The Soul of the War Part 36

Two of them looked up with drowsy eyes, into which there came a look of surprise and then of displeasure as I spoke a few words to them. Opposite me was a fair young man, with soft blond hair and a silky moustache. He looked like a Saxon, but told me afterwards that he came from Cologne. Next to him was a typical young aristocrat of the Bavarian type, in the uniform of a Jaeger regiment In the same carriage were some other officers sleeping heavily. One of them, with a closely-cropped bullet head and the low-browed face of, a man who fights according to the philosophy of Bernhardi, without pity, sat up abruptly, swore a fierce word or two, and then fell back and snored again.

The two younger men answered some of my questions, sullenly at first, but afterwards with more friendliness, against which their pride struggled. But they had not much to say. They were tired. They had been taken by surprise. They would have time to learn English as prisoners of war. They had plenty of food and tobacco.

When the next batch of them arrived I was able to get into a closed truck, among the private soldiers. They were quite comfortable in there, and were more cheery than the officers in the other train. I was surprised by their cleanliness, by the good condition of their uniforms, and by their good health and spirits. The life of the trenches had not left its marks upon them, though mentally, perhaps, they had gone to the uttermost limit of endurance. Only one man fired up savagely when I said that they were lucky in being captured. "It is good to fight for the Fatherland," he said. The others made no secret of their satisfaction in being out of it all, and all of them described the attack on Neuve Chapelle as a h.e.l.lish thing which had caught them by surprise and swept their ranks.

I went back to my billet in General Headquarters wis.h.i.+ng that I had seen something of that affair which had netted all these men. It had been a "day out" for the British troops, and we had not yet heard of the blunders or the blood that had spoilt its success. It was hard to have seen nothing of it though so near the front. And then a promise of seeing something of the operations on the morrow came as a prospect for the next day. It would be good to see the real business again and to thrill once more to the awful music of the guns.

Along the road next day it was obvious that "things" were going to happen. As we pa.s.sed through towns in our motor-cars there were signs of increased activity. Troops were being moved up. Groups of them in goatskin coats, so that English Tommies looked like their Viking ancestors, halted for a spell by the side of their stacked arms, waiting for orders. Long lines of motor-lorries, with supplies to feed the men and guns, narrowed the highway for traffic. Officers approached our cars at every halt, saluted our staff officer, and asked anxious questions: "How are things going? Is there any news?"

In the open country we could see the battle front, the low-lying marshlands with windmills waving their arms on the far horizon, the ridges and woods in which British and German batteries were concealed, and the lines of trenches in which our men lay very close to their enemy. We left the cars and, slithering in sticky mud, made our way up a hillock on which one of these innumerable windmills stood distinct. We were among the men who were in the actual fighting lines and who went into the trenches turn and turn about, so that it became the normal routine of their lives.

In the early days of the war these regiments had suffered heavy losses, so that there were new drafts in them now, but there were lads here who had fought at Mons and Charleroi and had seen their comrades fall in heaps round about Le Cateau. They told their tales, with old memories of terror, which had not made cowards of them.

Their chief interest to-day was centred in a football match which was to take place about the same time as the "other business." It was not their day out in the firing line. We left them putting on their football boots and hurling chaff at each other in the dim light. Out of the way of the flying sh.e.l.ls they forgot all about the horror of war for a little while.

Forcing our way through the brushwood on the slopes, we reached the crest of the hillock. Near by stood two generals and several staff officers--men whose names have been written many times in the Chief's dispatches and will be written for all time in the history of this war. They were at their post of observation, to watch the progress of an attack which was timed to begin shortly.

Presently two other figures came up the hillside. One of them arrested my attention. Who was that young officer, a mere boy, who came toiling up through the slime and mud, and who at the crest halted and gave a quick salute to the two generals? He turned, and I saw that it was Edward, Prince of Wales, and through the afternoon, when I glanced at him now and again as he studied his map and gazed across the fields, I thought of another Edward, Prince of Wales, who six centuries ago stood in another field of France. Out of the past came old ghosts of history, who once as English princes and knights and men-at-arms fought at St. Omer, and Ypres, Bailleul, and Bethune, and all that very ground which lay before me now...

More than an hour before the time at which the attack was to be concentrated upon the enemy's position--a line of trenches on a ridge crowned by a thin wood immediately opposite my observation point-- our guns began to speak from many different places. It was a demonstration to puzzle the enemy as to the objective of our attack.

The flashes came like the flicking of heliographs signalling messages by a Morse code of death. After each flash came the thunderous report and a rus.h.i.+ng noise as though great birds were in flight behind the veil of mist which lay on the hillsides. Puffs of woolly-white smoke showed where the shrapnel was bursting, and these were wisped away into the heavy clouds. Now and again one heard the high singing note of sh.e.l.ls travelling towards us--the German answer to this demonstration--and one saw the puff b.a.l.l.s resting on the hill-spur opposite our observation post.

Presently the fire became less scattered, and as the appointed hour approached our batteries aimed only in one direction. It was the ridge to the left of the hill where lines of German trenches had been dug below the fringe of wood. That place must have been a h.e.l.l for half an hour or more. Through the mist and the drowsy smoke I could see the flashes of the bursting sh.e.l.ls like twinkling stars. Those glittering jewels sparkled in constellations, six or more at a time, and there was never a minute without the glint of them. It was not hard to imagine the terror of men crouching in pits below that storm of fire, smas.h.i.+ng down upon their trenches, cutting up their barbed wire entanglements, killing any human life that could not hide below the ground. The din of guns was unceasing, and made a great symphony of staccato notes on a thunderous instrument. I could distinguish the sharp crack of the field batteries and the deeper boom of the heavier guns. When one of these spoke there was a trembling of earth, and through the sky a great sh.e.l.l hurtled, with such a rush of air that it seemed like an express train das.h.i.+ng through an endless tunnel. The bursts were, like volcanoes above the German lines, vomiting upwards a vast column of black smoke which stood solid on the sky- line for a minute or more before being torn down by the wind.

Something within me seemed to quake at these engines of destruction, these ma.s.ses of explosive power sent for the killing of men, invisible there on the ridge, but cowering in fear or lying in their blood.

How queer are the battlefields of life and the minds of men! Down below me, in a field, men were playing a game of football while all this business of death was going on. Above and between the guns I heard their shouts and cheers, and the shrill whistle for "half-time,"

though there was no half-time in the other game so close to them.

Nature, too, was playing, indifferent to this b.l.o.o.d.y business. All the time, while the batteries were at work, birds were singing the spring song in ecstatic lyrics of joyfulness, and they went on far flights across a pale blue lake which was surrounded by black mountains of cloud.

Another bird came out, but with a man above its wings. It was an English aeroplane on a journey of reconnaissance above the enemy's lines. I heard the loud hum of its engine, and watched how its white wings were made diaphanous by the glint of sun until it pa.s.sed away into the cloud wrack.

It was invisible to us now, but not to the enemy. They had sighted it, and we saw their shrapnel searching the sky for it. The airman continued his journey on a wide circling flight, and we saw him coming back unscathed.

For a little while our fire slackened. It was time for our infantry attack upon the line of trenches which had sustained such a storm of sh.e.l.ls.

Owing to the mist and the smoke we could not see our men leave the trenches, nor any sign of that great test of courage when each man depends upon the strength of his own heart, and has no cover behind which to hide any fear that may possess him. What were those cheers? Still the football players, or our soldiers scaling the ridge?

Was it only a freak of imagination that made us see ma.s.ses of dark figures moving over that field in the mist? The guns were firing again continuously, at longer range, to check the enemy's supports.

So the battle went on till darkness began to creep up our hillside, when we made our way down to the valley road and took tea with some of the officers in a house quite close to the zone of fire. Among them were the three remaining officers of a famous regiment--all that were left out of those who had come to France in August of 1914.

They were quite cheerful in their manner and made a joke or two when there was any chance. One of them was cutting up a birthday cake, highly emblazoned with sugar-plums and sent out by a pretty sister. It was quite a pleasant little party in the battle zone, and there was a discussion on the subject of temperance, led by an officer who was very keen on total prohibition. The guns did not seem to matter very much as one sat in that cosy room among those cheery men. It was only when we were leaving that one of them took a friend of mine on one side, and said in a kind of whisper, "This war! ... It's pretty rough, isn't it? I'm one of the last men out of the original lot. And, of course, I'm sure to get 'pipped' in a week or two. On the law of averages, you know."

A few days later I saw the wounded of Neuve Chapelle, which was a victory bought at a fearful price. They were streaming down to Boulogne, and the hospital s.h.i.+ps were crowded with them. Among them were thousands of Indians who had taken a big share in that battle.

With an Oriental endurance of pain, beyond the courage of most Western men, these men made no moan. The Sikhs, with their finely chiselled features and dreamy inscrutable eyes--many of them bearded men who have served for twenty years in the Indian army-- stared about them in an endless reverie as though puzzling out the meaning of this war among peoples who do not speak their tongue, for some cause they do not understand, and in a climate which makes the whole world different to them. What a strange, bewildering mystery it must have seemed to these men, who had come here in loyalty to the great Raj in whom they had faith and for whom they were glad to die. They seemed to be searching out the soul of the war, to find its secret.

The weeks have pa.s.sed since then, and the war goes on, and the wounded still stream back, and white men as well as dark men ask G.o.d to tell them what all this means; and can find no answer to the problem of the horror which has engulfed humanity and made a jungle of Europe in which we fight like beasts.

Conclusion

In this book I have set down simply the scenes and character of this war as they have come before my own eyes and as I have studied them for nearly a year of history. If there is any purpose in what I have written beyond mere record it is to reveal the soul of war so nakedly that it cannot be glossed over by the glamour of false sentiment and false heroics. More pa.s.sionate than any other emotion that has stirred me through life, is my conviction that any man who has seen these things must, if he has any gift of expression, and any human pity, dedicate his brain and heart to the sacred duty of preventing another war like this. A man with a pen in his hand, however feeble it may be, must use it to tell the truth about the monstrous horror, to etch its images of cruelty into the brains of his readers, and to tear down the veils by which the leaders of the peoples try to conceal its obscenities. The conscience of Europe must not be lulled to sleep again by the narcotics of old phrases about "the enn.o.bling influence of war" and its "purging fires." It must be shocked by the stark reality of this crime in which all humanity is involved, so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism raises its head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life's beauty.

The Germans have revealed the meaning of war, the devilish soul of it, in a full and complete way, with a most ruthless logic. The chiefs of their great soldier caste have been more honest than ourselves in the business, with the honesty of men who, knowing that war is murder, have adopted the methods of murderers, whole-heartedly, with all the force of their intellect and genius, not weakened by any fear of public opinion, by any p.r.i.c.k of conscience, or by any sentiment of compa.s.sion. Their logic seems to me flawless, though it is diabolical.

If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with machinery which makes a wholesale ma.s.sacre of life, tearing up trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make distinctions between one way of death and another, or to a.n.a.lyse degrees of horror. Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of sh.e.l.ls, or if worse then the more effective.

The lives of non-combatants are not to be respected any more than the lives of men in uniform, for modern war is not a military game between small bodies of professional soldiers, as in the old days, but a struggle to the death between one people and another. The blockading of the enemy's ports, the slow starvation of a besieged city, which is allowed by military purists of the old and sentimental school does not spare the non-combatant. The woman with a baby at her breast is drained of her mother's milk. There is a ma.s.sacre of innocents by poisonous microbes. So why be illogical and pander to false sentiment? Why not sink the Lusitania and set the waves afloat with the little corpses of children and the beauty of dead women? It is but one more incident of horror in a war which is all horror. Its logic is unanswerable in the Euclid of h.e.l.l. ... It is war, and when millions of men set out to kill each other, to strangle the enemy's industries, to ruin, starve, and annihilate him, so that the women may not breed more children, and so that the children shall perish of wide-spread epidemics, then a few laws of chivalry, a little pity here and there, the recognition of a Hague Treaty, are but foolishness, and the weak jugglings of men who try to soothe their conscience with a few drugged tabloids. That at least is the philosophy of the German war lords, and granted the premises that war may be waged by one people against another it seems to me sound and flawless in its abomination.

Germany thrust this thing upon Europe deliberately and after careful preparation. Upon the heads of her diplomats and princes are the blood and the guilt of it, and they stand before the world as murderers with red hands and bloodshot eyes, and souls as black as h.e.l.l. In this war of self-defence we are justified and need no special pleading to proclaim our cause. We did not want this war, and we went to the extreme limit of patience to avoid it. But if there is to be any hope for humanity we must go deeper into the truth than the mere a.n.a.lysis of White Papers and Yellow Papers with diplomatic correspondence.

We must ask ourselves whether in England, France, or Russia, "the defenders of modern civilization," there was any sincerity of belief in the ideals and faith for which civilization stands. Did the leaders of modern thought do anything with their genius or their knowledge to break down old frontiers of hatred, to enlighten the ignorance between one nation and another, or to put such power into the hands of peoples that they might have strength to resist the tyranny of military castes and of military ideals? Have not our politicians and our teachers, with few exceptions, used all their influence to foster dark old superst.i.tions which lurk in such good words as those of patriotism and honour, to keep the people blind so that they might not see the s.h.i.+ning light of liberty, and to adulterate the doctrine of Christ which most of them profess, by a gospel of international jealousy based upon trade interests and commercial greed?

The military castes have been supported in Europe by putting the spell of old traditions upon simple peoples. The Christian Churches have bolstered them up and failed utterly to preach the words of peace because in the heart of the priest there is the patriot, so that every Christian nation claims G.o.d as a national a.s.set leading its battalions. There will be no hope of peace until the peoples of the world recognize their brotherhood and refuse to be led to the shambles for mutual ma.s.sacre. If there is no hope of that, if, as some students of life hold, war will always happen because life itself is a continual warfare, and one man lives only at the expense of another, then there is no hope, and all the ideals of men striving for the progress of mankind, all the dreams of poets and the sacrifice of scientists, are utterly vain and foolish, and pious men should pray G.o.d to touch this planet with a star and end the folly of it all.