Add files from ibiblio as of 2025-03-08 22:12:34HEADmain

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 4559 deletions

diff --git a/40507-8.txt b/40507-8.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 992a47b..0000000
--- a/40507-8.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,4559 +0,0 @@
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Challenge of the Dead, by Stephen Graham
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Title: The Challenge of the Dead
-       A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in
-       France, seen two years afterwards between August and
-       November, 1920
-
-Author: Stephen Graham
-
-Release Date: August 14, 2012 [EBook #40507]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Barbara Kosker and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
-
-
-
-
-  _BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM_
-
-  A Vagabond in the Caucasus.
-  Undiscovered Russia.
-  A Tramp's Sketches.
-  Changing Russia.
-  With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem.
-  With Poor Emigrants to America.
-  Russia and the World.
-  The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary.
-  Through Russian Central Asia.
-  Priest of the Ideal.
-  Russia in 1916.
-  The Quest of the Face.
-  A Private in the Guards.
-  Children of the Slaves.
-  The Challenge of the Dead.
-
-
-
-
-  The Challenge of the Dead
-
-  A vision of the war and the life
-  of the common soldier in France,
-  seen two years afterwards between
-  August and November, 1920
-
-
-
-
-  By
-  Stephen Graham
-
-
-
-
-  Cassell and Company, Ltd
-  London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
-  1921
-
-
-
-
-The Challenge of the Dead
-
-
-The suns shines and a strong wind lifts the waves toward the land; the
-blue sea, in happy commotion, throws armfuls of white spray across the
-long stone breakwater which is called Zeebruges Mole. The white stone
-way goes two miles out to sea, and is swept by a marine healthiness.
-Upon it at intervals stand the German guns with the ends of their
-barrels burst out like thistle-heads. They point o'er the sea; they have
-their armoured shelter on the inner side of which on the level with the
-gunner's eye stand inscribed in neat German _schrift_ the distances to
-all places of importance within gunshot--greenish-yellow camouflaged
-German guns with something of the tiger in their expression. On the lee
-side of the Mole cling the giant sheds of hydroplanes--as it were,
-hooked to the side of the great stone wall. In the quieter water on this
-side of the Mole one sees jutting out of the fairway the tops of vessels
-sunk there in 1918, and near by is a tablet marking the spot where the
-landing-party of the _Vindictive_ made its daring raid upon the foe.
-
-Zeebruges! A party of school-children in "croc" are being escorted along
-the way by nuns; the Smiths of Surbiton have scrawled their names on the
-guns. There is a half-way house on the Mole now where one drinks beer
-and buys a picture postcard, or at the base of the Mole and looking
-outward toward England, one may dine alfresco at a Grand Palace Hotel.
-But what of that! The whole is sun-drowned and wind-swept and bare and
-open with a spaciousness and grandeur which are ample for the soul. The
-breeze which blows from England slackens nothing ere it reaches those
-fields where the wild flowers and the rushes bloom.
-
-The mind goes back to 1914 and that great October when Antwerp fell but
-Ypres was held--when the last transports rolled alongside this glorious
-Mole bearing the Seventh Division, soon to be called, in faith,
-immortal, because half its number was destroyed before the war was very
-old.
-
-  October fifth they sailed away
-  Upon the salt sea's raging spray
-  And landed safe in Bruges bay
-      Upon their way to Ypres.
-
-They stepped up from the boats, new, ruddy, well equipped, intact--they
-rolled forward, with drums beating, o'er the Belgian land. Now all who
-ever will arrive in Zeebruges from o'er the sea will arrive after the
-Seventh Division. The war-pilgrim, paying his due of honour to those
-who came that day, cannot follow very far on their road unless he die
-also. If he chooses to follow any one soldier, will he not very likely
-come soon to the road's end and a grey wooden cross where his soldier's
-destiny dipped into eternity?
-
-Follow, then, the many who ran in the great torch race of the war, where
-the spent runner handed the torch from his hand to another, who in turn
-ran with it blazing till he fell, thus from Zeebruges to Ypres; from
-Ypres, flaming, to Neuve Chapelle; from Neuve Chapelle, flaming, to
-Loos; then aflame to the defence of the Salient; then a long blaze to
-the sevenfold altar of the Somme ... man to man, unit to unit, period to
-period, till the November when the race was won.
-
-Was it not characteristic of the old war that the "Contemptibles" of the
-Seventh, landing at Zeebruges, should at once be marched thirty miles in
-the wrong direction and then brought back by train. Antwerp was the
-beacon; Antwerp was not yet taken; the Naval Brigade was trying to save
-it. It was to fall, Zeebruges was to fall, Ostende itself was to
-fall--all very rapidly. When the boys got to Bruges it was rumoured that
-the Germans had had a set-back; when they got to Ostende they heard that
-Antwerp had been taken. When they got back to Bruges terror had seized
-the city. When they got to Ghent they took the Antwerp road--and then
-they came back, to Ypres.
-
-The cobbled way to Bruges is not marked by destruction. The trees give
-shade, the houses stand, the fields are ploughed. Alice in an estaminet
-says she learned French from the French prisoners kept there--her bar
-used to be crowded with them. The Belfry of Bruges stands against the
-sky ahead--as if lifted out of the plain up to heaven itself.
-
-You cross a canal which looks like a moat, and are in Bruges itself, a
-perfectly whole, undamaged, serene and peaceful city. Trams, shops,
-carts pulled by dogs, rows of estaminets, old gateways, old churches,
-and then the Grande Place. The broad market-place is empty, but one sits
-facing the great tower and listens to the ever-repeating chimes of the
-bells--silver in the evening hour. It is--no, it is impossible--yes, it
-is "The Rosary" which is being played by the bells. "_I ... strive ...
-to kiss the Cross_," yells the steeple, and then goes plaintive and
-trickles tunefully away.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-"Well, here I am and here I remain," says an old man sitting behind me
-with a coffee-glass which he has long since drained. "Till England
-becomes sane, I stay here."
-
-"The cost of living is just as high in Peebles as in London," says a
-woman sitting opposite him.
-
-"Mad everywhere," says the man. "What I'd like is a flat somewhere near
-Lancaster Gate, so as I could go out into Kensington Gardens and sit
-under the trees and smoke."
-
-There was a pause.
-
-Then the woman from Peebles ventured in a thin, small voice:
-
-"I think that Peter Pan statue in Kensington is so sweet. It was put up
-in the night, wasn't it?"
-
-"Yes, it was; and isn't Kensington a delightful place?" says the old
-man.
-
-They gloated in silence over Kensington. The bells of the Belfry began
-selections from _Faust_. _Is there a war on?_ men used to ask
-facetiously. "There never was any war," says Bruges. The sound of the
-boots has long since died away, the _boots, boots, boots, boots,
-marching up and down again_, away, away--this city was not delivered
-unto the Angel of Death.
-
-It's a shady highway that goes eastward to Ostende. At the village of
-St. Andrews there is a first war memorial to Belgian soldiers who gave
-their lives in the war; and then you come to the open ground at
-Varssenaere where the 20th Brigade did outpost duty, the first
-resting-ground for many a man, if rest he could, on his first night on
-the terrain of war--Varssenaere, a mean red-brick village with
-estaminets and small shops. Next day 'twas Steine and then Ostende.
-
-October 9, 1914, they marched into Ostende station, crowded with wounded
-men who had been rushed down from the stricken front. Antwerp had
-fallen. The trains which brought the wounded down took the new army
-back--back to Bruges, on to Ghent, and tumbled it out into that great
-old city. The streets were full of refugees, but the khaki tide rolled
-forward through the crowds, past the cathedral, out by the Lokeren road,
-to meet the foe.
-
-Ghent also is an undamaged city. Our airmen spared her; our cannon could
-not reach her. She was not taken by assault, but fell into the enemy's
-hands. It is prosperous, all its factory chimneys are a-smoke. Cheap
-plenitude fills its shop windows. Its people are at work--or, rather,
-they are at work when there is not a _groodefeest_.
-
-It is calm on the Lokeren road. You cannot hear the battle-thunder of
-that October now, the ominous and insistent and encroaching roaring of
-the monster who was just spitting and flashing fire at Ghent in those
-days. You can see with the mind's eye the new army with its new boots
-and its sore feet and its loads of equipment. It did not carry bombs and
-it did not carry gas-masks, but it carried everything else. One can see
-the perplexed and anxious Staff looking at the _intelligence_ brought
-in--the Germans held nowhere, the Germans in vast numbers, truly ready
-and capable of sweeping the contemptibly little army into the sea, the
-Germans advancing everywhere. The order comes to retire.
-Retire--retreat--might not the retreat from Antwerp resemble the retreat
-from Mons? It is retreat in any case. Back into Ghent; back, perhaps, to
-Bruges and to Ostende. No one talks of Ypres. The army does not yet know
-where Ypres is. However, they filed through Ghent, and it was once more
-boots, boots, boots, boots over the cobbled roads. It was midnight, and
-they traversed the whole broad metropolis--singing a song which has not
-been forgotten in all the intervening years.
-
-But now it is midnight again, the night of the 1920 National Fête, and
-the whole population has got singing drunk and then screaming drunk on
-beer. Tens of thousands of men and women flock the streets. There are
-fireworks, there is music, there is dancing. The fronts of the
-estaminets have been taken out, and seats go from the bar to the middle
-of the street; long tables on trestles, and plank seats, have been put
-out; piles of shrimps litter the tables from end to end, and the yellow
-beer gleams as it streams. Tired children are massed on the cathedral
-steps waiting for the fireworks to begin, and past those who sit surges
-a tireless crowd.
-
-In the Groensel Maarkt a truly Dostoieffskian scene. A soldier with one
-arm, a diminutive woman with dislocated hips, and two children are
-singing Flemish songs to a ring of people of varying ages. The old
-soldier has a sheaf of leaflets with the words of the songs and sells
-them a penny a time, a small boy plays the concertina, "mother" sings
-all the while a murmuring sing-song which never rises or falls, and
-keeps time with her wasp-like waist, which seems to hang from the black
-hump of her hips and sways uncannily back and forth. Father with the one
-arm also sings all the while he sells, the little girl sings, and the
-boy playing the concertina sings also. To the tune of "Way Down in
-Tennessee" they sing:
-
-  Ik noem haar mijn everzwijn
-  Mijn voddenmagazijn
-
-They sing too, over and over again, a Flemish song about the war:
-
-  Nog niet genoeg dat hij
-  Binst d'oorlog was in 't lij
-  Tot overmaat huns laffe daad
-  Der duitschers vol van haat...
-
-and a haunting chorus which begins:
-
-  Hoe ... kan het bestaan
-  Dat men een man, die gansch zijn plicht
-  toch heeft gekweten
-
-and glasses of beer pass over the heads of the audience to the singing
-family. All in a dark, empty market-place, with somebody's statue
-looking down on the scene and many a tear softening human eyes.
-
-The rockets shoot up to the height of the cathedral spire and break in
-coloured lights, the large catherine-wheels are lit, the children clap
-and chase one another for firework cases.
-
-At two in the morning strings of men and women holding on to one another
-parade the streets and kick out with their legs, attempting to dance
-whilst they sing "Tipperary," "Marguerite," "Mademoiselle from
-Armentières," "Hoe kan het bestaan," the new girls in knee-skirts with
-spindly legs, the old wives in longer heavier ones, exposing when they
-dance white baggy drawers like Canterbury bells. At four in the morning
-there are still ten thousand in the streets; men and women have made
-circles round trees and lamp-posts, and kick out as they try to roll
-round; knots of men and girls go staggering past with howls and yells;
-young Flemish fellows are squeezing girls of twenty and pressing down
-their cheeks with large-mouthed kisses. At six, in the heavenly radiance
-of a pure morning, pandemonium still rolls on.
-
-Yes, it is good beer. The first glass of it on a hot day is
-refreshing--a flagon at lunch does not come amiss. But these men and
-women sat for hours pouring it in with floating shrimps--glasses,
-quarts, sitting on low seats with their legs apart, and visibly filling.
-And this plenitude did not make them weary. _Au contraire_, beer got
-into their toes and their knees and their thighs and their fat arms and
-necks, and expressed itself at all points of the body. I suppose one
-good reason for running in queues was that all holding on to one another
-none could fall down. One of the reasons why the bacchanalia continued
-long after morning-life had supervened was that many had forgotten they
-had any homes and mostly did not know where they were.
-
-What a night! Six years ago on that other night it was different.
-Anxiety and foreboding throbbed in these streets. Belgian manhood in
-arms marched away. The British marched away, and by midnight the last
-soldier had gone. Suspense ... and then at two in the morning the first
-German, a motor-cyclist, armed, goggled, covered with dust, vigilant....
-And from the dawn German order reigned in Ghent--no bacchanalias.
-
-The army went out by night by many roads, making, however, for Bruges.
-It fell back for the defence, perhaps, of Bruges and of Ostende.
-Brussels had fallen, and Ghent--there was not much of Belgium left. The
-first morning out of Ghent saw the army at Somerghem, and the second at
-Thielt. So tired were the troops that at each halt in the night both
-officers and men, lying down by the roadside, fell asleep. At the halts
-the men bumped into one another mechanically, like the trucks of a
-freight train coming to a sudden stop, and then they just tumbled down
-and snored.
-
-Newly tarred barges loll slowly along the Bruges-Ghent canal, and there
-is a vista along the straight water to the belfry of Ghent and the
-cathedral. The sides of the canal are lush with verdure; health and
-happiness spread out from its banks. One would say also the war never
-was here. But in Somerghem the old church on the hill crowning the town
-has been blown up. Its tower gave a view for leagues around, and the
-Devil made good use of it when he had a chance and when he had done his
-task blew it up lest others should follow his example. The Germans
-evacuated the town just before the end of the war; the Belgian army
-bombarded it and placed a gas concentration there. It was retaken, but
-at the price of a most beautiful church. The inhabitants are all back.
-They remember the Tommies and, of course, the Scots. The Gordons in
-their kilts made a lasting impression. Somerghem saw much war life
-before the enemy marched away, and German soldier life, with its
-violently repressive military discipline and its correspondingly lax
-morality, was rife. The more perfect their military obedience the less
-heed there was of God.
-
-One sees in these parts not a few war-babies, and worse than these, for
-they are innocent enough, one sees war-children in adolescence. The
-numbers of depraved young girls is appalling. Perhaps there were many
-before the war, but they look rather like war products. How many of them
-there are in the beer-houses and backyards of the small towns! It is
-difficult to avoid adventures with them. Bertha and Martha, depraved
-little rascals, come running along the canal bank, one in clogs, one in
-stocking soles. They talk scraps of German and scraps of French, and
-make disgusting gestures and throw themselves about in hard, coarse
-laughter. Martha is a strong and brazen little hussy with red face and
-fat little arms. Bertha is a soft-witted, pallid slip of a girl with
-full throat and weak lips. Both have long black finger-nails, both are
-in cotton rags; but Bertha has a large yellow festering wound on her
-ankle which she says was caused by a bit of shrapnel. Bertha is the
-younger. Martha may be sixteen; Bertha would be two years younger. And
-Martha would get Bertha into trouble. "Take Bertha!" she says
-continually, suggestively making signs. Poor war-children! When the war
-began Martha was ten and Bertha was eight. Martha was corrupted in it;
-pale, sickly, weak-lipped Bertha, with the shrapnel wound, perhaps not
-actually corrupted. When the wound had been examined and their nails cut
-they concluded they had met a doctor.
-
-They scamper away at last. The dark water of the canal flows peacefully
-between banks of untarnished green. Nature is unqualified loveliness.
-At Somerghem, however, behind this veil there has been war, there has
-been something of the curse. One begins to notice in old walls patches
-of new brick where shell-holes in human habitations have been cobbled.
-Re-pointing is going on. The splash where the splinters of iron rived a
-whole house has been sought to be gently erased. The most virtuous work
-in the world! But it splashed on to the children too, and who can
-re-point the Berthas and the Marthas?
-
-Enfin, the fair-sized town of Thielt, would-be picturesque but
-surprisingly shabby, not clean, not cleaned up, not quite like Belgium.
-The dirtiest of all possible hotels, more like a billet than a hotel,
-unswept floors, smashed china, supper in a kitchen which does not gleam
-like housewife's honour. It is a town unlike Ghent, unlike Bruges. It
-has not, however, been much shelled. British and Belgian gunners seem to
-have had orders to spare friendly cities. But there is no doubt that
-Thielt was in the war. Half its present inhabitants are _revenants_, as
-the French call those pitiful spirits who return to the places where
-they used to live. Mine host fled to Paris in 1914, and did not make a
-fortune there; he talks bitterly of _Bosches_ and compensation. He is
-forty-six and set. Six years ago he felt a young man, he says, but
-to-day he is not ready to start anything new.
-
-On then towards Roulers! 'Tis in gloomier country and with poor people.
-All high roads are under repair. If shells spared Thielt, they did not
-spare the roads. Where British army leather beat the cobbles in that
-long march back from Ghent, whistling shells touched later and blew up
-the ground that had been beneath their feet. The patient Flemish farmers
-hung on to their farms on each side of the shell-pitted road, and their
-cattle grazed in the fields with an equanimity that was sublime. For
-four years the cannon-thunder never ceased, and every night war flamed
-around the heavens, but the men on the soil remained true to the soil
-and drove straightly their ploughs.
-
-Not a few farmers were killed; they also were heroes, for they died at
-their posts. But no patriotic cockade marks their humble graves.
-Plentiful now are the crosses ornamented with flowers and the red, white
-and blue, for those _morts pour la patrie_. Above Ardoye the
-first-noticed wayside cemetery of German soldiers appears, and there
-lies Franz Delmann, of Chemnitz, and many others who died in November,
-1917. It is high up on a ridge beside the position of an old German
-battery. How the shells used to howl from this eminence over Roulers,
-over Passchendaele and leagues of destruction right into Ypres itself!
-Here in old days the grubby war-worn Germans plied the guns, and here
-the British guns found their prey also, and our enemies were put to
-sleep in this acre of death. Now most of the crosses are down, the
-cross-pieces of others have been taken away, part of the field has been
-dug up with a spade. For after all the ground is appropriated Belgian
-property. It was never paid for and it reverts to its owner, dead and
-all. What a pathetic tragedy is that of the dead the Germans left
-behind! Each cross, each dead one, refers back to some living family,
-some home, some set of human circumstances. What thoughts, what
-questions do not go out on the air from obscure homes to the dead who
-have been left behind! The reins which go from the living to the dead!
-
-But enemies take little stock of one another's dead. Roulers, which is
-vis-à-vis to Ypres, lay partially destroyed and now it is being builded
-up again. If the dead could be made to pay for it the dead would. The
-living for the living! Roulers was a fine city once. The creative eye
-sees that it can be so again. The British gunners could have laid it
-flat as Ypres but they did not. Ypres can never be raised. But Roulers
-will be Roulers once again. As one approaches it, behold, what activity.
-New houses have sprung up overnight. There are thousands of piles of
-bricks. Every Belgian has learned bricklaying. Clerks, shopkeepers,
-salesmen, porters, in shirt sleeves and plaster-sprinkled hats, are at
-work--_without trade union rules_. Hundreds of thousands of whitish
-vermilion flesh-coloured old bricks are being made fit to use again,
-new bricks in tiers are apparent in improvised kilns, and all day and
-every day sounds the chipping and slapping of real reconstruction. Iron
-girders are being fitted into the gutted depths of old shop-fronts, and
-with foundations and framework it is marvellous how speedily old houses
-are built up. The city is poor. Its many factory chimneys are innocent
-of smoke. Roulers for flax! It was famous for its linen industry. Two
-Scotch engineers, met at a hotel, are fitting in new machinery in the
-factories. Typical uncommunicative Britons, they volunteer no
-information, but sit face to face over their meals, lean over their food
-and chuckle to one another in private monosyllables. When asked how they
-are getting on, one of them replies:
-
-"Och slowly, man, slowly. They Chairmans didna leave muckle when they
-went awa!"
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-And six years ago the Army continued to fall back. Zeebruges whence it
-had started, Bruges and Ostende, and Ghent which it had marched through,
-became enemy country without much shedding of blood. No one stood long
-for their defence. After Roulers the name of a much less famous place
-than Bruges or Ghent came on to men's lips. Did they know that they were
-going to stand for the defence of it? No, it is all unlikely. And as
-they marched to Ypres they providentially did not know the four years'
-hell of which they trod the stage. War all over by Christmas was their
-thought if they thought at all as they marched o'er the ridge of
-Passchendaele in October, 1914.
-
-The soldier, it is said, has an elementary mind which does not imagine,
-does not think--a regimental mind. Others therefore must think about him
-and do the thinking for him. See, the dusty khaki-clad regulars as yet
-unbaptised by fire, but unknowingly on the brink of annihilation,
-treading the ground where
-
-  Few shall part where many meet...
-  And every turf beneath their feet
-  Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.
-
-Thus they marched into Ypres--"as pretty a town as you'd care to see
-after a day's march." Oh, it's highly romantic to look back to it now.
-
-  Banners yellow, glorious golden,
-  On its roof did float and flow.
-  This, all this, was in the olden time
-  Long ago.
-
-The business centre of Ypres was invested with a dignity which was not
-merely commercial in those old days when the silver chimes rolled
-regularly the quarter-hours from the Cloth Hall tower. And the Army
-arrived, the army for the defence of Ypres. They will dig trenches and
-throw out wire south of Ypres, looking at Kemmel without knowing its
-name, walking on Hill 60 before it was numbered and named.
-
-A quiet and little marked country south of Roulers now gives way first
-to trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks, and then
-to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farm-houses and
-cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of
-Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire--but now as it
-were in tumultuous conflict with Nature. Chiefly remarkable are the
-magnificent rushes with their black tops rising from almost every
-shell-hole. The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black
-rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred
-ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest
-of wild flowers--pink willow-herb, burly St. John's wort in a yellow
-glare, starry blue of outbreaking chicory, hundred-headed blossoming
-sweet thistles growing from the hollows where fell, I doubt not,
-Caledonia's sons, foxgloves flowering upward attempting to take crimson
-to heaven. Ypres by the compass lies south-west. No, there is nothing on
-the horizon, not a wall, not a wood, only the bare eminence of Kemmel
-Hill. Before you is a vast fen. Some Flemings are at work on it in shirt
-sleeves, but not a soul is traversing it. You constantly change your
-direction: there is no going directly. It is impassable. You make for
-what once was a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now--thrice
-thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous
-and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs,
-rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there still in plenty. Weather-beaten
-ammunition baskets with shells intact lie where they fell off the
-ammunition waggons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles,
-there are graves. There is all but the blood. But from the blood has
-risen flowers.
-
-On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards
-have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered
-trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned
-Flemish--what a return!--and they have made shacks of shreds and
-patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture
-forth--there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the
-battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased
-to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols
-ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by
-robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. It has needed
-courage to come back to your old ten acres. Few of these Flemish are
-owners; they are only tenants. Their landlords allow them now three
-years rent free. From the hut made of salvage starts the regeneracy of
-the land. In an irregular patch round its gates lies the first reclaimed
-ground, a mere kail yard, a bean plot. There are wonderful crops of
-beans, higher than beans are wont to grow, bean-stalks to climb up.
-Tobacco also has been growing, for the leaves hang wilting from green to
-yellow on the outside of the unpainted wooden walls. But beyond the
-oasis the tall black-topped reeds, like Guardsmen of the vegetable
-world, go rank beyond rank to the eyes' end. One comes to a road, and
-there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins
-each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for
-reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:--"In den Niewen
-wereld." Half of them seem to be estaminets.
-
-It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in
-one another's estaminets.
-
-"I wouldn't never have come back had I known it was like this," says a
-Belgian woman. "I had good job at Rouen all the war, make plenty money,
-not like this."
-
-"How was that?"
-
-"Me cook in sergeants' mess, huh, plenty food, plenty money."
-
-"That's where you learned English?"
-
-"Yes."
-
-There were two British Tommies drinking beer at the estaminet, one an
-R.E. the other an R.F. both talking knowingly about the old war. They
-had a motor-lorry which was waiting outside.
-
-"Take a lift?" said they.
-
-"Where to?"
-
-"Polygon Wood."
-
-To be on one of those old blundering kindly quixotic lorries again,
-pounding along a war-stricken highway! One might have thought the old
-lorry had now ceased its devils' dance. But no, it still has a duty to
-perform. Presently we pass a red-cross ambulance.
-
-"Got any to-day?" cries the R.E. to the driver of the ambulance.
-
-He puts up two fingers.
-
-"Two ..." says the soldier with an air of satisfaction. "We found a
-brigadier-general yesterday," he adds.
-
-"How do you mean?"
-
-"Ex-umed 'im. He'd bin missin' since 1916. All this no-man's land bein'
-dug up now," said he with a wide sweep of his hand.
-
-"That your job? It's pretty interesting."
-
-"It's jolly hard work. But it 'as its better side. Some fellers the
-other day came on a dug-out with three officers in it, and they picked
-up five thousand francs between 'em."
-
-The motor-lorry blundered forward toward a stone obelisk planted on a
-man-made hillock. On one side was a swamp of green stagnant water; on
-the other was a planting out of many hundred crosses of unvarnished
-wood. The lorry is full of crosses each named and numbered, roped up in
-scores, and these must be dumped inside the enclosure.
-
-The view from the Polygon monument is desolation on all sides. One
-living man standing there is as it were monarch of all the dead. It is a
-remarkable eminence, a pillar at Thermopylæ, one thing standing where
-all else is lying flat. As it stands to-day it has no inscription.
-Polygon--myriad-sided--it is one of the strangest standing places and
-shrines of the war. Pause thou who livest: salute the dead!
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Back thunders the empty lorry--on to the Menin road--and faces Ypres.
-You see the grey contour of the tower afar, but doubt whether you are
-approaching a city, so flat has all become. Yet certainly it is Ypres.
-You enter by a series of new-painted wooden taverns and hotels. You walk
-up a wide main street and there is Ypres----
-
-A great dust storm is raging here whilst the sun shines out of a perfect
-sky. Here are no rushes, no wild flowers, no moisture, but only infinite
-debris and the shatterings of old masonry. There is a suggestion of the
-desert. A notice says "THIS IS HOLY GROUND" and a barbed wire fence runs
-round the whole centre of old Ypres. Within that enclosure lies a ruined
-city. Thousands of years ago such a thing happened; all the people were
-slain or taken into bondage. No one came back, the victors went away,
-and the ruins remained glaring in the sands--centuries, millenniums.
-That is the impression of Ypres to-day. It is grim and moving. It is
-like the Pyramids. At least a hundred thousand dead lie round it--an
-inner circle of the dead and an outer circle of decay. Looking on those
-spacious sun-steeped, sand-blown ruins one's mind is inevitably taken to
-the East, and a sense of Shelley's poem comes to one--
-
-  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
-  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
-
-Yet six years ago the Cloth Hall tower chimed the quarter-hours! The
-road out from the Menin gate was shady. Polygon Wood was a wood, not a
-monument. There was seemingly a château near a wood called Hooge.
-Zandwoorde Church had a spire. Behold the army however digging itself
-in. There are rudimentary lines of defence making a spider's web across
-the Menin road. The Twentieth Brigade flounders from Zandwoorde to
-Gheluvelt in newly upturned earth. The Germans who followed so rapidly
-to Ghent and Thielt and Roulers are hot on the trail, expecting Ypres
-also to be left to them without a blow. But they have not arrived. Our
-men are sitting on the parapets of their trenches, singing. There have
-been no casualties to mention, a few men lost sight of; three sentries
-in fact left unrelieved at Ghent. There is a battalion of Guards in the
-line at Klein Zillebeke, and not one has yet been killed or wounded. A
-battle is coming, however, for the retirement has ceased.
-
-You turn out of Ypres by the left hand on a road which faces Kemmel
-Hill--the Wytschaete road, and you come to a flattened-out village at
-cross-roads, called Kruistraat. Where were once ploughed fields is now a
-land-ocean of humps and hollows with a foam of wild flowers. Plunging
-toward Voormezeele one is intoxicated by a perfume and looking to the
-right you see the cause in a field of thistles as thick and close as
-wheat. At what was Voormezeele there is now nothing more remarkable than
-the crosses of the P.P.C.L.I. the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light
-Infantry, who evidently went down in the most terrible way in 1915. Were
-not these the Canadians who first tasted the devilry of gas?
-
-Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein
-Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently
-examining the aluminium ribbons on which the names are fixed to the
-wooden crosses--looking perhaps for her husband's grave but with an
-expression in her face and form of "They have taken away my Lord, and I
-know not where they have laid Him."
-
-Virbranden Molen, where many encamped, is but a name now, and eastward
-the wire-covered duck-boards climb across the rushes and thistles to
-what was once a front line, past derelict limbers with rusty broken
-wheels, past unexploded five-nines--the wildest way. Reeds have filled
-the trenches, grass long and withered swarms o'er the parapets. There
-are heaps of rusty Mills bombs which no one has ever come to take away
-and no one will; there are ration-tins; there is all manner of army
-rubbish everywhere. Pilgrims and tourists evidently collect few
-souvenirs on the old Ypres front, and few Americans as yet arrive at
-Ypres, which has for them a lesser fame than Château Thierry and Verdun.
-
-In October, 1914, the line was far in advance of what became such a
-carnage-strewn battlefield. Here is the railway cutting, then in supreme
-peace, and beyond it is a pale British monument inscribed with many
-names, though already defaced--to the memory of a lost mining and
-tunnelling company that took a sudden way to heaven before the war was
-won. Beyond it is a first German grave, where lie Fleully, Beck,
-Dechert, Mehlhorn, and an unknown, and helmets and old bombs strew the
-place where they lie. Klein Zillebeke is now marked by a huge concrete
-fort. Zandwoorde and Kruisseecke, which were scenes of hand-to-hand
-fighting in 1914, soon fell into German hands and remained within the
-enemy's lines throughout the war. The old church at Zandwoorde cannot
-now be identified by any ruins--one has to ask where it was. Even the
-bricks and the stones seem to have been swept away, but there are three
-graves there, Captain Rose and Lieutenant Turnor, of the Tenth Hussars,
-and a private soldier nameless and unknown, a sort of batman in death.
-An estaminet has jumped up like a weed beside the ruins but it has
-little trade. Zandwoorde was once a substantial little place but now
-perhaps it will not grow again so readily--it is off the main road and
-not served by rail. Kruisseecke will be bigger. On October 21st the
-Gordons drove the Germans back from Zandwoorde at the point of the
-bayonet. On that day the church tower was twice struck by shells. That
-was about the beginning of the history.
-
-The old trenches 'twixt Zandwoorde and Gheluvelt are worn down and
-perhaps were never very deep. The shell-holes are much deeper. The land
-is desolate and all o'ergrown but it affords a scene of lesser
-desolation. The exhumers are patiently seeking for the dead who were
-left behind--the old dead of that first battle. It is ghoulish work, but
-they have become as matter of fact as can be.
-
-"No, we don't find many Gordons. But we're picking up a lot o' Borders
-just now. Yes, and some Grenadiers. Brought in about thirty Borders
-yesterday. It isn't a bad job if they'd pay us more. We gets used to it.
-They say as how the Americans won't have the British touch their dead
-and have given the job over to the French. Fifteen thousand of them to
-be boxed and stuffed--there's a lot of work in that."
-
-"You must dig up a fair number of Germans. What do you do with them?"
-
-"Leave them where they are. We notifies the authorities, that's all. Of
-course Jerry buried most of his own, and I'll give him credit for that,
-he gave every man his eight feet. You don't so easy come across a man
-the Germans buried, but some of ours----"
-
-The weather-beaten Tommy, in old flannel shirt and sagging breeches,
-waved his hand and grinned with mirth at our British ways.
-
-"'S a funny thing though--the British dead keep much longer than the
-Germans. If I put a spade through something and it's soft, I know it's a
-Jerry."
-
-"They say the body of a drunkard keeps fresh longest of all because of
-the spirit in it."
-
-"Yes, that's true. And if buried in an oilskin it makes a heap of
-difference. But it's queer what you find. We came on a fellow the other
-day with a bayonet through his jaw. He'd been buried that way. No one
-could get the bayonet out----"
-
-"Aren't the Germans doing anything to keep their dead? The Belgians
-would look after them if they got a hint from Berlin that it would be
-worth while."
-
-"Oh, we'd bury them like Christians if they'd give us another
-half-crown on our wages. We ain't got nothing agin 'em--specially the
-dead."
-
-"Do you sleep out here on this battlefield?"
-
-"We bin 'ere six months now."
-
-"No ghosts?"
-
-The man smiled. He saw none. He felt the presence of none. Imagination
-did not pull his heart-strings. If it did, he would go mad.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Lying in an old trench behold a skull! It is clean and polished--a
-soldier's head, low and broad at the brows, high at the back. There is a
-frayed hole in an otherwise perfect cranium. The simplest way to pick it
-up would be to put a finger in an eye-hole and lift it. You must put
-both hands together and raise it fearfully if it be the first skull you
-have ever found.... Friend or foe? Hm--there are no identification marks
-on this. Thinking anything about it all? No, nothing--long since ceased
-to think. Friends living? Probably, somewhere. The more you look at the
-skull the more angry does it seem--it has an intense eternal grievance.
-This one does not grin, for the mouth has been destroyed. It is just
-blind and senseless for ever and ever.
-
-Such is the Golgotha of Zandwoorde. Gheluvelt, the other end of the
-line, has now a diminutive yellow tower of new wood from an improvised
-church. Kruisseecke is a rusty-roofed, ramshackle, salvage-built
-settlement on the site of complete ruin. You see the yellow tower of
-Gheluvelt from all around, and like a livid finger the monument at
-Polygon Wood is seen far o'er the battlefields pointing to heaven.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-In the whole complex story of the battle of Ypres, where so many
-regiments were engaged in such diverse parts of the field, with all
-their varying calamities and triumphs, it is only possible to realise
-the story in glimpses and aperçus. A thousand dramas were being enacted
-simultaneously in a clamour so great that no neighbour understood what
-was happening to his neighbour. Tragedy was accomplished, swiftly and as
-it were privately. A dreadful way of speaking was begotten afterwards,
-and men said "He got _his_ at Polygon Wood," or "he got _his_ at the
-Château," or "_his_ at Kruisseecke."
-
-Our gallant marchers, with the confetti as it were still sticking to
-them, have seen a great deal of Belgium, have been greatly excited, have
-reached Ypres with numbers intact, have taken their stand four feet deep
-in the clay of the fields of Zandwoorde and have taken a look round.
-They have been shelled. The shells have been falling irrelevantly--far
-from them. The first man to perish is a colour-sergeant, who, taking a
-stroll, gets shot by accident by an over-hasty sentry. The
-colour-sergeant did not quite realise the war till then. Others also did
-not realise the silent symbol of the fact that in fighting others you
-start by killing yourselves. Next to die is a drummer-boy, killed by a
-shell on the way to a hamlet called America, a kilometre beyond
-Kruisseecke. With what pathos was that dead boy considered! For he was a
-child of the Army. Drummer-boys are nearly always orphans, or boys
-without homes, brought up in barracks, taught in the Army school, with
-the Army for father and mother, the Army for God, the Army for nurse.
-Little drummer-boy dead on the way to America--the first to go West! It
-is a matter for pause, for a sad thought. If, however, the dead meet one
-another in the other world, as so many now believe, the boy will soon be
-comforted, for within the week scores of friends, hundreds of
-acquaintances, will join him. See a reconnaissance at Polygon Wood and
-Eskernest! Out of a whole company, only twenty-five come back. Its
-commander killed. Another company half destroyed--its commander killed
-also. Two captains buried side by side near a much-shelled
-house--rudimentary wooden crosses put o'er their resting-place. They
-were eager impetuous captains who had chafed to wait in England all
-August and September. Their minds were full of what the war really
-meant. But so soon are they sped! For four years the agony of Ypres
-beginning in these days will roll impotently on whilst they lie there,
-and the war with its gossip, its articles and speeches, its new
-inventions and new bitternesses will go on. God loved them and removed
-them betimes from the scene.
-
-Yet if they see, if they can hear and know from other realms, what a
-spectacle, what an intense interest is theirs. To see the remains of
-their own poor companies of soldiers march back to Zandwoorde--the "not
-the six hundred," to see the ever-encroaching German and the more and
-more intimate and terrible strife proceed. The grand emotions of pity
-and fear thrill the air as the tumultuous battle goes on....
-
-The shell-fire ceases to be irrelevant and finds its mark, turns whole
-brigades out of their trenches; reinforcements move with the
-acceleration of a moving ant-heap which has been kicked over. False news
-comes and confounds true news. The Borders are said to have given way.
-Guards and Gordons go to their support. Weak points change to strong
-points, strong to weak. Columns of assault are launched by the enemy,
-first on one point, then on another. A column breaks through at
-Kruisseecke at nightfall. The madness of the murder-excitement enters
-the trenches, and it is bayonet to bayonet; the rain streams down to
-mingle with blood, it is intensely dark, many have lost their clearness
-of mind and balance of nerve. But there is a counter-attack. Gallant
-Major F----, leading, is shot down; there is a dreadful mêlée and then
-silence. The enemy is winning his way. Nevertheless patrols in
-Kruisseecke round up a large number and take them prisoner. There is a
-dispute as to who is to have the merit of having taken the prisoners.
-But what does that matter? Round about this village is confusion worse
-confounded. Germans appear dressed up as Gordon Highlanders, then
-Gordons are thought to be Germans in disguise. Strange masses roll up
-through the rain looking not at all like Germans and crying "We are
-French."--"We are Allies"--"Don't shoot"--"Where is Captain P----?" "We
-surrender," and things of that kind. The survivors of a Staffordshire
-regiment devoid of officers, officers all down and out, come pelting
-through the lines having thrown their rifles away. German yells of
-victory break out.... It is a terrible night, one night, one little
-corner of the ground outside the city. Dawn comes, and Kruisseecke is
-with the enemy. It remains with the enemy. And there for many the march
-from Zeebruges ends and a personal war history is concluded. The torch
-of war has been carried thus far, to the battle of Ypres. The spent
-runner gives it to another who carries it in turn--
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Back then to Ypres! It is an exposed moorland way. No woods, no houses
-stop the even progress of the wind. The trees are stumps no higher than
-Venetian masts. Instead of crops in the fields--crosses, an enormous
-harvest. Along the Menin road a steam tram rolls. At the entrance to
-Ypres is the communal cemetery of the city. Here, around the pre-war
-Belgian dead, lie Hussars, Lancers, Dragoon Guards, Scots Guards, all
-officers, all of the 1914 fighting. There they were lowered into graves
-with the flag about them--there they remain. In this acre of death the
-high wooden crucifix still stands, with its riven agonised Lord looking
-down. Of the hundreds of thousands of shells which fell in Ypres all
-spared Him--all but one which came direct and actually hit the Cross.
-That one did not explode but instead, half-buried itself in the wood and
-remains stuck in the upright to this day--an accidental symbol of the
-power of the Cross.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Ypres is terribly empty. Hundreds of thousands of eyes would look on it
-but there are few people who come to look at it--just ones and twos who
-stand diminutively in front of the great ruins and peer at them like the
-conventional figures in an old print. This absence of the living
-intensifies the strange atmosphere. It is said that the city will build
-itself up again, but it is possible to feel some doubt on that point.
-Perhaps Ypres will never be built again. At present it has some hundred
-and fifty places where they sell beer to two where they sell anything
-else. Its string of wooden hotels with cubicle bedrooms do not pay. The
-curious come for an hour or so from Ostende but do not spend the night.
-There is a sense of emptiness and tragedy which cannot be dispelled.
-Some sort of unit of British troops does duty instead of police and is
-posted to various guards, the sentries being however without rifles. The
-soldiers in their "sixth year" impart a certain liveliness. A party of
-them at night coming down the middle of the street singing
-
-      One word of thine,
-  Tell the world you are mine,
-  And the world will be dearer to me,
-
-in a full-throated chorus wakens echoes from dark corners of the ruins.
-There is music and dancing in favoured taverns. The returned Belgians do
-not perhaps belong naturally to the atmosphere of the sublime. They love
-beer and sociality. They will make their money by some means--they are
-not too particular how. Civilised ethics do not rule in these places
-where war has worked its will.
-
-Strolling along at dusk past the Cloth Hall tower a bright-eyed Belgian
-wolf asks you who you are. "_C'est triste, n'est ce pas?_" says he,
-pointing to the ruins. _Triste_ is what they are not. The Belgian is
-from Poperinghe. It is very dull there now. _Tous les soldats sont
-partis._ Also the mamzelles. Pas de jig-a-jig.
-
-"Like a glass of beer?" asks the Belgian.
-
-A spare woman of thirty serves two glasses of ale at a table outside a
-hotel. She seems to speak English for preference.
-
-"You want someone to sleep with?" asks the man from Poperinghe.
-
-"No, I sleep with no man."
-
-"Not married?"
-
-"No, and plenty time yet, and I shan't marry an English when I do. The
-English are all false."
-
-The man from Poperinghe seems taken aback. At a further table a curious
-scene is being enacted. Here are sitting a pioneer corporal and a
-sergeant, both wearing the 1914 ribbon. They have their beer, and
-between them is an effervescent loose-mouthed Alsatian. The latter, like
-the man from Poperinghe, stands treat.
-
-"I vill take you, one minit, I vill take you," says the Alsatian,
-kissing the tips of his fingers, "just vait, not ten minits from 'ere."
-
-"Oh you go on, you bloomin' well shut up. I b'lieve you're agent for the
-girl or something," says the sergeant.
-
-"No, listen, I'll tell you vot it is.... C'est de gateau, got that,
-gateau; naw need to drink any coffee, just ten minits, you see for
-yourself."
-
-The sergeant makes a mocking show of biffing him in the eye, and grins
-all over his weak sun-burnt face. The shoeing corporal sips at his beer
-and smirks. The Alsatian on the tips of his toes, leaning forward on
-his chair which is tilted toward the table, gesticulates and slobbers--
-
-"You wait till you see her, you'll felicitation yourself...."
-
-And the sergeant is persuaded against his will and goes with him.
-Meanwhile dusk has grown to dark, and the ruined Cloth Hall tower on the
-other side of the way seems more gloomy, more moody and threatening, as
-if the war were not yet over.
-
-This Ypres is a terrible place still. There is no life when night comes
-on but tavern life. Those who live and work here have lost their sense
-of proportion. They are out of focus somehow. "You lookin' for dead
-soldiers," says a Flemish woman to you with a glaring stare, wondering
-if you are one of the exhumers. Death and the ruins completely outweigh
-the living. One is tilted out of time by the huge weight on the other
-end of the plank, and it would be easy to imagine someone who had no
-insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death.
-There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit.
-One is ashamed to be alive. You try to sleep in a little bed in a
-cubicle with tiny doll's house window. You listen to a drunken company
-down below singing, "Mademoiselle, have you got any rum?" A French
-couple enter the room next door, smacking one another's hips and
-confounding one another with coarse violent laughter--that is the light
-end of the plank. Then night ensues, the real night, breathless and
-sepulchral, the night which belongs to all lost hopes and ended lives
-and wearinesses.
-
-You lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly
-a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy
-masonry. You go to the little window, behold, the whole sky is crimson
-once more, and living streamers of flame ascend to the stars. An old
-dump has gone up at Langhemarcq. Everyone in Ypres looks out and then
-returns to sleep--without excitement. The lurid glare dies down;
-stertorous night resumes her sway o'er the living and the dead. For a
-moment it was as if the old war had started again.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Day dawns in a mist. A veil hides the inner reality of Ypres, and as a
-visitor says--"It looks more picturesque in the mist." Ypres however is
-an altar to which the nation must return.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-After the great battle most of the survivors marched away. New men took
-their places. Glorious captains received their D.S.O.'s, battalions
-their first honours. A mere thirty thousand of the old army had stemmed
-the onrush of a quarter of a million of the enemy. Ypres remained in
-British hands--though badly battered, and the Germans were kept back
-from the vital ground of Calais.
-
-At Chateau Wood near Hooge where a placard now says "THIS PLACE WAS
-HOOGE" were the remains of many battalions--Grenadiers, Duke of
-Wellingtons, Scots Fusiliers; along the Menin road lay Scots Guards,
-Borders, Gordons; but all were withdrawn. The Scots marched then to
-Dickebusch and Locre and Bailleul, and then to Sailly sur la Lys, and
-were out of the battle line ten murky days at least.
-
-Now as you walk out from Ypres along the blighted Dickebusch road midst
-the iron thorn bushes of rusty barbed wire and sheaves of old spiral
-stakes you still see large notices that WASTE LENGTHENS THE WAR--what
-stronger appeal could one make! Does it not still prolong it and ever
-will!
-
-A south wind blows volumes of rain out of the clouds on Kemmel Hill, the
-old mud is restored on the road, and long plashy pools of water guide
-the steps. Dickebusch is getting itself dug out of the mud, and making
-fair progress. Of its church amid broken monuments only two needles of
-up-jutting wall remain--at altar and entrance. New La Clytte is
-soldering itself to the foundations of old La Clytte. Kemmel grows
-nearer to the view and all the detail of its hillside can be picked out
-by the eye--the wheat field, the pasture, the farm-house. It is one's
-eye-neighbour on the left as you march into Locre. Now the Locre
-church, unscathed in 1914, unthreatened, is but a heap of red rubble
-surmounted by eight beams pointing skyward. Men are digging among the
-bricks, uncovering soiled images, figures of the Virgin, altar cloths,
-banners, stools. Near by stands a rusty cast-iron church built of
-salvage, a straight Protestant meeting house but for some brand-new
-coloured effigies of saints set among the seats. One aspect of Locre is
-of a diminutive forest of stinging nettles and low stumps of dead trees,
-and beyond lie some hundreds of British dead, flanked by a disused
-medical shed where the bodies used to be brought out and a burying padre
-with clayey hands went through the painfully mechanical service of
-throwing "dust to dust." The graves are nicely kept, and the young
-Belgium of Locre grows up with this heritage of sacrifice. As you sit on
-the ruins of the church looking down to the wet highway muddy
-velocipedists come pelting past in a race round their native land. Their
-bare thighs are caked with brown mud, and their cotton chemises are
-stuck to their bare round-shouldered backs, their intent faces are
-dirt-covered--on they dash, a complete and happy irrelevance beside the
-old war.
-
-Here is the frontier 'twixt Belgium and France. A rope is drawn across
-the road; there was none in the days of the war. The customs gendarmes
-will examine you if you are coming into Belgium, though they will pay
-little attention if you are going out.
-
-The landscape is one of black dead trees hanging dead arms. Old blown-up
-trees lie, root and all, along the roadside. There are great numbers of
-sockets of old gas-shells relating to the taking of Locre by the Germans
-in April 1918, heaps also of rusty rifle grenades which seem to have
-been collected and put by the side of the road. Remarkable ever are the
-promiscuously piled mountains of domestic old iron which one passes. It
-would be an interesting exercise for a young detective to decide what
-each piece of wreckage had been before the war. Certain things you can
-be sure about however--oil-drums, coal-scuttles, wash-bowls, chamber
-conveniences, armchair and sofa springs, metal guts of mattresses,
-perforated bowls for straining greens, coffee-pots, mangling and washing
-machines, scales, canisters, salvers--a clean sweep for every farm-house
-and every village. And in the new houses there is scarcely one saved
-utensil carried forward. Among the new articles introduced one may
-remark china casts of Charlie Chaplin in gala attire.
-
-The frontier land is hilly. One skirts the upland of which Mount Kemmel
-on the left is the most prominent feature. It is three or four
-kilometres from the rope of the frontier to the French line of douane
-and its customs-gendarmes. One looks down to the first town in France,
-Bailleul, and it looks like a picture which someone has drawn and then
-crossed out with black lines and smudged. As one approaches, this is
-found to be the residential suburb or park called L'asile, with
-grandiose buildings, now an appalling wreck with not one redeeming new
-patch upon it. Heaps of debris stand higher than houses, and houses
-which have not fallen have as it were been pushed forward upon one
-another. The frontier gendarmes examine your passport and you are free
-in France. You see the first diminutive huts of the French returned
-refugees, and then in the mud of the street, urchins playing bat and
-ball with a slowly-expiring frog which they hold by one dangling leg,
-and toss to the boy with the bat. A few steps further and it is
-Bailleul.
-
-Bailleul too is a great wreck as remarkable as Ypres, and its progress
-of recuperation is much slower. It does not cater for war pilgrims or
-take the money of tourists, and so there are no prominent hotels and few
-estaminets. Most of its houses are down, its ways are choked with ruin,
-and in the evening nondescript squads of workmen shuffle through the
-streets to their homes in barracks and cellar.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Still the old Army of 1914 marches on. When it entered Bailleul all was
-calm. Its great red-brick houses stood fairly and uncracked. The people
-had had a fright, but they held on. They held on through years of the
-war, and though the guns kept pounding away at them they did not wholly
-abandon it till 1918 when the Germans seized the town as part fruit of
-their second great Spring attempt to end the war. Then it was "fort
-abimée." The owners all fled, and what they left an enemy army
-ransacked.
-
-Thousands of officers and men were snugly billeted in November 1914 at
-Locre and Bailleul and Meteren. Sir John French came and chatted with
-men in the billets--about the battle of Ypres. New drafts came out from
-England. There had been a clearance of reservists and first volunteers.
-Each stricken battalion received its half a thousand to make up.
-Practically new units were organised for the winter defence of the new
-lines, and when the time was come they marched three leagues nearer to
-their enemy--to Sailly sur la Lys and Laventie and Neuf Berquin,
-Estaires--such names of destiny! When the King came to Sailly sur la Lys
-at the end of November he could not see his guardsmen because they were
-already in the fighting line and it was thought it would be unsoldierly
-to call them back for the King to see, to which the King agreed.
-
-The flowers are withered, the thistles which gave their fragrance to the
-air at Ypres are white with down. Peasants everywhere are scything weeds
-and burning them in smoking heaps. But the trenches beyond Sailly are
-still shaggy-topped with teazle crowns and woolly nettle heads. One
-wonders how many different units at what different times occupied those
-1914 trenches. Here still, one picks up old blue water-bottles and faded
-green straps and pouches of British uniforms. They are poor
-trenches--the mere staves that lined them to keep up the mud are all
-warped and good dug-outs are few.
-
-The Germans of course swept o'er all this in 1918. Witness the "busted"
-concrete telegraph posts growing dozens of rusty iron wires from their
-stumps, witness the lumpy solid cement-bags by the side of the road. But
-between 1914 and 1918 what a history! A little way beyond the British
-line is a cemetery called "V.C. corner." There are two hundred and
-thirty crosses and on every cross is exactly the same legend--"G.R.U.
-Unknown Australian soldier." There is no name in the whole of the
-cemetery. Some time some band of Australians charged here and did not
-come back and were not taken prisoner. Old rifles with broken rusty
-bayonets have been placed against the white-washed cross-surmounted
-entrance. Not many paces on one comes to the German line wrought in
-impregnable concrete, a line of snug beds in which it seems one might
-comfortably await the Last Day. But one concrete structure has been
-mined and looks as if it had been thrown bodily into the air without
-flying into bits. Now it stands poised upside down on a heap of dirt
-beside a profound pit. The Germans who were there when that happened are
-nearer now to the unknown Australian soldiers than we are.
-
-In 1914 there was none of this concrete. Both sides were equal in the
-mud, and the same no-man's land lay between. Even the wire had not been
-thrown out--or was of a most rudimentary kind. Friend and foe heard one
-another talking from across the wet fields--even called to one another
-and were without especial bitterness. On the right and towards Laventie
-a nervous Indian division kept up a heavy rifle fire all night long, but
-otherwise the war was mild. Frost-bite harmed more than iron. The first
-night raids were planned--sporting expeditions in which the thrills were
-sufficiently novel. Pleasantries were often exchanged with the enemy who
-was found to be possessed of plenty of English slang, and occasionally
-an English soldier who knew some German risked being thought a spy by
-his comrades and replied.
-
-Someone however planned a sharp attack on Lille. It was really the
-predecessor of the battle of Neuve Chapelle and should be called perhaps
-the battle of Fromelles. But it was completely abortive and the details
-were removed from public news--the first and last night attack of its
-kind. The date was exactly one week before Christmas, and looking at
-that narrow strip of no-man's land in which the attack spent itself one
-realises afresh how ineffectual were all these little battles of the
-war. Men died: that was all their effect.
-
-The attack was timed to start at six in the evening. Men were hoisted to
-the parapets and lay flat awaiting a signal, the blowing of a whistle.
-At the sound of the whistle they stood up and walked slowly and
-cautiously forward not to disturb the Germans. The moment the enemy
-discerned them and fired they were to rush forward as one man and enter
-the German trenches. Some men walked hand in hand; some unfortunately
-lost their heads and ran forward at once. The night was black as pitch
-and full of the unknown. It was not long before the enemy began to fire,
-and men dropped rapidly, leaving the inevitable gaps and disconnections
-in the line. It is incredible to realise it: the affair lasted all night
-long, and scarcely anyone knew where anyone else was. But back and forth
-they ranged in that fatal width of eighty yards of no-man's land, and in
-one battalion alone a hundred and eighty men were lost. As was to be
-expected, the troops were highly complimented and medals were
-plentifully awarded to the heroes who survived. Lille was safe as ever.
-Little Fromelles, just behind the enemy lines, was safe as Lille. The
-dead lay in front of the German trenches, and the foe carried some of
-them to the graveyard at Fromelles and buried them. But seven days
-later, on the Christmas Day armistice, many still lay green on the
-green earth where they had fallen.
-
-A curious day in the war--that first twenty-fifth of December. It was
-surely a moment of hope after great suffering and in the midst of the
-great anxiety. Probably all the nations engaged felt horrified by what
-they had done, and a sort of penitence ranged in men's minds, a belated
-regret that a better way than war had not been found to solve Europe's
-problems. By most of the private soldiers and young officers it was
-fervently believed that all would be over soon. And away at home there
-was such idealistic hope as that the soldiers on both sides might
-unanimously refuse to fight and that thus war might die of old age and
-prove that it had truly been an anachronism. Immense new armies were
-drilling in England, France, Germany, Russia, but they would never be
-needed. Germany would speedily be forced back to the Rhine and would
-capitulate, indemnifying France and Belgium handsomely and owning
-herself in the wrong. Our armies held the Germans on the West and the
-enemy was short of shells. The Russian "steamroller" was at work on the
-other side of Europe, and men were betting one another that Przemysl
-would fall before the New Year. Germany also was short of food, and our
-sea power would cause her to starve. In Germany on the other hand, a
-sense of great military superiority prompted the thought that soon all
-the enemies of the Fatherland would be crushed.
-
-Despite the details of atrocities on both sides there was not the extent
-of international bitterness that existed later. There was much talk of
-an armistice, and there would have been official sanction for a general
-temporary peace if Germany had not been so deeply distrusted. As it was,
-there was a cessation of hostilities in many parts of the line and
-meetings of enemies which amounted to fraternisation. This first
-Christmas was the only one on which there was innocent and bloodless
-armistice. Next year men were killed; and in 1916 despite the hopes of
-rank and file there were few handshakes, few interchanges of civility
-and greeting.
-
-But the first Christmas Day was a holiday. A party of Germans came over
-from Fromelles and a party of ours went over to the German trenches.
-Here in this narrow no-man's land where but a week ago had been that
-"clash by night," foes met as friends. The Germans agreed to bring over
-those of the dead which had not been buried. This was a matter of great
-solemnity. The grey German soldiers put the bodies on stretchers and
-brought them to the midst of no-man's land. Graves were dug there and
-then. Detachments of British and German troops formed up in line, and a
-German and an English chaplain read prayers alternately in the two
-languages. It must have been heart-rending for our fellows to look on
-the faces of the dead they knew so well, some of whom had set out for
-the attack in such high spirits. And they lay with their terrible
-wounds, the silent and ghastly fruits of the war, and it seemed they had
-nothing in common with Christmas and the festival of peace and goodwill.
-
-The arrangements for the armistice had been made in this way. On the
-night of Christmas Eve the German trenches were lit up with lanterns and
-there was much singing of carols and popular German music. Now and then
-there would be shouting across at the British lines, Christmas wishes
-and attempts to enter into conversation. Early on Christmas morning one
-of our scouts went out accordingly and met a German patrol. The latter
-gave him a glass of whisky and some cigars with a message that if we
-didn't fire at them they wouldn't fire at us. There had been no firing
-since nightfall and an armistice was agreed to. At about dawn a party of
-Germans came over to our wire fence and a party of our men went out to
-meet them. The meeting was most friendly, and there was a general
-exchange of small souvenirs and much mirth. Out of their abundance our
-men gave the Germans of their Christmas puddings which were received
-with great appreciation. Cigarettes were smoked, and there was much
-conversation in which Tommy made himself understood and the German
-mustered all his English. They all said they were tired of the war but
-were convinced Germany would soon win. One or two had lived in England,
-one even had an English wife, another had had an English sweetheart in
-Suffolk, and these were very eager to get back, so they said. The German
-opinion about the war was that France was on her last legs; Russia had
-had a tremendous defeat in Poland and would soon be ready to make peace.
-England remained to be broken, but with France and Russia out of the way
-it would not be difficult to come to terms. They thought the war might
-come to an end in January, 1915, in the following month. They professed
-to hate their officers but were evidently afraid of them. It was clear
-that discipline was carried further in the German army than in ours and
-that it was very much harsher.
-
-The German officers, without tokens of rank, seemed much less at ease
-than their men and were inclined to observe a sort of official silence.
-One pointed to the dead and said in French "Les braves!" indicating a
-reverence for fallen foes. Another volunteered the information that the
-officers who had died a week ago had been buried in the graveyard at
-Fromelles. There were dignified exchanges of tokens of remembrance among
-officers--not very convincing perhaps as evidence of brotherly love, but
-there was no mistaking the good-humour and camaraderie of rank and file
-which continued all the while.
-
-What a sad moment when officers saluted and the men marched back to
-continue the bitterness and folly of Europe's suicide. And _feu de joie_
-at midnight and massed choruses of carol singing! Christmas 1914 how far
-away wert thou from happiness and peace!
-
-And Fromelles church on the hill has been rased to the ground. The
-English dead have been taken away--only French remain, and amidst the
-great smash-up of tombstones are seven or eight wooden crosses for
-Chasseurs Alpins and French dragoons.
-
-So 1914 passed and the new year opened with a long war penitence when in
-two months a battalion in the line lost but four or five men. Both sides
-were short of shells and were saving themselves for the Spring. We shall
-march soon to Neuve Chapelle. Meanwhile men are practising in the use of
-the jam-tin and the hair-brush bombs--for the British army went to war
-without a bomb, despised bombs. It went also without helmets, without
-metal hats. Men went to war in service hats. It will take some
-maniac-(sic) patriot to jump from the gallery of the House of Commons
-into the midst of dreaming politicians, yelling "Give them metal
-helmets" ere something of the kind be furnished. There are now
-proceeding rehearsals of a battle behind the lines. Neuve Chapelle is
-being thoroughly rehearsed against a dummy foe. The power of shrapnel to
-destroy barbed wire is being tried--the verdict being that the narrower
-the front attacked the more chance of completely destroying the wire. As
-the war was eventually decided on the broadest of fronts, so the new
-phase of the war which started with Neuve Chapelle was begun on the
-narrowest of fronts. Be it noted, a continuation of the grand strategic
-movements of 1914 has already been rendered impracticable by the
-organisation of trench defences.
-
-On March 10th was the first concentration on the enemy's line, the first
-attempt to pierce it. Behold the once crowded breastworks on the road to
-Aubers and Neuve Chapelle. The great shaggy earthwork is covered with
-dense thistle now. There are mounds of filled sand-bags all hanging in
-clots like shirt-tails of innumerable men. This was the jumping-off
-point for the attack. It was bristling with tense excited soldiers that
-wild March morning, but no one lives there now--only swarms of
-whispering grasshoppers. The earth-wave goes on across the flat country;
-it is uncontrollably wild, and the peasants who work on the fields
-before and in front of it have left it alone as a work of despair to
-clear. It looks like an old Roman line.
-
-It is pitiful and pathetic now to walk to Neuve Chapelle and
-Aubers--where officers clutched their revolvers, and men with bayonets
-fixed thought their last thoughts of home whilst they plunged perchance
-to death. All the German defences are in concrete--the wonderful 1916
-concrete, massive, impregnable. At Aubers there are six hundred and
-eighty block-houses of concrete, with walls three feet thick. There are
-impudent watch-towers of it.
-
-The roadway, still littered with shrapnel and fragments of rifles and
-bombs, crawls across disintegrated Nature to ramshackle Neuve Chapelle,
-and then there is that beautiful wood beyond, so often sketched, not
-dead, leafing from all its trunks. As one looks on its lacework of
-loveliness set against the sky one thinks of a martyr whose faith has
-been proved--rescued from fire in time to avert destruction.
-
-Neuve Chapelle however was no victory as also it was no defeat. =GOOD
-NEWS TO-NIGHT= said the placards of the London papers, but what had
-happened was merely a rehearsal with many accidents. The fighting lasted
-three days. The enemy gave as much as he took. Men spent the night in
-trenches waist-deep in water, and were shelled mercilessly. They got up
-prematurely to attack; to face fires of execution--the serried array of
-the enemy's machine gunnery. Did not a battalion of Guards lose three
-officers and a hundred men whilst speeding over a mere hundred and fifty
-yards? On the other hand certainly German positions were isolated and
-hundreds of foemen walked demurely into captivity behind the British
-lines.
-
-You will look in vain for the graves of thousands of heroes. The bodies
-have been taken far away, but Neuve Chapelle has its cemetery of exhumés
-covered with brown level-raked earth behind a fertile beanfield. Captain
-Sir Edward Hulse, hero of a night raid at Fromelles, lies buried by the
-wayside, and he died at Neuve Chapelle. As for German dead, there is a
-strange absence of graves, but beyond Neuve Chapelle is a field of
-outrageous thistles and broad-bladed rotting crosses, some down, some
-standing, all with faded inscriptions, but the thistles are so thick and
-high one might easily pass by without observing an old graveyard of our
-dread enemy. It would be interesting to read a German account, oh, not
-an official one, of this battle of Neuve Chapelle, an account by one of
-the common soldiers who fraternised with his enemy on Christmas Day and
-had to kill him ere Easter had arrived.
-
-A long black touring-car has drawn up at the side of the road at Neuve
-Chapelle, and a handsome grey-haired English gentleman looks on the
-ruins. Says a small boy to him, "Daddy, what did the Germans do here?"
-
-"I don't know, my boy," says he. "But there was a great battle here
-early in the war, and we tried to win it. I don't think anybody won."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-So the Army went back to its football leagues and boxing competitions
-which afforded a happy subsidiary interest. True, some of the athletes
-and bright particular sporting stars had fallen, but others constantly
-arrived from inexhaustible old England. As regards the war a rigorous
-optimism set in. Complete victory was postponed for two months. There
-must be more and better rehearsals, that was all. A passion for
-discipline and the shooting of cowards set in. Poor R---- was shot beside
-Laventie. Sergeant-majors "came into their own."
-
-Now however a new peace has settled upon Laventie. Even the workmen seem
-working quietly. Most of the old billets of 1914-15 lie in tumultuous
-heaps of brick dust and beams, though here and there are houses with the
-number of the billet marked and the number of men it would hold. Many a
-tap-room where our fellows gave voice to beer and _vin blanc_ has passed
-into nothingness--the heavy boots clattering under the tables, the red
-faces above, the bottles and glasses, the gambling-boards, the
-pale-faced non-committal French women unashamed by the filth of the
-talk--where are they all? The old owners have gone, dead perhaps, or
-they found better business elsewhere. Often those who served in those
-taverns behind the line were not the real owners but a sort of
-adventurer who came in when the real people fled in panic. Tommy was the
-source of their profit, they plied him with beer and girls, and gave
-shelter to gambling sharps and got France a bad name. Anyhow, the
-people you see now are a sober quiet-faced folk with a real unending
-gratitude and affection for the British soldier. They preserve nothing
-but good memories of him, and no calculations enter into their love.
-
-The old tavern of the Blue Horse seems to be down, but the Grand Cheval
-Blanc still stands and other taverns of the horse--Laventie was a
-horse-breeding place in days gone by. To-day it has only a tiny
-population--and is nothing. It perhaps will not be a notable place
-again.
-
-The mind goes on to the rest-billets of Hinges and Busnes and to the
-march to Festubert across a country less scarred by war than there, less
-gassed perhaps, for gas killed more than shells. There are new plans of
-battle, more auguries of complete victory. Brigadiers themselves come to
-lesser commanders to explain in person the secrets of the Festubert
-attack. It amounts to little more than an intensification of the
-bombardment rehearsed at Neuve Chapelle, and the pouring of a greater
-number of men through the neck of devastation thus made, a pitiful
-suicide trap as it turned out, but a natural experiment.
-
-Hinges, though in 1915 far enough from shell fire to be a place of
-rest-billets and the drilling of new drafts and the bringing of musketry
-practice up to high regimental standards, is now a wreck, its church as
-completely ruined as our Wenlock Abbey and looking not unlike it.
-Hinges has a commanding position with a view far o'er the stricken _Nord
-du France_. Behind its ridge of high land Bethune remained comparatively
-immune, its centre alone being utterly destroyed. No doubt parts of
-Bethune would have fallen into German hands in 1918 had Hinges not held.
-The neighbouring village of Locon fell--a mile or so to the North-east.
-Merville which is due North fell also, and shells from three sides
-screamed against this little village and the Canadians defending it.
-
-Hinges now is quietly rebuilding itself and is a little-visited war
-hamlet. A memory and shrine of the Festubert fight is the wayside
-cemetery with its Gordons and Black Watch and Lancs men. Here lie two
-unknown British soldiers of Lancashire regiments and on their temporary
-wooden crosses have been nailed metal discs of the Lancastrians with
-bright red roses and the words:--"They win or die who wear the rose of
-Lancashire." Some devotee of his county has placed this disc on
-thousands of the graves of the Lancastrians.
-
-On the evening of the 15th May 1915, 2nd and 6th Gordons, 1st
-Grenadiers, 2nd Scots and Borders marched out to the junction of the
-roads rue de Bois and rue de l'Epinette, then filed through trenches
-held by Indian troops, and reached an allotted storming position west of
-"Princes Road." An elaborate time-table had been arranged, and each
-unit knew its angle relative to the "gap in the wire" which the
-artillery were going to make. At midnight all the troops were in
-position. At a quarter past three in the morning Scots Guards and
-Borders started up to lead the assault. What a narrow-fronted
-concentrated effort it was may be judged by the battalion formation,
-which was in eight lines of two platoons each.
-
-One cannot be sure now what trenches each unit filled, but the trenches
-are there and it is not difficult to imagine the crush of khaki in the
-warm May night, the shrieking and thundering of the bombardment. Three
-o'clock in the morning and the rum being doled out and the men poised
-and ready for the race of death.
-
-Near the corner of rue de l'Epinette and just before the village of
-Richebourg l'Avoué lie three Colonels and a Major side by side--they are
-the commanders of the Grenadiers and of the 2nd Border regiment, Major
-Kennet the second in command of the 1st Grenadiers, and Colonel
-Alexander of a Yorkshire regiment--all four perished at Festubert. The
-corner of rue de l'Epinette has now a cottage of wood and bricks with a
-cast-iron roof, a bright garden of flowers and beans. Opposite stands a
-new estaminet. There is a jolly field of gathered haricots hanging to
-dry on ten-foot poles. Once more, iron thorn-bushes of barbed wire each
-side of the way, and where the men dug themselves in by the side of the
-road--water and reeds. The Indian section has become the Indian
-cemetery, and the brave dusky boys of Asian hills have passed away.
-Festubert is a little place where the pile of old white stone and cement
-which was the village church is higher than the huts which have sprung
-up around it. But where are those blossoming orchards through which our
-boys charged in the dawn twilight, where are the dead who lay so long
-unrecovered in that pitiful no-man's land beyond? Unrecovered then and
-irrecoverable now.
-
-On the 27th May 1915, ten days after the battle, General Joffre
-inspected the whole Seventh Division, which was drawn up in three great
-columns, a brigade in each, and with the 20th Brigade and its pipers
-leading, all marched past to the salute. Another day came the Divisional
-Commander General Gough, and perched high up on the central pile of
-straw and midden in a large farm-yard he thanked the men for
-Festubert--they had done what was asked and more--"as always," he added.
-
-Yet the Seventh Division had been destroyed at the First battle of
-Ypres, only its framework had remained; its large reinforcements had
-been worked off in the night-raids and at Neuve Chapelle, and its second
-reinforcements had been almost exhausted at this Festubert. The speeches
-were made, not so much to the heroes as to new drafts. Kitchener's army
-was however flooding into France, and despite enormous casualties we
-were beginning in a way to have a national army. What was left of the
-old army became the instructors of the new. The regular army gave way to
-the volunteers.
-
-It was a time of heart-searching in England. Optimism and pessimism
-began to be sharply defined. Russia had been routed. Lord Northcliffe
-made his sensational effort to make an easy-going London face bitter
-reality. Mr. Lloyd George at the Ministry of Munitions began to take a
-larger broader view of the military aspect of the war than did most of
-his colleagues. Preparations were made for the manufacture of shells for
-the terrific onslaught of the Somme next year. Whilst many poor fools
-still thought that 1915 would see us through the strife, plans on the
-basis of a three or four years struggle were being definitely made. Then
-we were beginning to manufacture poison gas and had at last invented a
-handy bomb--the Mills grenade, our answer to the stick-bombs which
-dangled from the belts of German soldiers. It was a time of far-reaching
-military plans and dreams. All grown-up children who were not themselves
-tin soldiers were playing soldiers. Flying men carried terror across the
-skies, and sailors of submarines carried it under the sea. No prophet
-knew the number of men who would have to be killed before the
-politicians would be ready to come to Versailles to discuss the matter.
-From England, France and Germany three or four million must actually
-die--that fact was unknown. In the summer of 1915 the number who had
-died was far from that figure. It is curious however to think of the
-many who had laid themselves down in earth's earthy bed in the full
-faith that their sacrifice would not be in vain--to think of the proud
-Germans, the fine ones, not the base ones, who believed in their Kaiser
-and that wonderful German Fatherland to which they owed their life
-before they owed their death, and to think of what was to come. Germany
-and her Kaiser not only defeated but humiliated and cast lower than all
-nations in old Europe; to think of the loyal Russian soldiers who
-perished in the first enthusiasm of the war with a bright starry faith
-in Russia, her Church and her Tsar, of the Grand Duke Oleg for instance,
-that young hero whose warm blood grew cold whilst the street-bred people
-of Berlin knocked nails in great Hindenburg's wooden statue--to think of
-these first Russians who lay dead with their weapons beside them in
-1914-15, and then to think of the hideous revolution and those murders
-in Ekaterinburg when all Russia fell; to think of the fine youth of
-England and Scotland, of France, of Serbia, who died in the faith not
-only of national victory but of a victory for humanity, the boys whose
-fragment of iron destiny clove their brains or rived their hearts at the
-outset of the fray, and then to think of that sordid clash of
-selfishness at Versailles and of the untamed menagerie of Europe let
-loose in 1920. The spiritualists quickly claimed to get special messages
-from the dead. But did the dead only speak to the spiritualists? Did
-they say nothing more than was said to them? Most of us alas, hear
-nothing or only a "Dinna ye hear it?" a wailing of the pipes at an
-infinite number of poor soldiers' funerals.
-
-Well, the war enters a new phase in the summer of 1915. It will be
-fought in a larger more terrible way, the number of millions of deaths
-will begin after a while to seem not so far off. Killing becomes the
-religion of the hour.
-
-The first hundreds of thousands of the volunteers roll up. The old
-Seventh Division which we have been following is broken up and
-reconstructed. The Guards Division was formed. So Scots Guards and
-Grenadiers marched away to join new comrades, to leave behind brave
-Borders and Gordons and Devons and Duke of Wellingtons. The 92nd feted
-the Scots, the Devons the Grenadiers; the Gordon pipers played all the
-laments of the clans and "_Will ye no come back again!_"
-
-And they went to Wizernes to prepare for the battle of Loos--a conflict
-which the gallant Highland lads were destined to enter first and the
-bright polished Guards but second, yet both to shine and die.
-
-In June General Foch's Tenth Army launched its Artois attack against the
-great ridge of "Notre Dame de Lorette" which commands the Lens country
-from the South as the high ground of Loos does from the North. A hundred
-thousand Frenchmen perished for Notre Dame and it is henceforth a place
-of pilgrimage for France. The battle was the prelude to our battle of
-Loos and whilst the great new British army in reserve drilled and
-marched away to the North, it heard each night the drum-fire of the 75's
-rolling from the South. Later in the war when the British took over all
-the line 'twixt Lens and Arras the Canadians took Foch's victory a step
-further and captured Vimy Ridge. What Foch did in the summer of '15 was
-however to be eclipsed by what the combined armies should do in the
-autumn. Reliance was placed chiefly on the new man-power. The earlier
-battles of Neuve Chapelle and Festubert had been tests of the
-relationship of gun-power and man-power. Opinion inclined to support the
-theory that a superiority in numbers was the most telling factor in a
-battle. This seemingly was disproved, and the next theory was that in
-order to obtain victory there must be overwhelming superiority both in
-guns and in men. The Somme battle proved that even these were not
-enough.
-
-In the battle of Loos however all the interest was centred on men, men
-personally. The new base was St. Omer, the picturesque ecclesiastical
-town with its castellated church towers in relief against the sky--all
-so thronged with khaki--henceforth till the war ends to be a great war
-centre. France lies in a bower beyond, and there are squads of poplar
-trees on hills, and green and happy meadows never scarred by shells or
-wilted by gas. On the left on the road out to Wizernes is now a large
-cemetery, and here lie French dead with the tricolour upon them, British
-with an infinity of flowers and wreaths, Americans with grim and tall
-white crosses--American dead who will not be exhumed perhaps. Behind the
-American graves stand wedges of unpainted wood--a Chinese plot where lie
-what was mortal of many unknown coolies. On the right lie Germans, on
-the left _soldados_ of Portugal. This is called playfully the souvenir
-cemetery--there are so many of the dead they can be thus arranged, as
-children might arrange their toys. St. Omer was known as a great base
-hospital to which alas, so many were called to look their last upon
-their dying children, dying sons of England breathing out their last
-words before their bodies were laid away. There are those who are fond
-of saying that everything began at St. Omer. But for many also it was
-the place where it all--_ended_.
-
-The cemetery past, (How it rains on it now!) you come to aerodromes all
-tortured and torn, indications of Handley Page but no indications of
-those who fly, the cages are all empty and there stands not a sentry. In
-plain blunt English the passer-by is told that "_Trespassers will be
-shot_" but in the heavy rain of a Saturday afternoon a muddy crowd of
-French boys are playing a football match. Chinamen evidently worked
-beside these aerodromes, for you see their scrawls on the sheds and
-shelters.
-
-Wizernes, where the Guards Division was formed, lies in a hollow below a
-long green ridge. Most of it is painted white--including _Au bon Diable_
-a tavern of some name. The people know a passing Englishman, not by the
-cut of his clothes alone but by his walk and his complexion and style.
-Standing at their doorways old men give military salutes to any
-Englishman who happens to go by. All know bits of our tongue, of which
-they are as proud as if they had wounds to show. A poor woman in a
-little beer-house has eight daughters, five of whom are married and a
-sixth has a child by a Canadian. Little Renée, flaxen-haired,
-ruddy-cheeked, is getting on very well and the mother adores her, though
-a father in the New World his progeny has forgotten. This sixth daughter
-of substantial mother was in service at Havre and met the soldier
-there; she is now in service at St. Omer and not at all "ruined." There
-are thousands of baby tokens of the war in France. Some died no doubt,
-through lack of care; lightly they came and lightly they go, but a
-widespread sentimental feeling about departed Tommy shields those who
-now, live from any feeling of disgrace.
-
-Of course the men at the base begot more infants than the men in the
-line, the latter were too much used up for "love" or "lust," saw fewer
-girls and had less time on their hands. But all had their opportunities.
-As we know, a great number of marriages were effected, and not a few
-overseas men are now living with French wives.
-
-That has little however to do with Wizernes, whence behold Lord Cavan's
-men marching away one dull September morn. The music of the bands is
-refracted from that long parallel ridge of hill which goes with the road
-toward Arques--the drums, the fifes, the brilliant array; each company
-compact, glittering--the new Division. Some of it is utterly new, such
-as 4th Grenadiers and 1st Welsh straight from Little Sparta, others
-trail already a great war history from other divisions of the old army.
-But the numbers are good. Sergeants are yelling at men who will be dead
-in a few weeks' time. Men are silently reviling those on whom destiny
-itself will quickly take revenge. All looks very authentic and lasting.
-Unchecked optimism moreover reigns supreme. These compact units in their
-unhurried and ever regular quick march believe that they will win the
-war. Lens will be taken by others. They will come into action at the
-critical moment, somewhere near Douai. They will pierce the German belt
-of defence, split the enemy army, "roll up their line," and Germany
-realising that she is beaten will at once sue for peace. There may be
-some delay in formalities--then home for Christmas!
-
-Behold in the Grand Place at Arques immaculate General Heywood
-inspecting his Third Brigade with its new units. Arques has a tall
-obelisk there now--_a ses cent cinquante heroiques et glorieux enfants,
-mort pour la France et la liberté_.
-
-These inspections were as great an ordeal as the going into battle
-itself. In the line at least there were no drill-sergeants and
-regimental sergeant-majors. However, inspections cease and the long
-march in the rain begins, and new leather beats cobbled highways for
-many a long fifty minutes, and weary backs and feet find ten minutes in
-the hour all too little for recuperation. A little-touched happy
-agricultural country, with Calvaries here and there erected and blessed
-in 1919 in token of thanks that the land was spared from invasion. By
-Aire to Fontaine St. Hilaire, to the sight of the first coal pyramids
-of the Lens country and to the hearing of the first mighty thunders of
-the opening great battle. The Guards were told that they were intended
-for a sort of anchor to the cavalry. The Division would press on, and
-somewhere beyond Loos the cavalry would come up from behind, pass
-through the ranks, and press on to Douai. The Division would perhaps
-come into action at the Canal at Douai. So when the cavalry overtook the
-Guards whilst yet on the road to Loos it was assumed that the whole
-British army was in advance of its program, Douai taken, and the enemy
-in disorderly retreat. But on the day when optimism reached its height a
-Colonel in a motor coming back from the front gave the duller tidings
-that the attack had been held up. However, the sight of the cavalry
-regiments going past in all their splendour was a sort of lasting
-encouragement in the simple soldier's mind.
-
-It is a gloomy sordid country with dirty mining villages placarded with
-yellow appeals to the proletariat and "Vive la Russie!" "Vive la
-revolution sociale!" and dirty homes and black-faced men in sooty coaly
-shirts--miserable Sailly, miserable Vermelles. Then the road debouches
-upon wide open country, the terrain and the landscape of the battle. It
-is a chalky heath interlaced and inter-run with trenches and barbed
-wire. The trenches were mostly dug by Scottish miners and were said to
-be the admiration of the troops in 1915. But standards in trench digging
-were low in the first year of the war, and one does not admire them now.
-The landmarks of the horizon are peaked coal-heaps. The road which goes
-to Lens is bare and hard. Loos and Hulluch are on the left, and also the
-German line. Close in to the suburbs of Lens the line crosses the road.
-Shells must have come thick and fast on these September days. It is not
-a covetable country to march over under fire. One wonders what exactly
-the first divisions accomplished here on the days before the Guards came
-up. Special correspondents were given facilities at the time and one
-remembers among other things Mr. Buchan's despatch with its native pride
-in Highland regiments, and a sort of belief that they themselves had won
-the day. One had the impression of a sort of trial charge of kilted lads
-which showed what they would do later on. Indeed some of the Highlanders
-must have actually got into Lens. Nothing could stop them but death.
-Were the lines between Vermelles and Loos German? These were supposed to
-have been captured during the first days of the attack. The Guards in
-artillery formation swept across leftward to Loos, past the spent
-legions--to the line, to Hill 70, the barrier to Lens city.
-
-It is memorable to be in Loos on the anniversary of the opening of the
-battle, to walk up Hill 70 by the sharp-dug clumsy communication-trench,
-to reach the lateral lines on the brow of the hill and look down toward
-the shattered town. And Loos lies in disruption and dejection. It lost
-every roof, now it has perhaps a score of new ones visible to the eye.
-The machinery of the pit-head is all down, likewise the clangorous iron
-tower which shells seemed unable to destroy. Rusty wreckage runs along
-the base of the coal heap, the length of a long train. Heavy green shrub
-almost covers the coal embankment. On Hill 70 itself the old rusty wire
-remains, though so scanty as if much had corroded away. Shell-holes seem
-to afford more cover than the pitiful scrapings in the chalk of the old
-trenches. There is a burnt-out wood on the left; on the right is the
-insurgent industrialism of unruined fosses; ahead are chalk-pits,
-chalk-mounds, thistles, dry grass, poppies, all dazzling in a bright
-September noon. Innumerable grasshoppers are whispering in the breeze,
-and from all horizons one hears also the softened clatter of building.
-You can even hear what is going on in Lens.
-
-There is little of the debris of the fight--a rotten butt-end of a
-rifle, a few shreds of German bombs, an old-fashioned gas bag. One
-recalls that the British first used gas at Loos. The air on Hill 70 on
-that September day was pregnant with gas. Many of our fellows died of
-it. The Germans on their side made much use of stick-bombs. The hill
-was strewn with "buckshee" bombs. Did not a young soldier valiantly
-digging drive a pick through one, and send himself and Lord Petre of the
-Grenadiers to better country? The enemy manufactured vast quantities of
-this bomb--it was a pet toy of his, curiously exemplifying his mind. Its
-stated object was to terrify rather than to kill, and Englishmen
-believing more in iron and "good shrapnel effects" always despised it.
-But it was responsible for an enormous number of accidents.
-
-On the brow of the hill and beyond there are increasing signs of German
-habitation. Near a vast white wallowing mine-crater there is a barricade
-of sand-bags and wire, the point of difference 'twixt friend and foe.
-After that one soon comes upon those wooden framed cellarways which
-plunge from the side of the trench into the bowels of the earth. They go
-down and down and are seldom explored by soldier or civilian. Some of
-these have their gruesome secrets in their dark depths. Many Germans
-were killed in them. Fear and industry conceived them. They were safe
-enough at ordinary times, but death-traps in an attack; a man at the
-bottom of a steep pit stood little chance against an enemy at the door
-with a bomb. The British and French in this case understood the war
-better than the Germans. A slighter cover or shelter whilst giving less
-sense of security did give vigilance and alertness. Germany dug the
-grave of her cause far from the ends she had in view and settled down to
-a war of concrete and defence when she should have understood her lines
-as the merest temporary abiding places on the way to victory. It
-prolonged the settlement for years.
-
-How the cornflowers blossom on the German side! Did not they sow the
-seeds here for their Kaiser. They sowed the seed--and now it blossoms on
-the wilderness. Bright blue flowers shine in the midst of withered
-nature, otherwise in September 1920 the crest of Hill 70 is so covered
-with brittle yellow weeds that a match would set it aflame from end to
-end. It is like a dried inland beach of the old war. The waves no longer
-roll up with thunder and expire as once they did. But you can see in
-imagination the young Guards officer in his Burberry, cane in hand
-leading his flower of manhood--forward, forward, toward the shore of
-Lens--see the expiring first line and the second line that follows
-passing through and over it, the third that goes again---- They were the
-waves which at last crumbled all defences.
-
-Not that Loos was a triumph of attack. Little justice will no doubt be
-done on our side to the German defence of Lens, but it was a defence
-which rivalled ours of Ypres. The enemy was driven back on both sides of
-it during the later campaigns of the war (chiefly in 1917). Technically
-and theoretically the Germans could be forced to yield it at any
-moment. But in practice it could not be taken from them. We'd take it
-were it of iron; they'd hold it were it of butter. Artillery laid the
-town flat, but artillery could not destroy the cellars, and of every
-cellar the German, with the reinforcement of iron and concrete, made a
-machine-gun nest or post for riflemen. For the rest, we held nearly all
-the Vermelles--Lens road, and the greater part of that from La Bassee to
-Lens. From Hill 70 one sees geographically a wide landscape of the war.
-It was a remarkable vantage-ground for beholding the doings of one's own
-side.
-
-One aspect of the fighting on Hill 70 ought not to be forgotten, and
-that was the work of the stretcher-bearers who for the sake of each
-wounded comrade they brought in exposed themselves constantly to death.
-The heavy bodies, the uneven and entangled way down an exposed hillside,
-the shells howling and bursting, the sniper's bullet whipping through
-the air--these made up the stretcher-bearers' Calvary-walk. They did
-their duty and ceased to think of whether they themselves would live or
-die. And Loos was nothing to the Somme--as those will tell you who came
-through both.
-
-But the battle of Loos was not ended at Loos. All the worst of the
-fighting was away to the left by Bois de Hugo and Chalk-pit wood where
-Scots and Coldstream strove again and again to establish a continuous
-line. The German system of trenches was entered, and Hulluch-ward, La
-Bassee-ward, a strife more bloody than Loos itself continued. On the
-night of the 29th September there is a relief on Hill 70--the 22nd
-Londons come in. The survivors of the Guards march off to billets in
-Sailly and about. But the fight continues for halves of trenches, for
-corners, for turnings. German and British are living in the same
-madhouse together and fighting for complete possession room by room.
-
-Now the new British bomb appears--the Mills grenade, the trench-clearer.
-Germans are fought in the white alleys with bombs, bombs only and bombs
-ever. October 1915 was the great month of bomb-mania. Its emblem should
-be the man and the bomb ready to throw. The Guards were soon back in the
-fray, and on the night when the bombs came up so great was the
-fascination that "Jocks" and "Bill Browns" were bombing one
-another--each thinking the other was the enemy.
-
-It is all indescribably wild now--Gun trench, Grab Alley, Big Willie,
-Hohenzollern and the rest, cement-coloured, or yellow with a withered
-prairie of weeds. Notices at various points indicate _chasse reservée_:
-the shooting rights are now reserved. Frenchmen with shot-guns and dogs
-prowl along the parapets, peppering the noisy partridges which they
-rouse up in scores. Decaying rifles lie in the trenches, rusty
-bayonets, and muddy shreds of belts and pouches. On the German side the
-inevitable litter of unexploded but sodden bombs; undo the metal
-protectors and you find the very string which caused them to explode has
-rotted in its case. No tourists turn up on these wild wastes. It is too
-terrible for them--and you cannot motor over innumerable pits.
-
-On Sunday October 3rd you can picture the survivors of Loos at "Divine
-Service" at Sailly la Bourse. On the evening of the Sunday they marched
-to Gun trench. The trench was so called because the enemy had a gun on
-it. Fifty yards of the centre the Germans held, and the British were in
-the trench both on the left and on the right of the enemy, and strove to
-bomb him out of it entirely.
-
-The gun was worked heavily, and shell after shell landed on parapet or
-parados scattering solid slag, ravaging chalk, burying men. The unburied
-were engaged all night digging out lost comrades and trench-repairing.
-It seems mere matter-of-fact when set down in dull print--but oh, the
-physical agonies of apprehension, the shuddering, the shattering of
-nerves physically under such conditions. It is easily understood how men
-were glad to be hit to get away and find peace. Death must at times have
-been eagerly desired and sought. It was called hell: it was hell. The
-new Kitchener divisions were thus not long in getting to the reality of
-war.
-
-In the diaries of the time you find much reference to gas fatigue.
-British gas was used whenever the wind seemed favourable. Gas did not
-seem however to have power to stifle many enemy defenders. Gas fatigue
-was the carrying of the cylinders to the line. Emplacements were dug for
-cylinders below the parapet of the trench and "riveted" with sand-bags.
-Twenty or thirty cylinders would be thus ranged together at intervals of
-twenty-five yards. The cylinders contained the gas in liquid form, and
-ejection was worked on the syphon principle. This use of gas was seldom
-justified by results, and added an infernal torture and ugliness. It was
-a true diabolism. Almost always it afflicted the side which operated it
-as much as it did the enemy. Protection against gas was clumsy and
-inadequate. We started with the "stokers' pad" which was proved useless.
-Then we had a cotton pad soaked in hypo and tied on by veiling which was
-supposed to protect the eyes. And then followed cloth helmets soaked in
-hypo, helmets with mica eyes, very smelly, clammy, and unreliable.
-Mustard gas at a later date brought the respirator. But the protection
-at Loos and Hulluch was the old hypo bag of which not a few still lie
-about.
-
-The war was becoming quite complicated and new. A Lewis gun was first
-used in the battle for Hohenzollern Redoubt, and in time each battalion,
-nay, each company, will have its Lewis gunners. Steel helmets were also
-issued at Hohenzollern and were considered curiosities. One battalion
-received five helmets! They were supposed to be for the special use of
-the bombers. But then everyone became a bomber in that battle.
-
-It is with awe that one looks on the silent empty Hohenzollern system
-now, where trenches for many days were choked with dead. Some commanders
-in those days thought double rum-rations put the necessary devil into
-men to carry them through the ordeal of a fray, and it is common talk in
-the Army that some of the units that went into the storming of
-Hohenzollern Redoubt knew very little of what they were doing. One thing
-is certain: alcohol has power to banish fear from men's minds, if fear
-there happen to be. It dulls the brain to danger. But then alas, it
-often dulls it to much else. Cool heads were needed to meet the German.
-And the night-attack at Hohenzollern failed. The dead lay as if emptied
-out of sacks into the pits, into the trenches, some head downward, some
-with legs alone visible. Whilst it rained in London, and the evening
-crowds glided along Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly talking of
-anything and everything, happily, snugly,--away out there in the
-darkness lay such a scene. It was most near, but an impenetrable black
-curtain hid it from the eyes.
-
-War in 1915 failed. We failed; the Germans failed. The German failure
-was the greater because it was not their rôle to stand and be attacked.
-Germans and Allies were not unequally matched. The result was a
-deadlock. Both sides came to the conclusion that no one in his wildest
-dreams of preparation for war had foreseen the number of shells and guns
-necessary to obtain victory. Fighting therefore slackened off in the
-trenches, and the real centre of war-activity was transferred to what we
-called "the home front," to the factories and war-industries of England,
-France, and Germany and Austria. All the wet and gloomy winter saw the
-ammunition heaping up for the myriad-fold destruction of men in 1916.
-Germany prepared a mountain of death to hurl at Verdun; Britain a
-mountain of death to hurl from the Somme. No serious discussion of the
-campaigns of 1915 was allowed to the peoples of the countries. Gallipoli
-however was evacuated and Serbia over-run, and Bulgaria came into the
-war on the other side. With the military power of the Tsar lying low
-Germany had fair hopes of victory. Neither Britain nor France had much
-to cheer them, but they knew that their resources were mighty, and they
-knew that their enemy on the Western front did not seem to want to fight
-and was continually on the defensive.
-
-It did not stir the mind of the soldier much. The autumn leaves fell for
-the Germans, and Christmas came for the British Tommy, and unfulfilled
-promises in plenty. A winter of rain and mist above, and water and mud
-below, and a sense of "a long long way to Tipperary and to everywhere
-else" were the lot of the British soldier. The war lost its tension
-after the Hulluch fighting was over. Unofficial fraternisation set in on
-many fronts. This was a mutual understanding by the rank and file of
-both sides. The Germans were quickest in arranging it--indeed their
-alacrity in this direction suggested the belief that it was organised
-from above and was intended as a way of winning the war, by undermining
-discipline and worming out secrets and spying. This however was not so.
-For if it undermined one side it undermined the other as much also, and
-if one side learned secrets so could the other. Moreover officers on
-both sides disliked it, and they for their part could not fraternise
-with enemy officers. Their quarrel was more serious. Officers understood
-more about the war and had more of the collective guilt of the war upon
-their minds than had the rank and file. Not that a winter lull was not
-to their liking. They were glad enough of the effects of these _petites
-armistices_. On the French fronts more was arranged than on that held by
-the British. Parties came over into one another's trenches. In Russia
-unfortunately fraternisation resulted in a constant loss of Muscovite
-rifles and material in exchange for _Schnapps_. Probably the British
-fraternised least of all, and though one has heard of Tommy's concert
-party in which "Brother 'Ans was arst ter sing the 'im of 'ate" it did
-not amount to more than tacit agreements not to shoot.
-
-The crack regiments on both sides were however indisposed for any kind
-of truce. They set the tone in discipline and were far from that Charlie
-Chaplin attitude towards the war which characterised some others. What
-was the astonishment of some of the Guardsmen when "taking over" at
-Laventie, after Loos and Hohenzollern, to see the easy-going way of
-warfare which had developed. "I saw a Jerry on top of the enemy parapet
-working away in broad daylight as cool as could be," said a sergeant.
-"Of course I at once got a bead on him."
-
-"What're you going to do? You're surely not going to fire on him?" asked
-one of the men of the outgoing regiment. "You'll spoil the game."
-
-"How's that?"
-
-"Why, they'll begin shooting at you."
-
-"What d'you think of that?" said the sergeant. "I fired just to let them
-know the Guards had come."
-
-Nevertheless even the Guards were mollified. Warfare dwindled to
-nothing. "Jerry" was very confiding. Christmas was coming. The war
-after all was not so serious and perhaps would not be renewed in the
-Spring. Inactivity always seems to soften opposing rank and file toward
-one another. It tends to bring them back to the natural human
-relationship. By Christmas there was a widespread popular sense for a
-thoroughgoing reconciliation in no-man's land. What had happened at
-Christmas in 1914 was the needful precedent. It was a sort of playful
-legend in the army. On Christmas Day there would be a going over and a
-shaking of hands and exchange of souvenirs and drinks. Both sides looked
-forward to it.
-
-But the authorities evidently thought it dangerous. Orders to the effect
-that there should be no fraternisation were sent out, and a
-staff-officer here and there spent Christmas Eve in the trenches to see
-that the orders were carried out. He could not however effect very much.
-At ten o'clock that night the men in all the trenches both German and
-English were talking without restraint, and the dark muddy lines of
-Laventie had a voice as of some great club at night when all the members
-are discussing at once. Germans were shouting invitations across,
-British were shouting invitations; and promises were made for next day.
-At dawn therefore parties went over, and whole battalions might have
-followed them had not the artillery at once set up a barrage. It was
-found also that sentries on both sides had been ordered to fire. Some
-obeyed, some did not. One Guards sentry was proud of having fired
-fifteen rounds. But he did not hit anyone. Meanwhile the troops about
-Neuve Chapelle and Aubers got across in large bodies. Even on the
-Guards' front men risked their lives to shake hands. Did not one thus
-lose his life that morning!
-
-There is a little old cemetery by the side of the road a mile or so from
-Laventie, and there lie prominently side by side two corporals of the
-Sixth Black Watch (Newell and Willis) and behind their graves is that of
-a certain Sergeant Oliver who perished on Christmas Day. A tall rose
-tree with crimson roses blooming even in the autumn is growing from the
-earth where he lies. Beside him lies one who was both captain and
-knight, with only a dock rising from his feet. On all graves are weeds
-except on that of the man who gave his life to shake hands on Christmas
-Day.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The winter life of 1915-16 was one of mud and frostbite in the line, and
-taverns and songs when out. The whole corner of Northern France about
-Armentières begot a sort of British character. Not that it was like any
-district at home. Or that the way of life resembled anything anywhere
-else at any time. Tommy in the _estaminet_, Tommy with his sing-song in
-billets, Tommy on the march slogging through the mud--began as it were
-to belong to France and to the war. He ceased to look like an imported
-article. He was disposed to be at home, and like Mark Tapley, that most
-characteristic of English types of men, to be happy even under the most
-melancholy circumstances. The soldier, whatever his inward sorrows,
-often so deep, so poignant, always kept a cheery face and had a
-devil-may-care smile for whatever came along. Of course he had his
-grousing fits. But they passed. He was most himself when singing. To
-France he sang all the old songs he ever knew and more besides which he
-invented. How vulgar, in London how banal were the songs--"vulgar songs
-which make you cough and blow your nose" as Kipling put it, the
-seemingly maudlin _Hullo my dearie I want you to-night_ sort of song.
-But in France how real, how passionate! A group of men stand in the
-partial shelter of a shattered building crooning together whilst it
-rains, whilst it pours on the mud outside! In England the words which
-they sing are sentimental drivel, they are the barrel-organ and its
-handle turning, but in France they are the voice of a suppressed
-yearning and suffering--
-
-  I ... shall meet you ... to-night, dear--
-  In my beautee ... ful dream ... land.
-  And your eyes will be bright, dear,
-  With ... the love light ... that shines for me.
-
-
-The only place where the soldier could meet her, till there came one of
-those madly-coveted greedily-snatched moments of leave, when a man
-dashed, with the mud of the trenches still on him, straight to
-"Blighty."
-
-There was a curious note of self-pity in many of the sentimental songs,
-and men gloated over the love of home. The love of mother became warmer
-in imagination (_Lordy, lordy lordy, how I love her!_); the tenderness
-of wife and sweetheart became desired in a way which could only be
-expressed in songs--and in letters, those most precious of all tokens of
-the war, the letters which men sent from the front to those who loved
-them. The little English soldier sang his very heart out asking his
-Lizzie to "keep the kettle boiling," asking anyone and everyone to
-
-  Keep the home fires burning
-  Till the boys come home!
-
-Even so, he would not allow himself to get down-hearted or to remain for
-long in a sentimental mood. The humorous inventive vein came to his
-assistance. He did not possess ready-made chansonettes of the French
-type. The music-hall had not provided them, but he straightway began to
-invent them to satisfy the need. So sprang into being _Mademoiselle from
-Armenteers_ which was reputed to have fifty thousand verses--anyone
-could invent a verse at any moment. So was born _Roll on, my Three_,
-that soldiers' litany and chorus, _The one-eyed Riley_, and many another
-burlesque. Then every well-known hymn and popular song had its war
-parody expressing the soldier's mind in lighter vein---- Some of the
-parodies of popular songs improved on the originals. Thus--
-
-  I wore a tunic, an old khaki tunic,
-  But you wore civilian clothes.
-  Whilst we were in the trenches
-  You were mashing all the wenches,
-      What a blessing no one knows!
-  We fought at Loos whilst you scoffed the booze.
-
-on the basis of--
-
-  I wore a tulip, a bright yellow tulip,
-  But you wore a red red rose.
-
-was extremely diverting, as was
-
-  I've lost my oil-bottle and pull-through,
-  I've lost my four by two.
-
-on the basis of "Love's beautiful garden."
-
-Endless were these songs and parodies now fast receding into limbo.
-Where so much was ugly and of the burlesque there was also much that was
-true and simple and direct, from the heart. Perhaps the most popular
-song in some regiments was, after all, "Mary." There was no parody of
-"Mary," and one was always hearing or singing--
-
-  The sweetest blossom on the tree
-  Cannot compare with Ma ... ry!
-
-
-The men lifted the roofs of the taverns with their songs. The war which
-increased life's suffering tenfold, increased life's music tenfold also.
-
-So the winter was sung through, a winter of rain and snow, with low
-skies, with mists, mist on land and sea and in the eyes and in the mind,
-the melancholy interim of 1915-16, where no one understood anything
-except that there was suffering. Meanwhile however the munition-makers
-on the home fronts went on manufacturing the stuff of death in
-ever-increasing appalling vast quantities.
-
-The Germans were the first to resume the struggle. 1916 presented itself
-as a year of destiny for Mittel-Europa and world-power. Russia lay low.
-Serbia was ravaged even to the shores of Greece. A galvanised Turkey had
-been raised from death and had driven France and Britain from the gates
-of the Hellespont. There remained but one vital enemy--France. Britain
-would soon compose the war if France were worsted. So now all the might
-of Prussia was forged into a weapon of assault, and the weapon was
-hurled in the centre.
-
-There commenced the terrible manslaughter of Verdun. Irresistible
-Germany met immovable France, and men by the myriad were sent post-haste
-to heaven. Between the petty forts of a French city Europe heaped a
-great pyramid of skulls to the sky. As in Verestchagin's picture, one
-saw an emblem of war without compromise and without cowardice.
-
-The French stubbornness before Verdun shone out like a miracle. It was
-an unexpected revelation of French tenacity and corporate strength. A
-Bismarckian contempt for the Frenchman had almost been the accepted
-measure of the French in Europe. They were considered degenerate,
-corrupt, lacking in spirit, loud to boast but quick to run away. The
-rapidity with which Germany overran France in 1914 had confirmed this
-opinion, despite the battle of the Marne. But Verdun revealed to Germany
-a new and terrible France. The whole of the rest of the war, as it were,
-paused to look on in wonder. France has raised now her memorials at
-Verdun, but it needs no monument. Verdun is written in iron upon
-Europe's heart. Dead called to the living there to join them. Verdun was
-never taken, but it always lured the enemy on--the lodestone of the
-charnel house.
-
-Rightly understood, the battle of the Somme was not a greater battle
-than that of Verdun. It was similar; it was our Verdun battle. It also
-was a "blood-bath" for both sides. It also was a spending of the
-ammunition which the winter, spring, and summer preparations had brought
-forth. Tens of thousands of those who sang so light-heartedly through
-the winter found eternal peace, stretched like lost star-fishes in the
-Somme mud. From Albert with the Virgin leaning from the church-tower,
-to within sight of the miserable, hitherto uncoveted, town of Bapaume
-what a progress! One of the heaviest epics in history, the slowest, most
-heavy footed of charges! As if each man bore a hundredweight of lead on
-his feet to keep him back when he would have rushed to gain the day!
-Hundreds met their death, not through shot or shell, but by actual
-drowning in mud. Hundreds were sent back to the rear partially
-distraught before they got the signal to leap forth to personal attack.
-The massing of the Somme artillery out-Heroded Herod--the greatest
-concentration of noise and destruction that the world had known. The
-greatest strain of the Somme battle was mental, and its greatest effect
-was no doubt moral. The extent of territory gained was no indication of
-the true result of the battle. The actual numbers of the dead might have
-been a greater indication had they not generally been hidden at the
-time. For the peace-quorum of death was being approached--there was a
-large advance towards hate's _desirabilia_, the three and a half
-millions who had to be slain. Men might have taken some comfort from
-that dreadful thought had they known. But it was theirs to fight and
-labour on in blindness.
-
-The Somme country was an extension of the British line. As our army
-doubled, trebled, quadrupled, so it multiplied the extent of France
-which it defended. From the flats of Flanders and Northern France we
-gradually progressed to a more diversified country of long ridges and
-downs, pleasanter in peace but equally terrible in war. As you approach
-it now by train the cemeteries roll into view on every hand. The dead
-are as it were drawn up in solid columns to greet you as you pass, as it
-were one live man were monarch o'er all the dead. The Army that went to
-guard the line is still there, still on duty--in Plot A, Plot B, Plot C,
-Plot Z, of multitudinous war-cemeteries marked now by map-references.
-The dead challenge the living in choruses of silence from broad fields
-of burial. The hills remain like great mounds in the mist, the same bare
-ridges of Cæsar's wars two thousand years ago, the same o'er which
-perchance mankind will climb to death as many centuries hence,
-antediluvian hummocks of old earth, somnolent, green, indifferent. Earth
-suggests itself constantly as something mightier than man. It is not the
-prostrate earth of Ypres Salient, but one which war has much less power
-to sear. Man's habitations and cities topple down, forests are fired
-away, but the elemental lines and contours of the hills remain unbroken
-and as it were indifferent both to time and history. These rivers too,
-by which men name their battles, flow on, flow away without a conscious
-memory even of a yesterday. The innocence of the Somme, the virginity
-of the Ancre, these have overcome all hate and blood, and lightly
-forgotten them.
-
-The Judas trees have leafed afresh upon the banks of Ancre, and every
-individual leaf is chattering and shivering--because, they say, two
-thousand years ago the betrayer hanged himself upon an aspen bough. The
-aspens give voice to the wind, and beside them the little willows are
-all silent. Tangled wild flowers cling to the river banks, and limpid
-water passes in bright armfuls over green sedgy tresses. On either hand
-the giant reeds lift their pompous heads. Shell-pits are pits of
-greenery. Deep brown of sagging rusty wire seems to be the complementary
-colour of an intense and shadowy green. In the road where the sentry
-stood guarding the crossing of the rail all is empty now. No
-dust-covered mud-splashed lorries come blundering and tearing along the
-high-road any more. There is a silence which is unearthly, as if the
-composed deep sleep of the dead had conquered the ways of the living.
-The little white towns and villages lie splashed in wreckage--without
-the power to lift themselves again. Your Ville sur Corbie, your Meault
-with its dirt-choked green strewn with pontoon boats, your Fricourt and
-Carnoy--all prostrate, inert--they lie on the ground as if sewn to it.
-On the left comes into view the triple blackness of the silhouette of
-Notre Dame at Albert. Trees with the horror of the martyrs on their
-receding withered hands seem fixed for years in the momentary awfulness
-of death, menacing, aghast, uprearing. Narrow crooked trenches in
-disorderly array seem to be hurrying forward, carrying their old wire
-with them--as if they too had to follow the men they once held. But they
-pause on the shores of dreadful pools and ponds, dead-horse and dead-men
-stagnancies that ponder and are still and reflect indifferently the grey
-sky above and the grey, blasted, shattered timber-bits on either hand.
-
-Oh Albert, what a place of death thou art now, with thy returned
-children playing hide and seek around the heaps of thy homes. How is it
-possible to _return_ to this place. It is not a return: no one can ever
-return to the Albert of 1914. These that we see are revenants come to
-look at spectral homes. For Albert is dead. There you can realise that a
-human home is a living being like the woman who made it. It can prosper
-or decay. It can go shabby and suffer. It can be wounded or maimed--it
-can be killed. We mercifully hide our dead in Earth's great bosom--but
-we leave our dead homes long when they lie, in all their horror and
-terror. There stands a shrunken little house where the tiles have been
-swept away, the plaster also, and the bare laths of the ceiling are all
-exposed, but they look like a cap bashed down on the head of a dead man.
-Yonder lies a recumbent habitation with a welter of grey laths and
-beams on its burst-out side, like the sun-dried ribs of a dead
-dromedary. Beyond it stands a wall that is left, and then an outraged
-home with madness fixed in its visage in the moment of death-agony. Here
-is a house with gutted entrails half congealed and terrible to behold.
-There is a house that died simply of shock. But its neighbour
-_vis-à-vis_ was hit by some striding giant with iron fist. Rows of
-houses are seen cowering, as if they had had their hands up trying to
-ward off the dreadful fate which stalked above them. Houses lie killed
-as it were in the action of flight, veritably in the act of treading on
-one another's heels in a frenzy to get away. There are houses which are
-abased, houses which have fallen foremost on their faces, houses which
-have fallen backwards, bottom over top into confusion and debris behind,
-houses with their sides torn off as men's sides were torn off in the
-war, exposing for one instant beating hearts. There are houses where
-simply the life-breath has gone out--dead, blind, empty and desolate.
-
-One can hardly think of the existence once of rooms, the
-marriage-bedrooms of sweet human honeymoons, the room where the baby
-slept a baby's untroubled sleep, the children's room where one thinks of
-a child's cry in the night or a child's lisped prayer before its mother
-or the crucifix, the room where the home met, the table round which went
-food and talk and laughter in a common innocence and ignorance of
-destiny--all gone now in shapeless ruin.
-
-All the houses were the children of Notre Dame--the leaning Virgin who
-hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the
-Cathedral-church, and yearned o'er the city. The miracle of her suspense
-in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder, and the soldiers said the
-city would never be taken as long as she remained un-shot down from the
-eminence of the great church.
-
-Alas, Albert had its day of fate and of complete sacrifice ere the war
-should end--when all should go, yea, Virgin and all, and only Golgotha
-remain, Golgotha and the Roman soldiers who smote the Master with their
-spears as He hung from the Cross.
-
-Twilight settles down upon the dead, the twilight of time and misery.
-The dreadful reality of destruction becomes more intense and real. After
-all, sunlight and the noonday do not always show us truth. They are in
-themselves so full of life and happiness that they divert attention from
-ruins and death unto themselves. Only in the grey light of afternoon and
-evening, and looking with the empty eye-socket of night-darkness can one
-easily apprehend what is spread out here--the last landscape of tens of
-thousands who lie dead. Hamlet must go to the battlements at the time
-when the ghost walks. The light of day hides the unseen world, or
-cannot quite hide it. But there is one moment when the ghost of Albert
-grows into vision majestically before the eyes. You go out through the
-primeval jungle of dead weeds, the tripartite crowned heads of brown
-teasles looking like low-lying spectral regalia of the death-kingdom,
-past dug-outs and deeps and quagmire, past the prostrate ribaldry and
-obscenity of war's doings with the earth--to the dark-flowing water
-which nurses its forgotten secrets, flowing on, flowing on. You wait,
-and whilst mist chills the marrow the ghostly moment of Albert comes
-once more. Night has more than heralded itself; it is here in a
-vast-fronted army and comes onward. Demon-eyes look over the ridges,
-flash angrily, greedily; the roar of battle thunder bursts up; the
-gas-shells cat-calling across the sky fall in showers on the mud;
-field-guns are advanced to point-blank range--there comes the tide of
-the war-worn German soldiery of March 1918, war-worn and yet exultant;
-the English are driven out, the leaning Virgin falls, and the city is
-given over to the enemy. Albert is dead; even its soul has died. English
-soldiers will come back in August, recapture it, but not the city they
-defended so long, not the city of the little Notre Dame leaning
-passionately o'er its life and its defence.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-From Albert to Bapaume, from Fricourt by Carnoy and Maricourt to
-Longueval and Ginchy and Le Transloy, a pleasant day's walk now. There
-is the incomparable Somme silence, a silence achieved by the tremendous
-thunderous contrast in history, a silence from the stilled hearts of the
-dead, a deafness and a muteness. Then when the mist disperses, and the
-sun lifts his awful radiance o'er the scene, there are audible the lowly
-orchestras of flies and bees. The rags of horses' skeletons lie on the
-roadway, and beside a ruined direction-post a clean-picked horse's skull
-has been placed on the stump of a tree. Lifting one's eyes to the view
-there rolls forth to the horizon vast moors empurpled here and there and
-with gashes of white on wan green wastes. An organised tour by car
-whirls past upon the road raising phantom hosts of white dust. It will
-do the whole Somme campaign in an hour and bring up safely at some
-French hotel where hot lunch and foaming beer persuade the living that
-life is still worth while. There was once a picture in _Simplicissimus_
-of a Cook's guide showing a human skull to some tourists--
-
-"This, sir," said he, "was a young man."
-
-It was meant for irony. But surely it is good for everyone who talks of
-war to go and get that thought--_this was a young man_. It does not
-matter that tourists whirl past without pause in a car. Let each and
-everyone come and dip a corner of a handkerchief in the blood of the
-war--for remembrance. Come to the sacrament of the young man's blood
-which was shed instead of yours.
-
-The road you traverse to the Somme altar is the road which hundreds of
-thousands of young men trod, marching to moments of destiny, moments of
-victory; the Manchesters to Montauban, South Africans to Delville, Royal
-Scots to Guillemont, the Guards to Les Boeufs, the Durham Light Infantry
-to the Butte of Warlencourt, the 47th Londons to Eaucourt l'Abbaye--and
-many others; they marched from the quiet places of the homeland and the
-empire, from Loos, from Laventie, from Flanders; defenders of Ypres and
-defenders of Arras, marching with their drums, marching with their
-bayonets, to Britain's quarrel and her mightiest enemy. Behind them were
-ranged the guns, and in front of them was Prussia. Now the desolation of
-Nature alone suggests what a desolation there was of men. The terrible
-woods are impressionist pictures of the ruined vitals of great
-regiments, and you can hold a forest in your mind as you would a skull
-in your hands and say--_This was a forest._ _This was an army._
-
-The generality of men and women however will not do that. The new-born
-generations mask their grief, and you will see if you walk into Bernafay
-Wood that a young Bernafay Wood is rising midst the dead masts of the
-old--self-sown. It will grow higher every year till the old is hidden.
-The masts will fall, will rot, will recede from this bright sunlight,
-and relapse into the shade which the new trees will give them, and then
-soon all will be forgotten. Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead
-lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no
-body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British
-soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are
-rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything.
-The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade
-by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich
-in their masses of brown-stained wood, will pass. They will first be
-re-set-up in stone. 1921 will see them rolling out in new stone crosses,
-at first startlingly pallid and virginal, but as the months go on,
-getting gradually greyened and darkened, rain-washed, wind-blown, then
-falling a little from the straight. Flowers will bloom as new summers
-shine o'er the dead. Visitors will come. There will be a greater time of
-visiting the cemeteries and the battlefields than there yet has been.
-Gardeners will be conscientious, and then some less conscientious as the
-years roll by and visitors become less. Most of the cemeteries in the
-more obscure places will be half-forgotten and gone desolate. There must
-come a time when no more visit the burial-places of the great war than
-visit now the cemeteries of the Crimea. In 1914 the great cemetery
-above Sevastopol, kept by a German gardener, had become from a national
-point of view utterly unvisited and forgotten. A roll used to be kept
-there of the visitors who came in their hundreds after the Crimean war
-was over, dwindling to a score a year and then to less than ten, and
-then to twos and threes and ones. The living who survived the Crimea do
-not need to go to Russia now, for they have joined the dead long since.
-So it will be with us; we shall join the authentic dead, and the young
-ones will have forgotten whilst chattering of some other war.
-
-Meanwhile look reverently at the graves of the men of the 32nd A.I.F.,
-with little rising suns adorning the centre-posts of their crosses! See
-where lies Capt. Claude with his high memorial, or Private Harry who
-carried out an equal sacrifice with him.
-
-Rusty old cans on ten-foot poles mark the limits of the burial-ground,
-and a notice says "Cemetery closed" as one might read outside a theatre
-at night--"Pit full" "Gallery full" "Stalls full." On the hillside
-above, sounds the laughter of men and the clatter of spades where a new
-acre of God is being dug, the foundations of a new theatre being laid.
-Here French Negroes, Flemings, and French peasants are at work under the
-guidance of British soldiers. Occasionally a car rushes up through the
-dust and a couple of British officers come forward to see how things
-are going on.
-
-Passing on to Longueval you see the masts of Longueval Wood, but before
-you come to it there stands now at the cross-roads a "café-restaurant,"
-an unpainted wooden hut. Here with the sun streaming full on their faces
-sit two Falstaffian wights with bottles labelled Malaga between them and
-glasses full. On their dewy red chins and necks there are three or four
-folds of flesh; red veins run down their necks like gutters at the side
-of a house. They hold hands and sing and make everyone in the tavern
-laugh--then swallow--swallow--swallow, the wine rolls down their
-exuberant gullets.
-
-Suddenly there is a note of warning in the restaurant, whisperings about
-_l'officier_, to make it appear as if the men were drinking beer, the
-woman comes and takes the wine-bottles and pours their contents into
-metal tankards, sweeps the table clean of wine driblets, and reprimands
-the topers.
-
-They pull themselves together and take on a sobered gait. One of them
-opens a sand-bag in his possession and brings out two enormous doorsteps
-of bread and butter. Silence reigns. There is a suspense. Someone
-evidently is expected. Will it be a dapper, constrained, politely
-inquisitive British officer? Hardly! Ah, here he is! Enter fiery British
-sergeant-major with bristling moustache and bright crown on his sleeve,
-stout, smart, and red.
-
-"Na then," says he, darting upon the Falstaffs, "play the game, play the
-bloomin' game. Come on, travai in the cemetery. Officeer come, no bon
-pour moy, bon pour vous, no bon pour moy. Com' on now or I'll jolly well
-have to shift yer. The Belgiques and the Algerians know all about yer.
-It's all over the place."
-
-"Ca ne fait rien."
-
-"Ca-ne-fait-rien pour vous but not pour moy. Officeer bocu faché avec
-moy. You no catch it, I catch it, compris?"
-
-One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.
-
-"Yers I know," says the sergeant-major indignantly. "Moy zig-zag las'
-night. But n-no zig-zag to-day."
-
-They offer him their glasses--apparently of beer. He sips one and then
-drains it, and then drains the other one too.
-
-"Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others," he
-continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall
-back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a
-heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out
-like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the
-nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.
-
-"Na then," says he. "Quick March to the cemetery!" And they go.
-
-How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the
-living!
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn
-sunshine the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit
-of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those
-mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some shores when a
-neap-tide leaves them bare.
-
-Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it
-will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. The _sinistrés_ of the
-Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits,
-levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their
-little petrol-ploughs. The shell-splashed approaches to the line can
-with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself
-has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real worship bending
-over _la France_ and he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred
-times what he has already done--and he will do it. A hundredth part of
-the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine
-parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this
-fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and
-rise on full fleshy stalks, and they are thick like a wall. They grow
-from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and
-all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible
-yet, though not so terrible if still impassable. You see gleaming above
-the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross shining afar and make
-it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some ship to a
-white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th
-Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a
-conventional scribble on the moor--the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out
-on to a limy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the
-returned peasants making _sauter les abris_ with dynamite, and then the
-eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from
-the centre of a large tableland. It is the Butte of Warlencourt, for the
-possession and retention of which what quantities of blood were shed,
-the famous Butte which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs.
-Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light
-Infantry--to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf.
-Regt. 159 who held the Butte against all comers in 1916 and recaptured
-it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their
-monument a concrete base. From the top of the Butte there is a complete
-circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards
-Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were
-waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods,
-wrecks of villages--a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the
-great Somme scene.
-
-[Illustration]
-
-It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from
-Albert runs smooth and level below the Butte, a track for
-space-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness
-of the massed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the
-left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorials of
-the German dead--Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and
-the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they
-are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short
-of it--like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they
-tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of
-1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening
-liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues
-of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front;
-rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A
-fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late
-autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to
-superintend a burying party--some three hundred sodden green bundles to
-be disposed of--three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the
-verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of
-Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find "the
-everlasting arms." He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the
-war-bred cynicism of those who believed in letting _others_ be heroic.
-He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in
-"putting his back into it," and doing even the meanest duty as if it
-were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men.
-He was so energetic in the football field playing officers versus
-sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and
-gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday
-evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted
-till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used
-such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He
-exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used
-expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his
-grave at C---- and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to
-use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had
-his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males, _entre eux_,
-a "man's man." Poor hero--from that night of burying green bundles to
-that morning when we buried him--he marched through the valley of the
-shadow of death, tormented as Pilgrim was by hobgoblins and satyrs. But
-when he died he shed his war body, he shed that lurid phraseology, and
-became once more, no doubt, the Kingsley-Carlylean hero that he was,
-with some sort of knowledge of human sorrow which those who lived in
-peace knew not. So it must have been also with those who once breathed
-within the sodden green bundles. They shook off something evil when they
-died, but in passing through it they must somehow have understood more.
-Sorrow dimmed the eyes even of the hardest swearer of the Army. And the
-dead now constrain us to a new human tenderness, they empower us to
-touch more delicately and to understand more deeply--to love more. Pity
-for us if we do not now live differently because of the dead!
-
-Thus as one walks through Bapaume and sees the children of new Bapaume
-playing in their innocence in the streets and the ruins, one can look
-down on them more tenderly, more caressingly, for the sake of the dead,
-passing on, as it were, man's forgiveness to man. And in our
-relationships with the grown-ups, our neighbours, ourselves dressed
-differently, we can have more patience, more compassion, more readiness
-to help and to be kind. It comes from the dead, it comes from the living
-who were dead.
-
-What that winter was before the Germans retreated! What the hours on the
-Cross were before the Saviour died! In our loathing of pain we shudder
-to think of it. Others bore it; we must bear it. And when the time is
-passed Golgotha remains, that Golgotha which was in fact so near to the
-gate of the Temple itself. In Bapaume, where all houses have been made
-vaults, stand the white ruins of a church, greyish-white and spectral as
-if of the material of another world. But for its pointing walls it is
-one white ruin, loveliness in a heap and the baleful shadow of the hand
-of the malefactor. In the ruins of the church of the leaning Virgin at
-Albert the first words one reads are JESUS NATUS EST, as if the ruins
-had been given tongue to say in the moment of death the supreme
-Christian paradox, and at Bapaume as you reverently approach this
-strange new _Pieta_ you see still unshattered the Church's Latin carved
-on stone--AD MEUM SANCTUARIUM--to My sanctuary. If, like Thomas, you do
-not believe, you must go forth and touch with your hands and feel with
-your eyes--to My sanctuary!
-
-Bapaume lies more abased even than Albert. It is as if its stones had
-had a soul and been afraid, vibrant with the horror of humanity. The
-consternation of inanimate matter is expressed in its ruins. The Hotel
-de Ville, its seat of power, was evidently built of large granite blocks
-which the rising German mine of March 1917 must have scattered like hail
-over the town. And amidst these mighty stones flew the tender bodies and
-the spirits of the French deputés, Albert Taillandier and Raoul Briquet,
-who had just said in their hearts--_The enemy hath departed_, when the
-enemy was suddenly at their doors.
-
-The _sinistrés_ are living in cellars and wooden huts. The
-railway-station is two "baby elephants" of rusty iron. Where were large
-shops and as one can imagine, in the old days, shop-fronts full of
-ladies' costumes and hats, windows displaying bedroom suites of
-furniture, windows full of stationery and books, are now diminutive
-piles of rubbish pathetically ticketed with the name of the old
-establishment--Maison Betrancourt, Maison this, Maison that--_transferée
-à un autre lieu_. In the Grande Place stands the much-shrapnelled base
-of a monument where the stone hero has gone to join the hero he
-commemorated, and the spite of a new era has even endeavoured to erase
-his name.
-
-Where thousands lived and loved and pushed their trade and died, now but
-a few hundred hold together in the midst of the wilderness. They have
-assembled from all points of the compass. War whirled some to Germany,
-some to Paris, some to the Pyrenees. The hopeful came back and the
-faithful decided to stay. It is a picture of human triumph over
-destruction, but only a pathetic triumph, not a glorious one. In the
-summer, with long days and warm nights it is less unnatural to live in
-this waste. Warmth and light join the _sinistrés_ to all France and
-Europe, but winter with its short days and cold and great darkness folds
-away the vision of a resurrection. A poky train, without lights, creeps
-at night from Achiet to Bapaume through villages of fearful name.
-Bapaume becomes conscious of all the dreadful places which surround it,
-places whose names are full of the awe of death and of the
-war--Riencourt, Bullecourt, Ervillers, Mory, Vaulx-Vraucourt, and a
-hundred others, nothing in themselves but held in the cerements of the
-dead.
-
-It is a strange walk now, to the Hindenburg line. You are traversing
-ground which was four times overtrodden and overfought. The Germans took
-it in 1914. We shelled it in 1916 and drove the enemy out in 1917. The
-enemy swept over it in March 1918 and then let it go as he retired in
-September. German, French, and British lie buried beside one another.
-The Germans lost their dead and then recaptured them. It is an appalling
-country, still as it were sulphurous with the war, stinking vaguely of
-cordite. The dead have got a grip on it, and hold with their hands the
-lap of earth which the peasants are ploughing. The air which is apt to
-sparkle in autumn frost is full of the light of the eyes of the men who
-once lived. And that light rests about the broken barns and billets and
-churches and halls. There is an influence which is pulling one way all
-the time, and that is not towards this world.
-
-The graveyards are many, and they have their history. It always seems a
-pity that it was not allowed during the war to make mention on the cross
-how and where each soldier met his death. The military mind imagined
-that such details might give information to the enemy or to the Press,
-and forbade anything beyond name, number, and regiment. Texts also were
-prohibited, the chaplains being over-ruled. Not that texts could
-entirely be kept out. In one of the cemeteries near Bapaume there stands
-for the time being a large wooden cross inscribed "He is not here; he
-is risen," which has an astonishing effect amidst a thousand crosses
-which are dumb.
-
-There are many many rows of human bodies planted out near
-Vaulx-Vraucourt, first a German cemetery with its old crosses torn to
-bits, partly no doubt by shells; and then side by side a regular British
-cemetery where lie many Australians, one of whom, Lieut. Pidgeon (aged
-23) has a little figure of Christ riven from a crucifix stuck in the
-earth beside his wooden cross. Here lie also many of the Leeds Rifles,
-seven even in one grave, killed evidently in the terrible encounter with
-the German machine-gunners in September '18. The German memorials go
-more into decay each day, but a man is paid to keep the British bright
-and clean and in repair, and his dog bites at the heels of the pilgrim
-as he walks from the dead to the dead. Facing both are the gaunt white
-ruins of the village church and the hideous smashage of the French
-communal cemetery, and there the people have put artificial roses in old
-rusty shell-cases in front of their stricken memorials.
-
-Further on, beside the light railway which runs north to Ecoust, there
-are tiny cemeteries. In one of these Germans and British are mingled,
-thus--Gefreiter Luckenmeyer of the German Field artillery betwixt a man
-of the Londons and a man of the Devons, and a German unknown and a
-British Tommy lie in a little plot together by themselves. In some
-cemeteries the bodies of our foes were buried just outside those of our
-own kindred, but as exhumed bodies were brought in, ever increasingly,
-it has come about that we have surrounded German graves with our own,
-and as it were accidentally forgiven our enemies and received them into
-the midst of the family.
-
-Over the way at Vraucourt Copse, perched high in a sun-kissed wheatfield
-lies Lieut. A. S. Robinson of the Royal Scots, with 22 private soldiers'
-names inscribed on his cross. One wondered if it would be true to
-say--"Here he lies where he longed to be" and did he love Stevenson and
-often quote
-
-  Under the wide and starry sky
-  Dig my grave and let me lie.
-
-These Royal Scots have the widest of all starry skies above them and the
-unbarred gate of heaven in its midst.
-
-A little further still and you have the Australian cemetery at Noreuil
-at the corner of the road, rectilinear, handsome, clean and cared-for,
-neatly fenced in with wire and having a little white gate by which to
-enter. But outside the cemetery and as it were falling back in every
-attitude of banishment and despair, the old faded wood and broken
-crosses of the Germans, overgrown with weeds, crazy-roofed crosses,
-aslant, tumbled. In 1916 the enemy began to bury here. In 1917 he left
-his dead behind. In 1918 he recaptured them and repaired the
-crosses--and added to them. In 1918 it was a decent graveyard; one could
-read the names of all the dead. But their kindred went away and forgot.
-Their crosses are the monuments of the forgotten and the vague memorial
-of a useless sacrifice.
-
-Doubtless the drama of the penultimate year 1917 did not centre in the
-supra-Somme country. Its scenes of action were at Lens and Vimy, at
-Pilkelm Ridge and Passchendaele. The year which ran on from the German
-retirement was the strangest of the war, promising everything,
-fulfilling nothing, beginning with Haig's victory interview and ending
-with the failures in Flanders and the German break-through from Cambrai.
-It was the year of American self-announcement, of the Russian
-revolution, of the pros and contras of peace at Stockholm, of the
-victory of the Bolsheviks, of the Italian debacle. Germany seemed to
-grow stronger all the year, and the morale of the Allies waned. Men no
-longer betted one another that it would be all over by Christmas. Lord
-Grey's supposed prediction was forgotten. The whisper went abroad that
-"it might last a lifetime," and then in mock cynicism, _They say the
-first seven years will be the worst_. New units hitherto untried in the
-war still made their appearance, whole battalions whose war-history
-commences with the conflicts about Lens or the battles for
-Passchendaele Ridge. The Derby drafts were reputed to come marching to
-the strains of "The Church's One Foundation" singing their own
-confession--
-
-  We are Lord Derby's Army
-  Just come across the sea.
-  We cannot march, we cannot shoot,
-  What bloomin' good are we?
-
-And the old army said "Where have you been this long while?" The
-conscripts however were to follow in even more desperate case, and when
-they first reached France and their tender feet struck the cobbled
-roadways they sang--not a hymn, but a new version of "Auld Lang Syne"--
-
-  We're here because we're here,
-    Because we're here, because we're here,
-  We're here because we're here,
-    Because we're here, because we're here.
-
-"Take me back to dear old Blighty!" was the song of the whole army and
-had completely displaced Tipperary.
-
-No doubt owing to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line the
-Allied plan of attack for the summer had been foiled. All the machinery
-of assault had been arranged for a stubborn and dreadful prolongation of
-the Somme battle between the horizons where winter had halted it. The
-greatest concentration of guns which the war had seen had to be
-liquidated. New gun-positions had to be dug and a new concentration
-achieved. Telephone and telegraph had to be brought up to a new line.
-Organisation work which would ordinarily have been accomplished in the
-quiet winter months had to be done through the campaigning season of
-Spring and Summer. Men looked less seriously on the war, though the war
-was not less serious for them. Witness the sinister stare of the Lens
-country which knew the 1917 army and has looked on terrible things. We
-made Lens in 1917 into a narrow deep pocket full of Germans. The taking
-of it was confidently anticipated. Fleet Street wanted it to serve on a
-platter to Herod. But it could not be had though thousands died for it.
-The enemy held it by miracle. It was impossible to hold such a position
-but the impossible held.
-
-Grey and terrible is Vimy Ridge with its line of block-houses and the
-masts of Farbus Wood. Looking outward from Vimy o'er the vast Arras
-war-scape the eye is sick and returns in vision to itself as the dove
-returned to the Ark when it found no other mercy of the Lord above
-misery's tide.
-
-Praise God the enemy could not do to Arras what we did to Lens! Arras
-still lives, surmounting the grandeur of her ruins. The Cathedral with
-the top of its massive tower gnawn off by Fate is to be preserved for
-ever as a memorial of these days. You can climb from the grass-grown
-rubble below to mountains of lime and broken stone and reach a high
-eminence against the pinky-grey fissured wall of the tower. It is
-sunset, and you look down upon widespread recuperative Arras standing in
-pink haze into which smoky air or fog is pouring. The houses are grey or
-splotchy with their shrapnel marks still on them, but there are others
-which are red and white, and these stand gaping with empty glassless
-windows. You look on spangling new red roofs, you look on Noah's Arks,
-you look on half-consumed unsupported walls, you look on shadows which
-are pits where houses were. On the one hand is the lofty massiveness of
-the Episcopal Palace--on the other the irrecoverable smash of poor men's
-homes. From all this great city below, pious men and women used to come
-to the Cathedral--but now no more shall they come.
-
-You step down from the height, and cross the cobbled immensity of the
-Cathedral Square. Every shop all the four sides has the same façade
-above, the same porticos below, and from grimy and broken windows four
-hundred ruined wizened houses stare. Then night has come. God has called
-away the redness and left the murk. You turn and see the mountain of
-God's house. There is no tint of rose in the grey walls now, no petty
-detail of ruin, but one general effect. The Cathedral tower is a great
-black mass. It is suffering made supreme and dominant, the shadow of a
-mediæval Christ on the Cross. It is a romantic but dreadful pointer full
-of terror and power. Men creep diminutively across the vast and shoppy
-square, and the great feudal shadow above them makes them smaller yet.
-
-All night the shadow reigns, becoming even mightier in the moonlight,
-and crowning itself with starry diadem. But there come the mists of the
-morning and then morn itself, and you may stand where now no longer Mass
-is heard--on the East side of the Cathedral, and see the white light of
-heaven streaming through gossamer and driving out pale silhouettes of
-the shadows of all the bleared houses of the Square. There are pale
-peaked shadows of all the façades which face the Cathedral. Over your
-head sounds the rush of dove's wings. Men and women everywhere are
-moving; men with their tools and women with their baskets. The life of
-the city goes on, but the dream of the ruin has fallen back into the
-night and limbo, and will not be recovered till the stars come again.
-
-The city of Arras was the pilot city of the British in 1917. All
-Flanders looked to her from the left, all France from the right. And in
-'18 when the tide of Fortune changed she was our bulwark of defence and
-was right in the fighting line like a Coeur de Lion with battle-axe at
-Acre. Our mighty city of coal and steel in England has chosen specially
-to identify itself with Arras--Newcastle-on-Tyne--and Arras has many
-English sons. It is no doubt natural to say that Newcastle has adopted
-Arras, as we might say of a converted man that he had taken Christ to
-himself, but the deeper truth is that Arras has adopted Newcastle--"Ye
-have not chosen me but I have chosen you."
-
-The British victories at Arras and the French victories above Verdun
-were of happy augury. But no victory is a victory unless followed by a
-victory, and Time itself wilts laurels. Haig's dream of striking the
-enemy hard and often, leaving no time to recover from a blow at one
-point before calamity fell upon him at another, proved only a dream. The
-German invention of mustard gas and the appearance of many hostile tanks
-upon the scene were examples of the unforeseen. Very efficient tank-guns
-and studied methods of attack upon tanks reduced the usefulness of our
-new war-engine to comparatively low terms. In the late summer we
-embarked on a new campaign in Flanders, and our best weapon was a still
-boundless belief in our ability to "beat the Hun" whom, mentally, in
-every possible way, the army under-rated. The Hun, so-called, suffered
-nothing like so much as our fellows. He would not have stood so much.
-And of all war-struggles, that which sank at last to rest in the
-wilderness of Poelcapelle and Passchendaele in the November of the year
-seemed the most hopeless.
-
-Much of the main interest of humanity was transferred from the strife at
-the front to other scenes of action. 1917 was an air and water year, a
-submarine year, a Gotha year. London was terrified by day by wonderful
-almost invisible planes which ravaged East-end schools and caused the
-exodus from Whitechapel to Brighton. Daylight raids were followed by
-starlight raids, and although the papers of the time laughed at such
-affairs and said we liked them, there is no need to keep up that
-deception now. London suffered in mind excruciatingly.
-
-With the persistent bombing of London came a more systematic bombing of
-the lines at night. It is more unpleasant, though really safer, to await
-bombs in open fields than it is in London, but the soldier loathed the
-bomb from air far more than he did the shell. The transverse movement of
-the shell no doubt gives the mind more scope for judgment and calm than
-does the missile falling vertically.
-
-The Germans were so impressed by this fear of bombs that they
-endeavoured to give shelter underground to each and every one of their
-soldiers when threatened from above. There must have been a regular
-routine like fire-drill when our bombing planes went over, and Fritz was
-marched into his enormous subterranean shelters. British and French
-troops had no such organised way of escape, and they had to find what
-cover they could where they were. It was always surprising what a number
-of miscellaneous casualties were caused by the night-bombers.
-
-Expectation of the German planes' approach was intense, and men could
-distinguish readily the sound of the engines of our own planes and those
-of the enemy. There seemed to be something peculiarly sinister in the
-sound of a "Jerry" and men were fond of imitating it in screeds of words
-in the style of "Hush hush hush, here comes the bogey man!"
-
-A characteristic imitation given sometimes at regimental concerts used
-to run in this way:--
-
-    _I-see-ye, I-see-ye, I-see-ye,
-      I-see-ye.
-  I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming.
-  Biv-eee, biv-eee, biv-eee.
-  Sh, sh........sh.
-  HAH!
-  I'm off, I'm off, I'm off,
-      I'm off!_
-
-And a current French marching-song of the time imitated the promiscuous
-crump of bomb-explosions thus:--
-
-    _Il pleut, il pleut des bombes
-  (Et boum! et bon! badaboum et bon!)
-    Il s'ecriera Guillaume
-    Rentrons, rentrons--
-    Zon, zon._
-
-But no rhyme in any language ever expressed that lurid splash on the
-night-sky when a bomber was destroyed, that effusion of crimson which
-caused men's eyes to dilate looking up at it, that sense of dreadfulness
-and awe and satisfaction, that banishment of pity through fear's
-reaction which steeped men's minds, as if on the floor of their souls an
-answering red glow appeared. It was tragical to be bombed, but how much
-more so to see the bomber die. They died most dreadful deaths, those
-Zeppelin crews and aero-bus teams, and yet of course they merely died.
-They met the common soldier's destiny---- Nevertheless you could not
-lessen the sensation of watching an airman's death by reasonableness. In
-the lurid spectacle in the heavens men saw not death but a
-hieroglyphic--a sign.
-
-Men did not liken them to Lucifer cast from heaven, but their fall was
-like the rebel angels' fall--
-
-  With hideous ruin and combustion, down
-  To bottomless perdition.
-
-Day-flying was different and affected the mind in an entirely different
-way. Even the stricken night-bomber, when his charred remains were seen
-by daylight, became in enemies' eyes nothing but honourable. The triumph
-over him was forgotten in a sort of triumph in him. There was a
-naturally chivalrous attitude towards dead airmen. That chivalry was
-sometimes spoiled by human jackals--but the majority nevertheless
-instinctively preserved it.
-
-Many of the graves of our airmen were marked by crosses which are
-adorned with carven wings, and in this speaks, not only a military but a
-human pride. Foot-soldiers did not see in the aeroplane a mere
-mechanical contrivance but a new human victory over matter. The feats of
-airmen flattered pedestrian souls, who knew thereby that they could fly
-if they would, flattered us all. Because men had to enter some section
-of the fighting services thousands chose to fly and fight who otherwise
-would not have been tempted off the firmer elements of land and sea.
-They conquered the first nausea of fear, and learned to live with danger
-as with a wife. They tumbled above us and we marvelled, not taking
-anywise into account the war-sting which started them, bidding neither
-sit nor stand but go. One is not sorry that the guns speak no more. One
-is not sorry that the night-bombers and Zeppelins have ceased to menace
-us. But the emptiness of the heavens by day has its sadness now in
-France, its human wanness and melancholy. One realises that the war
-brought out the flier--as it were before his time, and we must wait long
-ere we see in peace the state of air society which he prefigured.
-
-Down below the airmen trudged heavy-footed men. The airmen were
-literally supermen; those below were a sort of undermen. In heavily
-weighted boots, with backs bent and not straightened by war's routine,
-with clumsily encumbered bodies, trudged under-humanity, through mud,
-along gulleys, into holes and pits, down into subterranean chambers. The
-underman enjoyed no human exaltation except occasionally at the prospect
-of getting free; he had no mercurial lightness on his heels, no rapid
-quicksilver of mounting imagination; instead, he was gripped downward
-and held till he died or there was peace. It used to be a common saying
-that from the moment you stepped off at Havre you were a slave. You
-walked in the chains of the war. Men's hearts hardened. They told
-themselves they wanted nothing and cared nothing. Their minds fell
-victims to a dull passivity or false boisterousness. They banished the
-bright ego and took up with a Cerberus, yowled the dog-language of the
-army, and got selfishly irate over biscuits and slops and bully-beef.
-They grew more and more dirty and came out in boils. Coarse hair grew
-apace, brows grew lower, hands that had any cunning in them grew to mere
-claws and clutches, eyes dullened, and the ear-gate stood ajar for the
-sound of animal noises and animal confessions. The war was a Bacchanalia
-for the animal in man.
-
-It was in 1917 that Paris leave as a supplement to the usual home leave
-was common. This was understood as for the soldier's health. It would
-stop the boils and ease the system. Men could draw a handsome arrear of
-pay on the strength of Paris leave, and once in Paris they went deeper
-than in the dug-outs of the war. Or units were withdrawn to places where
-the women thronged. Men were robbed by the war of their respect unto
-their living selves. And 1917 saw the entry of puritan America into the
-war, the nation of vice-hunting and prohibition, and the rest. But it
-did not raise the morality of rank and file. The Yanks were shipped with
-a thirst. The men brought up in sheltered Western communities proved to
-have no more power than we had to resist the temptations of European
-vice. The virus of the army seems to have been the same in United States
-training grounds as in those of England. Material conditions imposed
-some restraint, but imagination fed the starved side of men's souls with
-lurid pictures of what obtained in France. Uncle Sam's common soldiers,
-handsome and clean as they were, and brave, yet brought with them an
-expectancy which caused them to take no moral lead but on the contrary
-to plunge headlong into that war-mire which we had all been making. And
-disease ravaged the American ranks. Some few thousands fell dead on the
-field of battle and some tens of thousands were wounded, but disease
-casualties filled the hospitals. It was fortunate for America's manhood
-that the war was not protracted. Their war enthusiasm was pushing them
-on. They did not realise that what they called "the shooting gallery"
-was a myriad-fold death-trap. Death in many shapes was ready to raven on
-America. As her men were inexperienced in war's alarms, so also were
-they unfitted to face the moral ordeal. Humanitarianism, materialism,
-and a superimposed morality do not produce men more capable of
-withstanding temptation. Purity depends too often on keeping temptation
-away. The Yanks brought their own brand of bad language with them--a
-language beside which lurid English was but pale. Where they had learned
-such verbal frightfulness seemed puzzling. But curiously enough it
-caused the American soldier to be hail-fellow well-met. He brought no
-airs of moral superiority or prudishness. It became a pastime in the
-British army to imitate admiringly the American type of swearing. It is
-all beyond the power of the pen. But those who heard it know. If the
-Yanks had kept to this extreme they would have remained enduringly
-popular--but they vaunted their prowess and exaggerated their feats and
-ignored the reality of the hell through which others had been, and they
-started the talk of their winning the war, and so lost ground. The
-Americans in France were on the whole perplexing to the average
-European. Their exaggerated thirst for war's relaxations on the one
-hand tended to make them one with the other armies in the field, but
-their idea of superiority kept them separate.
-
-At Calais now the boxes are stacked on the quays with the embalmed
-American dead. At great cost of time and labour the dead soldiers are
-being removed from the places where they fell and packed in crates for
-transport to America. In this way America's sacrifice is lessened. For
-while in America this is considered to be America's own concern, it is
-certain that it is deplored in Europe. The taking away of the American
-dead has given the impression of a slur on the honour of lying in
-France. America removes her dead because of a sweet sentiment towards
-her own. She takes them from a more honourable resting-place to a less
-honourable one. It is said to be due in part to the commercial
-enterprise of the American undertakers, but it is more due to the
-sentiment of mothers and wives and provincial pastors in America. That
-the transference of the dead across the Atlantic is out of keeping with
-European sentiment she ignores, or fails to understand. America feels
-that she is morally superior to Europe. American soil is God's own
-country and the rest is comparatively unhallowed. To be one in death
-with Frenchmen, Italians, Negroes, Chinamen, Portuguese, does not suit
-her frame of mind. Of course, lack of imagination, lack of knowledge of
-the war and of the great mix-up of the dead is natural enough at a
-distance of three thousand miles--the vain thought that the identity of
-dead bodies with human beings can be retained. As it is, the inscription
-on every hundredth cross in France is probably a misnomer. There never
-was time for meticulous care, and the dead were not always buried by
-full daylight or identified by other than the slightest of clues. Is it
-remarkable if someone receives instead of soldier son the body of a
-coolie from China, or if a citizen should receive what portends to be
-his own corpse? By risking such accidents the majesty of the dead is
-offended. If love desired its dead again, love should come and lift its
-dead with its own hands and carry it home.
-
-Politically understood, there should be no property in the dead bodies
-of this great war. There is only one totality of death and suffering.
-The dead of the war are a blend. One high stone might stand at the head
-of each cemetery, and on it all the names be inscribed. The little
-crosses with name and numbers on each are but desperate human reminders
-of individuality. But for a dreadful peace, worse than the war, America
-would have been convinced, as was her war-commander Pershing, that it
-was nobler to leave her sacrifices on the altar with the others.
-
-Had America's ideal won all had been different, but only the side she
-joined won and not the ideal. France and England broke the spirit of
-America's great President and ruined him as the Kaiser was ruined,
-relegated him to another Amerongen, drove him to his Ekaterinburg too,
-the third great monarch and leader of men to lose his crown in the war.
-The American masses were left leaderless, bereft of their ideal. In
-contempt for a vain France and distrust of a lip-serving inimical
-England they plunged for "_America first and always and one hundred per
-cent_." But had Wilson carried his great program there had been no
-estrangement, no exhuming of the American dead. America would have
-gloried in her European shrines. Therefore in looking upon the collapsed
-heaps of coffins in the harbour and the dead glowering through riven
-wood, one is really looking upon an aspect of the Treaty of Versailles.
-In the second year after the war you see terrible things. Who could have
-foreseen thousands of dead stacked in the holds of Atlantic vessels,
-making their unmurmurous return across the ocean!
-
-It is night again in human history, deep night, when we dream things of
-evil and look upon sights of horror which we have no power to dispel. In
-the gathering gloom of the autumn of 1920 see a whole succession of
-phantoms stalking. Ireland goes wailing and clanking her chains.
-Exultant France struts and threatens. Ghosts of Tsar and Tsarina are
-crying pitifully from Siberian dust. Red demons, mirthless and terrible,
-stare at us from Russia. Italia stabs nightly fair Fiume. And all the
-while maledictory shouts and cries are heard on all hands.
-
-Spectres and ghosts and things of evil stalk around and terrify us, and
-there is only one way to lay them low, and that is by the token of the
-Cross--by the token of the crosses, the hundreds of thousands of them
-that run out like rows of pins in France. It is only coming from France
-that the right approach can be made to new life. Let each new man faring
-forth into this beset enchanted world dip his soul in the blood of the
-Altar of France--or if not his very soul, let him at least dip a
-kerchief or a flag there--for remembrance. With that charm he can
-uncurse curses and disenchant enchantment and break through the chimeras
-and fogs which cling to the base of the mountain of the world, and he
-will reach the singing-bird and the water of life at the top of the
-mountain, and then restore, as in the Arabian tale, the dead to life.
-
-Doubtless every man who was in the Army and took a chance of death and
-yet escaped, must have reflected on his good fortune, the strange light
-of Providence which fell upon his destiny and spared him whilst on all
-hands his friends and neighbours and fellow-countrymen had fallen. As
-the soldier left the Army and became civilian again he inevitably
-thought to himself--"Whereas I might have been dead I am alive; whereas
-I might be bond I am free." And some indeed could add "Whereas I might
-have been a cripple, or blind, or lamed, or a neurasthenic or a
-shell-shocked broken man I am sound and fit and have a whole life and
-freedom to give to the new time which comes with the blessing of peace."
-
-The Frenchman came back to a glorified and magnified France; to a proved
-capacity to defeat and hold in check a deadly and historical enemy. The
-Englishman came back to a free England, to a nation who was queen of the
-nations, to a larger and more untrammelled world-empire; the Belgian to
-a justified and safeguarded Belgium; the American to an America which
-had achieved for the first time in history a complete sense of
-nationhood and unity. The Serbian returned to a resurrected Serbia and a
-prospective future of Southern Slav greatness. Of the Italian, who
-joined in the war as a bargain with the others and did not fight
-primarily for our ideals, we will say nothing. But how near we all were
-to being beaten, and to realising the very opposite of the present happy
-potentialities. But a turn in the wheel or a hair in the scale, and the
-French would have been slaves, the Englishman beaten on land if not on
-sea would have returned cowering to his little island, empire falling
-from his grasp and almost the whole bill of the war to defray by the
-efforts of his restive working-class population; the Belgian a German
-subject; the American flouted and anxious with the shadow of a terrible
-new war to fight all by himself in the years to come; the Serbian a peon
-of Bulgaria or shackled in the heavy rusty Austrian irons. When we are
-in despair in 1920, 1921, 1922 we should all say to ourselves--"Whereas
-we might have been slaves we are free; whereas we might have been dead
-we are alive----" It is what the graveyards of France tell those who
-look at them. The dead are all pointing mutely to themselves. Their
-crosses are the direction-posts of new life.
-
-Our enemy came nearer to overthrowing us by the result of the Russian
-Revolution than by anything else. The defection of Russia, the
-liberation of the German and Austrian Eastern armies, nearly took
-victory away from us, and we have God and our cause to thank for
-salvation. In the late summer and autumn of 1917 the tide of victory
-turned and began to roll the other way. At the battle for Passchendaele
-commenced the last year of the war. In that year we experienced every
-emotion of victory and defeat. The year opened inauspiciously at
-Passchendaele where so many fell trying to traverse an infernal area of
-wire and pits and mud, facing the reinforced machine-gunners, facing the
-new gas, facing the fire of a vastly increased artillery. Many a cheery
-boy with muddy uniform and bright morning face stood up for the last
-time at Passchendaele, and unexpectedly--died for England. You may seek
-their bodies in the Flemish earth to-day. Perhaps one of them is the
-unknown soldier in the Abbey. But their spirits are far away from here.
-They are watchful and radiant and celestial now--not so lovable perhaps
-in their immortality, for how can mortals feel for the immortals, but
-enormously more lovable in our mortal conception of them than ever they
-were when alive--the dead of the last year of the war.
-
-Passchendaele was followed by the sudden triumph of the Austrian armies
-in the Italian Alps, and the surrender of a hundred thousand Italians
-and a thousand guns. Revolutionary propaganda was said to have been
-ravaging the Italian soldier's mind. Others said the Italians sold the
-day to the enemy. But the prime cause of Austrian victory was to be
-sought in the great accession of strength due to the Russian lapse from
-war. No more offensives of Brusilof; no Grand Duke Nicholas any more to
-terrify Vienna; not even a Kornilof! Austria naturally rounded upon her
-Southern foe with double might. Vienna bells rang forth and Berlin
-floated in military joy. Wilhelmstrasse, the street of the Kaiser,
-reflected deeply and sucked in the significance of the new victory.
-After a desperate summer of peace-seeking suddenly a last hope of
-triumph dawned like a fiery star late in the night and nigh unto
-morning. The thought of coming with a white flag to the Council of
-Europe was banished. Instead the stern decree of war to the uttermost
-bound the German mind to the old choice of "complete victory or
-downfall." Despite our opinion of the enemy conveyed in sneers at
-concrete dug-outs and funk-holes and the "Kamerad" cry, the Germans
-decided to come all out and win or lose on a gambler's throw. It was
-perhaps more calculated and more calculable than the cast of the dice,
-but if the Allies won, Germany had no second chance and would know that
-she had lost.
-
-Teutonic preparations went ahead. The Allies took little stock of these
-preparations, not believing that the enemy had much kick left in him.
-Instead of organising our defence we planned a new attack upon the
-Germans, and to the astonishment and chagrin of the latter the Byng Boys
-carried off the laurels of the Battle of Cambrai. Fritz was taken by
-surprise in late November, and we nearly went all the way to Cambrai.
-Fleet Street wished to have joy-bells rung in London, but the Church
-wisely bade us wait, while wrathful Germany averred that we had gone
-into a trap in which we should presently be terribly caught. Then in the
-break-through of Gouzeaucourt we learned the lesson that a new and more
-dangerous enemy was in front of us.
-
-As you walk now along the Byng Boys way on a November afternoon and the
-sun goes down in greyness and gloom you can feel the mystery of the
-battle as if it had occurred hundreds of years ago. Reality has become
-remote, remote as the last songs and shouts of the men who went through.
-Sadness has covered the earth. It is all incredibly empty and desolate.
-On a post on the road you discern through the evening mist ICI BOURSIES
-and then after much plodding you pass the grey empty Canal du Nord with
-its crumpled rusty bridges, and skirt the naked bones of Bourlon Wood.
-Then by the side of the road all the dead of Anneux are lined up to see
-you pass. You go on, but _they_ remain. It seems as if when you have
-passed some spectral sergeant must say to all those pallid ranks "Fall
-out!" and the order is broken up, and the dead mingle and commingle till
-another comes past upon the broad highway. Night settles like a curtain
-shutting off Cambrai from the view, and no light on any hand tells of a
-return to home or of happiness restored. Suddenly the silence is broken
-by three blundering lorries--old lorries of the war tearing past you
-back on the road to Bapaume--ghostly lorries laden with doors, doors
-only, to be dumped at some wilderness somewhere which was once a town.
-They pass, and the night-silence resumes its sway, and there are no
-stars but it is utter peace. Again a spectral post--ICI FONTAINE, ICI
-FONTAINE NOTRE DAME, and you have reached the end of the fight, and the
-bridge where life met death and both stood at last immobile, unyielding.
-
-A happier-looking place is the wood of Havrincourt where a Brigade of
-Guards was sleeping, waiting and resting after the ordeal of Bourlon and
-Fontaine. They had been relieved on the 26th November and marched back
-in snow to this wood where in the umbrage of the forest and on the
-carpet of withered leaves and snow they set up many tents. And whiles
-they rested the enemy put into action a bold plan of encirclement which
-might have caused the complete loss of Sir Julian Byng's army and guns
-and of everything else in the pocket of Cambrai. One of the most
-remarkable moments of the whole war occurred. Of many impressions of
-what took place the story which one of the Guards' quartermasters tells
-is most pictorial. He had set off early in the morning of the 30th
-November for Villers au Flos to get money to pay his men. They had just
-come out of action. He rode through Metz and Bertingcourt, where the
-other Brigades were billeted, and no one was stirring. There was no hint
-of coming trouble when he passed through Ruyaulcourt, where lay the
-Divisional Headquarters Staff. On all roads were the usual road-carts,
-plodding along in humdrum style. But by the time he reached Villers au
-Flos, however, an alarm of some kind had evidently come, for the cashier
-was busy packing up his cash and his papers, and flatly refused to pay
-out any money whatever. Though not wishing to confess fright, he was
-evidently extremely perturbed.
-
-"But I must have money for the men," cried the visiting officer. "The
-coffee-bars and canteens will soon be arriving up there and opening; the
-men are tired after the fighting. They have won a great victory and must
-have some relaxation now, so you'll have to give me some money."
-
-"It isn't a victory, it's a retreat," said the cashier. "They say the
-Germans have broken through."
-
-"Rot," said the Guardsman. "I have just come from the line and all is
-quiet. You get wind up easily, you folk."
-
-He gained his point, and was happy to turn about his horse with a full
-16,000 francs to pay out. On his return, however, the German
-break-through became apparent and he realised that the cashier had been
-right. He sampled all the adventures of the situation. First he saw
-soldiers without rifle or equipment running intently, and he, not
-suspecting the significance of their flight, thought there was a
-paper-chase on, arranged by some regiment that was resting in the
-neighbourhood. But at Bertingcourt, to his great astonishment, he met a
-battalion of Guards in fighting order marching to action in the opposite
-direction from that in which he understood the enemy to be. It was
-incredible that it could have happened, but he realised that the enemy
-had somehow shifted his ground. This regiment had been fighting at
-Bourlon and Fontaine in the north--and now they were marching south to
-fight again. South and not north--what could have happened! He "passed
-the time of day" to the commander and learned that the worst was true,
-the enemy had broken through at Gouzeaucourt. The further he rode along
-the way to Havrincourt Wood the stranger became the sights which
-confronted his eyes. The roads, which had now been cleared by order,
-began to have troops going up to stem the German advance, and every now
-and then a car plunging the other way. Out of Bertingcourt he met the
-2nd Brigade Machine-Gun transport, saddled up and under orders. The
-water in the jackets of the machine-guns was frozen and they wondered
-how they'd thaw them. There were still many fugitives on the road, and
-at cross-roads he overheard two of them who were contradicting one
-another in the most violent language as to which was the way. He could
-tell that their nerves had got the better of them by their high falsetto
-tones. They were as unlike characteristic British soldiers as it is
-possible to imagine. At Metz-en-Couture there was a complete jam of
-traffic, which lasted all the way along the high-road towards
-Gouzeaucourt. The retiring masses were greatly in excess of those going
-up. They were mostly the transport of those who belonged to the
-rear--railway-men, A.S.C., ambulance, canteen, Y.M.C.A. and what-not. A
-pained expression was on the chauffeurs' faces, every one of whom
-seemed to desire to say what a terrific speed he would make if he could
-only get clear of the deadlock. He saw the ranks of the Guards broken
-and made uneven by the struggle to get through. Outside Metz was a
-Colonel of Grenadiers on horseback, enraged past belief at the
-obstruction of his Guardsmen, and addressing the chauffeurs and
-wagon-men in every imaginable blend of language. His aspect so terrified
-our officer with the cash that he decided to make a detour and get to
-his quarters at Havrincourt Wood by a cross-country route. But the
-Germans had a high-velocity gun on Metz and shelled it methodically, and
-he had not taken many steps when an exploding shell wounded his horse in
-the head. He did not want anything to happen to him with 16,000 francs
-on his person, so he decided to brave the presence of the justifiably
-enraged Grenadier and proceed along the roadway as best he could. This
-he did, but when at last he got to Havrincourt Wood his battalion was
-gone and he was not able to get abreast of his men and pay them till
-they came out of action some days afterwards and the Germans had been
-stopped.
-
-The alarm had come about breakfast-time. Nothing was doing in camp; no
-parades. Both officers and men were taking things easy in order to shake
-off the Bourlon Wood exhaustion. Some were sleeping, some were shaving,
-one Brigadier was in his bath, when the order came for the Guards to
-stand-to and be in readiness, as the position east of Gouzeaucourt was
-considered "obscure."
-
-The Headquarters of the 1st Brigade was at Metz, and a great deal was
-due, no doubt, to the Brigadier who discovered that the Germans had
-broken through and promptly decided to push on and occupy the high
-ground east of Gouzeaucourt. The General of the 1st Brigade of Guards
-was a fine figure of a soldier, with bold eyes, massive shoulders and
-brows, and finely-curved smiling lips. Mounted on his white horse at the
-cross-roads of Metz he was in charge of the situation. It was he who saw
-the first fugitives come in, green, trembling, speechless with panic,
-and as others followed breathless the same way, he deflected their
-course into a great courtyard, lately the courtyard of the Army Corps
-Headquarters. With that the Brigadier rode out along the Gouzeaucourt
-road, and presently beyond Gouzeaucourt Wood he came into contact with
-German patrols, and he rode back to Metz and called out the Guards.
-Meanwhile the extraordinary stampede continued--Labour men, gunners with
-breech-blocks in their hands, riflemen with or without rifles and
-equipment, transport, some men half-dressed. And those who could speak
-called out to those whom they met that the Germans were coming. There
-were officers as well as men, and even chaplains, in the throng, and a
-German aeroplane hovered overhead and followed with machine-gun fire,
-methodically stirring up the panic to a higher and higher pitch. The
-Guards debouched from Metz in close column and deployed in artillery
-formation under cover of Gouzeaucourt Wood. As they hurried up the road
-they passed the fugitive streams going the other way. The look on the
-Guards' faces as they encountered the others was one of astonishment and
-bewilderment. It would have been difficult to agree that the two streams
-of troops belonged to the same nation. Two different conditions of
-soldiery. With one there was discipline, with the others discipline had
-gone.
-
-The road from Gouzeaucourt to Metz is a sort of gully, a deep-dug way
-between high banks, and along the sides one still sees shards of old
-rifles, rusty helmets, bits of equipment, and mess-tins. The peasants in
-farming the ditches have unearthed not a few Mills' bombs which now
-repose in piles by the side of the road. Here also reposes a dug-up
-Lewis gun and various parts and bits of war's attire thrown away
-possibly in the stampede, perhaps however, despite an inevitable
-association of ideas, belonging to another moment of the war. For
-although the Guards re-established the line once more it broke again in
-the succeeding March, when once more the Germans pursued their foes
-through the jetsam-covered streets of Gouzeaucourt.
-
-Gouzeaucourt was evidently greatly smitten by the war. It is a very
-extensive village raked by the devil from end to end. It swarms now on
-housetop and in yard with builders and joiners. A widespread clatter
-ascends from every road so that the very sparrows cannot hear themselves
-chirp. Hundreds of white barrack-like shelters have sprung into being.
-But as if the villagers had not had time for small amenities, every
-street and alley is strewn with brickbats. The scenery of the war still
-holds, and November 30th could be played over again without loss of
-reality from the scene.
-
-The road out to Metz is quiet enough now with carts of turnips jolting
-along where three Novembers ago the lorries were fleeing. On the top of
-the bank stretches the view of a war moorland becoming once more
-grain-productive. To the north lies a pleasant boscage, the verdure of
-Havrincourt. Along the south goes the straight line and the tree-stumps
-which mark the Cambrai-Peronne road.
-
-Metz-en-Couture looks like a great rubbish-heap from which masses of
-decaying brickwork are projecting. It is much less alive than
-Gouzeaucourt. Its returned French peasants are however at work. Like all
-desolated places which are off the railway it has to depend on motor
-transport for the materials of reconstruction, and it is
-characteristically behindhand compared with towns on the railway. And
-Gouzeaucourt is well served by a railway from Cambrai.
-
-At Metz-en-Couture is a roadside cemetery. How good that most of the
-cemeteries are actually close to the highways, and even automobilists
-speeding past will see them, though it be only a blur on the
-consciousness. All the crosses will fade into one another as a car
-passes them. Here at Metz the Chinese and the Germans are put together
-as outcasts from the pens of decency if not from God's grace. But it
-will be all one to the man who passes by and does not pause to see. The
-pilgrim however will find the graves of the stalwart Guardsmen, and
-remember that they met their end saving the day and marching the right
-way when the foe had broken through. The whole winter of 1917-18 might
-have been very terrible had the Germans gained a great victory here, and
-bad as it was the rout of March 1918 might have been complete. As you
-walk back from Metz to Gouzeaucourt you figure again the way the enemy
-was stopped and his grand potential victory robbed of its crown. In
-Gouzeaucourt the Guards took back a hundred and fifty guns. Beyond
-Gouzeaucourt Wood they cleared out the machine-gunners. Next day at dawn
-the Grenadiers made good the line and together with the Indian cavalry
-closed the gap and dug in. The Indians were most happy in their
-association with the Guards in victory, and averred that henceforth
-December First would always be known as Grenadiers' Day.
-
-Back at Metz the low-flying German airman who with his machine-gun had
-been whipping up the panic of the men who had fled was shot down. He was
-a young officer of the fearless angry type, terribly mortified at being
-taken prisoner. He was put in a cage by himself till one of our runaways
-came into the courtyard and began to strike a Charlie Chaplin pose, and
-the officer in charge lost his patience and thrust him in with the
-German. The German was striding up and down like a lion or tiger, and
-the sudden depression of the erstwhile Charlie Chaplin gave to the
-latter the gait of an Androcles thrown to a wild beast to be destroyed.
-
-Later in the day German prisoners began to flow along the road from
-Gouzeaucourt to Metz in considerable numbers. What was the astonishment
-of the "Jerries" to find when they were put into the barbed-wire
-enclosures that their neighbours, also enclosed, were British and not
-German, and to see the mixed crowd of Old Bills, Labour-men,
-artillerymen, infantry, engineers, and even padres and officers mixed
-with men. Presently however these were marched out of the cages and
-lined up in miscellaneous squads derived from varying units with no
-distinction of rank. Rifles were put into their hands and an attempt was
-made to use them as a reserve defence in the trenches outside Metz. This
-however proved impossible. The disease of panic had gripped their minds,
-and at the idea of being sent to fight once more many threw their rifles
-down.
-
-Up in the lines there were many comical scenes and disputes. The men
-made themselves at home in the abandoned dug-outs which they found, and
-where the dinner had been left cooking they finished it and ate it.
-Drummers and pipers found superb quarters, and such original owners as
-turned up were much annoyed. Disputes were settled by neutral soldiers
-as a rule and went in favour of those who had not lost guns or abandoned
-their posts.
-
-Where the railway intersects the Gouzeaucourt-Cambrai road was a
-wonderful supply train, better than any golden wreck in desert-island
-story. This was stacked with every imaginable kind of food. The Germans
-had been through it, but had devoted their attention almost exclusively
-to the letters and the despatch-bags. They had taken away a few tit-bits
-but what was left sufficed the Guards for days. The transport was warned
-not to send up their rations for three days but to send up limbers
-instead to cart the food. At the disposal of the victors were also a
-number of abandoned motor-cars. There is a lively impression of a
-Sergeant-major going to and fro in a Ford car to this wonderful train.
-Authorities asked afterwards who had pillaged the train--the culprits
-ought to be brought to justice. But those in charge of that section of
-the line felt that the action was possibly excusable under the
-circumstances. Had they condemned it they had condemned themselves. The
-following lines by an unknown author appeared some months after the
-incident at Gouzeaucourt and men in the ranks copied it into their
-notebooks and diaries.
-
-        The Guards' Division were out to rest
-          They wanted it;
-        They'd "popped it"--"as on parade."
-          (What a jest!)
-        Then they'd held the line and had done their best
-          And were out.
-
-        Twenty-four hours had scarcely passed;
-          They were resting.
-        When an orderly--bearing a message fast--
-        "The Germans have broken through at last,
-          You're wanted."
-
-        And wanted they were--without a doubt--
-          At Gouzeaucourt.
-        The Huns had turned a lot of us out--
-        (A lot of us, mind you--supposed to be stout)
-          "Help wanted!"
-
-        Weary and footsore and stiff with cold--
-          Weren't shirking,
-        The Guards' Division, demeanour bold,
-        With drummers playing (so I'm told)
-          Went at 'em.
-
-        Said an A.P.M. as they marched along--
-          "Stand back there!"
-        Get out of the way, you funking throng,
-        They'll put to rights what you've done wrong,
-          THE GUARDS DIVISION.
-            (And they did.)
-
-After Gouzeaucourt it was slowly borne in upon the military mind that
-the "initiative," as it is called, had passed to the enemy, and that the
-role of attack would not be ours for a while. There was a great
-disparity between the forward mind and the rear mind. The forward mind
-registering all the buffets and "sticking it" was getting very sick of
-the war. The rear mind, making plenty of profit, playing men across the
-map like chess pieces, preserved all its zest. The rear mind had great
-patience and little imagination. It dreamed of a year, be it 1919 or
-1920 or 1921, when America would be affording her maximum strength.
-America had to be played into the war. She had started late, and it
-would take years to commit her fully and make her spend according to her
-means. The Tommy and the poilu would hold on till then. The Hun, as the
-red hats loved to call the foe, would also play the game. 1918 was never
-intended as the final year of the war--as far as the rear mind was
-concerned, even though the men of fifty be called up and drilled with
-youths of eighteen. Fortunately for us all, the Germans had decided to
-win or lose and put all things to the test that year. Theirs had been
-the supreme crime of starting the war, but let us acknowledge that they
-at least had the grace at last to "hands up" when they saw their game
-was lost and did not keep us at it for five years more. Germany at least
-saved us at last from what may be called the blood lust of the rear.
-
-March 21st came with its never-to-be-forgotten bid for all or nothing,
-with the Kaiser in command and all Germany on the march. The largest
-numbers of men involved and the broadest front of action in the war.
-"_Nach Paris_" was the cry--"Paris, Paris," the exultant yell of the
-Goth bearing down upon the new Rome.
-
-On the 19th and 20th there were suspicions that something new was in
-preparation on the German side. "From Headquarters to Headquarters," as
-one officer puts it, "throbbed the order to man the battle-stations."
-The night of the 20th was of intense darkness, and the watchful sentries
-at their posts stared into a deep and silent curtain of fog. The vague
-light that comes before dawn revealed only the mist.
-
-Then suddenly on a mighty breadth of line spoke the guns, came the swift
-chasing shells through the sky, and the chorus of their sighs and their
-cat-calls and yells and the hubbub of disruption in their explosion.
-Trench mortars of all calibres and field-guns had been brought up to
-closest range under cover of mist and darkness, and pounded into all
-our trenches thick and warm with khaki and live flesh and blood, and
-from behind the field-guns, but not far behind, in serried ranks spoke
-the heavy guns, the Russian heavies, the Italian heavies, the grand
-Austrian heavies, heaving death and destruction in the paths of retreat.
-Accommodated with the heavies in fiendish fraternal task were the light
-guns in vast numbers which flung the gas-bombs in tens of thousands to
-the spots where of a certainty there must be congestion of traffic in
-the British rear. It was ten minutes to five in the morning of the 21st
-March--_der Tag_ had come, the hour of German fate had struck.
-
-Our guns replied at once in mighty salvos from accustomed points on the
-horizon, but also many hitherto silent guns and batteries spoke for the
-first time. A steady and perhaps unimaginative confidence was expressed
-by our artillery, but it was quickly realised that we were out-gunned
-and out-manned. Our battery positions were soon drenched with mustard
-gas. The enemy firing was remarkably accurate and scored direct hits on
-many headquarters, billets, and ammunition dumps which had never been
-assailed before. The roads all received a great deal of attention and at
-many vital points deep craters threatened to hold up traffic for hours.
-
-Daylight streamed through the mist. The guardians of the line with
-strained nerves and brain stood on the alert expecting grey Fritz
-momentarily to emerge from the mist with lowering brows and bayonet at
-the port. Our machine-guns chattered at the unknown, and meanwhile the
-enemy wire-cutters were at work clearing the way. It was not until
-half-past nine that the anonymous artillery gave way to the deadly
-personality of the foe. On the same lavish scale as that in which the
-guns were firing, stick-bombs showered into the front lines, exploding
-with their deafening and would-be-terrifying concussion of high
-explosive. The enemy soldiers got rid of all the bombs they had right
-away, and then very soon they were themselves to be seen. Tommy faced
-forward. But Fritz, though he came steadily across no-man's land
-offering an easy target, came also from the flanks and was soon to be
-seen in the rear. British troops were massed here and there and posted
-in clusters of defence, but the enemy with his vastly extended waves
-broke through at the thin places and the empty places. The alarm went to
-the flanks and the rear, but the runners found their various
-headquarters and destinations full of the men in grey. Surrenders were
-rapid on all hands. It was a puzzle what had happened. Brave units
-fought it out against fearful odds. Some reserve battalions led by their
-Colonels rushed in to counter-attack, and the Colonels fell and the
-battalions fell. Other reserve battalions received orders to retire and
-they retired. Others received no orders of any kind and remained where
-they were and were overtaken. All day of the 21st and all night long our
-lines were confusion worse confounded. On the 22nd there were Generals
-in the fray encouraging the defence in person and trying to re-establish
-lost contact right and left. But towards nightfall the last lines were
-over-run and the enemy was through.
-
-The British menace was lifted from St. Quentin and Cambrai, from La Fere
-and Laon. The enemy plunged for Arras, Peronne and Ham, and for the
-far-flung hope of Albert, Doullens, Amiens, Compiègne. They rolled our
-legions back, they set Divisions marching, fleeing; they captured
-front-line men in tens of thousands, captured second-line men in tens of
-thousands, captured artillerymen, captured their guns, captured the Old
-Bills and Charlie Chaplins a-mending the roads, captured Red-cross men,
-captured Chinamen, captured the Y.M.C.A., captured an infinite array of
-stores and shells. If they were doubtful of themselves at first, their
-faith soon lit up, as how could it fail to light. The banner of a
-victorious end of the war and a crown of all German privations and
-sufferings was raised. "I heard nothing more dreadful in the war," said
-an English captain, "than the yell of the German cheers as their first
-men entered Ham and they knew they had broken the line and had us
-running. _Paris_, _Paris_ was the watchword, and many a Teutonic
-soldier mortally wounded in the moment of victory, sank joyfully to the
-rest of death in the belief that the Vaterland and the Kaiser were
-winning through at last."
-
-And the embattled hosts swept onward toward Amiens, where at last the
-onrush was stabilised. A greater victory had been won than the German
-dreamed of when he planned. The offensive paused at last as it must, but
-a staggering blow had been dealt at the forces of George the Fifth. The
-King was down, and even if he were not counted out this time it was
-doubtful if he could survive many such rounds if the German could repeat
-such blows.
-
-What a time that was for England! The war staff tried to keep the
-consternation to themselves but it could hardly be done. The whole
-nation trembled with anxiety and apprehension. In France, as we now
-know, screened from public view, the leaders of France and England met
-in a grave mood. There was Milner and Haig and Foch and Clemenceau.
-Haig, with a terribly pallid and drawn face looked as if he had not
-slept for three nights. Foch was nervous and excitable, and carried in
-his hand a small wooden wand on the knob of which was carved a poilu's
-head.
-
-"I will do my best," said Haig pathetically, "to stop them before
-Amiens," and it seemed he doubted whether it could be done.
-
-"We can always stop the Boche," said Foch, "we must stop him where he
-is, not at Amiens."
-
-"But how?"
-
-"Well, I could do it," said Foch. "Seal up the centre. The Boche has
-broken through the British and the French armies. His forces are pushing
-against the wings of folding-doors; each door gives a little, making a
-gap between, and through the gap the enemy is pouring. Seal up the gap,
-seal it up!"
-
-There was only one way of sealing it up, and that was by uniting French
-and British forces under one single commander. Lord Milner saw it. He
-started up and pointed dramatically with his finger to Foch standing
-there with his wooden wand, and he cried out:
-
-"There is the man."
-
-Haig, endowed by God and nature with a fine character, at once came
-forward and agreed. No littleness stood in his way at that moment of
-destiny. Foch was the man, let Foch take the supreme command. Foch took
-it and poured French troops to our aid and stopped the tide and saved
-the great city, the railway-key of Calais and of Paris.
-
-The great German effort had resulted first in German victory, then in a
-dramatic change in the leadership of the war. Doubtless the German took
-little stock of Foch. It seemed of good augury to our foe that the enemy
-should have been forced to make a change in command. Changes of the
-kind are seldom good in the midst of a strenuous campaign. But the sway
-of Foch nevertheless gave a new faith to the whole army of the Allies.
-The famous S.O.S. was sent to Wilson: _We have our backs to the wall but
-send your army quickly or we perish_. And Wilson speeded up the
-transport of his army in a marvellous way. He also saved us.
-
-Amiens, whose fate was in the balance for so many days, became baptised
-as a shrine of the war as the enemy long-range guns sent to it fire and
-death unintermittently.
-
-What new fields and cities the enemy had opened for destruction! Had the
-Germans stayed before the city, the Cathedral of St. Firmin might have
-become as remarkable a ruin as the shrine of St. Vaast. St. Firmin is
-the patron saint of Amiens and is supposed to hold the city in his
-protection, and the pious of Amiens prayed to St. Firmin and to God in
-March 1918 as never before. That their prayers availed whereas other
-cities had fallen despite all prayer is not a fact on which to lay much
-stress. But it was just six months to the festival of St. Firmin, and
-ere that happy day came round the dreadful menacing demon had fled far
-from their walls.
-
-Two years later behold the procession of the relics of St. Firmin at
-Amiens. The Church parades in praise and mediæval glory--cherubic boys
-in crimson and white lace, young tonsured monks with health and life
-throbbing from their close-cropped skulls, aged ecclesiastics with
-Latinised faces, beautiful youths carrying emblems and banners, and then
-supported on either hand by wise and reverend fathers comes the Bishop,
-crowned with a gilded mitre crimson within and golden without, and
-streaming with two golden streamers hanging behind. He bears his golden
-crook, and before his arrested step and hand held up in blessing the
-people sway like reeds when the wind which bloweth where it listeth
-passes over them. From his uplifted hand and his arrested pose there
-flung out mysterious power. You felt it; it was the blessing of the
-Church imparted with all the consciousness of true succession even from
-Peter and from Christ.
-
-So they bear what is left of the memory and the dust of St. Firmin,
-nodding as they go, looking like an ecclesiastical picture on a vast
-canvas, and singing to their measured steps--_Salve, Salve_.
-
-The second round of 1918 was fought on the Lys when the Germans 'twixt
-Ypres on the north and Bethune in the south plunged towards Hazebrouck
-and St. Omer. Bailleul and Merville fell, the eminence of Kemmel was
-taken and Locre, and it seemed likely that the enemy would do with the
-sanctuary of Ypres what he had done with that of Albert.
-
-The smashed centre of Bethune and the wilderness of its Grande Place
-testifies to the violence of the onset, and Hazebrouck still bears the
-marks of a great trembling and nervous shock. Hazebrouck had its three
-days of anguish when all its people fled, and the town, like a victim in
-a dungeon, awaited the coming of the persecutor. The cross-roads at
-Vieux Berquin are almost as sinister in the after-the-war light as they
-were then, and in all the waste fields which ran with destiny and khaki
-that April the rusty wire still lies in tangles. Rain streams on the
-choked cemeteries once but sparse with graves, now full and overflowing
-with the dead and their crosses. But you seek in vain for hundreds and
-thousands of defenders, names of V.C.'s, names of the brave
-undecorated--all lost now in the unknown, the plenitude of unknown
-soldiers.
-
-The German won his second round, though not too well, not shaping very
-well. There were hammer-blows, but not the dreadful death-dealing weight
-of the March fighting. French troops had been hurried to Belgium by
-Foch, and once more they stopped the rot and possibly saved our now
-rather nervy army. Certainly the enemy was now having matters his own
-way. But Arras fortunately held, and that was our centre of defence. All
-expected that the next attack would be upon the city, an attempt at
-encirclement from the north and from the south. A wet spring wore on to
-early summer and all the army waited.
-
-The third attack was of an entirely unexpected kind, being an almost
-overwhelming blow at France and France alone--an attempt to put her
-entirely out of gear and make it impossible for Foch to send more troops
-to help the British army, an attempt to destroy the spirit and the
-mobility of the army of France. The enemy advanced on a front broader
-even than that of March 21st, and found an even thinner, weaker line of
-defenders. Once more Germany was able to do even more than she dreamed,
-and plunged towards Paris, making the sky drone and tremble with the
-ominous thunder of her approaching guns.
-
-As we all know now the enemy went too far, and had not the men to man
-his greatly extended lines or the labour to reorganise the new rear. He
-had spent his energy too lavishly, and Foch had all that was necessary,
-the one extra punch which sent the German reeling even in the moment
-which should have held his greatest pride. The fourth round was won by
-Foch and the Americans. The fifth by the British when they rolled the
-foe back from Amiens. After that Fritz was a lost man and floundered
-backward homeward, playing only for time, and only on his defensive,
-with all the triumph gone, hope gone, faith gone, and only punishment
-and humiliation ahead of him. In but a short while after the most
-terrible defeats it could be said that the Allies had won the war.
-
-The land o'er which the great advance was made is quiet enough now. To
-the towns and cities of the back areas the circus is coming for the
-first time since the war. After the leaping from trapeze to trapeze in
-mid-air, after the walking the tight rope, and the facing wild beasts in
-their cages, and other feats of daring, the clowns come tumbling into
-the arena. So it is also in life. There is one all in Turkey-red riding
-backward on an ass, telling all and sundry how much more clever he is
-than the genuine heroes they have been clapping. He gains in the long
-run more applause than the tight-rope dancer. Then two funny Columbines
-with air-blown bladders pretend to fight and whack at one another with
-resounding boshes, clumps and raps, laying one another out, panting for
-breath, exhausting themselves, almost expiring, and yet weakly hitting
-out with their quaint weapons. And the populace forgets the thrill of
-the spectacle of the man in the lions' cage making wild beasts jump
-through hoops of fire. The clowns are to its taste. The scene-shifters
-are quietly preparing the arena for the next heroic item--"A Roman
-spectacle when the gladiators meet"--and the clowns divert public
-attention from the carpentering of such a show until all is ready for
-the heroes to come out. A fourth clown all the while strikes heroic
-attitudes and mimics the after-the-war celebrities with apt
-buffoonery--now he is Wilson with the fourteen points, now he is
-D'Annunzio in mock heroic pose saying "J'y suis, j'y reste," now Lloyd
-George making the Germans pay by letting the Germans off paying. The
-malice of the buffoons provokes great mirth and takes the attention of
-the crowd so well that the heroes are almost forgotten, Tom Wildwest
-glowering from one of the exits and handling his rope and running noose
-as if he'd like to lasso the whole bunch of clowns and pull them out of
-the arena and the public gaze.
-
-In the summer of 1918 there was a waiting time. The enemy was held and
-his utter defeat was manifest, but Time paused and the denouement
-paused. The French and Americans carried on. The British reorganised.
-The Germans began the knight's tour of the board with the right move
-first. The British army was bored with the war and looked homeward.
-Special wires conveyed the Derby result and the verdict of the
-Pemberton-Billing case. Pemberton-Billing became a great hero of the
-rank and file. The book of the 47,000 names of people who could be
-blackmailed was a popular idea--such is the readiness to believe evil.
-
-At a battalion Sports near Saulty the Duke of Connaught watched the
-battalion clowns arrange a race for the tiniest tots of the French
-village. One clown had printed on his back "Breezy Bacchus" and the
-other "One of the 47,000," which was thought a most amusing and
-up-to-date cognomen. "One of the 47,000" won the obstacle race by and
-by. He had won the obstacle race each annual Sports of his battalion, an
-unwounded Tipperary man who had come right through, not only the hazards
-of so many races, but of the great race itself. Fate however claimed him
-at last when the war was nearly over, and a lone cringing gas shell
-sneaking through the air came and took his leg off. The French
-villagers, whose children he had guided in the baby race, shrugged their
-shoulders and had nothing to say.
-
-The war-sun which was now setting did not sink in a grey haze or in mere
-cloud, but in blood. To take the final victory-march of even one
-Division, from Arras to Maubeuge--is it not marked by fresh graves all
-the way? The old and the new laid down their lives prodigally.
-
-There is an extra sorrow for their death now because the pathos of being
-so near to deliverance and yet missing it was not known then. Though the
-German was beaten the war might last for years. A common gag used to
-be--
-
-"Heard the news?"
-
-"What's that? The war over?"
-
-"All over bar the shouting."
-
-But it was ironical, and there were few who saw the faint gleam of the
-new hope which came with the German retreat.
-
-The Army did not know when it began its advance that the familiar ruins
-of old villages were being left behind for good, that Berles au Bois
-with its growing graveyard and ruined church was placed finally behind,
-Monchy, Blairville, Hamelincourt, St. Leger, Bullecourt, Ecoust, behind
-for ever, that Albert, Maricourt, Bapaume, re-conquered Peronne, were
-all permanently held and soon to be left far in obscurity in the rear.
-It is strange to come back over this track again and see the site of
-hideous and monstrous latrines now overgrown with rankest weeds, to see
-the ruined barns all re-roofed, to see the dank acre into which, wrapped
-in the flag, your comrades were lowered down, to see what was left of
-the village church of Berles now brought flat because as it stood it was
-a menace, to see the place where but for the grace of God you might
-yourself be lying with a cross above your head, to see Monchy lifting
-itself with great difficulty from its sunken blocks of stone, to listen
-to the stillness and deadness of old lifeless ruins, to cross the
-stubble fields to Adinfer and hear the petrol plough methodically
-scouring the old lines, to approach once more the dreadfulness of
-Ayette.
-
-The villagers have come back to the craters of death. There is an
-estaminet where was nothing before; there are salvage-made huts with
-"baby-elephant" roofs built o'er spots where for days lay the dead in a
-torture of wire. A family is in the estaminet, it was divided into five
-parts by the war--five members of the family each in a different place
-and none of them in touch with any other, each believing the other four
-dead, two in different parts of Germany, one in Paris, one in Belgium,
-one in the Pyrenees. They are poor people, touched by their suffering to
-tenderness and generosity, and when there comes to them one who served
-as a soldier in the war they spread their best before him and do not
-want to take money for it--wonderful for France. But the people who have
-suffered are the best people there as elsewhere.
-
-At Ablainzville the new brick cabins grow into being amid the high
-seared masts of her dead trees. At sunset the hard-working peasants are
-still in the fields. They have heaped old iron and wire on to the roads,
-and filled up the shell-holes and burned the weeds and broken the
-intractable hard moorland with tractor-drawn ploughs. They have riven
-the sturdy roots of the docks and the reeds, they have driven St. John's
-wort and rocket and willow-herb from the grain-field, turning up the
-tramped-down battered earth in huge slabs and chunks. The league of
-death which goes over the brow of the hill, that old no-man's land which
-the machine-guns swept is now a great black upturned drive of ploughing
-in which alight thousands of crows, all extruding from the earth and
-discussing what they find, talking and grabbing, fluttering and flying.
-Sodden green equipment has been ploughed into the earth and still lies
-half exposed, and helmets like little coal-buckets disturb here and
-there the even surface of the land. It is heavy going, and your boots
-want to lift tons of mother earth, but you struggle on with eyes
-furtively engaged in "spotting" here a shell and there a bomb. Next year
-the corn will cover up all our sins.
-
-The peasants complain that the Government gives them nothing. The
-Germans replaced some of the cattle they stole, but how about the French
-who commandeered their horses at the beginning of the war and in
-exchange gave them a merely nominal sum. In the stricken areas how few
-are the horses now! The conservative peasant who does not like changing
-his agricultural habits has been forced to the use of the petrol engine.
-His chief motive force is the old lorry engine. But of course he does
-more with that than he did with the horse, and when one has walked right
-across the zone of desolation and come to the little-touched farms on
-the other side one cannot but feel that the peasants working their
-horses there are not getting on so quickly as the deprived ones with
-their motors.
-
-Many of the refugees when they came back started at an absolute zero.
-Their plight would have driven a less stubborn people to despair, but
-they set-to and worked, and can already show a dumbfounding progress.
-Theirs is a hard life without luxury and with little food, but with the
-capital of their toiling hands they are making wealth for themselves and
-France once more. The people of the war-lands will recover quicker than
-their Governments, and whilst with every year the plight of the national
-exchequer gets worse the plight of the domestic exchequer will improve.
-There are too many parasites feeding on the Governments, and the latter
-have too many obligations in the matter of paying interest on loan. All
-France is placarded with appeals to French people to take up
-State-loans--the object of such loans being to get money to pay the
-interest on past loans. French people cannot be persuaded to pay onerous
-taxes. The Germans, without great commercial activity, cannot make the
-French deficit good, and we see the State sliding slowly but steadily
-downward like a loosened avalanche toward a precipice. But in the light
-of the French peasants' steady unremitting toil one need have little
-fear for the nation itself. It will get rid of this type of Government
-and the mountains of debt when the time comes. Long after sunset, in the
-after-murk of night, sound the droning of the petrol-ploughs on the old
-battlefields, and the clatter of hammer and plane in the stricken
-villages.--Vive la France!
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-It is twenty miles to Cambrai by the seemingly Druidical remains of
-Lagnicourt and the life-clusters of Queant, Pronville, Moeuvres,
-Fontaine. Cambrai is resurgent. No one is in mourning except those
-widows whom black suits. The merry-go-rounds and the razzle-dazzle with
-all manner of toy-booths and gipsy-shows occupy the market-place on
-which grandiose buildings with broken windows stare. In the town gardens
-is a statue without a head, and on its base is engraved--"_Son invention
-fut un bienfait pour son pays_."
-
-He probably made some improvement in the manufacture of silk, but an
-ironical British soldier has written in English beneath--_He invented
-the gun stock_.
-
-On the way out from Cambrai the towns of Boussieres and St. Hilaire look
-as if no war had been, and the trains are all running on the road to
-Solesmes. Where men stalked their foes along the railway embankment,
-where men won military medals and D.C.M.s and one the V.C. all is
-perfect prose. Where so many died and risked their lives a
-life-insurance office has reopened. All slumbers on the road to Le
-Quesnoy and Bavai. You have passed through the war area and come to the
-unscarred green of innocent fields and the undesolated symmetry of
-unscathed woods. Peasants lead the horses in the plough, and cows in
-plenty graze in sun-steeped pastures.
-
-It is November 10th and the same strong highway on which two years ago
-the army marched to the end of the war. At the end of a fair fine
-afternoon the sun is sinking slowly but must be in eclipse ere it set.
-Peasants are sitting on heaps of stones at La Longueville looking
-westward. In the smoky capitals of Europe nothing will be seen, but
-something is due to happen if the sky keeps clear and will be visible at
-the last outposts of the war.
-
-From the grandeur of the setting sun pale shadows are cast of posts and
-cows and houses and railings and heaps of stones. Unexpectedly they
-faint away as something steals upon the splendour of the radiant disc
-and stops the brightness of the rays. Myriads of wisps of cloud, like
-tiny hands, assist at the eclipse, laying the sun to rest in a dreadful
-bloody bath, agonising and bleeding and growing less and going down,
-with evil triumphing over good. Out, brief candle! Yes, it is out--it is
-night. The last day of the war is done--tomorrow Armistice. The reaper
-has put up his scythe--the angel of death has gone by. A bitter wind
-passes swiftly along the high-road, just touching you, just making you
-aware that something invisible and unkind has passed you, having a going
-and a coming which is not yours.
-
-So in a mood which has changed you walk the last miles of the war--to
-the fortress of Maubeuge. Here is gloomy smoky Douzies, and there, yes
-at that very spot, is the place where the Brigade messenger was accosted
-and you read his message--_Hostilities will cease as from eleven
-o'clock_. Yonder the factory sheds where you heard the first lecture on
-demobilisation, where you sang "Take me back to dear old Blighty!" with
-such a will, and a free issue of rum punch was made to all. There the
-erstwhile deserted steel works which men said would be years before they
-worked again. The great stacks smoke, belying the prophecy, and on the
-night wind comes the clangour of tireless machinery working for France,
-working for Peace. On the railway all the twisted rails are gone, the
-lines gleam with the brightness of train-wheels and go straight to
-Maubeuge. Upon the roadway lie the disjecta membra of an armoured train
-marked Lot 1 and Lot 2 and likely to remain till time itself remove
-them.
-
-You descend into the trough where the moat goes round the fortress, and
-by a wooden bridge enter Maubeuge, the city of the end of the war, one
-of the cities where the war ended. At Maubeuge then let us be silent
-with those who are silent whilst at Westminster the Unknown is buried
-and the Cenotaph unveiled and at Paris the Arc de Triomphe receives its
-guest.
-
-November the eleventh in the morning--there is Mass in the Cathedral for
-the _poilu inconnu_, the anonymous soldier of France, and about an empty
-coffin swathed with the tricolour are ten high candles. The sacrifice is
-sanctified with holy water and incense. The divine elements are raised
-from the Altar. The throngs of the pious all cross themselves. Comes the
-alarm crash of the Sanctus thrice repeated, the mumbo-jumbo of
-fast-gabbled Latin, the exultant organ. You stand wedged in by a pillar,
-the only Englishman there now, and as your eye ranges o'er the scene it
-reads on the Cathedral wall the inscription which is nearest. _N'oublie
-pas pecheur endurci que c'est pour la troisième fois que Jesus est
-tombé!_ "Forget not, hardened sinner, that it is now for the third time
-that Jesus has fallen," suggestive and unforgettable monition given in
-the half-light of the Cathedral.
-
-A Te Deum which does not rend the sky nor the Cathedral roof passes
-sweetly o'er our heads, and the congregation with its wreaths and flags
-files out to march with bands to the cemeteries of Maubeuge. It is still
-not eleven by the clock. But it will be eleven in the Place des Casernes
-where the Guards were drawn up on parade that November morning. The
-barrack square then!
-
-Behold it dirty and drab. A squad in sabots is being detailed by a
-corporal for fatigue duty. They answer their names, their old tunics are
-all undone, they shuffle across the square. But it is eleven. Silence
-then. Let us be silent with all who are silent.
-
-
-
-
-_EPILOGUE_
-
-
-The afternoon train speeds from Maubeuge to Paris. "Am I right for
-Paris?" you ask, and a Frenchman replies facetiously "Nach Paris, nach
-Paris." In a few hours you roll up the whole Western front. You traverse
-infinite graveyards and scenes of desolation like an arrow of thought,
-and alight where the German soldiers wished to be. The train has come
-from Berlin: it has passed through Cologne and the zone held by the
-occupying army. It roars forward to St. Quentin, Noyon, Compiègne, like
-the symbol of the March offensive. But in all the little shattered towns
-and villages joy-flags are flying and the bands are playing. It is
-to-day a fête of French victory and French peace. Besides being
-Armistice Day it is the Cinquantenaire of the Republic, the day of the
-celebration of the first fifty years of the present Republic of France,
-and Paris will be alight from end to end to-night with fairy lights.
-Paris and France will render homage to the Republic which brought
-victory. In 1870 under the fatal Government of Napoleon the Third the
-hated German conquered France. Then the Napoleons fell and Gambetta made
-possible "la revanche du Droit." It could hardly have been predicted
-that within fifty years the stricken unstable France of 1870 would lay
-the Prussian low. The victory over the Germans has been an enormous
-confirmation of the success of the "Third Republic" and has shed a glory
-on the line of Presidents from Thiers to Millerand which is perhaps not
-entirely appreciated in other countries. The Republic celebrating its
-fiftieth birthday on November 11th sunned itself in as much glory as the
-Army or the Nation. It is true that "un soldat sans nom, representant la
-foule heroique des poilus, repose dans l'Arc de Triomphe"--a nameless
-soldier representing the heroic crowd who fought is buried now in the
-Arc de Triomphe--but it is also true that the heart of Gambetta carried
-in a chariot accompanied the hearse of the unknown soldier, and whilst
-the soldier was buried in the first storey of the triumphal arch the
-heart of Gambetta was placed in the Pantheon itself. All must redound to
-the greatness of France and of the Republic.
-
-As you step from the train at Paris you realise that everyone is out for
-gaiety even before the gaiety has commenced. The Parisians are holding
-on to one another, humming and singing baby-song, making believe to
-stumble as they walk. Gone are the care and solemnity of the weekday
-Paris crowd. A heaviness has been shed, everyone feels light as if there
-was quicksilver in his heels. Evening is just turning to night and all
-houses are giving forth their people, and they stream to the centre in
-ever increasing crowds--all gay, all light-hearted, all without a
-thought of ever coming home. The city is cleverly decorated with massed
-flags, arcades of flags, but without those strings of bunting which so
-often look like coloured washing hanging out to dry. The illuminations
-are to be most elaborate. Hundreds of thousands of francs are being
-spent in coloured light effects. There will be a torchlight procession,
-massed bands, and street dancing till morning. Long lines of men and
-women holding on to one another plunge through the crowds, and scream,
-and break, and join again. Everyone is wearing a little flag of the
-Republic. Men and women are to be seen carrying little red paper
-lanterns on bamboo sticks. Every restaurant and café is crammed and
-jammed with people with flushed faces. The waiters, having lost control,
-bring you dishes you have not ordered, but you graciously accept them
-faute de mieux. Hawkers keep bellowing the last editions of the papers,
-especially of _L'intransigeant_, which says that the meaning of the
-festivity is that the Allies are agreed to force Germany to fulfil the
-treaty to the letter. Night meanwhile has become night with no stars
-above and all the stars below.
-
-The crowds have become immense. If you are at the Place de la Concorde
-where part of the torchlight procession is forming up and men are
-playing on the crowd with ghastly searchlights, then you are likely to
-remain at the Place de la Concorde. It will take you two hours to
-struggle to the Place de l'Opera. On the Underground railway some
-stations are blocked, and no one can get either in or out--notably Hotel
-de Ville. Out at the Arc de Triomphe there is a cavalry guard with drawn
-sabres. The Arc very fittingly has no illumination, but its dark mass
-catches the light beams from the buildings around. No one knows what is
-going to happen here, all the little folk stand on tip-toe and strain
-their eyes and yet see nought. Lots of girls are mounted on men's
-shoulders with legs round men's necks and their ankles grasped in male
-hands, and they certainly see the nothing which is to be seen. All are
-laughing, all are ready to sing and to roll in gaiety. Presently some
-statesmen in carriages pass out between lines of cavalrymen; big Bertha,
-the great gun, follows them and then an empty Roman chariot and the
-hearse on which the _poilu inconnu_ was carried. But even when these
-pass the crowd remains riveted to the place where the unknown soldier
-reposes--constantly expecting some marvel of the night to start from
-there.
-
-Similar crowds hold the Place Vendome where Napoleon stands on his
-column of stone, the St. Simon of Paris. This statue also commemorates a
-national victory over Germany, though it elevates one soldier so high.
-The design of the frieze at the foot of the column is one of
-accoutrements and weapons and adornments and uniforms and guns, but
-without a limb or a face anywhere, the meaning being that one man wore
-all the glory. Here is exhibited not much joy in the Republic but a
-whole series of advertisement for French State loans. On the whole, the
-Cinquantenaire of the Republic may be a good advertisement for
-Government Stock. All manner of provincials have come to Paris for this
-day, and there is no doubt they are dazzled by the grandeur of France.
-
-At the Palais Royal there is one of the most radiant designs in coloured
-lights. The whole front of the place is covered with a picture of light
-which reminds one of the advertisements of the great white way between
-40th and 50th Street, New York. Crimson and emerald and gold tell the
-glory of the fifty years of the Republic, the numbers 1870 and 1920
-being festooned with dazzling light, and the names of all the Presidents
-in one great row--Thiers, MacMahon ... to Deschanel and Millerand--given
-the prominence of a dynasty. On all the sidewalks down below are trees
-of naked flames, gas-pipes with branches coming up out of the pavement
-and instead of leaves little jets of twinkling flame at which the crowd
-lights its cigarettes. The entrances to the grand avenues are surmounted
-by fantastic arches of most gorgeous illuminated colouring. In front of
-all this stand men and women thoroughly epaté, hypnotised by it, with
-mouths open and eyes dilated.
-
-"Oh but it's wonderful!" "I cannot take my eyes off it, can you?" "Look,
-neighbour, just look at that, eh!" "Ah but look!" "What splendour!"
-"What an effect!" And there is audible all the while a continuous
-collective low murmur of approbation and satisfaction.
-
-You walk slowly along the Avenue de l'Opera. There are uninterrupted
-rows of footlights along the bases of first and second storeys throwing
-a lurid glamour on solemn and stately tricolours. So it is all the way
-to the Opera House, and happy crowds, fluttering and chattering, now
-breaking into an infection of expectancy when all push forward to see
-some imagined interest somewhere, and then lurching back in gay
-disillusion and laughter. The lofty buildings like monuments to the
-goddess of Trade look down on diminutive people with bright faces and
-round heads, and the stone itself of Paris seems indulgent.
-
-Away however in those strange fields covered with darkness at this
-midnight hour, unilluminated, lie the silent ones, crosses without
-end--the signs of life laid down. France will not forget them and we
-shall not forget.
-
-So let us leave this gaiety behind and take the midnight train for
-Calais, for Dover, for London, for the Cenotaph, the Abbey, for new
-life. It is a full train and pulls out soberly from the gay city, and
-bears onward, onward to the little channel and the waiting boat which
-ere the dawn shall face the wonderful white cliffs of Albion and home.
-
-The most enduring moment of Armistice Day will be the silence at eleven,
-the moment of communion. In America in many cities work ceased at eleven
-but every one was instructed to make the utmost noise possible. Thus a
-year ago at New Orleans the writer of these lines listened to an
-infernal din of train whistles, factory syrens, steam horns and hooters,
-clashing church-bells, roaring Klaxon-horns, hammering of anvils,
-squeaking of trumpets, and shouts of people. And the thought inevitably
-came--the West does not understand. It did not suffer as we did and came
-into a share in it all too late. Only the end of a small war can express
-itself in noise; the end of such an one as this in Europe was silence.
-
-And a fitting monument of silence is the Cenotaph, the empty tomb.
-England is very happy in the Cenotaph, much more happy than in the Edith
-Cavell statue, which leaves out the last words of the kind nurse, does
-not say "_Patriotism is not enough_," but writes "Brussels Dawn"
-instead, making her a kindler of anger against a foe rather than a
-salver of wounds. The impersonal cenotaph, without any Cross or weeping
-Christ, or rampant lions, without even the pronoun "our" which some
-wished to see upon it--"Our glorious dead," instead of "The glorious
-dead," can stand for all who laid down their lives baptised or
-unbaptised, white or coloured, friend or foe. For even Germans had to
-die that Europe might be free.
-
-So in leaving the fields of the dead and the beginning and the end of
-the war and Paris itself, you come naturally to the Cenotaph, the stone
-which gathers to itself all the experience and all that was sacred in
-the war--the altar at the summit of a thousand weary steps. It stands in
-the midst of England's great street of Government, 'twixt Nelson and the
-Abbey, and says to all who pass--"Go and do thou likewise." To all the
-selfish, "_We were not selfish_;" to the clamorous, "_We are silent, yet
-we speak_;" to the strident and ambitious, to the self-seekers and the
-cynical, to those who live as though there had been no sacrifice, to
-those who sneer at the ideal, "_We suffered and died that you might have
-your life, that all might have more life; we suffered and died for the
-good of the whole!_"
-
-When Millerand was elected President of France his supporters insisted
-always that they had found a man whose public life would be worthy of
-France _and of her dead_. France's ideal is that through the sacrifice
-of her sons France should become "greater yet." Our men did not die that
-England might become greater, but that Europe might be saved from
-tyranny and greed, and it is for us and our public men to see that their
-sacrifice shall never seem to grow barren.
-
-It will grow barren unless we who now live are ready to continue the
-sacrifice. No good comes into the world but after struggle and pain. No
-new life comes but through death, no common weal is gained without
-giving and serving. Our common life must have a foundation of human
-hearts, ready to give, ready to live, for England and for us all.
-
-     It hath been said: "He liveth best who is always ready to die."
-
-     It can be put in a new way: "He liveth best who is always ready
-     to put all upon the Altar."
-
-     Humanity is well served when nations are ready to sacrifice
-     themselves for her good.
-
-     She is worst served by the nations who still preserve the
-     tribal instinct to fight and destroy their neighbours.
-
-     She is worst served by the nations who are enslaving other
-     nations.
-
-     And that nation is most alive which has most people ready to
-     sacrifice themselves and their estate.
-
-     That nation liveth worst which contains the most selfish.
-
-     Of Christ it was written: He saved others; Himself he could not
-     save. But the selfish man saves himself first and then thinks
-     of others.
-
-     The selfish man is quarrelsome and runs easily to law; he
-     exacts guarantees; he counts his costs; he heavily insures; he
-     holds what he does not want and is afraid of another getting
-     it.
-
-     That nation liveth best whose men and women are freest for an
-     adventure.
-
-     But worst whose men and women are most cautious.
-
-     He is most happy who has run to the Altar and surrendered his
-     _all_ there to God and then found a will and a way in which to
-     live.
-
-     For most, alas! there is no altar visible, no way to an altar.
-     They do not know what the Altar is nor what it is for.
-
-     Business and war and hate and selfish desire have hidden it
-     from men's eyes.
-
-     Only when the cloud lifts the Altar is disclosed, and men
-     commonly when they see it leave all that they have and run to
-     it and fling themselves before it in tears.
-
-     It is the grand altar of humanity. The altar of _all_ on which
-     the _one_ sacrifices himself.
-
-     It is the altar of the sacrifice of Christ.
-
-     The Cross.
-
-     The quartering of humanity--an altar in the midst of the
-     people.
-
-     All education and literature and religious mission should be to
-     one end--that the way to the Altar may be kept clear.
-
-     It is work to clear away all the obstructions and the fogs and
-     mists.
-
-     Sweet singing, pious exhortation, the reading of books, love of
-     the dim religious light of churches--these should not be ends
-     in themselves.
-
-     Humanity has its pious part which goes to church; but it does
-     not need the organisation of the pious.
-
-     Humanity has its charitable part but it does not need the
-     organisation of the charitable.
-
-     Humanity has its cultures but it does not stand in need of
-     "schools of thought" and "cults" and "intelligentsia,"
-
-     But humanity does need sacrifice upon the one great Altar,
-     every day and all days.
-
-The Cenotaph rising in our midst may be our altar. We may leave our
-flowers there, the incense-smoke of burning hearts, but the flowers
-should be our lives. The Cenotaph after all is only the visible sign of
-the great invisible Cenotaph of humanity which stands in the midst of
-the ages, an empty tomb in memory of all those who have gone before--of
-those whose sacrifice _without ours_ is not perfect.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-At Westminster Abbey they have buried the dead soldier among poets and
-statesmen. They have dug up from France Tom, Dick, or Harry, one of us,
-unnamed, unknown, who laughed and talked and marched and fired and
-suffered in the war, one of the many who are always unknown. He did
-guard duty no doubt in France. He is put on sentry again. Touching as it
-is to have a soldier in the dim light of the Abbey where so many can
-shed invisible tears, it had been better perhaps in a stern era to have
-posted him at St. Stephen's, at the entry to Parliament, that he might
-challenge in his silence all who enter there to stand for England--
-
-"Who goes there?"
-
-"Friend."
-
-"Advance and be recognised!"
-
-"Pass, friend!"
-
-Proceed at your peril if you cannot meet the challenge of the dead!
-
-
-
-
-PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.4
-F.100.121
-
-
-
-
-    +-----------------------------------------------+
-    |             Transcriber's Note:               |
-    |                                               |
-    | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the  |
-    | original document have been preserved.        |
-    |                                               |
-    | = sign denotes bold type                      |
-    |                                               |
-    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:   |
-    |                                               |
-    | Page 99 Algeerians changed to Algerians       |
-    +-----------------------------------------------+
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's The Challenge of the Dead, by Stephen Graham
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD ***
-
-***** This file should be named 40507-8.txt or 40507-8.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/0/5/0/40507/
-
-Produced by Barbara Kosker and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive)
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
-or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.