The Challenge of the Dead Part 3

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Duke of Wellingtons, Scots Fusiliers; along the Menin road lay Scots Guards, Borders, Gordons; but all were withdrawn.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 d.i.c.kebusch 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 d.i.c.kebusch 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. d.i.c.kebusch 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-sh.e.l.ls 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 pa.s.ses. 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sport 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 abimee." 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 s.h.a.ggy-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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 gla.s.s 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 ma.s.sed 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 Cha.s.seurs Alpins and French dragoons.

So 1914 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 s.h.a.ggy earthwork is covered with dense thistle now. There are mounds of filled sand-bags all hanging in clots like s.h.i.+rt-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 gra.s.shoppers. 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, ma.s.sive, 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 sh.e.l.led 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 exhumes 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 pa.s.s 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 compet.i.tions 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed into nothingness--the heavy boots clattering under the tables, the red faces above, the bottles and gla.s.ses, 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 grat.i.tude 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 ga.s.sed perhaps, for gas killed more than sh.e.l.ls. 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 Lancas.h.i.+re 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 Lancas.h.i.+re." 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 a.s.sault. 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'Avoue 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 pa.s.sed 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.