St. Omer, and many other towns in France I
watched our British officers and tried to read their character after
getting a different point of view among the French troops. Certainly in
their way they were magnificent--the first gentlemen in the world, the
most perfect type of aristocratic manhood. Their quietude and their
coldness struck me as remarkable, because of the great contrast in
the character of the people around them. For the first time I saw the
qualities of my own race, with something like a foreigner's eyes, and
realized the strength of our racial character. It was good to see the
physique of these men, with their clear-cut English faces, and their
fine easy swagger, utterly unconscious and unaffected, due to having
played all manner of games since early boyhood, so that their athletic
build was not spoilt by deliberate development.

And I gave homage to them because of the perfect cut and
equipment of their uniforms, so neat and simple, and workmanlike for
the job of war. Only Englishmen could look so well in these clothes.
And even in these French towns I saw the influence of English school
life and of all our social traditions standing clear-cut against the
temperament of another nation with different habits and ideals. They
were confident without any demonstrative sign that they were
superior beings destined by God, or the force of fate, to hold the
fullest meaning of civilization. They were splendidly secure in this
faith, not making a brag of it, not alluding to it, but taking it for
granted, just as they had taken for granted their duty to come
out to France and die if that were destined.

And studying them, at café tables, at the base, or in their depots, I
acknowledged that, broadly, they were right. In spite of an
extraordinary ignorance of art and letters (speaking of the great
majority), in spite of ideas stereotyped by the machinery of their
schools and universities, so that one might know precisely their
attitude to such questions as social reform, internationalism, Home
Rule for Ireland, or the Suffragettes--any big problem demanding
freedom of thought and un-conventionality of discussion--it was
impossible to resist the conviction that these officers of the British
army have qualities, supreme of their kind, which give a mastery to
men. Their courage was not a passion, demanding rage or religious
fervour, or patriotic enthusiasm, for its inspiration. It was the very law
of their life, the essential spirit in them. They were unconscious of it as
a man is unconscious of breathing, unless diseased. Their honour
was not a thing to talk about. To prate about the honour of the army
or the honour of England was like talking about the honour of their
mother. It is not done. And yet, as Mark Antony said, "They were all
honourable men," and there seemed an austerity of virtue in them
which no temptation would betray--the virtue of men who have a code
admitting of certain easy vices, but not of treachery, or cowardice, or
corruption.

They had such good form, these young men who had come out to a
dirty devilish war. It was enormously good to hear them talking to
each other in just the same civil, disinterested, casual way which
belongs to the conversational range of St. James's Street clubs. Not
once--like French soldiers--did they plunge into heated discussions
on the ethics of war, or the philosophy of life, or the progress of
civilization, or the rights of democracies. Never did they reveal to
casual strangers like myself--and hundreds of French soldiers did--
the secret affections of their hearts, flowing back to the women they
had left, or their fears of death and disablement, or their sense of the
mystery of God. Not even war, with its unloosing of old restraints, its
smashing of conventionalities, could break down the code of these
young English gentlemen whose first and last lessons had been
those of self-concealment and self-control.

In England these characteristics are accepted, and one hardly thinks
of them. It is the foreigner's point of view of us. But in France, in war
time, in a country all vibrant with emotionalism, this restraint of
manner and speech and utter disregard of all "problems" and
mysteries of life, and quiet, cheerful acceptation of the job in hand,
startled the imagination of Englishmen who had been long enough
away from home to stand aloof and to study those officers with a
fresh vision. There was something superb in those simple, self-
confident, normal men, who made no fuss, but obeyed orders, or
gave them, with a spirit of discipline which belonged to their own
souls and was not imposed by a self-conscious philosophy. And yet I
could understand why certain Frenchmen, in spite of their admiration,
were sometimes irritated by these British officers. There were times
when the similarity between them, the uniformity of that ridiculous little
moustache on the upper lip, the intonation of voices with the peculiar
timbre of the public school drawl, sound to them rather tiresome.
They had the manners of a caste, the touch of arrogance which
belongs to a caste, in power. Every idea they had was a caste idea,
contemptuous in a civil way of poor devils who had other ideas and
who were therefore guilty--not by their own fault of course--of
shocking bad form. To be a Socialist in such company would be
worse than being drunk. To express a belief in democratic liberty
would cause a silence to fall upon a group of them as though some
obscenity beyond the limits allowed in an officers' mess-room had
been uttered by a man without manners.

Their attitude to French officers was, in the beginning of the war,
calculated to put a little strain upon the Entente Cordiale. It was an
attitude of polite but haughty condescension. A number of young
Frenchmen of the best families had been appointed as interpreters to
the British Expedition. There were aristocrats among them whose
names run like golden threads through the pages of French history. It
was therefore disconcerting when the young Viscomte de Chose and
a certain Marquis de Machin found that their knowledge of English
was used for the purpose of buying a packet of cigarettes for a
lieutenant who knew no French, and of running errands for British
officers who accepted such services as a matter of course. The rank-
and-file of the British army which first came into France was also a
little careless of French susceptibilities. After the first rapture of that
welcome which was extended to anyone in khaki, French citizens
began to look a little askance at the regiments from the Highlands
and Lowlands, some of whose men demanded free gifts in the shops,
and, when a little drunk, were rather crude in their amorous advances
to girls of decent up-bringing. These things were inevitable. In our
regular army there were the sweepings of many slums, as well as the
best blood of our peasantry and our good old families. Tough and
hardened fellows called to the Colours again from Glasgow and
Liverpool, Cardiff and Limehouse, had none of the refinements of the
younger generation of soldiers who prefer lemonade to whisky, and
sweetmeats to shag. It was these who in the first Expeditionary Force
gave most trouble to the military police and found themselves under
the iron heel of a discipline which is very hard and very necessary in
time of war.


4


These men were heroic soldiers, yet our hero-worship need not blind
us to the truth of things. There is nothing more utterly false than to
imagine that war purges human nature of all its frailties and vices,
and that under the shadow of death a great body of men gathered
like this from many classes and cities, become suddenly white
knights, sans-peur et sans reproche, inspired by the highest ideals of
faith and chivalry. If only some new Shakespeare would come out of
the ranks after this war to give us immortal portraits of a twentieth-
century Falstaff, with a modern Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph--what a
human comedy would be there in the midst of all this tragedy in
France and Flanders, setting off the fine exalted heroism of all those
noble and excellent men who, like the knights and men-at-arms of
Henry at Agincourt, thought that "the fewer men the greater share of
honour," and fought for England with a devotion that was careless of
death.

After the British retreat from Mons, when our regular troops realized
very rapidly the real meaning of modern warfare, knowing now that it
was to be no "picnic," but a deadly struggle against great odds, and a
fight of men powerless against infernal engines, there came out to
France by every ship the oddest types of men who had been called
out to fill up the gaps and take a share in the deadly business. These
"dug-outs" were strange fellows, some of them. Territorial officers
who had held commissions in the Yeomanry, old soldiers who had
served in India, Egypt, and South Africa, before playing interminable
games of chess in St. James's Street, or taking tea in country
rectories and croquet mallets on country lawns; provincial
schoolmasters who had commanded an O.T.C. with high-toned
voices which could recite a passage from Ovid with cultured diction;
purple-faced old fellows who for years had tempted Providence and
apoplexy by violence to their valets; and young bloods who had once
"gone through the Guards," before spending their week-ends at
Brighton with little ladies from the Gaiety chorus, came to Boulogne or
Havre by every boatload and astonished the natives of those ports by
their martial manners.

The Red Cross was responsible for many astounding representatives
of the British race in France, and there were other crosses--purple,
green, blue, and black--who contributed to this melodrama of mixed
classes and types. Benevolent old gentlemen, garbed like second-
hand Field Marshals, tottered down the quaysides and took the
salutes of startled French soldiers with bland but dignified
benevolence. The Jewish people were not only generous to the Red
Cross work with unstinted wealth which they poured into its coffers,
but with rich young men who offered their lives and their motor-cars in
this good service--though the greater part of them never went nearer
to the front (through no fault of their own) than Rouen or Paris, where
they spent enormous sums of money at the best hotels, and took
lady friends for joy rides in ambulances of magnificent design.
Boulogne became overcrowded with men and women wearing military
uniforms of no known design with badges of mysterious import.

Even the Scotland Yard detectives were bewildered by some of these
people whose passports were thoroughly sound, but whose
costumes aroused deep suspicion. What could they do, for instance,
with a young Hindu, dressed as a boy-scout, wearing tortoise-shell
spectacles, and a field kit of dangling bags, water-bottles, maps,
cooking utensils, and other material suitable for life on a desert isle?
Or what could they say to a lady in breeches and top-boots, with a
revolver stuck through her belt, and a sou'wester on her head, who
was going to nurse the wounded in a voluntary hospital at Nice?
Contingents of remarkable women invaded the chief tea-shops in
Boulogne and caused a panic among the waitresses. They wore
Buffalo Bill hats and blue uniforms with heavy blue coats, which were
literally spangled with brass buttons. Upon their stalwart bosoms were
four rows of buttons, and there was a row of brass on each side of
their top-coats, on their shoulders, and at the back of their waist-belts.
In the light of the tea-shop, where they consumed innumerable buns,
one's eyes became dizzy with all these bits of shining metal. To a
wounded man the sight of one of these ladies must have been
frightening, as though a shell had burst near his bedside, with the glint
of broken steel. Young officers just drafted out with commissions on
which the ink was hardly dry, plucked at their budding moustaches
and said "War is hell."

Some of the older officers, who had been called out after many years
of civilian ease, found the spirit of youth again as soon as they set
foot on the soil of France, and indulged in I the follies of youth as
when they had been sub-lieutenants in the Indian hills. I remember
one of these old gentlemen who refused to go to bed in the Hôtel
Tortoni at Havre, though the call was for six o'clock next morning with
quite a chance of death before the week was out. Some younger
officers with him coaxed him to his room just before midnight, but he
came down again, condemning their impudence, and went out into
the great silent square, shouting for a taxi. It seemed to me pitiful that
a man with so many ribbons on his breast, showing distinguished
service, should be wandering about a place where many queer
characters roam in the darkness of night. I asked him if I could show
him the way back to the Hôtel Tortoni. "Sir," he said, "I desire to go to
Piccadilly Circus, and if I have any of your impertinence I will break
your head." Two apaches lurched up to him, a few minutes later, and
he went off with them into a dark ally, speaking French with great
deliberation and a Mayfair accent. He was a twentieth century
Falstaff, and the playwright might find his low comedy in a character
like this thrust into the grim horror of the war.


5


One's imagination must try to disintegrate that great collective thing
called an army and see it as much as possible as a number of
separate individualities, with their differences of temperament and
ideals and habits of mind. There has been too much of the
impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though
it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving
with one purpose. In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech
and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness
and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous
shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane--so that when I met him in a
field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him
he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant
who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and
heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the
melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of
Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on
his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the
Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage
fighting instinct. Soldiers who had been through several battles and
knew the tricks of old campaigners were the stiffening in regiments of
younger men whose first experience of shell-fire was soul-shattering,
so that some of them whimpered and were blanched with fear.

In the ranks were men who had been mob-orators, and who had
once been those worst of pests, "barrack-room lawyers." They talked
Socialism and revolution in the trenches to comrades who saw no
use to alter the good old ways of England and "could find no manner
of use" for political balderdash. Can you not see all these men, made
up of every type in the life of the British Isles, suddenly transported to
the Continent and thence into the zone of fire of massed artillery
which put each man to the supreme test of courage, demanding the
last strength of his soul? Some of them had been slackers, rebels
against discipline, "hard cases." Some of them were sensitive fellows
with imaginations over-developed by cinematograph shows and the
unhealthiness of life in cities. Some of them were no braver than you
or I, my readers. And yet out of all this mass of manhood, with all their
faults, vices, coward instincts, pride of courage, unexpressed ideals,
unconscious patriotism, old traditions of pluck, untutored faith in
things more precious than self-interest--the mixture that one finds in
any great body of men--there was made an army, that "contemptible
little army" of ours which has added a deathless story of human
valour to the chronicles of our race.

These men who came out with the first Expeditionary Force had to
endure a mode of warfare more terrible than anything the world has
known before, and for week after week, month after month, they were
called upon to stand firm under storms of shells which seemed to
come from no human agency, but to be devilish in intensity and
frightfulness of destruction. Whole companies of them were
annihilated, whole battalions decimated, yet the survivors were led to
the shambles again. Great gaps were torn out of famous regiments and
filled up with new men, so often that the old regiment was but a name
and the last remaining officers and men were almost lost among the
new-comers. Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in
humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance,
these cockneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men
from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little
England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though
sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to God for mercy in all this hell.
With a pride of manhood beyond one's imagination, with a stern and
bitter contempt for all this devilish torture, loathing it but "sticking"
it, very much afraid yet refusing to surrender to the coward in their
souls (the coward in our souls which tempts all of us), sick of the
blood and the beastliness, yet keeping sane (for the most part) with
the health of normal minds and bodies in spite of all this wear and
tear upon the nerves, the rank-and-file of that British Expedition in
France and Flanders, under the leadership of young men who gave
their lives, with the largess of great prodigals, to the monstrous
appetite of Death, fought with something like superhuman qualities.


6


Although I spent most of my time on the Belgian and French side of
the war, I had many glimpses of the British troops who were enduring
these things, and many conversations with officers and men who had
come, but a few hours ago, from the line of fire. I went through British
hospitals and British ambulance trains where thousands of them lay
with new wounds, and I dined with them when after a few weeks of
convalescence they returned to the front to undergo the same ordeal.
Always I felt myself touched with a kind of wonderment at these men.
After many months of war the unwounded men were still unchanged,
to all outward appearance, though something had altered in their
souls. They were still quiet, self-controlled, unemotional. Only by a
slight nervousness of their hands, a slightly fidgety way so that they
could not sit still for very long, and by sudden lapses into silence, did
some of them show the signs of the strain upon them. Even the lightly
wounded men were astoundingly cheerful, resolute, and unbroken.
There were times when I used to think that my imagination
exaggerated the things I had seen and heard, and that after all war
was not so terrible, but a rather hard game with heavy risks. It was
only when I walked among the wounded who had been more than
"touched," and who were the shattered wrecks of men, that I realized
again the immensity of the horror through which these other men had
passed and to which some of them were going back. When the
shrieks of poor tortured boys rang in my ears, when one day I passed
an officer sitting up in his cot and laughing with insane mirth at his
own image in a mirror, and when I saw men with both legs amputated
up to the thighs, or with one leg torn to ribbons, and another already
sawn away, lying among blinded and paralysed men, and men
smashed out of human recognition but still alive, that I knew the
courage of those others, who having seen and known, went back to
risk the same frightfulness.


7


There was always a drama worth watching at the British base, for it
was the gate of those who came in and of those who went out, "the
halfway house" as a friend of mine called another place in France,
between the front and home.

Everything came here first--the food for guns and men, new boots for
soldiers who had marched the leather off their feet; the comforters
and body-belts knitted by nimble-fingered girls, who in suburban
houses and country factories had put a little bit of love into every
stitch; chloroform and morphia for army doctors who have moments
of despair when their bottles get empty; ambulances, instruments,
uniforms, motor lorries; all the letters which came to France full of
prayers and hopes; and all the men who came to fill up the places of
those for whom there are still prayers, but no more hope on this side
of the river. It was the base of the British Expeditionary Force, and the
Army in the field would be starved in less than a week if it were cut off
from this port of supplies.

There was a hangar here, down by the docks, half a mile long. I
suppose it was the largest shed in the world, and it was certainly the
biggest store-cupboard ever kept under lock and key by a Mother
Hubbard with a lot of hungry boys to feed. Their appetites were
prodigious, so that every day thousands of cases were shifted out of
this cupboard and sent by train and motor-car to the front. But always
new cases were arriving in boats that are piloted into harbour across
a sea where strange fish came up from the deeps at times. So the
hangar was never empty, and on the signature of a British officer the
British soldiers might be sure of their bully beef, and fairly sure of a
clean shirt or two when the old ones had been burnt by the order of a
medical officer with a delicate nose and high ideals in a trench.

New men as well as new stores came in the boats to this harbour,
which was already crowded with craft not venturesome in a sea
where one day huge submarine creatures lurked about. I watched
some Tommies arrive. They had had a nasty "dusting" on the
voyage, and as they marched through the streets of the port some of
them looked rather washed out. They carried their rifles upside down
as though that might ease the burden of them, and they had that
bluish look of men who have suffered a bad bout of sea-sickness. But
they pulled themselves up when they came into the chief square
where the French girls at the flower stalls, and ladies at the hotel
windows, and a group of French and Belgian soldiers under the
shelter of an arcade, watched them pass through the rain.

"Give 'em their old tune, lads," said one of the men, and from this
battalion of new-comers who had just set foot in France to fill up gaps
in the ranks, out there, at the front, there came a shrill whistling
chorus of La Marseillaise. Yorkshire had learnt the hymn of France,
her song of victory, and I heard it on the lips of Highlanders and
Welshmen, who came tramping through the British base to the
camps outside the town where they waited to be sent forward to the
fighting line.

"Vive les Anglais!" cried a French girl, in answer to the whistling
courtesy. Then she laughed, with her arm round the waist of a girl
friend, and said, "They are all the same, these English soldiers. In
their khaki one cannot tell one from the other, and now that I have
seen so many thousands of them--Heaven! hundreds of thousands!
--I have exhausted my first enthusiasm. It is sad: the new arrivals
do not get the same welcome from us."

That was true. So many of our soldiers had been through the British
base that they were no longer a novelty. The French flower-girls did
not empty their stalls into the arms of the regiments, as on the first
days.

It was an English voice that gave the new-comers the highest praise,
because professional.

"A hefty lot! ... Wish I were leading them." The praise and the wish
came from a young English officer who was staying in the same hotel
with me. For two days I had watched his desperate efforts to avoid
death by boredom. He read every line of the Matin and Journal
before luncheon, with tragic sighs, because every line repeated what
had been said in the French newspapers since the early days of the
war. After luncheon he made a sortie for the English newspapers,
which arrived by boats. They kept him quiet until tea-time. After that
he searched the cafés for any fellow officers who might be there.

"This is the most awful place in the world!" he repeated at intervals,
even to the hall porter, who agreed with him. When I asked him how
long he had been at the base he groaned miserably and confessed to
three weeks of purgatory.

"I've been put into the wrong pigeon-hole at the War Office," he said.
"I'm lost."

There were many other men at the British base who seemed to have
been put into the wrong pigeon-holes. Among them were about two
hundred French interpreters who were awaiting orders to proceed
with a certain division. But they were not so restless as my friend in
the hotel. Was it not enough for them that they had been put into
English khaki--supplied from the store-cupboard--and that every
morning they had to practise the art of putting on a puttee? In order to
be perfectly English they also practised the art of smoking a briar
pipe--it was astoundingly difficult to keep it alight--and indulged in the
habit of five o'clock tea (with boiled eggs, ye gods!), and braved all
the horrors of indigestion, because they are not used to these things,
with heroic fortitude. At any cost they were determined to do honour
to le khaki, in spite of the arrogance of certain British officers who
treated them de haut en bas.

The Base Commandant's office was the sorting-house of the
Expeditionary Force. The relays of officers who had just come off the
boats came here to report themselves. They had sailed as it were
under sealed orders and did not know their destination until they were
enlightened by the Commandant, who received instructions from the
headquarters in the field. They waited about in groups outside his
door, slapping their riding-boots or twisting neat little moustaches,
which were the envy of subalterns just out of Sandhurst.

Through another door was the registry office through which all the
Army's letters passed inwards and outwards. The military censors
were there reading the letters of Private Atkins to his best girl, and to
his second best. They shook their heads over military strategy written
in the trenches, and laughed quietly at the humour of men who
looked on the best side of things, even if they were German shells or
French fleas. It was astonishing what a lot of humour passed through
this central registry from men who were having a tragic time for
England's sake; but sometimes the military Censor had to blow his
nose with violence because Private Atkins lapsed into pathos, and
wrote of tragedy with a too poignant truth.

The Base Commandant was here at all hours. Even two hours after
midnight he sat in the inner room with tired secretaries who marvelled
at the physical and mental strength of a man who at that hour could
still dictate letters full of important detail without missing a point or a
comma; though he came down early in the morning. But he was
responsible for the guarding of the Army's store-cupboard--that great
hangar, half a mile long--and for the discipline of a town full of soldiers
who, without discipline, would make a merry hell of it, and for the
orderly disposition of all the supplies at the base upon which the army
in the field depends for its welfare. It was not what men call a soft job.

Through the hotel where I stayed there was a continual flow of
officers who came for one night only. Their kit-bags and sleeping-
bags were dumped into the hall, and these young gentlemen, some
of whom had been gazetted only a few months ago, crowded into the
little drawing-room to write their letters home before going to the front,
and to inquire of each other what on earth there was to do in a town
where lights are out at ten o'clock, where the theatres were all closed,
and where rain was beating down on the pavements outside.

"How about a bath?" said one of them. "It is about the last chance, I
reckon."

They took turns to the bathroom, thinking of the mud and vermin of
the trenches which would soon be their home. Among those who
stayed in the sitting-room until the patron turned out the lights were
several officers who had been on forty-eight hours' leave from the
front. They had made a dash to London and back, they had seen the
lights of Piccadilly again, and the crowds in the streets of a city which
seemed to know nothing of war, they had dined with women in
evening-dress who had asked innocent questions about the way of a
modern battlefield, and they had said good-bye again to those who
clung to them a little too long outside a carriage window.

"Worth it, do you think?" asked one of them.

"Enormously so. But it's a bit of a pull--going back to that--
beastliness. After one knows the meaning of it."

"It's because I know that I want to go back," said another man who
had sat very quietly looking at the toe of one of his riding-boots. "I had
a good time in town--it seemed too good to be true--but, after all, one
has to finish one's job before one can sit around with an easy mind.
We've got to finish our job out there in the stinking trenches."


8


I suppose even now after all that has been written it is difficult for the
imagination of "the man who stayed at home" to realize the life and
conditions of the soldiers abroad. So many phrases which appeared
day by day in the newspapers conveyed no more than a vague,
uncertain meaning.

"The Front"--how did it look, that place which was drawn in a jagged
black line across the map on the wall? "General Headquarters"--what
sort of a place was that in which the Commander-in-Chief lived with
his staff, directing the operations in the fighting lines? "An attack was
made yesterday upon the enemy's position at-----. A line of trenches
was carried by assault." So ran the officiai bulletin, but the wife of a
soldier abroad could not fill in the picture, the father of a young
Territorial could not get enough detail upon which his imagination
might build. For all those at home, whose spirits came out to Flanders
seeking to get into touch with young men who were fighting for
honour's sake, it was difficult to form any kind of mental vision, giving
a clear and true picture of this great adventure in "foreign parts."

They would have been surprised at the reality, it was to different from
all their previous imaginings. General Headquarters, for instance, was
a surprise to those who came to such a place for the first time. It was
not, when I went there some months ago, a very long distance from
the fighting lines in these days of long-range guns, but it was a place
of strange quietude in which it was easy to forget the actuality of war--
until one was reminded by sullen far-off rumblings which made the
windows tremble, and made men lift their heads a moment to say:
"They are busy out there to-day." There were no great movements of
troops in the streets. Most of the soldiers one saw were staff officers,
who walked briskly from one building to another with no more than a
word and a smile to any friend they met on the way. Sentries stood
outside the doorways of big houses.

Here and there at the street comers was a military policeman,
scrutinizing any new-comer in civilian clothes with watchful eyes.
Church bells tinkled for early morning Mass or Benediction. Through
an open window looking out upon a broad courtyard the voices of
school children came chanting their A B C in French, as though no
war had taken away their fathers. There was an air of profound peace
here.

At night, when I stood at an open window listening to the silence of
the place it was hard, even though I knew, to think that here in this
town was the Headquarters Staff of the greatest army England has
ever sent abroad, and that the greatest war in history was being
fought out only a few miles away. The raucous horn of a motor-car,
the panting of a motor-cycle, the rumble of a convoy of ambulances,
the shock of a solitary gun, came as the only reminders of the great
horror away there through the darkness. A dispatch rider was coming
back from a night ride on a machine which had side-slipped all the
way from Ypres. An officer was motoring back to a divisional
headquarters after a late interview with the chief... The work went on,
though it was very quiet in General Headquarters.

But the brains of the Army were not asleep. Behind those doors,
guarded by sentries, men in khaki uniforms, with just a touch of red
about the collar, were bending over maps and documents--studying
the lines of German trenches as they had been sketched out by
aviators flying above German shrapnel, writing out orders for
ammunition to be sent in a hurry to a certain point on the fighting line
where things were very "busy" in the afternoon, ordering the food-
supplies wanted by a division of hungry men whose lorries are waiting
at the rail-head for bread and meat and a new day's rations.

"Things are going very well," said one of the officers, with a glance at
a piece of flimsy paper which had just come from the Signals
Department across the street. But things would not have gone so well
unless at General Headquarters every officer had done his duty to
the last detail, whatever the fatigue of body or spirit. The place was
quiet, because the work was done behind closed doors in these
private houses of French and Flemish bourgeoisie whose family
portraits hang upon the walls. Outside I could not see the spirit of war
unless I searched for it.

It was after I had left "G.H.Q." that I saw something of the human side
of war and all its ceaseless traffic. Yet even then, as I travelled nearer
and nearer to the front, I was astounded at the silence, the
peacefulness of the scenery about me, the absence of all tragic
sights. That day, on the way to a place which was very close to the
German lines, children were playing on the roadside, and old women
in black gowns trudged down the long, straight high roads, with their
endless sentinels of trees.

In a furrowed field a peasant was sowing the seed for an autumn
harvesting, and I watched his swinging gestures from left to right
which seem symbolical of all that peace means and of all nature's life
and beauty. The seed is scattered and God does the rest, though
men may kill each other and invent new ways of death...

But the roads were encumbered and the traffic of war was surging
forward ceaselessly in a muddled, confused, aimless sort of way, as it
seemed to me, before I knew the system and saw the working of the
brain behind it all. A long train of carts without horses stood, shafts
down, on the muddy side of the road. Little blue and red flags
fluttered above them. A group of soldiers were lounging in their
neighbourhood, waiting, it seems, for something to turn up. Perhaps
that something was a distant train which came with a long trail of
smoke across the distant marshlands.

At the railway crossing there was a great park of motor lorries. They,
too, seemed to be waiting for new loads. Obviously this was one of
the "railheads" about which I had a lecture that morning from a
distinguished officer, who thinks in railheads and refilling stations and
other details of transport upon which the armies in the field depend
for their food and ammunition. Without that explanation all these
roadside halts, all these stationary lorries and forage carts would
have seemed like a temporary stagnation in the business of war, with
nothing doing.

A thrill comes to every one when he sees bodies of British troops
moving along the roads. He is glad when his motorcar gets held up
by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side
of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a
"Hullo, boys! How's it going? And who are you?" After all the thrill of
the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the
enthusiasm with which they sang Tipperary through the streets of
their first port of call in France, they had settled down to the real
business.

Some of them had been into the trenches for the first time a night or
two before. "How did you like it?" Well, it wasn't amusing to them, it
seems, but they "stuck it." They were ready to go again. That was the
spirit of it all. They "stuck it," gamely, without grousing, without
swanking, without any other thought than suffering all the hardships
and all the thrills of war like men who know the gravity of the game,
and the risks, and the duty to which they have pledged themselves.

I passed thousands of these men on a long motor journey on my first
day at the British front, and though I could not speak to very many of
them I saw on all their faces the same hard, strong, dogged look of
men who were being put through a great ordeal and who would not
fail through any moral weakness. They were tired, some of them,
after a long march, but they grinned back cheery answers to my
greetings, and scrambled merrily for the few packets of cigarettes I
tossed to them.

Thousands of these khaki-clad fellows lay along the roadsides looking
in the distance as though great masses of russet leaves had fallen
from autumn trees. They were having a rest on their way up to the
front, and their heads were upon each other's shoulders in a
comradely way, while some lay face upwards to the sky with their
hands folded behind their heads, in a brown study and careless of
everything that passed.

Away across marshy fields, intersected by pools and rivulets, I saw
our men billeted in French and Flemish farmhouses, of the old post-
and-plaster kind, like those in English villages.

They seemed thoroughly at home, and were chopping wood and
drawing water and cooking stews, and arranging straw beds in the
barns, and busying themselves with all the domestic side of life as
quietly and cheerily as though they were on manuvres in
Devonshire or Surrey, where war is only a game without death in the
roar of a gun. Well fed and well clothed, hard as nails, in spite of all
their hardships, they gave me a sense of pride as I watched them, for
the spirit of the old race was in them, and they would stick it through
thick and thin.

I passed that day through the shell-stricken town of. Ypres and
wandered through the great tragedy of the Cloth Hall--that old
splendour in stone which was now a gaunt and ghastly ruin. British
soldiers were buying picture postcards at booths in the market-place,
and none of them seemed to worry because at any moment another
shell might come crashing across the shattered roofs with a new
message of destruction.

Yet on all this journey of mine in the war zone of the British front for at
least 100 kilometres or so there was no thrill or shock of war itself. A
little way off, on some parts of the road men were in the trenches
facing the enemy only a few yards distant from their hiding-places.

The rumble of guns rolled sullenly now and then across the
marshlands, and one knew intellectually, but not instinctively, that if
one's motor-car took the wrong turning and travelled a mile or two
heedlessly, sudden death would call a halt.

And that was the strangeness of it all--the strangeness that startled
me as I drove back to the quietude of the General Headquarters, as
darkness came down upon this low-lying countryside and put its cloak
about the figures of British soldiers moving to their billets, and gave a
ghostliness to the tall, tufted trees, which seemed to come striding
towards my headlights.

In this siege warfare of the trenches there was a deadly stillness
behind the front and a queer absence of war's tumult and turmoil. Yet
all the time it was going on slowly, yard by yard, trench by trench, and
somewhere along the front men were always fighting and dying.

"Gentlemen," said a staff officer that night, "there has been good
work to-day. We have taken several lines of trenches, and the
operation is proceeding very well."

We bent over his map, following the line drawn by his finger, listening
to details of a grim bit of work, glad that five hundred German
prisoners had been taken that day. As he spoke the window rattled,
and we heard the boom of another gun... The war was going on,
though it had seemed so quiet at the front.


9


For several months there was comparative quietude at the British
front after the tremendous attacks upon our lines at Soissons and
Venizel and Vic-sur-Aisne, and the still more bloody battles round
Ypres in the autumn of the first year of war. Each side settled down
for the winter campaign, and killing was done by continual artillery fire
with only occasional bayonet charges between trench and trench.
That long period of dark wet days was the most tragic ordeal of our
men, and a time when depression settled heavily upon their spirits, so
that not all their courage could keep any flame of enthusiasm in their
hearts for such fine words as honour and glory.

In "Plug Street" and other lines of trenches they stood in water with
walls of oozy mud about them, until their legs rotted and became
black with a false frostbite, until many of them were carried away with
bronchitis and pneumonia, and until all of them, however many
comforters they tied about their necks, or however many body-belts
they used, were shivering, sodden scarecrows, plastered with slime.
They crawled with lice, these decent Englishmen from good clean
homes, these dandy men who once upon a time had strolled down
the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, immaculate, and fragrant as their
lavender kid gloves. They were eaten alive by these vermin and
suffered the intolerable agony of itch. Strange and terrible diseases
attacked some of them, though the poisonous microbes were
checked by vigilant men in laboratories behind the front before they
could spread an epidemic. For the first time men without science
heard the name of cerebro-spinal meningitis and shuddered at it. The
war became a hopeless, dreary thing, without a thrill to it, except
when men wading in water were smashed by shell-fire and floated
about in a bloody mess which ran red through all a trench. That was a
thrill of beastliness, but gave no fire to men's hearts. Passion, if it had
ever burnt in these British soldiers' hearts, had smouldered out into
the white ash of patient misery. Certainly there was no passion of
hatred against the enemy, not far away there in the trenches. These
Germans were enduring the same hardships, and the same squalor.
There was only pity for them and a sense of comradeship, as of men
forced by the cruel gods to be tortured by fate.

This sense of comradeship reached strange lengths at Christmas,
and on other days. Truces were established and men who had been
engaged in trying to kill each other came out of opposite trenches and
fraternized. They took photographs of mixed groups of Germans and
English, arm-in-arm. They exchanged cigarettes, and patted each
other on the shoulder, and cursed the war. . . . The war had become
the most tragic farce in the world. The frightful senselessness of it
was apparent when the enemies of two nations fighting to the death
stood in the grey mist together and liked each other. They did not
want to kill each other, these Saxons of the same race and blood, so
like each other in physical appearance, and with the same human
qualities. They were both under the spell of high, distant Powers
which had decreed this warfare, and had so enslaved them that like
gladiators in the Roman amphitheatres they killed men so that they
should not be put to death by their task-masters. The monstrous
absurdity of war, this devil's jest, stood revealed nakedly by those
little groups of men standing together in the mists of Flanders. ... It
became so apparent that army orders had to be issued stopping
such truces. They were issued but not always obeyed. For months
after German and British soldiers in neighbouring trenches fixed up
secret treaties by which they fired at fixed targets at stated periods to
keep up appearances, and then strolled about in safety, sure of each
other's loyalty.

From one trench a German officer signalled to one of our own
lieutenants:

"I have six of your men in my trench. What shall I do with them?"

The lieutenant signalled back.

"I have two of yours. This is ridiculous."

The English officer spoke to the two Germans:

"Look here, you had better clear out. Otherwise I shall have to make
you prisoners."

"We want to be prisoners," said the Germans, who spoke English
with the accent of the Tottenham Court Road.

It appears that the lieutenant would not oblige them, and begged
them to play the game.

So with occasional embarrassments like this to break the deadly
monotony of life, and to make men think about the mystery of human
nature, coerced to massacre by sovereign powers beyond their ken,
the winter passed, in one long wet agony, in one great bog of misery.


10


It was in March, when the roads had begun to dry up, that our troops
resumed the offensive at several points of the line. I was at General
Headquarters when the first news of the first day's attack at Neuve
Chapelle was brought in by dispatch riders.

We crowded again round a table where a staff officer had spread out
his map and showed us the general disposition of the troops engaged
in the operation. The vague tremor of distant guns gave a grim
significance to his words, and on our own journey that day we had
seen many signs of organized activity bearing upon this attack.

But we were to see a more impressive demonstration of the day's
success, the human counters which had been won by our side in this
game of life and death. Nearly a thousand German prisoners had
been taken, and were being brought down from the front by rail. If we
liked we might have a talk with these men, and see the character of
the enemy which lies hidden in the trenches opposite our lines. It was
nearly ten o'clock at night when we motored to the railway junction
through which they were passing.

Were they glad to be out of the game, away from the shriek of shells
and out of the mud? I framed the question in German as I clambered
on to the footboard at a part of the train where the trucks ended and
where German officers had been given the luxury of first-class
carriages.

Two of them looked up with drowsy eyes, into which there came a
look of surprise and then of displeasure as I spoke a few words to
them. Opposite me was a fair young man, with soft blond hair and a
silky moustache. He looked like a Saxon, but told me afterwards that
he came from Cologne. Next to him was a typical young aristocrat of
the Bavarian type, in the uniform of a Jaeger regiment In the same
carriage were some other officers sleeping heavily. One of them, with
a closely-cropped bullet head and the low-browed face of, a man who
fights according to the philosophy of Bernhardi, without pity, sat up
abruptly, swore a fierce word or two, and then fell back and snored
again.

The two younger men answered some of my questions, sullenly at
first, but afterwards with more friendliness, against which their pride
struggled. But they had not much to say. They were tired. They had
been taken by surprise. They would have time to learn English as
prisoners of war. They had plenty of food and tobacco.

When the next batch of them arrived I was able to get into a closed
truck, among the private soldiers. They were quite comfortable in
there, and were more cheery than the officers in the other train. I was
surprised by their cleanliness, by the good condition of their uniforms,
and by their good health and spirits. The life of the trenches had not
left its marks upon them, though mentally, perhaps, they had gone to
the uttermost limit of endurance. Only one man fired up savagely
when I said that they were lucky in being captured. "It is good to fight
for the Fatherland," he said. The others made no secret of their
satisfaction in being out of it all, and all of them described the attack
on Neuve Chapelle as a hellish thing which had caught them by
surprise and swept their ranks.

I went back to my billet in General Headquarters wishing that I had
seen something of that affair which had netted all these men. It had
been a "day out" for the British troops, and we had not yet heard of
the blunders or the blood that had spoilt its success. It was hard to
have seen nothing of it though so near the front. And then a promise
of seeing something of the operations on the morrow came as a
prospect for the next day. It would be good to see the real business
again and to thrill once more to the awful music of the guns.

Along the road next day it was obvious that "things" were going to
happen. As we passed through towns in our motor-cars there were
signs of increased activity. Troops were being moved up. Groups of
them in goatskin coats, so that English Tommies looked like their
Viking ancestors, halted for a spell by the side of their stacked arms,
waiting for orders. Long lines of motor-lorries, with supplies to feed
the men and guns, narrowed the highway for traffic. Officers
approached our cars at every halt, saluted our staff officer, and asked
anxious questions: "How are things going? Is there any news?"

In the open country we could see the battle front, the low-lying
marshlands with windmills waving their arms on the far horizon, the
ridges and woods in which British and German batteries were
concealed, and the lines of trenches in which our men lay very close
to their enemy. We left the cars and, slithering in sticky mud, made
our way up a hillock on which one of these innumerable windmills
stood distinct. We were among the men who were in the actual
fighting lines and who went into the trenches turn and turn about, so
that it became the normal routine of their lives.

In the early days of the war these regiments had suffered heavy
losses, so that there were new drafts in them now, but there were
lads here who had fought at Mons and Charleroi and had seen their
comrades fall in heaps round about Le Cateau. They told their tales,
with old memories of terror, which had not made cowards of them.
Their chief interest to-day was centred in a football match which was
to take place about the same time as the "other business." It was not
their day out in the firing line. We left them putting on their football
boots and hurling chaff at each other in the dim light. Out of the way
of the flying shells they forgot all about the horror of war for a little
while.

Forcing our way through the brushwood on the slopes, we reached
the crest of the hillock. Near by stood two generals and several staff
officers--men whose names have been written many times in the
Chief's dispatches and will be written for all time in the history of this
war. They were at their post of observation, to watch the progress of
an attack which was timed to begin shortly.

Presently two other figures came up the hillside. One of them
arrested my attention. Who was that young officer, a mere boy, who
came toiling up through the slime and mud, and who at the crest
halted and gave a quick salute to the two generals? He turned, and I
saw that it was Edward, Prince of Wales, and through the afternoon,
when I glanced at him now and again as he studied his map and
gazed across the fields, I thought of another Edward, Prince of
Wales, who six centuries ago stood in another field of France. Out of
the past came old ghosts of history, who once as English princes and
knights and men-at-arms fought at St. Omer, and Ypres, Bailleul, and
Béthune, and all that very ground which lay before me now...

More than an hour before the time at which the attack was to be
concentrated upon the enemy's position--a line of trenches on a ridge
crowned by a thin wood immediately opposite my observation point--
our guns began to speak from many different places. It was a
demonstration to puzzle the enemy as to the objective of our attack.

The flashes came like the flicking of heliographs signalling messages
by a Morse code of death. After each flash came the thunderous
report and a rushing noise as though great birds were in flight behind
the veil of mist which lay on the hillsides. Puffs of woolly-white smoke
showed where the shrapnel was bursting, and these were wisped
away into the heavy clouds. Now and again one heard the high
singing note of shells travelling towards us--the German answer to
this demonstration--and one saw the puff balls resting on the hill-spur
opposite our observation post.

Presently the fire became less scattered, and as the appointed hour
approached our batteries aimed only in one direction. It was the ridge
to the left of the hill where lines of German trenches had been dug
below the fringe of wood. That place must have been a hell for half an
hour or more. Through the mist and the drowsy smoke I could see
the flashes of the bursting shells like twinkling stars. Those glittering
jewels sparkled in constellations, six or more at a time, and there was
never a minute without the glint of them. It was not hard to imagine
the terror of men crouching in pits below that storm of fire,
smashing down upon their trenches, cutting up their barbed wire
entanglements, killing any human life that could not hide below the
ground. The din of guns was unceasing, and made a great symphony
of staccato notes on a thunderous instrument. I could distinguish the
sharp crack of the field batteries and the deeper boom of the heavier
guns. When one of these spoke there was a trembling of earth, and
through the sky a great shell hurtled, with such a rush of air that it
seemed like an express train dashing through an endless tunnel. The
bursts were, like volcanoes above the German lines, vomiting
upwards a vast column of black smoke which stood solid on the sky-
line for a minute or more before being torn down by the wind.
Something within me seemed to quake at these engines of
destruction, these masses of explosive power sent for the killing of
men, invisible there on the ridge, but cowering in fear or lying in their
blood.

How queer are the battlefields of life and the minds of men! Down
below me, in a field, men were playing a game of football while all this
business of death was going on. Above and between the guns I
heard their shouts and cheers, and the shrill whistle for "half-time,"
though there was no half-time in the other game so close to them.
Nature, too, was playing, indifferent to this bloody business. All the
time, while the batteries were at work, birds were singing the spring
song in ecstatic lyrics of joyfulness, and they went on far flights
across a pale blue lake which was surrounded by black mountains of
cloud.

Another bird came out, but with a man above its wings. It was an
English aeroplane on a journey of reconnaissance above the
enemy's lines. I heard the loud hum of its engine, and watched how
its white wings were made diaphanous by the glint of sun until it
passed away into the cloud wrack.

It was invisible to us now, but not to the enemy. They had sighted it,
and we saw their shrapnel searching the sky for it. The airman
continued his journey on a wide circling flight, and we saw him
coming back unscathed.

For a little while our fire slackened. It was time for our infantry attack
upon the line of trenches which had sustained such a storm of shells.
Owing to the mist and the smoke we could not see our men leave the
trenches, nor any sign of that great test of courage when each man
depends upon the strength of his own heart, and has no cover behind
which to hide any fear that may possess him. What were those
cheers? Still the football players, or our soldiers scaling the ridge?
Was it only a freak of imagination that made us see masses of dark
figures moving over that field in the mist? The guns were firing again
continuously, at longer range, to check the enemy's supports.

So the battle went on till darkness began to creep up our hillside,
when we made our way down to the valley road and took tea with
some of the officers in a house quite close to the zone of fire. Among
them were the three remaining officers of a famous regiment--all that
were left out of those who had come to France in August of 1914.
They were quite cheerful in their manner and made a joke or two
when there was any chance. One of them was cutting up a birthday
cake, highly emblazoned with sugar-plums and sent out by a pretty
sister. It was quite a pleasant little party in the battle zone, and there
was a discussion on the subject of temperance, led by an officer who
was very keen on total prohibition. The guns did not seem to matter
very much as one sat in that cosy room among those cheery men. It
was only when we were leaving that one of them took a friend of mine
on one side, and said in a kind of whisper, "This war! ... It's pretty
rough, isn't it? I'm one of the last men out of the original lot. And, of
course, I'm sure to get 'pipped' in a week or two. On the law of
averages, you know."

A few days later I saw the wounded of Neuve Chapelle, which was a
victory bought at a fearful price. They were streaming down to
Boulogne, and the hospital ships were crowded with them. Among
them were thousands of Indians who had taken a big share in that
battle.

With an Oriental endurance of pain, beyond the courage of most
Western men, these men made no moan. The Sikhs, with their finely
chiselled features and dreamy inscrutable eyes--many of them
bearded men who have served for twenty years in the Indian army--
stared about them in an endless reverie as though puzzling out the
meaning of this war among peoples who do not speak their tongue,
for some cause they do not understand, and in a climate which
makes the whole world different to them. What a strange, bewildering
mystery it must have seemed to these men, who had come here in
loyalty to the great Raj in whom they had faith and for whom they
were glad to die. They seemed to be searching out the soul of the
war, to find its secret.

The weeks have passed since then, and the war goes on, and the
wounded still stream back, and white men as well as dark men ask
God to tell them what all this means; and can find no answer to the
problem of the horror which has engulfed humanity and made a
jungle of Europe in which we fight like beasts.





Conclusion



In this book I have set down simply the scenes and character of this
war as they have come before my own eyes and as I have studied
them for nearly a year of history. If there is any purpose in what I
have written beyond mere record it is to reveal the soul of war so
nakedly that it cannot be glossed over by the glamour of false
sentiment and false heroics. More passionate than any other emotion
that has stirred me through life, is my conviction that any man who
has seen these things must, if he has any gift of expression, and any
human pity, dedicate his brain and heart to the sacred duty of
preventing another war like this. A man with a pen in his hand,
however feeble it may be, must use it to tell the truth about the
monstrous horror, to etch its images of cruelty into the brains of his
readers, and to tear down the veils by which the leaders of the
peoples try to conceal its obscenities. The conscience of Europe
must not be lulled to sleep again by the narcotics of old phrases
about "the ennobling influence of war" and its "purging fires." It must
be shocked by the stark reality of this crime in which all humanity is
involved, so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will
be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism raises its
head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life's beauty.

The Germans have revealed the meaning of war, the devilish soul of
it, in a full and complete way, with a most ruthless logic. The chiefs of
their great soldier caste have been more honest than ourselves in the
business, with the honesty of men who, knowing that war is murder,
have adopted the methods of murderers, whole-heartedly, with all the
force of their intellect and genius, not weakened by any fear of public
opinion, by any prick of conscience, or by any sentiment of
compassion. Their logic seems to me flawless, though it is diabolical.
If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with
machinery which makes a wholesale massacre of life, tearing up
trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a
great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended
towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make
distinctions between one way of death and another, or to analyse
degrees of horror. Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of
shells, or if worse then the more effective.

The lives of non-combatants are not to be respected any more than
the lives of men in uniform, for modern war is not a military game
between small bodies of professional soldiers, as in the old days, but
a struggle to the death between one people and another. The
blockading of the enemy's ports, the slow starvation of a besieged
city, which is allowed by military purists of the old and sentimental
school does not spare the non-combatant. The woman with a baby at
her breast is drained of her mother's milk. There is a massacre of
innocents by poisonous microbes. So why be illogical and pander to
false sentiment? Why not sink the Lusitania and set the waves afloat
with the little corpses of children and the beauty of dead women? It is
but one more incident of horror in a war which is all horror. Its logic is
unanswerable in the Euclid of Hell. ... It is war, and when millions of
men set out to kill each other, to strangle the enemy's industries, to
ruin, starve, and annihilate him, so that the women may not breed
more children, and so that the children shall perish of wide-spread
epidemics, then a few laws of chivalry, a little pity here and there, the
recognition of a Hague Treaty, are but foolishness, and the weak
jugglings of men who try to soothe their conscience with a few
drugged tabloids. That at least is the philosophy of the German war
lords, and granted the premises that war may be waged by one
people against another it seems to me sound and flawless in its
abomination.

Germany thrust this thing upon Europe deliberately and after careful
preparation. Upon the heads of her diplomats and princes are the
blood and the guilt of it, and they stand before the world as murderers
with red hands and bloodshot eyes, and souls as black as hell. In this
war of self-defence we are justified and need no special pleading to
proclaim our cause. We did not want this war, and we went to the
extreme limit of patience to avoid it. But if there is to be any hope for
humanity we must go deeper into the truth than the mere analysis of
White Papers and Yellow Papers with diplomatic correspondence.
We must ask ourselves whether in England, France, or Russia, "the
defenders of modern civilization," there was any sincerity of belief in
the ideals and faith for which civilization stands. Did the leaders of
modern thought do anything with their genius or their knowledge to
break down old frontiers of hatred, to enlighten the ignorance
between one nation and another, or to put such power into the hands
of peoples that they might have strength to resist the tyranny of
military castes and of military ideals? Have not our politicians and our
teachers, with few exceptions, used all their influence to foster dark
old superstitions which lurk in such good words as those of patriotism
and honour, to keep the people blind so that they might not see the
shining light of liberty, and to adulterate the doctrine of Christ which
most of them profess, by a gospel of international jealousy based
upon trade interests and commercial greed?

The military castes have been supported in Europe by putting the
spell of old traditions upon simple peoples. The Christian Churches
have bolstered them up and failed utterly to preach the words of
peace because in the heart of the priest there is the patriot, so that
every Christian nation claims God as a national asset leading its
battalions. There will be no hope of peace until the peoples of the
world recognize their brotherhood and refuse to be led to the
shambles for mutual massacre. If there is no hope of that, if, as some
students of life hold, war will always happen because life itself is a
continual warfare, and one man lives only at the expense of another,
then there is no hope, and all the ideals of men striving for the
progress of mankind, all the dreams of poets and the sacrifice of
scientists, are utterly vain and foolish, and pious men should pray
God to touch this planet with a star and end the folly of it all.