The Soul of the War Part 14

The field was strewn with great jagged pieces of metal, and to the old Alsatian it seemed a huge joke that the Germans had had to leave behind so much "food for the guns." After all it was not a bad joke as far as we are concerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter VI Invasion

1

Before this year has ended England will know something of what war means. In English country towns there will be many familiar faces missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts.

Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will understand the misery of war and its brutalities. But in spite of all our national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and Belgium. They will not know the meaning of invasion.

It is a great luck to be born in an island. The girdle of sea is a safeguard which gives a sense of security to the whole psychology of a race, and for that reason there is a gulf of ignorance about the terrors of war which, happily, may never be bridged by the collective imagination of English and Scottish people. A continental nation, divided by a few hills, a river, or a line on the map, from another race with other instincts and ideals, is haunted throughout its history by a sense of peril. Even in times of profound peace, the thought is there, in the background, with a continual menace. It shapes the character of a people and enters into all their political and educational progress.

To keep on friendly terms with a powerful next-door neighbour, or to build defensive works high enough to make hostility a safe game, is the lifework of its statesmen and its politicians. Great crises and agitations shake the nation convulsively when cowardice or treachery or laziness has allowed that boundary wall to crumble or has made a breach in it. The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against them.

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine such a case in England. A man leaves his office in London and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are waiting supper for him. At Weybridge the train comes to a dead-halt.

The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back to say that the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy. It is reported that Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded. Families flying from Guildford describe the bombardment of the town. A part of it is in flames. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been killed. Most of the others have fled.

The man who was going home to supper wants to set out to find his wife and children. His friends hold him back in spite of his struggles.

"You are mad!" they shout. "Mad!"... He has no supper at home that night. His supper and his home have been burnt to cinders. For weeks he advertises in the papers for the whereabouts of his wife and babes. n.o.body can tell him. He does not know whether they are dead or alive.

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

3

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

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

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

In a week or two, the enemy was beaten back from some of these places, and then the most hardy of the townsfolk returned "home." I saw some of them going home-at Senlis, at Sermaize, and other places. They came back doubtful of what they would find, but soon they stood stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were once their house. They did not weep, but just stared in a dazed way.

They picked over the ashes and found burnt bits of former treasures-- the baby's cot, the old grandfather's chair, the parlour clock. Or they went into houses still standing neat and perfect, and found that some insanity of rage had smashed up all their household, as though baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. The chest of drawers had been looted or its contents tumbled out upon the floor.

Broken gla.s.ses, bottles, jugs, were mixed up with a shattered violin, the medals of a grandfather who fought in '70, the children's broken toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I saw many of such houses after the coming and going of the German soldiers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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