France, November 28th.
He is having a hard time. I do not see that there is any reason to make light of it. If you do, you rob him of the credit which, if ever man deserved it, he ought to be getting now—the credit for putting a good face upon it under conditions which, to him, especially at the beginning, were sheer undiluted misery. Some people think that to tell the truth in these matters would hinder recruiting. Well, if it did, it would only mean that the young Australians who stay at home are guilty of greater meanness than one has ever thought. For the Australian here has plunged straight into an existence more like that of a duck in a farmyard drain than to any other condition known or dreamed of in his own sunny land. He is resisting it not only passably but well. And if you want to know the reason—as far as any general reason can be given—the motive, whichkeeps him trying day after day, is the desire that no man shall say a word against Australia. I don't know if his country is thinking of him—a good part of it must be—but he is thinking of his country all the time. Australia has made her name in the world during this war—the world knows her now. It is these men—not the men who shout at stadiums and race meetings at home, but the simple, willing men who are described in this letter—who are making Australia's name for her—and just at present holding on to it like grim death.
Even the life of a duck in a farmyard drain becomes in a wonderful way supportable when you tackle it as cheerfully as that. It comes to the Australian as a shock, at the first introduction—the Manning River country after the Manning River flood has subsided is, as a New South Welshman suggested, the nearest imitation that he has ever seen. But then there was blue sky and dazzling sun over that; whereas here the whole grey sky seems to drip off his hatbrim and nose and chilled fingers and the shiny oil sheet tied around his neck, and to ooze into his back and his boots. It is all fairly comfortable in the green country from which he starts. There has been a fairly warm billet in the halfdark of a big barn, where the morning light comes through in strange shafts and triangles up in the blackness amongst the gaunt roof beams. There was a canteen—which is really an officially managed shop for good, cheap groceries—in an outhouse at the end of the village; there were three or four estaminets and cafés, with cheerful and passably pretty mademoiselles, and good coffee, and very vile wine, labelled temporarily as champagne. There was also—for some who obtained leave—a visit to a neighbouring town.
The battalion moved off early—its much-prized brass band at its head—and the men who didn't obtain leave at the tail. The battalion is to be carried to the front in the same string of groaning autobuses which brought out its weary predecessors. The buses are a great help immensely valued—but the battalion has to march four miles to them—to warm it, I suppose. The men who did not obtain leave are carrying the iron cooking dixies for those four miles. In the nature of things military, there will be another four miles to march at the other end. The platoon at the tail thoroughly appreciates this. Its philosophy of life is wasted, unfortunately, on four miles of stately, dripping French elm trees which cannot understand, and one richly appreciative Australian subaltern who can.
The battalion was not disappointed. The motor-buses brought it to a most comfortable-looking village—pretty well as good as the one it had left. It climbed out, and straightaway marched to another village five miles distant. The darkness had come down—huge motor-wagons shouldered them off the road into gutters, where they found themselves ankle deep in the mud-heaps scraped by the road gangs. Every second wagon blinded them with its two glaring gig-lamps, and slapped up the mud on to their cheeks. A mule wagon, trotting up behind, splashed it into their back hair, where they found it in dry beads of assorted sizes next morning. It was raining dismally. The head of the column was commenting richly on its surroundings—the platoon at the tail had ceased to comment at all. The last couple were a pair who, I will swear, must have tramped together many a long road over the Old Man Plains towards the evening sun—old felt hats slightly battered; grim, set lips, knees and backs a little bent with the act of carrying; and pack, oil sheet, mess tin rising heavenwards in one mighty hump above their spines. At the gap in a hedge, where the columnturned off into a sort of mud lake, stood an officer whose kindly eyes were puckered from the glare of the central Australian sun. You could have told they were Australians at a mile's distance. He looked at them with a queer smile.
"Are you the Scottish Horse?" he asked inquiringly.
"We are the blanky camel corps," was the answer.
That march at both ends of the motor trip was the adjutant's salvation. When the battalion splashed up to its appointed billets, and found them calculated for receiving only half of its number of soldiers awake, he shifted two-thirds of them in; and, as they promptly fell to sleep the moment the column ceased to move, he shifted in the remainder when they were asleep.
When the battalion drew its breath next morning, it was inclined to think that it was enduring the full horror of war; and was preparing to summarise the situation. But before it could draw a second breath it was marched off to—to what I will call a reserve camp. It was not technically a reserve camp, which was farther on; but they knew it was a camp for battalions to rest in—when they have beenvery good, and it is desired to give them time to recover their wind. They were rather "bucked" with the idea of this resting-place.
At midday they arrived there. That is to say, they waded up to a collection of little tents, not unlike bushmen's tents in Australia, and stood knee deep at the entrances, looking into them—speechless. They were not much by way of tents at the best of times. There was nearly as much mud inside as there was outside. But on top of the normal conditions came the fact that the last battalion to occupy those tents must have camped there in dry weather. Since there was not enough headroom upwards it had dug downwards. And, as it had not put a drain round them, the water had come in, and the interior of a fair proportion of these residences consisted of a circular lake, varying in depth from a few inches to a foot and a half.
The battalion could only find one word, when its breath came—and, as the regiment which had made those holes, and the town major to whom they now belonged, were probably of unimpeachable ancestry, I do not think the accusation was justified. But when it realised that, good or bad, this was the place where it was to pass the night, it split itselfup, as good Australian battalions have a way of doing.
"Which is the way to our tents, Bill?" asked the rear platoon of one of the band, which had arrived half an hour before.
"I don't know—I'm not the blanky harbour-master," was the reply. The battalion set to work, like a tribe of beavers, to make a home. It banked up little parapets of mud to prevent water coming in. It dug capacious drains to let the water which was in run out. It scraped the mud out of the interior of its lake dwellings, until it reached more or less dry earth. A fair proportion of the regiment melted out into the landscape, and returned during the rest of the day by ones and twos, carrying odd bits of timber, broken wood, bricks, fag ends of rusty sheet iron, old posts, wire and straw. By nightfall those Australians were, I will not say in comfort, but moderately and passably warm and dry.
It so happened that they stayed in that camp four days. By the time they left it they were looking upon themselves as almost fortunate. There was only one break in its improvement—and that was when a dug-out was discovered. It was a charming underground home, dug by some French battery before theBritish came—with bunks and a table and stove. The privates who discovered it made a most comfortable home until its fame got abroad, and the regimental headquarters were moved in there. Dug-outs became all the fashion for the moment—everyone set about searching for them. But the supply in any works on the Allied side is, unfortunately, limited—and after half a day's enthusiasm the battalion fell back resignedly on its canvas home.
When it came back some time later to these familiar dwellings, heavy-eyed and heavy-footed, there was no insincerity in the relief with which it regarded them. They were a resting-place then. Another battalion had kept them decently clean, and handed them over drained and dry; for which thoughtfulness, not always met with, they were more grateful than those tired men could have explained.
For they had been up into the line, and the places behind the line, and out again.
France, December 20th.
A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne. Its writer had asked a man—an educated man—if he would give a subscription for the Australian Comforts Fund. "Certainly not," was the reply. "The men have every comfort in the trenches."
That is the sort of dense-skinned ignorance which makes one unspeakably angry—the ignorance which, because it has heard of or read a letter from some brave-hearted youngster, making light of hardships for his mother's sake, therefore flies to the conclusion that everything written and spoken about the horrors of this war is humbug, and what the Army calls "eyewash"—a big conspiracy to deceive the people who are not there.
As a matter of fact, the early winter of 1916 which these men have just been going through will have a chapter to itself in history as longas history lasts. It is to some extent past history now—to what extent I do not suppose anyone on the German side or ours can tell.
I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live through that sort of time. Remember that a fair proportion of them were a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a shipping firm—gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a teashop in King or Collins Streets. But take even a Central District farmer or a Newcastle miner—yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English poacher—take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test, and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit. Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with—on his back—all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees—sometimes up to his waist—along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell holes—holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he were found, or even might never be found at all. After manyhours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks, except that there is no grass about it—nothing but brown, slippery mud on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far as eye can see. At the end of it all put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail, snowstorm—whatever weather comes—and to watch there during the endless winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And this is what our men have had to go through.
The longed-for relief comes at last—a change to other shell-battered areas in support or reserve—and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which aSouth Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I can hear them as I write—it is the first longed-for gloriously bright day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world—there has never yet been anything to approach it except at Verdun.
Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more settled parts of the front—there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do there. Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing hardships undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as "artillery and trench mortar activity"—after the Somme, I say, one found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with me, as "war de luxe."
It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally sees and knows at the moment. These conditions which I have described are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not be describing them. I personally know that English troops, Scottish troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases, issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of them. Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and hardship without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day—and I doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tell him—whether he will, at any given date, be in a worse condition or a better one.
What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is described in another chapter. For our grand men—and though to be called a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never grander than at these times—the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A. and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever enters that grim region. In the areasto which those tired men come for a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for concert troupes and cinemas. It provides some hundreds of pounds to be spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas, besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.
But, for those who are actually in the front or just behind it, one cup of warm coffee in a jam-tin from a roadside stall has been, in certain times and places, all that can be given; the Fund has given that, and it has been the landmark in the day for many men. In those conditions there was but one occasional solace. A friend of mine found an Australian in the trenches in those days, standing in mud nearly to his waist, shivering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.
France, December 20th.
Yesterday morning we were looking across a bare, shallow valley at the opposite knuckle of hill-side, around the foot of which the valley doubled back out of sight. A solitary grey line of broken earth ran like a mole burrow up the bare knuckle and vanished over the top. A line of bare, dead willow stumps marked a few yards of the hollow below. On the skyline, beyond the valley's end, stood out a distant line of ghostly trees—so faint and blue as to be scarcely distinguishable from the sky. There was nothing else in the landscape—absolutely nothing but the bare, blank shape of the land; save for those old ghosts of departed willows—no trees—no grass—no colour—no living or moving or singing or sounding thing.
Only—that morning at dawn had found a number of men tumbling, jumping, running, dodging in and out of the shell-holes acrossthat slope, making towards our lines. The peck of occasional rifles came from some farther part of the grey, featureless hill-side—the report was the only trace of the rifles or of the men firing them. But as the men who were dodging back were Australians the rifles must have been the rifles of Germans, in trenches or shell-holes, somewhere on the face of that waste. Who these Australians were, the men who watched from where we stood did not know. Apparently they were men who had lost their way in the dark and wandered beyond our trenches; as the light grew they had suddenly realised that they were in front of our front line, and not behind it, as they thought, and had come tumbling back over the craters. They all reached the trench safely.
For this battle has now reached such a formless, featureless landscape, that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front of our lines, and contenting themselves with fighting a sort of rearguard action there, while they tunnel, bore, dig, burrow like moles into thefarther heights where their reserve line runs near Bapaume. The battle has widened out generally over the landscape.
It is a very great difference from that boiling, bursting nightmare of Pozières, where the whole struggle tightened down to little more than one narrow hill-top. This battle is now being fought in a sort of dreamland of brown mudholes, which the blue northern mist turns to a dull purple grey. The shape of the land is there, the hills, valleys, lines of willow stumps, ends of broken telegraph poles. But the colour is all gone. It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills, and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the grass had yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in the slime which covered it; an old, old age before anything moved on the earth or sang in the air, and when the naked bones of the earth lay bare under the naked sky century after century, with no change or movement save when the cloud shadows chased across it, or the storms lashed it, or the evening sunlight glinted from the water trapped in its meaningless hollows. It is to that unremembered chaos that German ideas of life have reduced the world.
Up the hill-side opposite there is running a strange purple-grey streak between two purple-grey banks. There is something mysterious in this flat ribbon, ruled, as if by the hand of man, across that primeval colourless slope. The line of it can be traced distinctly over the hill and out of sight. It takes a moment's thinking to realise that the grey streak was once a road. It is a road which one has read of as the centre of some desultory fighting. I dare say it will appear in its own small way in history. "The battalion next attacked along the Bapaume-Cambrai road"—to give it a name it does not own; and readers will picture the troops in khaki dodging along a hedge, beneath green, leafy elm trees....
Something moved. Yes, as I live, something is moving up that old purple-grey scar across the hill-side. Two figures in pink, untanned leather waistcoats are strolling up the old road, side by side. Their hands are in their trousers pockets, and the only sign of war visible about them is their copper-green hats. A sniper's rifle pecks somewhere in the landscape thereabout, but the two figures do noteven turn a head. They are Bill and Jim from South Melbourne let loose upon the antediluvian landscape, strolling up it, yawning. And they gave me much the same shock as if some green and pink animal had suddenly issued from its unsuspected burrow in a field of primeval grey slime and begun crawling over its face to some haunt in the slime elsewhere. Two other distant figures were moving on the far hill-side too. Perhaps it was at them the rifle was pecking; for to our certain knowledge the crest of that hill was German territory.
Men lose their bearings in that sort of country every day. Germans find themselves behind our lines without knowing that they have even passed over their own; and an Australian carrying party has been known to deposit its hot food, in the warm food containers, all ready steaming to be eaten, in German territory. To their great credit be it said that the party got back safely to the Australian trenches—save for one who is missing and three who lie out there, face upwards.... Brave men.
There is only one time when that unearthly landscape returns to itself again. I suppose men and women lived in those valleys once; French farmers' girls tugged home at dusk upthat ghostly roadway slow-footed, reluctant cows; I dare say they even made love—French lads and sweethearts—down some long obliterated path beside those willow stumps where the German patrol sneaks nightly from shell-hole to shell-hole. There comes an afternoon when the sky turns dull yellow-white like an old smoker's beard, and before dusk the snowflakes begin to fall. Far back the cursing drivers are dragging their jibbing horses past half-frozen shell-holes, which they can scarcely see. And out there, where the freezing sentries keep watch over the fringe where civilisation grinds against the German—out there under the tender white mantle, flickering pink and orange under the gun flashes—out there for a few short hours the land which Kultur has defaced comes by its own.
France, December 10th.
The connection of Tamar the Hammerhead, who cut the Grass Bank out of the forest, with Timothy Gibbs, of Booligal, in New South Wales, may not be clear at first sight. Tam's beech forest covered two or three green hills in Gaul at the time when Caius Sulpicius, and his working party of the Tenth Legion, were laying down new paving stones on the big road from Amiens over the hill-tops. The wagon carrying the military secretary to the Governor had bumped uncomfortably down that long slope the week before; and as the Tenth Legion was resting, its commanding officer received, two days later, an order to detail another fatigue party. The big trees looked down on a string of private soldiers shouldering big square paving stones from a neighbouring dump, where the wagons stood, and fitting them carefully into the pavement, and—and otherwise enjoyingtheir rest. Caius Sulpicius and his orderly officer stood watching them. The orderly officer leant on his stick. Caius had a piece of bread in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other. His forearm was black with grubbing amongst the paving stones.
"When the Tenth Legion gets a rest without some old brass helmet helping us to spend it," he said with his mouth full, "I'll begin to think the end of the war is coming."
"Why didn't it strike old Brassribs to make the inhabitants do a job of work occasionally?" he added presently. "Now, in the old general's time—"
Far down on the edge of the forest, across two or three miles of rolling hills, a patch of orange earth, newly turned, caught the orderly officer's eye. One of the inhabitants was doing a job of work there, anyway. Two days ago he had passed that way in a stroll after parade. A mallet-headed man, his bare arm-muscles orange with mud, was piling up an earthen embankment on the hill-side. A patch of the forest had been allowed to him. In two years he had cut out the trees and undergrowth. He was now trying to make his patch of hill-side level. The orange mud bank of his terrace had been the labour of twelve months, and therewas a year's work in it yet. He had scarcely hoped to possess even a rood of land, and now he had two acres. He was going to use every inch of it. That was Tamar the Hammerhead's life's work.
The Tenth Legion did get its rest. Caius lay beneath a moss-covered, tilted gravestone—long, long forgotten—not so far from the great road. One of a much later generation of orderly officers, who had scraped part of the inscription clean with his penknife, went back and told the mess at dinner that he had come across the grave of an officer of their own unit, who had died thereabouts in some camp a hundred and fifty years before. He did not mention that, on his stroll, he had scrambled down a steep grass bank which ran curiously across the hill-side. There was green grass above it, and green grass below it; and green grass and patches of ploughland all over the downs. The white frost still hung to the blades, though it was midday. The remnant of a small wood stood from the hill-side. "I must get a fatigue party on to that timber to-morrow," had said the orderly officer to himself.
And so it was that the forest passed away—the general service wagons from the neighbouring Roman camp called there daily forsixty years for fuel cut by generations of fatigue parties. The only trees left, over miles of sloping downs, were the thickets around the villages and one row of walnut trees growing along the top of that steep grass embankment—the one remnant of Hammerhead's old orchard. Years later the tow-haired Franks swept through the country. The walnut trees were cut by a farmer for the uprights in his long barn. His children rolled down the old bank in their games, and in bad baby Latin invited the youngsters of the farm next door to charge up "the Grass Bank" while they defended it. The generations, whose bad Latin gradually became French, still spoke of Hammerhead's old landmark—now situated in a large grass field—as "The Grass Bank."
On the military maps some way behind the arterial system of red lines which stood for the German trenches—exactly as on a German map it stands for ours—was a shaded mark shaped like an elongated pea pod. There was no name to it—but a note in some pigeonhole of the local Intelligence Officer stated that the inhabitants called the place "The Grass Bank." Through it the map showed a lonely little red capillary, wandering by itself for a quarter of an inch, and fading off into nothingagain. The stout German colonel of the local artillery group—big guns which barked mostly of nights—having found his forward observation post knocked in by a small field-gun shell, had come back and growled like a bear all dinner-time, most inconsequentially, about the lack of cover from heavy shells in the back areas. His real object was to abuse the men at the table with him; but one junior Staff Officer, hankering after promotion, looked round for the best dug-out site; and caused to be burrowed downwards, from the bottom of a steep grassy bank which ran half-way across a neighbouring field, four narrow dark tunnels leading into low square rooms, held up with stout beams, and all connected with each other. Two were lined with rough bunks on wooden frames folding against the wall. Another held a table covered with papers, a telephone switchboard, and four busy clerks. The fourth was panelled carefully with deal, the ceiling neatly gridironed with dark stained wood, a cupboard let into a recess with a looking-glass panel above it, a comfortable bunk with an electric bulb above the pillow and a telephone by the bedside. The group commander slept there undisturbed, even when the British suddenly pushed their front forward, and the GrassBank began to shake with the thump of 9-inch shells. The junior Staff Officer wonders why he is a junior Staff Officer still.
The great battle climbed like some slow, devouring monster up one green slope, down the next, and up the green slopes beyond, clawing on to green fields, and leaving them behind it a wilderness of pock-marked slime. One of the many small obstacles, which held up its local progress for a while, was some sort of nest of Germans behind a certain bank. Several attacks had been made on it. The Intelligence Officer of an Australian Brigade followed the Intelligence Officer of an Australian Battalion on his stomach, for one night, up to the barbed wire; and gave it as his opinion that the enemy kept his machine-guns in dug-outs at the bottom of the bank. Later, a wild night of driving rain, and flashes, and crashes, and black forms struggling in the mud against the glint of flares on slimy white crater edges, left things still uncertain.
It was there that Tim Gibbs came in—and Booligal. Tradition in New South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order. Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven byshrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental bombers when they reached France. When they came to a sea of brown mud waves, which some cynic had misnamed the "Grass Bank," it was not Tim who volunteered to take it. He had been in far too many hot corners to retain any of his old hankering after them, and the Grass Bank was hotter than Booligal. He went for the place because his colonel told him to—went cheerfully to do a thing he horribly disliked, without letting anyone guess by word or deed or the least little sign that he disliked it—which, if you think of it, is more heroic by a long chalk.
It was after dark on a winter's night that he and his men—about sixteen of them—crept out up a slimy trench deep to the knees in sloppy mud; peered at the enemy's wire against the skyline; half crawled, half slid through a gap in it, and disappeared, Tim leading. A white flash—a shower of bombs—red and orange flares breaking like Roman candles in the sky—the chatter of a machine-gun—the enemy's barrage presently shrieking down thevault of heaven. A dozen wounded men came back before dawn. And Tim—Tim lay with his face to the stars, dreaming for ever and ever of red plains and travelling sheep, on the edge of Tamar the Hammerhead's Grass Bank.
Slime Trench—Grass Bank—Gibbs' Corner—you will read of them all in their chapter in the War's History. They were in every map for a month—the newspapers made headings of them—they were household words in London suburbs and Melbourne teashops. A month later the flood of battle swept past them all in a great general attack without so much as pausing to look. Two months—and a string of lorries pushed up a newly made road until a policeman held them up, just as he would in London, to let some cross stream of traffic through. One of the crossing lorries bumped into a hole and impaled itself on a beam that had fallen off the lorry ahead. The two drivers of a lorry far behind climbed up a steep, shell-shattered neighbouring bank, and munched bread and bully beef while the afternoon grew to dusk and gun flashes showed like lightning on the angry low winter clouds ahead.
"What they want to get us stuck in this flaming mud-hole for?" said the driver to the second driver. "The Huns must have had adug-out down there, Bill," he added, pointing to certain splintered, buried timber at the foot of the bank.
Now there may be no such place as the Grass Bank; and there may have been no Hammerhead nor Tim Gibbs; and he did not come from Booligal. But the story is true to this extent—that it happens all the time upon this battlefield.
France, December 20th.
By the muddy, shell-pitted roadside of the sunken road in Le Barque, behind the German lines, were found three shapeless forms. The mud dripped from them as they lay, but they were the forms of men. And the German soldiers who saw them, and who buried them, took it that they were men who had not lost their lives from any shell wound; that they had not been killed by the fire of our machine-guns, or by stray bullets. They put down the death of those men to the mud and the mud alone. The sunken road at Le Barque had been mashed with shells and trampled to slime with traffic; some runner from battalion headquarters at night, slipping through the sleet, some couple of men straggling after the tail of an incoming platoon on a wild night when the English barrage suddenly startled them and caused them to miss the path by a few yards in the blackness, had stumbled unnoticed into a shell-hole. All their company officer knew was that they were missing—and no trace of them was found until three bodies were dragged from a shell crater, when men told stories of men missed there before.
Now, I do not know if it really was the mud which engulfed alive the three Germans who lay beside the sunken road of Le Barque; but I know that their comrades thought it was. And that is a simple proof that the mud, of which the Germans talk so much, is not all on the British side of the trenches.
Looking from our lines yesterday across a valley one noticed a German trench running up the farther side, the grey mud parapet heaped out, like the earth of one long, continuous grave, on both sides of the trench. Behind that trench, along its whole length, as far as we could see, ran a sinuous thread of light-coloured soil. It was the beaten track by which the Germans had moved up and down their trench. They could not moveinthe trench, so when they wanted to move they had to hop up and move outside of it. If we were sniping by day they could not move at all; and the track had probably been made by Germans moving at night. It hugged the trench in case we started shooting or shelling—when theGermans could at once jump back into the mud again.
The Germans in some parts of the Somme battlefield have been going down with frostbite in great numbers, so great as to put at least one battalion out of action. This is through getting feet wet and frozen in muddy trenches. To reach their front line, last month, in these valleys in front of Bapaume and Le Transloy, has been quite impossible to the Germans unless they went up over the open, or used such trenches as a self-respecting man could scarcely enter. They came up, as would any other soldiers under the same circumstances, across the open land. Even then there were places which a man could scarcely pass. I know a man who, in that same sunken road at Le Barque, pulled two of his comrades by force out of the mud—an everyday matter. They left their boots and socks in the mud behind them.
If a man is wounded in some of those German trenches it takes eight men to get him to the dressing station and five hours to arrive there, and very much longer if there is any fighting in progress. One would not say that any of these difficulties have been more acute amongst the Germans than with the Britishand Australians—in some ways our men have faced and overcome greater hardships than the Germans. But there is this chief difference—the German is now getting back the shells which for two years he rained upon the British. And he is talking—like a German—about the unfairness of it.
The German Staff claims that German infantry is the best in the world. Certainly it is tough, and thoroughly convinced that it is better than any of its friends. "The Turk is a pretty good fighter," said a German to me a few days ago, "and the Bulgars fight well. The Austrians are worth little. Every time the Russians drive the Austrians back they have to call us in to repulse the Russians again for them."
The German infantryman is tough, but not tougher than ours, and without the dash; his outstanding virtue is his great power of work. But I do not believe from what I have seen that he works one scrap harder than the Australian. He might be supposed to have his heart more in the war than the soldier of any other nation, but he certainly has not. Many German soldiers have told me that there was a universal longing for the war to end—but they seem to wonder at your asking themwhat they think, or what their people in Germany think—as though it mattered one straw. They tell you, in a detached sort of way, that a great many of their people in Germany are tired of the war. "But they have no influence on these matters," they say, "nor have the soldiers. We do not meet together—we have nothing to say with it. They would go on with the war all next year even if a million more men are killed—they will bring back all the wounded, and the sick, if necessary."
The German who used those words seemed to have no quarrel with those who were driving his country, and no pride in them—he did not approve and he did not disapprove. He seemed to accept them as part of the unquestioned, unchangeable laws of his existence; they were there—and what business was it of his to interfere with them?
One can scarcely see a gleam of hope for them in the attitude of their prisoners—a people that cannot rebel. But perhaps it is unfair to judge.
For these men, whom we now see, have been at long, long last through the fire of guns heavier than their own; and through the mud of Le Barque.
France, December 11th.
A fair-sized shell recently arrived in a certain front trench held by Australians in France. It exploded, and an Australian found himself struggling amongst some debris in No Man's Land. He tried to haul himself clear, but the tumbled rubbish kept him down; and, as often as he was seen to move, bullets whizzed past him from a green slope near by. The green slope ran like a low railway embankment along the other side of the unkempt paddock between the trenches. It was the German front line.
Finally one of his mates, I am told, jumped over to his help and dragged him clear. When he got in he asked to be put into the very next party that should visit the German trenches. He wanted his own back.
He was one of the newest Australians. That is exactly the sort of request that would have been made by the oldest ones.
We have seen the newest Australian draft in France, and the verdict from first to last amongst those who know them is, "They will do." There is always a certain amount of chaff thrown out by the oldest Australians at the latest arrivals. The sort of Australian who used to talk about our "tinpot navy" labelled the Australians who rushed at the chance of adventure the moment the recruiting lists were opened "the six bob a day tourists." Well—the "Tourists" made a name for Australia such as no other Australians can ever have the privilege to make. The next shipment were the "Dinkums"—the men who came over on principle to fight for Australia—the real, fair dinkum[3]Australians. After them came the "Super-dinkums"—and the next the "War Babies," and after them the "Chocolate Soldiers," then the "Hard Thinkers," who were pictured as thinking very hard before they came. And then the "Neutrals." "We know they are not against the Allies," the others said, when came news of the latest drafts still training steadily under peace conditions, "we know they are not against us—we suppose they are just neutral."
There has always been some chaff thrownat the latest arrival—and it is a mistake to think that there was never any feeling behind the chaff. I remember long ago at Anzac when a new draft was moving up past some of the older troops—past men who were thin with disease and overworn with heavy work—there was a cry of "You have come at last, have you?" flung in a tone of which the bitterness was unmistakable. There has always been a feeling, amongst the older troops here, that they have been holding the fort—hanging on for Australia's name until the others have time to come along and give them a hand. There is a tendency to feel that soldiers who are still at home are getting all the limelight—the parading of streets and praises of the newspapers—and will probably live to reap most of the glory at the end of it all.
If so, there was never a feeling that melted more quickly the moment each new draft arrives and is really tested. The moment it goes into the whirl of a modern battle, and acquits itself through some wild night as every Australian draft always has done in its first fight and always will do, every sign of that old feeling melts as if it had never existed; and the new draft finds itself taken into the heart of the old force on the same terms as the oldestand proudest regiment there. I make no apology for talking of them as "old" regiments. There are regiments in this war, not three years old, which have seen as much terrible fighting as others whose record goes back over hundreds of years. Ages ago, prehistoric ages, the "Dinkums" became a title for men to be intensely proud of. Men who were through the first fortnight at Pozières need never be ashamed to compare their experiences with those of any soldiers in the world, for it is the literal truth that there has never in history been a harder battle fought. The "Chocolate Soldiers" became veterans in one terrible struggle. The "War Babies" were old soldiers almost before they had cut their teeth. It is one of the pities of the censorship, but a necessary one, that the Australian public cannot know, until the story of this war is fully told at the end of it, the famous Australian battalions which will most assuredly go down to history as household names.
And if there are not battalions, amongst the newest troops, which will go down to history with some of the very best Australia possesses—then I am a German. They have had a wonderful training of late—a training which can only be compared in thoroughness with that ofMena Camp in Egypt where our first troops trained, and with the full experience of this war to back it. The British authorities are equipping the new Australian drafts generously. The discipline of Australians, once they come to understand their work, has never given the slightest real anxiety to those responsible for them. The newest men have exactly the same straight frank look and speech as has every other batch that I have seen. If there is any difference between them first and last I will be bound that it is beyond the keenest eye to detect it.
Indeed, if there is a difference between one Australian infantry battalion and another, it is, and has always been, a matter of officers. A commander who can make all his subordinates feel that they are pulling in the same boat's crew—that they are all swinging together, not only with their own but with every other battalion and brigade; who can make them look upon themselves as all helping in the one big cause; who can make them regard the difficulty of another battalion merely as a chance for freely and fully assisting it—a commander who can do these things with his officers can make a wonderful force of his Australians. This may sound abstract and vague, but it isreal to such an extent that it is the main reason of all differences that exist between Australian units.
Australian units have, like the Scots, a wonderful confidence in each other. They have been proud to fight by the side of grand regiments and divisions; but I fancy they would rather fight beside other Australians or New Zealanders than beside the most famous units in the world. Chaffing apart, that is the feeling of the oldest unit towards the newest.