The Soul of the War Part 10

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

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

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

We had our own provisions, and we gave them to these people.

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

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

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

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

10

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

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

All the way the cavalry and the convoys were followed by the enemy, and there were moments when it seemed inevitable that the strength of the horses would give out and that the retreating force would be surrounded. But as we know now, the enemy was exhausted also.

Their pursuit was a chase by blown horses and puffed men. They called a halt and breathed heavily, at the very time when a last gallop and a hard fight would have given them their prize--the flower of the British army.

On that last stage of the retreat we lost less men than any text-book of war would have given as a credible number in such conditions.

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

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

11

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

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

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

Among all these civilians were soldiers of many regiments and of two nations--Turcos and Zouaves, cha.s.seurs and infantry, regulars and Highland British. Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor among the crying babies and weary-eyed women. Many of them were drinking and drunk. They clinked gla.s.ses and pledged each other in French and English and broadest Scotch, with a "h.e.l.l to the Kaiser!"

and "a bas Guillaume!" A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed that he would never have left England for such a b.l.o.o.d.y game if he had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace. The French soldier greeted these sentiments with a "Bravo, mon vieux!" not understanding a word of them, and the drunkard swayed and fell across the marble-topped table, amid a crash of broken gla.s.s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12

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

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

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

"J'ai trois enfants, messieurs! Ayez un peu de pitie!" "Cre nom de Dieu, c'est le dernier train! Et j'ai peur pour les pet.i.ts. Nous sommes tous dans le meme cas, n'est-ce-pas?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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