There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station, organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the city and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he had refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did not guess that one day I should be a patient there. That was two years later, at the end of the Somme battles. I was worn out and bloodless after five months of hard strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten me up in the fields where lay the unburied dead.
“Trench fever,” said the doctor.
“You look in need of a rest,” said the matron. “My word, how white you are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?”
I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of the New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which officers lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.
“That's all right. You're going to die!” said a rosy—cheeked young orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy with a fine, delicate face, a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a pile of books at his elbow—all by Anatole France. It was the first time I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak and helpless, but interested in my surroundings. The day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand girl whom the general chaffed with sarcastic humor, and who gave back more than she got, went off duty with a cheery, “Good night, all!” and the night nurse took her place, and made a first visit to each bed. She was a dainty little woman with the complexion of a delicate rose and large, luminous eyes. She had a nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for all these men, who were like children in her hands. They seemed glad at her coming.
“Good evening, sister!” said one man after another, even one who had laid with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on his face.
She knelt down beside each one, saying, “How are you to-night?” and chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I heard a boy's voice say: “Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only given me two minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in love with you, you know, and I have been waiting all day for your beauty!”
There was a gust of laughter in the ward.
“The child is at it again!” said one of the officers.
“When are you going to write me another sonnet?” asked the nurse. “The last one was much admired.”
“The last one was rotten,” said the boy. “I have written a real corker this time. Read it to yourself, and don't drop its pearls before these swine.”
“Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all.”
An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the bedclothes off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas.
“I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't want to be a hero! I don't want to die! I want to be loved!... I'm a glutton for love!”
In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a schoolboy who was mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother. With his tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to chide him. It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had thrown off his clothes he snuggled under them again and said: “All right, I'll be good. Only I want a kiss before I go to sleep.”
I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life. But he was killed... I had a letter from his stricken mother months afterward. The child was “Missing” then, and her heart cried out for him.
Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire—I suppose he had been in a cotton-mill or a factory—a hard-headed, simple-hearted fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of “the wife.” But his nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the dreams that came to him.
“Sister,” he said, “don't let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can't bear it.”
“You will sleep better to-night,” she said. “I am putting something in your milk. Something to stop the dreaming.”
But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in a dazed way, saying:
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” trembling with fear, so that the bed was shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he called out, hushing him down, whispering to him.
“I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep,” he told me. “It's what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn't it? Nerves, you know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before this war.”
The little night nurse came to my bedside.
“Can't you sleep?”
“I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?”
She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.
“Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep.”
In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red glasses, and now and then all through the night matches were lighted, illuminating the room for a second, followed by the glowing end of a cigarette shining like a star in the darkness.
The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about violently, gave strange jerks and starts. Sometimes they spoke aloud in their sleep.
“That isn't a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell.”
“Now then, get on with it, can't you?”
“Look out! They're coming! Can't you see them moving by the wire?”
The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their sleep; lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness. Sights which they had tried to forget stared at them through their closed eyelids. The daylight came and the night nurse slipped away, and the day nurse shook one's shoulders and said: “Time to wash and shave. No malingering!”
It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as rats had to sit up in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave themselves.
“You're merciless!” I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse dabbed my back with cold iodine at six o'clock on a winter morning, with the windows wide open.
“Oh, there's no mercy in this place!” said the strong-minded girl. “It's kill or cure here, and no time to worry.”
“You're all devils,” said the New Zealand general. “You don't care a damn about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the time the doctor comes around. I'm a general, I am, and you can't order ME about, and if you think I'm going to shave at this time in the morning you are jolly well mistaken. I am down with dysentery, and don't you forget it. I didn't get through the Dardanelles to be murdered at Amiens.”
“That's where you may be mistaken, general,” said the imperturbable girl. “I have to carry out orders, and if they lead to your death it's not my responsibility. I'm paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my duty, rough or smooth, kill or cure.”
“You're a vampire. That's what you are.”
“I'm a nurse.”
“If ever I hear you're going to marry a New Zealand boy I'll warn him against you.”
“He'll be too much of a fool to listen to you.”
“I've a good mind to marry you myself and beat you every morning.”
“Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm!”
* * *
Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as the German mark was the railway station we were in the center of the danger-zone. There was a frightful noise of splintering glass and smashing timber between each crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the anti—aircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of those officers who had come down from the fighting—lines nerve-racked and fever-stricken. They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about from bed to bed, with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed no other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at that time, though they had done the hero's job all right.
It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that an officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, “If there is another air raid I shall go mad.” He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.
The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st, when our lines were stormed and broken by his men's odds against our defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like all who knew what had happened better than the troops themselves. Every day after the first break-through we pushed out in different directions—Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes until we came up with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back and back, day after day, with increasing speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It was a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and sticks these soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our front-lines, were trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks, ambulances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, agricultural implements, transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A. tents, gun-horse and mule columns, while rear-guard actions were being fought within gunfire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back along the roads in this uproar of traffic, and word came that a further retreat was happening and that the enemy had broken through again...
Amiens seemed threatened on the morning when, to the north, Albert was held by a mixed crowd of Scottish and English troops, too thin, as I could see when I passed through them, to fight any big action, with an enemy advancing rapidly from Courcellette and outflanking our line by Montauban and Fricourt. I saw our men marching hastily in retreat to escape that tightening net, and while the southern side of Amiens was held by a crowd of stragglers with cyclist battalions, clerks from headquarters staffs, and dismounted cavalry, commanded by Brigadier-General Carey, sent down hurriedly to link them together and stop a widening gap until the French could get to our relief on the right and until the Australians had come down from Flanders. There was nothing on that day to prevent the Germans breaking through to Amiens except the courage of exhausted boys thinly strung out, and the lagging footsteps of the Germans themselves, who had suffered heavy losses all the way and were spent for a while by their progress over the wild ground of the old fighting-fields. Their heavy guns were far behind, unable to keep pace with the storm troops, and the enemy was relying entirely on machine-guns and a few field-guns, but most of our guns were also out of action, captured or falling back to new lines, and upon the speed with which the enemy could mass his men for a new assault depended the safety of Amiens and the road to Abbeville and the coast. If he could hurl fresh divisions of men against our line on that last night of March, or bring up strong forces of cavalry, or armored cars, our line would break and Amiens would be lost, and all our work would be in jeopardy. That was certain. It was visible. It could not be concealed by any camouflage of hope or courage.
It was after a day on the Somme battlefields, passing through our retiring troops, that I sat down, with other war correspondents and several officers, to a dinner in the old Hotel du Rhin in Amiens. It was a dismal meal, in a room where there had been much laughter and, throughout the battles of the Somme, in 1916, a coming and going of generals and staffs and officers of all grades, cheery and high-spirited at these little tables where there were good wine and not bad food, and putting away from their minds for the time being the thought of tragic losses or forlorn battles in which they might fall. In the quietude of the hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered by flower-beds, I had had strange conversations with boys who had revealed their souls a little, after dinner in the darkness, their faces bared now and then by the light of cigarettes or the flare of a match.
“Death is nothing,” said one young officer just down from the Somme fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. “I don't care a damn for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck... My nerves are like fiddle-strings.”
In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between their stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and ditches under frightful fire which had “wiped out” their platoons or companies. A bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling gull, used to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his wing, and its head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on the figures in khaki—until suddenly it would clap its long bill rapidly in a wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire—“Curse the bloody bird!” said officers startled by this evil and reminiscent noise—and caper with ridiculous postures round the imperturbable gull... Beyond the lines, from the dining-room, would come the babble of many tongues and the laughter of officers telling stories against one another over their bottles of wine, served by Gaston the head-waiter, between our discussions on strategy—he was a strategist by virtue of service in the trenches and several wounds—or by “Von Tirpitz,” an older, whiskered man, or by Joseph, who had a high, cackling laugh and strong views against the fair sex, and the inevitable cry, “C'est la guerre!” when officers complained of the service... There had been merry parties in this room, crowded with the ghosts of many heroic fellows, but it was a gloomy gathering on that evening at the end of March when we sat there for the last time. There were there officers who had lost their towns, and “Dadoses” (Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies) whose stores had gone up in smoke and flame, and a few cavalry officers back from special leave and appalled by what had happened in their absence, and a group of Y.M.C.A. officials who had escaped by the skin of their teeth from huts now far behind the German lines, and censors who knew that no blue pencil could hide the truth of the retreat, and war correspondents who had to write the truth and hated it.
Gaston whispered gloomily behind my chair: “Mon petit caporal”—he called me that because of a fancied likeness to the young Napoleon—“dites donc. Vous croyex quils vont passer par Amiens? Non, ce n'est pas possible, ca! Pour la deuxieme fois? Non. Je refuse a le croire. Mais c'est mauvais, c'est affreux, apres tant de sacrifice!”
Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for company's sake, fixing up accounts as though the last day of reckoning had come...as it had. Her hair, with its little curls, was still in perfect order. She had two dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a waxen pallor. She was working out accounts with a young officer, who smoked innumerable cigarettes to steady his nerves. “Von Tirpitz” was going round in an absent-minded way, pulling at his long whiskers.
The war correspondents talked together. We spoke gloomily, in low voices, so that the waiters should not hear.
“If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the coast.”
“Will that be a win for the Germans, even then?”
“It will make it hell in the Channel.”
“We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire.”
“France won't give in now, whatever happens. And England never gives in.”
“We're exhausted, all the same. It's a question of man-power.”
“They're bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow.”
“I don't see that at all. There's still a line...”
“A line! A handful of tired men.”
“It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux to-night. It commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map.”
“They won't.”
“We keep on saying, 'They won't.' We said, 'They won't get the Somme crossings!' but they did. Let's face it squarely, without any damned false optimism. That has been our curse all through.”
“Better than your damned pessimism.”
“It's quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is to keep them back? There's nothing up the road.”
“It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. How they would laugh!”
“We shouldn't laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on things.”
“How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication. Anything may happen in the night.”
Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There were two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass. Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways. Then some one laughed.
“Not this time!”
The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table, and lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the loud hum of airplanes, the well known “zooz-zooz” of the Gothas' double fuselage. More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the same sound of explosives and falling masonry. The anti—aircraft guns got to work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells winging over the roofs.
“Bang!... Crash!”
That was nearer again.
Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.
“They're making a mess outside. Perhaps we'd better get away before it gets too hot.”
Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer who was settling up for a group of others.
The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly bright and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets were flooded with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver above intense black shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by projecting walls.
“Curse the moon!” said one officer. “How I hate its damned light”
But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions. Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.
An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.
“A fellow was killed just by my side.” he said. “We were standing in a doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a log, without a sound, as dead as a door-nail.”
There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note which vibrated like 'cello strings, very loudly, and with that sinister noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they passed across the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel below them. From time to time they went away until they were specks of silver and black; but always they came back again, or others came, with new stores of bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went on all through the night.
I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was impossible. My will-power was not strong enough to disregard those crashes in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful falling noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which I lay engulfed in the chaos of this wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many times I said, “To hell with it all... I'm going to sleep,” and then sat up in the darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on the electric light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in the corridor there was a stampede of heavy boots. Officers were running to get into the cellars before the next crash, which might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law of gravity. I walked along the corridor, now deserted, and saw a stairway littered with broken glass, which my feet scrunched. There were no lights in the basement of the hotel, but I had a flash-lamp, going dim, and by its pale eye fumbled my way to a stone passage leading to the cellar. That flight of stone steps was littered also with broken glass. In the cellar itself was a mixed company of men who had been dining earlier in the evening, joined by others who had come in from the streets for shelter. Some of them had dragged down mattresses from the bedrooms and were lying there in their trench-coats, with their steel hats beside them. Others were sitting on wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while there were others on their knees, and their faces in their hands, trying to sleep. There were some of the town majors who had lost their towns, and some Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three private soldiers, and some motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel lying together on dirty straw. By one of the stone pillars of the vaulted room two American war correspondents—Sims and Mackenzie—were sitting on a packing-case playing cards on a board between them. They had stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering light played on their faces and cast deep shadows under their eyes. I stood watching these men in that cellar and thought what a good subject it would be for the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a comfortable place. There was only one place on the bare stones, and when I lay down there my bones ached abominably, and it was very cold. Through an aperture in the window came a keen draft and I could see in a square of moonlit sky a glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A direct hit on the Hotel du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this vaulted room and end a game of cards. After fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that the room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this damp cellar and these hard stones. I returned to it and lay down on the bed again and switched off the light. But the noises outside, the loneliness of the room, the sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again. Many houses round about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage was being made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the room, smoking cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty explosion, very close, made all my nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the best place. If one had to die it was better to be in the company of friends. Down I went again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He, too, was a wanderer between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.
“I am getting bored with this,” he said. “It's absurd to think that this filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense calls one down. Anyhow, I can't sleep.”
We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well as sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the mattresses, vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ol' Bill, with a fierce frown above his black mustache. Sims and Mackenzie still played their game of cards, silently, between the guttering candles.
I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the cellar, six times that night. There was never ten minutes' relief from the drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens. It was at four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me wandering before.
“Let us go for a walk,” he said. “The birds will be away by dawn.”
It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hotel du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of horses and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The air raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first light of dawn came into the sky....
That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops—where there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many people must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own houses—I never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of the tragedy in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the first high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them about the city, destroying many other houses. A fire started by these shells formed a great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois Cailloux, where there had been an arcade and many good shops and houses. I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted ironwork when I went through the city after the day of exodus.
It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect—I often think of Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the enemy—but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in another.
One of our sentries came out of a little house near the Place and said:
“Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, sir. They've been falling pretty thick on the east side. Made no end of a mess!”
On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Australian headquarters, on the left bank of the Somme, we ate sandwiches in the public gardens outside the Hotel du Rhin. There were big shell-holes in the flower-beds, and trees had been torn down and flung across the pathway, and there was a broken statue lying on the grass. Some French and English soldiers tramped past. Then there was no living soul about in the place which had been so crowded with life, with pretty women and children, and young officers doing their shopping, and the business of a city at work.
“It makes one understand what Rome was like after the barbarians had sacked and left it,” said a friend of mine.
“There is something ghastly about it,” said another.
We stood round the Hotel du Rhin, shut up and abandoned. The house next door had been wrecked, and it was scarred and wounded, but still stood after that night of terror.
One day during its desolation I went to a banquet in Amiens, in the cellars of the Hotel de Ville. It was to celebrate the Fourth of July, and an invitation had been sent to me by the French commandant de place and the English A. P. M.
It was a beau geste, gallant and romantic in those days of trouble, when Amiens was still closely beleaguered, but safer now that Australians and British troops were holding the lines strongly outside, with French on their right southward from Boves and Hangest Wood. The French commandant had procured a collection of flags and his men had decorated the battered city with the Tricolor. It even fluttered above some of the ruins, as though for the passing of a pageant. But only a few cars entered the city and drew up to the Town Hall, and then took cover behind the walls.
Down below, in the cellars, the damp walls were garlanded with flowers from the market-gardens of the Somme, now deserted by their gardeners, and roses were heaped on the banqueting-table. General Monash, commanding the Australian corps, was there, with the general of the French division on his right. A young American officer sat very grave and silent, not, perhaps, understanding much of the conversation about him, because most of the guests were French officers, with Senators and Deputies of Amiens and its Department. There was good wine to drink from the cold vaults of the Hotel de Ville, and with the scent of rose and hope for victory in spite of all disasters—the German offensive had been checked and the Americans were now coming over in a tide—it was a cheerful luncheon-party. The old general, black-visaged, bullet-headed, with a bristly mustache like a French bull—terrier, sat utterly silent, eating steadily and fiercely. But the French commandant de place, as handsome as Athos, as gay as D'Artagnan, raised his glass to England and France, to the gallant Allies, and to all fair women. He became reminiscent of his days as a sous-lieutenant. He remembered a girl called Marguerite—she was exquisite; and another called Yvonne—he had adored her. O life! O youth!... He had been a careless young devil, with laughter in his heart....
I suppose it was three months later when I saw the first crowds coming back to their homes in Amiens. The tide had turned and the enemy was in hard retreat. Amiens was safe again! They had never had any doubt of this homecoming after that day nearly three months before, when, in spite of the enemy's being so close, Foch said, in his calm way, “I guarantee Amiens.” They believed what Marshal Foch said. He always knew. So now they were coming back again with their little bundles and their babies and small children holding their hands or skirts, according as they had received permits from the French authorities. They were the lucky ones whose houses still existed. They were conscious of their own good fortune and came chattering very cheerfully from the station up the Street of the Three Pebbles, on their way to their streets. But every now and then they gave a cry of surprise and dismay at the damage done to other people's houses.
“O la la! Regardez ca! c'est affreux!”
There was the butcher's shop, destroyed; and the house of poor little Madeleine; and old Christopher's workshop; and the milliner's place, where they used to buy their Sunday hats; and that frightful gap where the Arcade had been. Truly, poor Amiens had suffered martyrdom; though, thank God, the cathedral still stood in glory, hardly touched, with only one little shellhole through the roof.
Terrible was the damage up the rue de Beauvais and the streets that went out of it. To one rubbish heap which had been a corner house two girls came back. Perhaps the French authorities had not had that one on their list. The girls came tripping home, with light in their eyes, staring about them, ejaculating pity for neighbors whose houses had been destroyed. Then suddenly they stood outside their own house and saw that the direct hit of a shell had knocked it to bits. The light went out of their eyes. They stood there staring, with their mouths open... Some Australian soldiers stood about and watched the girls, understanding the drama.
“Bit of a mess, missy!” said one of them. “Not much left of the old home, eh?”
The girls were amazingly brave. They did not weep. They climbed up a hillock of bricks and pulled out bits of old, familiar things. They recovered the whole of a child's perambulator, with its wheels crushed. With an air of triumph and shrill laughter they turned round to the Australians.
“Pour les bebes!” they cried.
“While there's life there's hope,” said one of the Australians, with sardonic humor.
So the martyrdom of Amiens was at an end, and life came back to the city that had been dead, and the soul of the city had survived. I have not seen it since then, but one day I hope I shall go back and shake hands with Gaston the waiter and say, “Comment ca va, mon vieux?” (“How goes it, my old one?”) and stroll into the bookshop and say, “Bon jour, mademoiselle!” and walk round the cathedral and see its beauty in moonlight again when no one will look up and say, “Curse the moon!”
There will be many ghosts in the city at night—the ghosts of British officers and men who thronged those streets in the great war and have now passed on.
All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than generalship—by the fate which decides the doom of men.
The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by Ypres, were defensive actions of rear—guards holding the enemy back by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race were being raised.
The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn their lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the daily visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two years it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons against the enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach them. At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of '16, it was France which sustained the full weight of the German offensive on the western front and broke its human waves, until they were spent in a sea of blood, above which the French poilus, the “hairy ones,” stood panting and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks. The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses—six hundred thousand casualties—already conscious, icily, of a dwindling man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out by sledge-hammer blows, left and right, west and east, from that ring of nations which girdled them. On the west they would stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of their strength, but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by that enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the back of the narrow brains of those bald-headed vultures on the German General Staff), they most feared as their future peril—England. They had been fools to let the British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the folly of the madness by which they had flung the gauntlet down to the souls of proud peoples arrayed against them.
Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six hundred thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England, immense reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks before the summer foliage turned to russet tints.
Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean harness and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get their targets. We were strong in “heavies,” twelve-inchers, 9.2's, eight-inchers, 4.2's, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled sixty-pounders terrible in their long range and destructiveness. Our aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon squadron, and our aviators had been trained in the school of General Trenchard, who sent them out over the German lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and how to die like little gentlemen.
For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned “buses”—primitive machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying Fokkers who waited for them behind a screen of cloud and then “stooped” on them like hawks sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery, replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless they flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men gained an absolute supremacy by greater daring—there was nothing they did not dare—and by equal skill. As a caution, not wasting their strength in unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful concentrations. But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy cost of life, kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes.
The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in this direction a merry hell was being prepared.
There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast to the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts and tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing stations near the front the wounded—the human wreckage of routine warfare—were being evacuated “in a hurry” to the base, and from the base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so that all the wards might be empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying up. There was a sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being made for a multitude that was coming.
“We shall be very busy,” said the doctors.
“We must get all the rest we can now,” said the nurses.
“In a little while every bed will be filled,” said the matrons.
Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four wounded Germans, Wurtemburgers and Bavarians, too ill to move just then. Each of them had lost a leg under the surgeon's knife. They were eating strawberries, and seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them.
“Wie befinden sie sich?”
“Ganz wohl; wir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung.”
I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard where the “shell-shocks” sat about, dumb, or making queer, foolish noises, or staring with a look of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room came a sound of singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so mad!
“We are clearing them out,” said the medical officer. “There will be many more soon.”
How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. It was the only secret, and even that was known in London, where little ladies in society were naming the date, “in confidence,” to men who were directly concerned with it—having, as they knew, only a few more weeks, or days, of certain life. But I believe there were not many officers who would have surrendered deliberately all share in “The Great Push.” In spite of all the horror which these young officers knew it would involve, they had to be “in it” and could not endure the thought that all their friends and all their men should be there while they were “out of it.” A decent excuse for the safer side of it—yes. A staff job, the Intelligence branch, any post behind the actual shambles—and thank God for the luck. But not an absolute shirk.
Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, rows and rows of bell tents and pavilions stained to a reddish brown. Small cities of them were growing up on the right of the road between Amiens and Albert—at Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous-Corbie. I thought they might be for troops in reserve until I saw large flags hoisted to tall staffs and men of the R.A.M.C. busy painting signs on large sheets stretched out on the grass. It was always the same sign—the Sign of the Cross that was Red.
There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains were traveling on light railways day and night to railroads just beyond shell-range. What was all the weight they carried? No need to ask. The “dumps” were being filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells, covered by tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. Enormous shells, some of them, like gigantic pigs without legs. Those were for the fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2's. There was enough high-explosive force littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map.
“It does one good to see,” said a cheery fellow. “The people at home have been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been packing those things. Well done, Munitions!”
I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of satisfaction that at least when our men attacked they would have a power of artillery behind them. It might help them to smash through to a finish, if that were the only way to end this long-drawn suicide of nations.
My friend was shocked when I said:
“Curse all munitions!”