March 24
After long days of tiring adventure in the wake of the German rear-guards, following through places only just evacuated, and tramping through the great ruin they have left behind them, I have tried to give some idea of the tragic drama of it all, the uncanny quietude of the abandoned country, the frightful wreckage of towns and villages destroyed, not by shell-fire, but by picks and axes and firebrands, the deep mine-craters blown under roads, the broken bridges across the Somme, the crowds of starved civilians surrounding our patrols in market squares where they had been herded while their homes were in flames around them, the little bodies of British troops advancing through barbed-wire entanglements into fortress positions like Bapaume and Péronne, and our cavalry patrols feeling their way forward into unknown country where the enemy's rear-guards are in hiding.
That, in a few lines, is the historical picture of this strange new phase of warfare in which we have been pushing forward during the past two weeks. But through it all, to me, an onlooker of these things, there has been one special theme of interest. It is the revelation of the German way of life behind his lines—these abundant lines—his military methods of defence and observation and organization, and the domestic arrangements by which he has tried to make himself comfortable in the field of war. Along every step of the way by which he has retreated there are relics which show us exactly how our enemies lived and fought when they were hidden from us across No Man's Land, and their philosophy of life in war. All that is worth a little study.
Everywhere—outside Bapaume and Péronne and Chaulnes, and all those deserted places near the front lines—one ugly thing stares one in the face: German barbed wire. It is heavier, stronger stuff than ours or the French, with great cross-pieces of iron, and he has used amazing quantities of it in deep wide belts in three lines of defence before his trench systems, and in all sorts of odd places, by bridges and roads and villages evenfar behind the trenches, to prevent any sudden rush of hostile infantry or to tear our cavalry to pieces should we break his lines and get through. His trenches were deeply dug, and along the whole line from which he has now retreated they are provided with great concreted and timbered dug-outs leading into an elaborate system of tunnelled galleries perfectly proof from shell-fire, and similar to those which I have described often enough in the Somme battlefields. As a builder of dug-outs the German soldier has no equal. But in addition to these trench systems he made behind his lines a series of strong posts cunningly concealed and commanding a wide field of fire with dominating observation over our side of the country.
I found such a place quite by accident yesterday. My car broke down by a little wood near Roye looking across to Damery and Bouchoir, and the woody, wired fields which till a week ago were No Man's Land. When I strolled into the wood I suddenly looked down an enormous sand-pit covering an acre or so, and saw that it was a concealed fortress of extraordinary strength and organization—an underground citadel for a garrison of at least 3000 men perfectly screened by the wood above. Into the sand-banks on every side of the vast pit were built hundreds of chambers leading deeper down into a maze of tunnels which ran right round the central arena. Before leaving the enemy had busied himself with an elaborate packing up, and had taken away most of his movable property, but the "fixtures" still remained, and a litter of mattresses stuffed with shavings, empty wine-bottles, candles which had burnt down on the last night in the old home, old socks and old boots and old clothes no longer good for active service, and just the usual relics which people leave behind when they change houses.
The officers' quarters were all timbered and panelled and papered, with glass windows and fancy curtains. They were furnished with bedsteads looted from French houses, and with mirrors, cabinets, washhand-stands, marble-top tables, and easy chairs. The cross-beams of the roofs were painted with allegorical devices and with legends such as "Gott mitt uns," "Furchtlos und treu," "In Treue fest."
Each room had an enamelled or iron stove, so that the place must have been snug and warm, and I noticed in several of them empty cages from which singing birds had flown when German officers opened the doors before their own flitting.
The men's quarters were hardly less comfortable, and the whole place was organized as a self-contained garrison, with carpenters' shops and blacksmiths' sheds, and a quartermaster's stores still crowded with bombs and aerial torpedoes—thousands of them, which the enemy had left behind in his hurry—and kitchens with great stoves and boilers, and a Red Cross establishment for first aid, and concrete bath-houses with shower-baths and cigar-racks for officers, who smoke before and after bathing. Outside the artillery officers' headquarters was a board painted in white letters, with the following couplet:
Schnell und gut ist unser SchussDeutscher Artilleristen Gruss.(Quick and good is our shootingOf the German gunners' greeting.)
Shell-craters in the open arena showed the French gunners had returned the greeting, and that the garrison of this citadel had done well to arrange their life mainly as a subterranean existence. But at times when the French guns were quiet and when the French sun was shining they had built alfresco corners with garden seats and tables, round which enormous stacks of wine-bottles were littered, showing, as I have seen in all these abandoned places, the enormous quantity of drink consumed by German officers in their lighter moments.
This citadel in the wood is only one out of similar strong points all along the lines now abandoned by the enemy. Péronne, with Mont-St.-Quentin on its flank, and with the Somme winding around it, and with forests of barbed wire in the marshes below it, could be called impregnable if any place may defy great armies. It was wonderfully fortified with great industry and great skill for over two years, and walking into these places now, marvelling at their strength, I can only ask one question, which certainly the enemy will find it hard to answer. Why has he abandoned such formidable strongholds? It seems to me that there is only one answer. It is because they had to go and not because they wanted to go. It was because they have no longer the strength to hold their old line against the growing gun-power and the growing man-power of the British Armies, and have been compelled to attempt a new strategy which will save their reserves and shorten their line.
Behind the lines the German officers and men lived comfortably in French billets, and organized amusements for battalions in rest. At Bapaume they had a little theatre with painted scenery. Two of the wings were among the few things left in the rubbish-heaps of that poor destroyed town, burnt and sacked by the Germans before they left, and when I went in there with our troops some Australian soldiers propped them up against the walls of a gutted house and inscribed upon them in white chalk the name "Maison de la Co-ee," inviting their comrades to walk up and see the finest show on earth. In Nesle the Germans turned the Café de Commerce into their casino, and played military bands, whose music did not cheer the hearts of wan women whose children were starving.
Strange fellows! Who knows what to make of them? The French people just liberated from their rule, which was a reign of terror in the severity of its official regulations, contradict themselves in expressing their white-hot hatred of the German character and their liking for the individual soldiers who were quartered on them.
"They were kind to the children ... but they burnt our houses."—"Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away.... But he helped to smash up the neighbours' furniture with an axe."—"The lieutenant was a good fellow ... but he carried out the orders of destruction."
"They were kind to the children ... but they burnt our houses."—"Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away.... But he helped to smash up the neighbours' furniture with an axe."—"The lieutenant was a good fellow ... but he carried out the orders of destruction."
A woman told me, with a quivering rage in her voice, that a German officer rode his horse into her room one day. Another woman showed me the cut down her hand and arm which she had received from a German soldier who tried to force his way into her house at night. Other stories have been told me by women white with passion.... Yet it is clear that, on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and all that was in them.
March25
In the village of Voyennes, not far from Ham, and one of the few hamlets not utterly destroyed, because the people of the district were herded here while their own houses were being burnt, I went into the ruins of the church. It was easy to see how the flames had licked about its old stones, scorching them red, and how the high oak roof had come blazing down before the walls and pillars had given way. Everything had been licked down by flame except one figure on an encalcined fragment of wall. Only one hand of the Christ there had been burned, and the body hanging on the Cross was unscathed, like so many of those Calvaries which I have seen in shell-fired places.
But this place had not been touched by shell-fire, for it had been far beyond the range of French or British guns; it had been destroyed wilfully. The village around had been spared because of the large number of people driven into it from the neighbouring countryside, and when I called upon the priest who lives opposite the ruin of the church, where he served God and the people of his little parish, I heard the story of its burning.
It was a queer thing to me to sit to-day in that room of the French presbytery talking to the old Curé. Just a week before, on Sunday, at the very hour of my visit, which was at midday, that old church outside the window had become a blazing torch, and this priest, who loved it, had wept tears as hot as its flames, and in his heart was the fire of a great agony. He sat before me, a tall old man of the aristocratic type, with a finely chiselled face, but thin and gaunt, and as sallow as though he had been raised from the dead. If I could put down his words as he spoke them to me with passion in his clear, vivid French, with gestures of those transparent hands which gave a deeper meaning to his words, it would be a great story, revealing the agony of the French people behind the German lines. For the story of this village of Voyennes is just that of all the villages on the enemy's side of the barbed wire.
Here in a few little streets about an old church were thebodily suffering, the spiritual torture, the patient courage, the fight against despair, the brooding but hidden fears, which have been the life over a great tract of France since August 1914. "For a year," said M. le Curé Caron, "my people here have had not a morsel of meat and not a drop of wine, and only bad water in which the Germans put their filth. They gave us bread which was disgusting, and bad haricots and potatoes, and potatoes and haricots, and not enough even, so that the children became wan and the women weak. The American people sent us some food-stuffs, but the Germans took the best of them, and in any case we were always hungry. But those things do not matter, those physical things. It was the suffering of the spirit that mattered, and, monsieur, we suffered mentally so much that it almost destroyed our intelligence, it almost made us silly, so that even now we can hardly think or reason, for you will understand what it meant to us French people. We were slaves after the Germans came in and settled down upon us, and said, 'We are at home; all here is ours.' They ordered our men to work, and punished them with prison for any slight fault. They were the masters of our women, they put our young girls among their soldiers, they set themselves out deliberately at first to crush our spirit, to beat us by terror, to subdue us to their will by an iron rule. They failed, and they were astonished. 'We cannot understand you people,' they said; 'you are so proud, your women are so proud.' And that was true, sir. Some women, not worthy of the name of French women, were weak—it was inevitable, alas!—but for the most part they raised their heads and said, 'We are French, we will never give in to you, not after one year, nor two years, nor three years, nor four years.'
"The Germans asked constantly, 'When do you think the war will end?' We answered, 'Perhaps in five years, but in the end we will smash you,' and this made them very angry, so our people went about with their heads up, scornful, refusing to complain against any severity or any hardship."Secretly among ourselves it was different. We could get no news for months except lies. We knew nothing of what was happening. Starvation crept closer upon us. We were surrounded by the fires of hell. As you see, we are in the outer section of the great Somme battle line, and very close to it.For fifty hours at a time the roar of guns swept round us week after week, and month after month, and the sky blazed around us. We were afraid of the temper of the German officers after the defeat on the Marne, and after the battles of the Somme Germany was like a wounded tiger, fierce, desperate, cruel. Secretly, though our people kept brave faces, they feared what would happen if the Germans were forced to retreat. At last that happened, and after all we had endured the days of terror were hard to bear. From all the villages around, one by one, people were driven out, young women and men as old as sixty were taken away to work for Germany, and an orderly destruction began, which ended with the cutting down of our orchards and ruin everywhere. The Commandant before that was a good man and a gentleman, afraid of God and his conscience. He said, 'I do not approve of these things. The world will have a right to call us barbarians.' He asked for forgiveness because he had to obey orders, and I gave it him. An order came to take away all the bells of the churches and all the metalwork. I had already put my church bells in a loft, and I showed them to him, and said, 'There they are.' He was very sorry. This man was the only good German officer I have met, and it was because he had been fifteen years in America and had married an American wife and escaped from the spell of his country's philosophy. Then he went away. Last Sunday, a week ago, at this very hour when the people were all in their houses under strict orders, and already the country was on fire with burning villages, a group of soldiers came outside there with cans of petroleum, which they put into the church. Then they set fire to it, and watched my church burn in a great bonfire. At this very hour a week ago I watched it burn.... That night the Germans went away through Voyennes, and early in the morning, up in my attic, looking through a pair of glasses I saw four horsemen ride in. They were English soldiers, and our people rushed out to them. Soon afterwards came some Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the Colonel gave me the news of the outer world to which we now belong after our years of isolation and misery. Our agony had ended.... The Germans know they were beaten, monsieur; a Commandant of Ham said, 'We are lost.' After the battles of the Somme the men groaned and wept when they were sent off to the Front. 'God,' they cried, 'the horror of the French and English gun-fire; OChrist, save us!' During the battles of the Somme the wounded poured back, a thousand or more a day, and Ham was one great hospital of bleeding flesh. The German soldiers have bad food and not enough of it, and their people are starving as we starved. The German officers behaved to their men with their usual brutality. I have seen them beat the soldiers about the head while those men stood at attention, not daring to say a word, but as soon as the officers are out of the way, the men say, 'We will cut those fellows' throats after the war. We have been deceived! After the war we will make them pay.'"
"The Germans asked constantly, 'When do you think the war will end?' We answered, 'Perhaps in five years, but in the end we will smash you,' and this made them very angry, so our people went about with their heads up, scornful, refusing to complain against any severity or any hardship.
"Secretly among ourselves it was different. We could get no news for months except lies. We knew nothing of what was happening. Starvation crept closer upon us. We were surrounded by the fires of hell. As you see, we are in the outer section of the great Somme battle line, and very close to it.For fifty hours at a time the roar of guns swept round us week after week, and month after month, and the sky blazed around us. We were afraid of the temper of the German officers after the defeat on the Marne, and after the battles of the Somme Germany was like a wounded tiger, fierce, desperate, cruel. Secretly, though our people kept brave faces, they feared what would happen if the Germans were forced to retreat. At last that happened, and after all we had endured the days of terror were hard to bear. From all the villages around, one by one, people were driven out, young women and men as old as sixty were taken away to work for Germany, and an orderly destruction began, which ended with the cutting down of our orchards and ruin everywhere. The Commandant before that was a good man and a gentleman, afraid of God and his conscience. He said, 'I do not approve of these things. The world will have a right to call us barbarians.' He asked for forgiveness because he had to obey orders, and I gave it him. An order came to take away all the bells of the churches and all the metalwork. I had already put my church bells in a loft, and I showed them to him, and said, 'There they are.' He was very sorry. This man was the only good German officer I have met, and it was because he had been fifteen years in America and had married an American wife and escaped from the spell of his country's philosophy. Then he went away. Last Sunday, a week ago, at this very hour when the people were all in their houses under strict orders, and already the country was on fire with burning villages, a group of soldiers came outside there with cans of petroleum, which they put into the church. Then they set fire to it, and watched my church burn in a great bonfire. At this very hour a week ago I watched it burn.... That night the Germans went away through Voyennes, and early in the morning, up in my attic, looking through a pair of glasses I saw four horsemen ride in. They were English soldiers, and our people rushed out to them. Soon afterwards came some Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the Colonel gave me the news of the outer world to which we now belong after our years of isolation and misery. Our agony had ended.... The Germans know they were beaten, monsieur; a Commandant of Ham said, 'We are lost.' After the battles of the Somme the men groaned and wept when they were sent off to the Front. 'God,' they cried, 'the horror of the French and English gun-fire; OChrist, save us!' During the battles of the Somme the wounded poured back, a thousand or more a day, and Ham was one great hospital of bleeding flesh. The German soldiers have bad food and not enough of it, and their people are starving as we starved. The German officers behaved to their men with their usual brutality. I have seen them beat the soldiers about the head while those men stood at attention, not daring to say a word, but as soon as the officers are out of the way, the men say, 'We will cut those fellows' throats after the war. We have been deceived! After the war we will make them pay.'"
So the Curé talked to me, and I have only given a few of his words, but what I have given is enough.
March28
Day by day our soldiers push farther forward across the country which the Germans have laid waste, so that even when peace comes there will be no dwelling-places where there were once fine châteaux of France, and thriving little towns and hamlets clustering about old farmsteads, and great barns; nor any orchards, where for miles there was white blossom in the Aprils of many centuries, and ruddy fruit in all the autumns of the past.
These men of ours take all this desolation in a matter-of-fact way, as they take everything in this war, and pass almost without thought scenes more than usually fantastic in piled ruins, and it is only by some such phrase or two as "Did you ever see the like?" or "They've made a pretty mess of that!" that they express their astonishment in this wide belt of death which the enemy has left along his tracks. Secretly I think some of them are stirred with a sense of the sinister drama of it all, and are a little staggered by a ruthlessness of war beyond even their own earlier experience, which covers the battle of the Somme. All this is something new, something which seems unnecessary, something more devilish, and our men go poking about among the burnt houses and into the German underground defences searching among the rubbish and examiningthe relics of the old life there, as though to discover the secret of the men who have gone away, the secret of "Old Fritz" their enemy.
Sometimes they find messages written to them by the enemy in good English, but with dark meanings. In one German dug-out the other day an officer of ours found a note scribbled on the table.
"We are going away, Tommy dear, and leave some empty bottles of Rhein wine. It is the best wine in the world. Take care it is not the best for you.""When are they coming?" was another note. "Enlist at once, Tommy my boy."
"We are going away, Tommy dear, and leave some empty bottles of Rhein wine. It is the best wine in the world. Take care it is not the best for you."
"When are they coming?" was another note. "Enlist at once, Tommy my boy."
But those things do not explain. It is difficult to find any clue to the character of these German soldiers, who have left behind them proofs of wonderful labour and skill, and proofs of great sentiment and religious piety, and proofs of an ordered cruelty worse than anything seen in France since barbarous days. How can one explain?
Yesterday I went to a village called Liancourt. There is a big château there. Even now at a little distance it seems a place of old romance, with a strong, round tower and high peaked roofs, and great wings of dark old brick. In such a place Henri IV lived. It was centuries old when the Revolution made its heraldic shields meaningless, but until a year or two ago its walls were still hung with tapestries, and its halls were filled with Empire furniture, and its great vaulted cellars with wine. When the Germans came they made it a hospital for their wounded—their Red Cross is still painted on one of the sloping roofs—and though it was far behind their lines, surrounded it with barbed wire which is now red with rust, and built enormous dug-outs in its grounds in case French guns should ever come near. When the Germans went a few days ago they left but an empty shell. They stripped the walls of panelling and tapestry, they took all the clocks and pictures and furniture and carpets, and I wandered yesterday through scores of rooms empty of everything so that my footsteps echoed in them. The Château of Liancourt had been looted from attic to cellar. But quite close to the château the Germans have left the bodies of many of their soldiers, as all over this country, byroadsides and in fields, there are the graves of German dead. Here there was one of their cemeteries, strongly walled with heavy blocks of stone, each grave with its big wooden headpiece, with a stone chapel built for the burial service, and with a "Denkmal," or monument, in the centre of all these dead. It was a memorial put up by Hessian troops in July 1915 to the honour of men taken on the field of honour.
In this graveyard one sees the deep respect paid by the Germans to the dead—French dead as well as German dead.... But just a hundred yards away is another graveyard. It is the cemetery of the little church in the grounds of the château, and is full of vaults and tombs where lay the dust of French citizens, men, women, and children, who died before the horror of this war.
The vaults had been opened by pickaxes. The tombstones were split across and graves exposed. Into these little houses of the dead—a young girl had lain in one of them—rubbish had been flung. From one vault the coffin had been taken away.... The church had been a little gem, with a tall, pointed spire. Not by shell-fire, but by an explosive charge placed there the day before the Germans went away the spire had been flung down and one end of the church blown clean away. The face of its clock lay upon the rubbish-heap. The sanctuary had been opened and the reliquaries smashed. The statues of the saints had been overturned, and the vestments of the priest trampled and torn.
I went into the village of Crémery not far away. Here also the graves had been opened in the churchyard, and in the church the relics of saints had been looted—a queer kind of loot for German homes—and in the sacristy fine old books of prayer and music lay tattered on the floor.
I went again yesterday to the great area of destroyed villages which the enemy left behind him on his retreat to St.-Quentin, and from Holnon Wood, which our cavalry were the first to enter a few weeks ago, looked across the open country between our outposts and that old city whose cathedral rises as a grey mass above the last ridge, so near and so clear when the sunlight falls upon it that our men can see the tracery of the windows. It still stands unbroken and beautiful, though houses have been destroyed around it to clear the enemy's fieldof fire. German officers use its towers as observation-posts, and can see every movement of our men in the fields below.
"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young officer, smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall in a heap of ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off-chance of hitting some one, and you never can tell where they are likely to drop."
"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young officer, smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall in a heap of ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off-chance of hitting some one, and you never can tell where they are likely to drop."
Some of them came whirring across to the Holnon Wood and down into the village of Francilly as I stood looking across to Savy Wood, but not close enough to hurt any one. It is the queerest thing to be in this part of our Front. Go a little too far down a road, mistake one village for another—and it is quite easy, for they all look alike in ruin—and if you are an absent-minded man you can get into the enemy's lines without realizing your danger. Yesterday only occasional shell-bursts and short spasms of machine-gun fire from the edge of Savy Wood came to prove that here masses of men are watching out to kill each other. Pigeons cooed in the woods. The ground at my feet was spangled with anemones, and the sunlight chased shadows across the fields of spring below the city, where soon the streets may be noisy with battle. Our men, living amidst ruin this side of St.-Quentin, have settled down to this life of open warfare as though they had known nothing else. Whether the tragedy of it all sinks into them I do not know, but they whistle music-hall tunes in the vast rubbish-heaps which were once old châteaux of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient crypts among the coffins of French aristocrats who died before, or just a little after, the French Revolution, and find shelter from wind and rain in poor little sacristies filled with statues of saints adjoining churches wrecked by explosive charges before the German soldiers went their way.
One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all this countryside, as when yesterday I came across a Highlander playing his pipes in a wild and merry way on an avalanche of old red bricks which once formed part of the mansion of Caulaincourt, with many terraces lined with white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and mutilated among the great rubbish-heaps.
By the roadside on my way I saw some English soldiers resting, and close to them was a marble tablet stuck up in aheap of earth. I read the words carved on the stone, and it told me that here was the heart of Anne-Joséphine Barandier, Marquise de Caulaincourt, who died in Paris on January 17, 1830.
Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In a vault near by all the tablets of her family had been smashed, and the coffins laid bare, but there was no little niche to show where the lady's heart had been.
Outside in the churchyard there was a great tomb to the memory of the French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next to them the graves of German soldiers killed in this war, and a wooden cross to Second Lieutenant Nixon, of the Royal Flying Corps, killed here behind the German lines on July 19, 1915.
March 29
One scene on the roadside of war will remain sharp in my memory among all these scenes in the wilderness which the Germans have made behind them, through which I have been passing. It is because of the courage of old women who sat there on the way.
It was beyond Péronne, and through the open country where our cavalry patrols are working, and in the village of Tincourt. Up beyond Lagnicourt the guns yesterday were firing heavily, and sharp gusts of wind blew forward the noise of a greater and farther bombardment, deep and low. Quite close, the village of Roisel, taken by our troops the day before, was still smouldering, and all around for miles was the long black trail of war with hundreds of villages and farmsteads laid low by fire and dynamite before the Germans left them in retreat. But in Tincourt only the outer streets and the neighbouring, separate buildings had been destroyed. The main part of the village was still standing, though the enemy had shelled it a little the day before. When I came into it I saw that it was one of the few places left by the Germans, because it was a concentration camp of civilians driven in from other villages while they were being smashed.
The people were gathered about the roadway, about twohundred of them, sitting or standing among piles of bundles, like refugees in the old days of the war. There were many old, old women among them in black dresses and bonnets, and a group of young girls, of fifteen or so, and small boys and children in arms. They were looking down the road anxiously, and I found that they were waiting for British lorries and ambulances to take them away to safer country, beyond the reach of German shell-fire. They were people who had just been liberated from hostile rule. The grey tide of the German army had swept back from them, and they found themselves once again free people of France, with news of France, and of the world on the other side of the trenches and the wire which for two years and a half had shut them in with the enemy.
I spoke with the old women, these brave old grandmothers who were sitting homeless and houseless on their bundles in the midst of a ruined countryside, within reach of the guns. They were not weeping but smiling. They were not afraid but scornful of the perils through which they had passed.
They were thin because they had stinted for their grandchildren, and they had suffered great misery, but they held their old grey heads high, and said, "For our sons' sake we endured all things."
They are the grandmothers of the babes who know nothing of all this war, and one day will be told, and the mothers of men who have fought and died, and who fight and die with supreme self-sacrifice in the shambles of this war. They are women worthy of hero sons, themselves heroic. They were not passionate against the enemy, only contemptuous of him, and of his rule of them. They liked some of the German soldiers and made no accusations of individual brutality, but cursed the spirit which had laid waste their villages, and destroyed their houses and orchards, and taken away their young girls and all men to the age of fifty. They spoke with the dispassionate eloquence of people who have been in earthquakes and shipwrecks and tornadoes. German cruelty was natural, inevitable, and unarguable, and the soldiers who had done these things were the slaves of the fate which ordained their acts.
"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther back," said one old lady. "They burnt my house and my neighbours'houses and drove us forward. Roisel was all in flames when we passed through. The fires came out of the houses, and the heat of them scorched us. Then we came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The little ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and full of terror."You will understand that it is hard to see one's village destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to know what is to happen next. For us old women it was not so bad. We are too old to weep, having wept too much. We thought of our sons who have died for France. We showed our scorn for the enemy by hiding our fear.""They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They ask always for peace. They are afraid of the punishment which God holds in store for them for all this wickedness.""Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be punished. What we have suffered they will suffer. All this"—she thrust up a skinny hand towards the ruined land behind her—"must be paid for.""It is William who will pay," said another old woman, "with his head."
"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther back," said one old lady. "They burnt my house and my neighbours'houses and drove us forward. Roisel was all in flames when we passed through. The fires came out of the houses, and the heat of them scorched us. Then we came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The little ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and full of terror.
"You will understand that it is hard to see one's village destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to know what is to happen next. For us old women it was not so bad. We are too old to weep, having wept too much. We thought of our sons who have died for France. We showed our scorn for the enemy by hiding our fear."
"They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They ask always for peace. They are afraid of the punishment which God holds in store for them for all this wickedness."
"Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be punished. What we have suffered they will suffer. All this"—she thrust up a skinny hand towards the ruined land behind her—"must be paid for."
"It is William who will pay," said another old woman, "with his head."
It was like the talk of the Greek Fates, the three old women who held the thread and spun the thread and snipped the thread—this talk of the old women of Tincourt, so passionless, so hard, so fair, so certain. But I marvelled at their courage, sitting there on their bundles, after tramping away from their blazing homesteads, waiting for British lorries to take them away from a place which, even then, was registered by German guns, with the young girls, and the babies who were born under hostile rule.
March 31
I am moved to write again of the old men and women and of the young women and children who have been liberated by our advance, because I have just been among these people again, seeing their tears, hearing their pitiful tales, touched by hands which plucked my sleeve so that I should listen to another story of outrage and misery.
All they told me, and all I have seen, builds up into a great tragedy. These young girls, who wept before me, shaken by the terror of their remembrance, these old brave men, who cried like children, these old women who did not weep but spoke with strange, smiling eyes as to life's great ironies, revealed to me in a fuller way the enormous agony of life behind the German lines now shifted back a little so that these people have escaped. It is an agony which includes the German soldiers, themselves enslaved, wretched, disillusionized men, under the great doom which has killed so many of their brothers, ordered to do the things many of them loathe to do, brutal by order even when they have gentle instincts, doing kind things by stealth, afraid of punishment for charity, stricken both by fear and hunger.
"Why do you go?" they were asked by one of the women who have been speaking to me."Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," they answered. "The English gun-fire smashed us to death on the Somme. The officers know we cannot stand that horror a second time."
"Why do you go?" they were asked by one of the women who have been speaking to me.
"Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," they answered. "The English gun-fire smashed us to death on the Somme. The officers know we cannot stand that horror a second time."
They spoke as men horribly afraid.
"I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulaincourt," said an elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me a coronet on the badge. "When the Germans came first to our village they seized all the tools, and all the farm-carts, and all the harvesting, and then they forced us all to work for them, the men at three sous an hour, the women at two sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to work. From the château they sent back the tapestries, the pictures, and anything which pleased this Commandant or that, until there was nothing left. Then in the last days they burnt the château to the ground and all the village and all the orchards.""It was the same always," said a woman. "There were processions of carts covered with linen, and underneath the linen was the furniture stolen from good houses.""Fourteen days ago," said an old man who had tears in his eyes as he spoke, "I passed the night in the cemetery of Vraignes. There were one thousand and fifteen of us people from neighbouring villages, some in the church and some inthe cemetery. They searched us there and took all our money. Some of the women were stripped and searched. In the cemetery it was a cold night and dark, but all around the sky was flaming with the fire of our villages—Pœuilly, Bouvincourt, Marteville, Trefçon, Monchy, Bernes, Hancourt, and many more. The people with me wept and cried out loud to see their dear places burning and all this hell. Terrible explosions came to our ears. There were mines everywhere under the roads. Then Vraignes was set on fire and burnt around us, and we were stricken with a great terror. Next day the English came when the last Uhlans had left. 'The English!' we shouted, and ran forward to meet them, stumbling, with outstretched hands. Soon shells began to fall in Vraignes. The enemy was firing upon us, and some of the shells fell very close to a barn quite full of women and children. 'Come away,' said your English soldiers, and we fled farther."
"I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulaincourt," said an elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me a coronet on the badge. "When the Germans came first to our village they seized all the tools, and all the farm-carts, and all the harvesting, and then they forced us all to work for them, the men at three sous an hour, the women at two sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to work. From the château they sent back the tapestries, the pictures, and anything which pleased this Commandant or that, until there was nothing left. Then in the last days they burnt the château to the ground and all the village and all the orchards."
"It was the same always," said a woman. "There were processions of carts covered with linen, and underneath the linen was the furniture stolen from good houses."
"Fourteen days ago," said an old man who had tears in his eyes as he spoke, "I passed the night in the cemetery of Vraignes. There were one thousand and fifteen of us people from neighbouring villages, some in the church and some inthe cemetery. They searched us there and took all our money. Some of the women were stripped and searched. In the cemetery it was a cold night and dark, but all around the sky was flaming with the fire of our villages—Pœuilly, Bouvincourt, Marteville, Trefçon, Monchy, Bernes, Hancourt, and many more. The people with me wept and cried out loud to see their dear places burning and all this hell. Terrible explosions came to our ears. There were mines everywhere under the roads. Then Vraignes was set on fire and burnt around us, and we were stricken with a great terror. Next day the English came when the last Uhlans had left. 'The English!' we shouted, and ran forward to meet them, stumbling, with outstretched hands. Soon shells began to fall in Vraignes. The enemy was firing upon us, and some of the shells fell very close to a barn quite full of women and children. 'Come away,' said your English soldiers, and we fled farther."
Russian prisoners were brought to work behind the lines, and some French prisoners. They were so badly fed that they were too weak to work.
"Poor devils!" said a young Frenchwoman. "It made my heart ache to see them."
She watched a French prisoner one day through her window. He was so faint that he staggered and dropped his pick. A German sentry knocked him down with a violent blow on the ear. The young Frenchwoman opened the window, and the blood rushed to her head.
"Sale bête!" she cried to the German sentry.
He spoke French and understood, and came under the window.
"'Sale bête'? ... For those words you shall go to prison, madame."
She repeated the words, and called him a monster, and at last the man spoke in a shamed way and said:
"Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre. C'est cruelle, la guerre!"
This man had kinder comrades. Pitying the Russian prisoners, they gave them stealthily a little brandy and cigarettes, and some who were caught did two hours' extra drill each day for a fortnight.
"My three sisters were taken away when the Germans left," said a young girl. She spoke her sisters' names, Yvonne,Juliette, and Madeleine, and said they were eighteen and twenty-two and twenty-seven, and then, turning away from me, wept very bitterly.
"They are my daughters," said a middle-aged woman. "When they were taken away I went a little mad. My pretty girls! And all our neighbours' daughters have gone, up from sixteen years of age, and all the men-folk up to fifty. They have gone to slavery, and for the girls it is a great peril. How can they escape?"
How can one write of these things? For the women it was always worst. Many of them had surpassing courage, but some were weak and some were bad. The bad women preyed on the others in a way so vile that it seems incredible. There was no distinction of class or sex in the forced labour of the harvest-fields, and delicate women of good families were forced to labour on the soil with girls strong and used to this toil. There were many who died of weakness and pneumonia and under-feeding.
"Are you not afraid of being called barbarians for ever?" asked a woman of a German officer who had not been brutal, but, like others, had tried to soften the hardships of the people.
"Madame," he said very gravely, "we act under the orders of people greater than ourselves, and we are bound to obey, because otherwise we should be shot. But we hate the cruelty of war, and we hate those who have made it. One day we will make them pay for the vile things we have had to do."
What strange little dramas, what tragic stories I have heard in these recent days! I have told the tale of one old priest. Here is the tale of another, as he told it to me in the midst of ruin.
He is the Abbé Barbe, of Muille, near Ham. In the neighbourhood was an enemy, too, a Frenchman, who was once a Christian brother, and now, unfrocked, a drunkard and a debauchee. He accused the abbé of having a telephone in his cellar from which he sent messages to Paris about German military secrets. One night there came a bang at the door of the abbé's study. Five soldiers entered with fixed bayonets and arrested the old priest. He was taken to the fortress of Ham and put into a dark cell with one small iron grating and a plank bed. Here he was interrogated by a German officer, who told him of the grave accusation against him.
"Search my cellars," said the abbé. "If there is a telephone there, shoot me as a spy. If not, set me free, after your court martial."
There was no court martial. After four days in the darkness the abbé was taken away by German soldiers and set down, not at Muille, but at Voyennes, ten kilometres or so away, and forbidden to go back to his village or his church. He went back a few days ago, when the Germans left. When he went into his house he found that it had been sacked. All the rare old books in his library had been burnt. There was nothing left to him.
"Sir," said a sister of charity, "these people whom you see here were brave but tortured in spirit and in body. Beyond the German lines they have lived in continual fear and servitude. The tales which they have told us must make the good God weep at the wickedness of his creatures. There will be a special place in hell, perhaps, for the Emperor William and his gang of bandits."
She spoke the words as a pious aspiration, this little pale woman with meek and kindly eyes, in her nun's dress.
April 2
Our troops have advanced since yesterday on to a line of high ground overlooking St.-Quentin and sweeping in a curve round the wood of Holnon, which is the last strong point between us and the trenches immediately before the cathedral city. This morning our outposts were in Bihucourt and Villecholles, and advancing to Maissemy, thereby holding all the roads except one on the western side of the Hindenburg-Siegfried line between Péronne and St.-Quentin. Our enemy is shelling the villages from which he has lately retired with long-range guns, and we are now drawing very close to his new line of trenches and fixed positions.
Northwards of Péronne and east of Bapaume our troops have taken Doignies, above the forest of Havrincourt, and hold Neuville and Ruyaulcourt to the south of it, so that this great wood is encircled like that of Holnon; and the enemy mustescape quickly from the shelter of the trees or be trapped there.
Northwards again, above Bapaume, we have made to-day a heavy and successful attack south-east of Croisilles, where a few days ago there was sharp fighting and several German counter-attacks, because the position threatens that sector of the Hindenburg line which is immediately behind the village striking down at an angle south-eastwards in front of Quéant, from which we are three miles distant. Two small villages below Croisilles, named Longatte and Ecoust-St.-Mien, have also fallen to us.
Our attack to-day was preceded by great gun-fire, and the enemy has defended himself with desperate courage, acting upon Hindenburg's orders that the position must be held at all costs. We have brought back over a hundred prisoners, and have inflicted great losses upon the garrison.
One of the most interesting and extraordinary features in all the fighting east of Bapaume has been the work of our cavalry squadrons in reconnaissance and attack. I confess that, after two and a half years of trench warfare, I was utterly sceptical of the value of mounted troops, in spite of the little stunt (as they called it) south of High Wood, after we took the Bazentins and Longueval in July of last year, when the Royal Dragoons and Deccan Horse rode out and brought back prisoners. Conditions have changed since then by a great transformation scene, owing to the enemy's abandonment of his old fortress positions on the Somme under our frightful onslaught of gun-fire. The country into which we have now gone is beyond the great wide belt of shell-craters, which made the battlefields of the Somme a wild quagmire of deep pits and ponds. The roads between the ruined villages are wonderfully smooth and good where they have not been mined, and the fields are as nature and French husbandry left them after last year's harvest. Then there has been a glorious absence of heavy shell-fire while the enemy has been drawing back his guns to emplacements behind the Hindenburg line; and this to cavalry, as well as to infantry, makes all the difference between heaven and hell. So the cavalry has had its chance again after the old far-off days when they rode up the Mont des Cats and chased Uhlans through Meteren, and scouted along the Messines Ridge in the autumn of 1914.
There have been no great sensational episodes, no shock of lance against lance in dense masses, no cutting up of rear-guards nor slashing into a routed army, but there has been a great deal of good scouting work during the past three weeks. Eight villages have been taken by the Canadian cavalry under General Seely, and they have captured a number of prisoners and machine-guns. They have liked their hunting. I have seen the Indian cavalry riding across the fields with their lances high, and it was a great sight, and as strange as an Arabian Nights tale in this land of France, to see those streams of brown-bearded men, as handsome as fairy-book princes, with the wind blowing their khaki turbans.
Night after night our cavalry have gone out in patrols, the leader ahead and alone; two men following; behind them a small body keeping in touch. They ride silently like shadows, with no clatter of stirrup or chink of bit. They find the gaps in the enemy's wire, creep close to his infantry outposts, ride very deftly into the charred ruins of abandoned villages, and come back with their news of the enemy's whereabouts. A week ago one of their patrols went into the Forest of Holnon, which is still held by the enemy, and listened to Germans talking. Our men were undiscovered. They took the villages by sweeping round on both sides in a great gallop, with their lances down, and the enemy fled at the first sight of them.
When the cavalry charged at Equancourt, a body of British infantry, who had come on to the ground six hours earlier than they need have done, in order (as they said) not to miss the show, cheered them on with the wildest enthusiasm.
"Look at those beggars," shouted one man as the cavalry swept past; "that's the way to take a village. No blighted bombs for them, and hell for leather all the way!"
It was a difficult operation, this taking of Equancourt, and was carried out in the best cavalry style according to the old traditions. The village and a little wood in the front of it were held by Germans with machine-guns, and another village to the right named Sorel was defended in the same way, and commanded the field of fire before Equancourt. The cavalry had two spurs of ground in front of them divided by two narrow gullies, or re-entrants. One gully ran straight to the village of Equancourt, but was directly in front of the German machine-gun emplacements. The other gully was to the right,and it was through this that the cavalry rode, sweeping round in a curve to Equancourt. Before their charge of two parties, a third party was posted on the left on rising ground, and swept the wood below Equancourt with machine-gun fire, and a smaller body of cavalry to the right occupied the attention of the enemy in Sorel in the same way. Then the two attacking parties were launched, and rode hard at a pace of twenty-three miles an hour.
The enemy did not stand. After a few bursts of machine-gun fire, which only hit a few of our mounted men, they fled behind the shelter of a railway embankment beyond the village, and most of them escaped.
All this is an interlude between greater and grimmer things. We have not yet come to the period of real open warfare, but have only passed over a wide belt of No Man's Land: and the fantasy of cavalry skirmishes and wandering Germans and civilians greeting us with outstretched hands from ruined villages will soon be closed by the wire and walls of the Hindenburg line, where once again the old fortress and siege warfare will begin, unless we have the luck to turn it or break through before the Siegfried divisions have finished their fortifications.