The Soul of the War Part 35

"Enormously so. But it's a bit of a pull--going back to that-- beastliness. After one knows the meaning of it."

"It's because I know that I want to go back," said another man who had sat very quietly looking at the toe of one of his riding-boots. "I had a good time in town--it seemed too good to be true--but, after all, one has to finish one's job before one can sit around with an easy mind.

We've got to finish our job out there in the stinking trenches."

8

I suppose even now after all that has been written it is difficult for the imagination of "the man who stayed at home" to realize the life and conditions of the soldiers abroad. So many phrases which appeared day by day in the newspapers conveyed no more than a vague, uncertain meaning.

"The Front"--how did it look, that place which was drawn in a jagged black line across the map on the wall? "General Headquarters"--what sort of a place was that in which the Commander-in-Chief lived with his staff, directing the operations in the fighting lines? "An attack was made yesterday upon the enemy's position at-----. A line of trenches was carried by a.s.sault." So ran the officiai bulletin, but the wife of a soldier abroad could not fill in the picture, the father of a young Territorial could not get enough detail upon which his imagination might build. For all those at home, whose spirits came out to Flanders seeking to get into touch with young men who were fighting for honour's sake, it was difficult to form any kind of mental vision, giving a clear and true picture of this great adventure in "foreign parts."

They would have been surprised at the reality, it was to different from all their previous imaginings. General Headquarters, for instance, was a surprise to those who came to such a place for the first time. It was not, when I went there some months ago, a very long distance from the fighting lines in these days of long-range guns, but it was a place of strange quietude in which it was easy to forget the actuality of war-- until one was reminded by sullen far-off rumblings which made the windows tremble, and made men lift their heads a moment to say: "They are busy out there to-day." There were no great movements of troops in the streets. Most of the soldiers one saw were staff officers, who walked briskly from one building to another with no more than a word and a smile to any friend they met on the way. Sentries stood outside the doorways of big houses.

Here and there at the street comers was a military policeman, scrutinizing any new-comer in civilian clothes with watchful eyes.

Church bells tinkled for early morning Ma.s.s or Benediction. Through an open window looking out upon a broad courtyard the voices of school children came chanting their A B C in French, as though no war had taken away their fathers. There was an air of profound peace here.

At night, when I stood at an open window listening to the silence of the place it was hard, even though I knew, to think that here in this town was the Headquarters Staff of the greatest army England has ever sent abroad, and that the greatest war in history was being fought out only a few miles away. The raucous horn of a motor-car, the panting of a motor-cycle, the rumble of a convoy of ambulances, the shock of a solitary gun, came as the only reminders of the great horror away there through the darkness. A dispatch rider was coming back from a night ride on a machine which had side-slipped all the way from Ypres. An officer was motoring back to a divisional headquarters after a late interview with the chief... The work went on, though it was very quiet in General Headquarters.

But the brains of the Army were not asleep. Behind those doors, guarded by sentries, men in khaki uniforms, with just a touch of red about the collar, were bending over maps and doc.u.ments--studying the lines of German trenches as they had been sketched out by aviators flying above German shrapnel, writing out orders for ammunition to be sent in a hurry to a certain point on the fighting line where things were very "busy" in the afternoon, ordering the food- supplies wanted by a division of hungry men whose lorries are waiting at the rail-head for bread and meat and a new day's rations.

"Things are going very well," said one of the officers, with a glance at a piece of flimsy paper which had just come from the Signals Department across the street. But things would not have gone so well unless at General Headquarters every officer had done his duty to the last detail, whatever the fatigue of body or spirit. The place was quiet, because the work was done behind closed doors in these private houses of French and Flemish bourgeoisie whose family portraits hang upon the walls. Outside I could not see the spirit of war unless I searched for it.

It was after I had left "G.H.Q." that I saw something of the human side of war and all its ceaseless traffic. Yet even then, as I travelled nearer and nearer to the front, I was astounded at the silence, the peacefulness of the scenery about me, the absence of all tragic sights. That day, on the way to a place which was very close to the German lines, children were playing on the roadside, and old women in black gowns trudged down the long, straight high roads, with their endless sentinels of trees.

In a furrowed field a peasant was sowing the seed for an autumn harvesting, and I watched his swinging gestures from left to right which seem symbolical of all that peace means and of all nature's life and beauty. The seed is scattered and G.o.d does the rest, though men may kill each other and invent new ways of death...

But the roads were enc.u.mbered and the traffic of war was surging forward ceaselessly in a muddled, confused, aimless sort of way, as it seemed to me, before I knew the system and saw the working of the brain behind it all. A long train of carts without horses stood, shafts down, on the muddy side of the road. Little blue and red flags fluttered above them. A group of soldiers were lounging in their neighbourhood, waiting, it seems, for something to turn up. Perhaps that something was a distant train which came with a long trail of smoke across the distant marshlands.

At the railway crossing there was a great park of motor lorries. They, too, seemed to be waiting for new loads. Obviously this was one of the "railheads" about which I had a lecture that morning from a distinguished officer, who thinks in railheads and refilling stations and other details of transport upon which the armies in the field depend for their food and ammunition. Without that explanation all these roadside halts, all these stationary lorries and forage carts would have seemed like a temporary stagnation in the business of war, with nothing doing.

A thrill comes to every one when he sees bodies of British troops moving along the roads. He is glad when his motorcar gets held up by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a "Hullo, boys! How's it going? And who are you?" After all the thrill of the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the enthusiasm with which they sang Tipperary through the streets of their first port of call in France, they had settled down to the real business.

Some of them had been into the trenches for the first time a night or two before. "How did you like it?" Well, it wasn't amusing to them, it seems, but they "stuck it." They were ready to go again. That was the spirit of it all. They "stuck it," gamely, without grousing, without sw.a.n.king, without any other thought than suffering all the hards.h.i.+ps and all the thrills of war like men who know the gravity of the game, and the risks, and the duty to which they have pledged themselves.

I pa.s.sed thousands of these men on a long motor journey on my first day at the British front, and though I could not speak to very many of them I saw on all their faces the same hard, strong, dogged look of men who were being put through a great ordeal and who would not fail through any moral weakness. They were tired, some of them, after a long march, but they grinned back cheery answers to my greetings, and scrambled merrily for the few packets of cigarettes I tossed to them.

Thousands of these khaki-clad fellows lay along the roadsides looking in the distance as though great ma.s.ses of russet leaves had fallen from autumn trees. They were having a rest on their way up to the front, and their heads were upon each other's shoulders in a comradely way, while some lay face upwards to the sky with their hands folded behind their heads, in a brown study and careless of everything that pa.s.sed.

Away across marshy fields, intersected by pools and rivulets, I saw our men billeted in French and Flemish farmhouses, of the old post- and-plaster kind, like those in English villages.

They seemed thoroughly at home, and were chopping wood and drawing water and cooking stews, and arranging straw beds in the barns, and busying themselves with all the domestic side of life as quietly and cheerily as though they were on man?uvres in Devons.h.i.+re or Surrey, where war is only a game without death in the roar of a gun. Well fed and well clothed, hard as nails, in spite of all their hards.h.i.+ps, they gave me a sense of pride as I watched them, for the spirit of the old race was in them, and they would stick it through thick and thin.

I pa.s.sed that day through the sh.e.l.l-stricken town of. Ypres and wandered through the great tragedy of the Cloth Hall--that old splendour in stone which was now a gaunt and ghastly ruin. British soldiers were buying picture postcards at booths in the market-place, and none of them seemed to worry because at any moment another sh.e.l.l might come cras.h.i.+ng across the shattered roofs with a new message of destruction.

Yet on all this journey of mine in the war zone of the British front for at least 100 kilometres or so there was no thrill or shock of war itself. A little way off, on some parts of the road men were in the trenches facing the enemy only a few yards distant from their hiding-places.

The rumble of guns rolled sullenly now and then across the marshlands, and one knew intellectually, but not instinctively, that if one's motor-car took the wrong turning and travelled a mile or two heedlessly, sudden death would call a halt.

And that was the strangeness of it all--the strangeness that startled me as I drove back to the quietude of the General Headquarters, as darkness came down upon this low-lying countryside and put its cloak about the figures of British soldiers moving to their billets, and gave a ghostliness to the tall, tufted trees, which seemed to come striding towards my headlights.

In this siege warfare of the trenches there was a deadly stillness behind the front and a queer absence of war's tumult and turmoil. Yet all the time it was going on slowly, yard by yard, trench by trench, and somewhere along the front men were always fighting and dying.

"Gentlemen," said a staff officer that night, "there has been good work to-day. We have taken several lines of trenches, and the operation is proceeding very well."

We bent over his map, following the line drawn by his finger, listening to details of a grim bit of work, glad that five hundred German prisoners had been taken that day. As he spoke the window rattled, and we heard the boom of another gun... The war was going on, though it had seemed so quiet at the front.

9

For several months there was comparative quietude at the British front after the tremendous attacks upon our lines at Soissons and Venizel and Vic-sur-Aisne, and the still more b.l.o.o.d.y battles round Ypres in the autumn of the first year of war. Each side settled down for the winter campaign, and killing was done by continual artillery fire with only occasional bayonet charges between trench and trench.

That long period of dark wet days was the most tragic ordeal of our men, and a time when depression settled heavily upon their spirits, so that not all their courage could keep any flame of enthusiasm in their hearts for such fine words as honour and glory.

In "Plug Street" and other lines of trenches they stood in water with walls of oozy mud about them, until their legs rotted and became black with a false frostbite, until many of them were carried away with bronchitis and pneumonia, and until all of them, however many comforters they tied about their necks, or however many body-belts they used, were s.h.i.+vering, sodden scarecrows, plastered with slime.

They crawled with lice, these decent Englishmen from good clean homes, these dandy men who once upon a time had strolled down the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, immaculate, and fragrant as their lavender kid gloves. They were eaten alive by these vermin and suffered the intolerable agony of itch. Strange and terrible diseases attacked some of them, though the poisonous microbes were checked by vigilant men in laboratories behind the front before they could spread an epidemic. For the first time men without science heard the name of cerebro-spinal meningitis and shuddered at it. The war became a hopeless, dreary thing, without a thrill to it, except when men wading in water were smashed by sh.e.l.l-fire and floated about in a b.l.o.o.d.y mess which ran red through all a trench. That was a thrill of beastliness, but gave no fire to men's hearts. Pa.s.sion, if it had ever burnt in these British soldiers' hearts, had smouldered out into the white ash of patient misery. Certainly there was no pa.s.sion of hatred against the enemy, not far away there in the trenches. These Germans were enduring the same hards.h.i.+ps, and the same squalor.

There was only pity for them and a sense of comrades.h.i.+p, as of men forced by the cruel G.o.ds to be tortured by fate.

This sense of comrades.h.i.+p reached strange lengths at Christmas, and on other days. Truces were established and men who had been engaged in trying to kill each other came out of opposite trenches and fraternized. They took photographs of mixed groups of Germans and English, arm-in-arm. They exchanged cigarettes, and patted each other on the shoulder, and cursed the war. . . . The war had become the most tragic farce in the world. The frightful senselessness of it was apparent when the enemies of two nations fighting to the death stood in the grey mist together and liked each other. They did not want to kill each other, these Saxons of the same race and blood, so like each other in physical appearance, and with the same human qualities. They were both under the spell of high, distant Powers which had decreed this warfare, and had so enslaved them that like gladiators in the Roman amphitheatres they killed men so that they should not be put to death by their task-masters. The monstrous absurdity of war, this devil's jest, stood revealed nakedly by those little groups of men standing together in the mists of Flanders. ... It became so apparent that army orders had to be issued stopping such truces. They were issued but not always obeyed. For months after German and British soldiers in neighbouring trenches fixed up secret treaties by which they fired at fixed targets at stated periods to keep up appearances, and then strolled about in safety, sure of each other's loyalty.

From one trench a German officer signalled to one of our own lieutenants:

"I have six of your men in my trench. What shall I do with them?"

The lieutenant signalled back.

"I have two of yours. This is ridiculous."

The English officer spoke to the two Germans:

"Look here, you had better clear out. Otherwise I shall have to make you prisoners."

"We want to be prisoners," said the Germans, who spoke English with the accent of the Tottenham Court Road.

It appears that the lieutenant would not oblige them, and begged them to play the game.

So with occasional embarra.s.sments like this to break the deadly monotony of life, and to make men think about the mystery of human nature, coerced to ma.s.sacre by sovereign powers beyond their ken, the winter pa.s.sed, in one long wet agony, in one great bog of misery.

10

It was in March, when the roads had begun to dry up, that our troops resumed the offensive at several points of the line. I was at General Headquarters when the first news of the first day's attack at Neuve Chapelle was brought in by dispatch riders.

We crowded again round a table where a staff officer had spread out his map and showed us the general disposition of the troops engaged in the operation. The vague tremor of distant guns gave a grim significance to his words, and on our own journey that day we had seen many signs of organized activity bearing upon this attack.

But we were to see a more impressive demonstration of the day's success, the human counters which had been won by our side in this game of life and death. Nearly a thousand German prisoners had been taken, and were being brought down from the front by rail. If we liked we might have a talk with these men, and see the character of the enemy which lies hidden in the trenches opposite our lines. It was nearly ten o'clock at night when we motored to the railway junction through which they were pa.s.sing.

Were they glad to be out of the game, away from the shriek of sh.e.l.ls and out of the mud? I framed the question in German as I clambered on to the footboard at a part of the train where the trucks ended and where German officers had been given the luxury of first-cla.s.s carriages.