Back then to Ypres! It is an exposed moorland way. No woods, no houses stop the even progress of the wind. The trees are stumps no higher than Venetian masts. Instead of crops in the fields—crosses, an enormous harvest. Alongthe Menin road a steam tram rolls. At the entrance to Ypres is the communal cemetery of the city. Here, around the pre-war Belgian dead, lie Hussars, Lancers, Dragoon Guards, Scots Guards, all officers, all of the 1914 fighting. There they were lowered into graves with the flag about them—there they remain. In this acre of death the high wooden crucifix still stands, with its riven agonised Lord looking down. Of the hundreds of thousands of shells which fell in Ypres all spared Him—all but one which came direct and actually hit the Cross. That one did not explode but instead, half-buried itself in the wood and remains stuck in the upright to this day—an accidental symbol of the power of the Cross.
Ypres is terribly empty. Hundreds of thousands of eyes would look on it but there are few people who come to look at it—just ones and twos who stand diminutively in front of the great ruins and peer at them like the conventional figures in an old print. This absence of the living intensifies the strange atmosphere. It is said that the city will build itself up again, but it is possible to feel some doubt on that point. Perhaps Ypres will never be built again. At present it has some hundred and fifty places where they sell beer to two where they sell anything else. Its string of wooden hotels with cubicle bedrooms do not pay.The curious come for an hour or so from Ostende but do not spend the night. There is a sense of emptiness and tragedy which cannot be dispelled. Some sort of unit of British troops does duty instead of police and is posted to various guards, the sentries being however without rifles. The soldiers in their "sixth year" impart a certain liveliness. A party of them at night coming down the middle of the street singing
One word of thine,Tell the world you are mine,And the world will be dearer to me,
in a full-throated chorus wakens echoes from dark corners of the ruins. There is music and dancing in favoured taverns. The returned Belgians do not perhaps belong naturally to the atmosphere of the sublime. They love beer and sociality. They will make their money by some means—they are not too particular how. Civilised ethics do not rule in these places where war has worked its will.
Strolling along at dusk past the Cloth Hall tower a bright-eyed Belgian wolf asks you who you are. "C'est triste, n'est ce pas?" says he, pointing to the ruins.Tristeis what they are not. The Belgian is from Poperinghe. It is very dull there now.Tous les soldats sont partis.Also the mamzelles. Pas de jig-a-jig.
"Like a glass of beer?" asks the Belgian.
A spare woman of thirty serves two glasses ofale at a table outside a hotel. She seems to speak English for preference.
"You want someone to sleep with?" asks the man from Poperinghe.
"No, I sleep with no man."
"Not married?"
"No, and plenty time yet, and I shan't marry an English when I do. The English are all false."
The man from Poperinghe seems taken aback. At a further table a curious scene is being enacted. Here are sitting a pioneer corporal and a sergeant, both wearing the 1914 ribbon. They have their beer, and between them is an effervescent loose-mouthed Alsatian. The latter, like the man from Poperinghe, stands treat.
"I vill take you, one minit, I vill take you," says the Alsatian, kissing the tips of his fingers, "just vait, not ten minits from 'ere."
"Oh you go on, you bloomin' well shut up. I b'lieve you're agent for the girl or something," says the sergeant.
"No, listen, I'll tell you vot it is.... C'est de gateau, got that, gateau; naw need to drink any coffee, just ten minits, you see for yourself."
The sergeant makes a mocking show of biffing him in the eye, and grins all over his weak sun-burnt face. The shoeing corporal sips at his beer and smirks. The Alsatian on the tips of his toes,leaning forward on his chair which is tilted toward the table, gesticulates and slobbers—
"You wait till you see her, you'll felicitation yourself...."
And the sergeant is persuaded against his will and goes with him. Meanwhile dusk has grown to dark, and the ruined Cloth Hall tower on the other side of the way seems more gloomy, more moody and threatening, as if the war were not yet over.
This Ypres is a terrible place still. There is no life when night comes on but tavern life. Those who live and work here have lost their sense of proportion. They are out of focus somehow. "You lookin' for dead soldiers," says a Flemish woman to you with a glaring stare, wondering if you are one of the exhumers. Death and the ruins completely outweigh the living. One is tilted out of time by the huge weight on the other end of the plank, and it would be easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death. There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit. One is ashamed to be alive. You try to sleep in a little bed in a cubicle with tiny doll's house window. You listen to a drunken company down below singing, "Mademoiselle, have you got any rum?" A French couple enter the room next door, smacking one another's hips and confounding oneanother with coarse violent laughter—that is the light end of the plank. Then night ensues, the real night, breathless and sepulchral, the night which belongs to all lost hopes and ended lives and wearinesses.
You lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy masonry. You go to the little window, behold, the whole sky is crimson once more, and living streamers of flame ascend to the stars. An old dump has gone up at Langhemarcq. Everyone in Ypres looks out and then returns to sleep—without excitement. The lurid glare dies down; stertorous night resumes her sway o'er the living and the dead. For a moment it was as if the old war had started again.
Day dawns in a mist. A veil hides the inner reality of Ypres, and as a visitor says—"It looks more picturesque in the mist." Ypres however is an altar to which the nation must return.
After the great battle most of the survivors marched away. New men took their places. Glorious captains received their D.S.O.'s, battalions their first honours. A mere thirty thousand of the old army had stemmed the onrush of a quarter of a million of the enemy. Ypres remained in British hands—though badly battered,and the Germans were kept back from the vital ground of Calais.
At Chateau Wood near Hooge where a placard now says "This Place Was Hooge" were the remains of many battalions—Grenadiers, Duke of Wellingtons, Scots Fusiliers; along the Menin road lay Scots Guards, Borders, Gordons; but all were withdrawn. The Scots marched then to Dickebusch and Locre and Bailleul, and then to Sailly sur la Lys, and were out of the battle line ten murky days at least.
Now as you walk out from Ypres along the blighted Dickebusch road midst the iron thorn bushes of rusty barbed wire and sheaves of old spiral stakes you still see large notices thatWaste Lengthens the War—what stronger appeal could one make! Does it not still prolong it and ever will!
A south wind blows volumes of rain out of the clouds on Kemmel Hill, the old mud is restored on the road, and long plashy pools of water guide the steps. Dickebusch is getting itself dug out of the mud, and making fair progress. Of its church amid broken monuments only two needles of up-jutting wall remain—at altar and entrance. New La Clytte is soldering itself to the foundations of old La Clytte. Kemmel grows nearer to the view and all the detail of its hillside can be picked out by the eye—the wheat field, the pasture, the farm-house. It is one's eye-neighbour on theleft as you march into Locre. Now the Locre church, unscathed in 1914, unthreatened, is but a heap of red rubble surmounted by eight beams pointing skyward. Men are digging among the bricks, uncovering soiled images, figures of the Virgin, altar cloths, banners, stools. Near by stands a rusty cast-iron church built of salvage, a straight Protestant meeting house but for some brand-new coloured effigies of saints set among the seats. One aspect of Locre is of a diminutive forest of stinging nettles and low stumps of dead trees, and beyond lie some hundreds of British dead, flanked by a disused medical shed where the bodies used to be brought out and a burying padre with clayey hands went through the painfully mechanical service of throwing "dust to dust." The graves are nicely kept, and the young Belgium of Locre grows up with this heritage of sacrifice. As you sit on the ruins of the church looking down to the wet highway muddy velocipedists come pelting past in a race round their native land. Their bare thighs are caked with brown mud, and their cotton chemises are stuck to their bare round-shouldered backs, their intent faces are dirt-covered—on they dash, a complete and happy irrelevance beside the old war.
Here is the frontier 'twixt Belgium and France. A rope is drawn across the road; there was none in the days of the war. The customs gendarmes will examine you if you are coming into Belgium,though they will pay little attention if you are going out.
The landscape is one of black dead trees hanging dead arms. Old blown-up trees lie, root and all, along the roadside. There are great numbers of sockets of old gas-shells relating to the taking of Locre by the Germans in April 1918, heaps also of rusty rifle grenades which seem to have been collected and put by the side of the road. Remarkable ever are the promiscuously piled mountains of domestic old iron which one passes. It would be an interesting exercise for a young detective to decide what each piece of wreckage had been before the war. Certain things you can be sure about however—oil-drums, coal-scuttles, wash-bowls, chamber conveniences, armchair and sofa springs, metal guts of mattresses, perforated bowls for straining greens, coffee-pots, mangling and washing machines, scales, canisters, salvers—a clean sweep for every farm-house and every village. And in the new houses there is scarcely one saved utensil carried forward. Among the new articles introduced one may remark china casts of Charlie Chaplin in gala attire.
The frontier land is hilly. One skirts the upland of which Mount Kemmel on the left is the most prominent feature. It is three or four kilometres from the rope of the frontier to the French line of douane and its customs-gendarmes. One looks down to the first town in France,Bailleul, and it looks like a picture which someone has drawn and then crossed out with black lines and smudged. As one approaches, this is found to be the residential suburb or park called L'asile, with grandiose buildings, now an appalling wreck with not one redeeming new patch upon it. Heaps of debris stand higher than houses, and houses which have not fallen have as it were been pushed forward upon one another. The frontier gendarmes examine your passport and you are free in France. You see the first diminutive huts of the French returned refugees, and then in the mud of the street, urchins playing bat and ball with a slowly-expiring frog which they hold by one dangling leg, and toss to the boy with the bat. A few steps further and it is Bailleul.
Bailleul too is a great wreck as remarkable as Ypres, and its progress of recuperation is much slower. It does not cater for war pilgrims or take the money of tourists, and so there are no prominent hotels and few estaminets. Most of its houses are down, its ways are choked with ruin, and in the evening nondescript squads of workmen shuffle through the streets to their homes in barracks and cellar.
Still the old Army of 1914 marches on. When it entered Bailleul all was calm. Its great red-brick houses stood fairly and uncracked. Thepeople had had a fright, but they held on. They held on through years of the war, and though the guns kept pounding away at them they did not wholly abandon it till 1918 when the Germans seized the town as part fruit of their second great Spring attempt to end the war. Then it was "fort abimée." The owners all fled, and what they left an enemy army ransacked.
Thousands of officers and men were snugly billeted in November 1914 at Locre and Bailleul and Meteren. Sir John French came and chatted with men in the billets—about the battle of Ypres. New drafts came out from England. There had been a clearance of reservists and first volunteers. Each stricken battalion received its half a thousand to make up. Practically new units were organised for the winter defence of the new lines, and when the time was come they marched three leagues nearer to their enemy—to Sailly sur la Lys and Laventie and Neuf Berquin, Estaires—such names of destiny! When the King came to Sailly sur la Lys at the end of November he could not see his guardsmen because they were already in the fighting line and it was thought it would be unsoldierly to call them back for the King to see, to which the King agreed.
The flowers are withered, the thistles which gave their fragrance to the air at Ypres are white with down. Peasants everywhere are scything weeds and burning them in smoking heaps. Butthe trenches beyond Sailly are still shaggy-topped with teazle crowns and woolly nettle heads. One wonders how many different units at what different times occupied those 1914 trenches. Here still, one picks up old blue water-bottles and faded green straps and pouches of British uniforms. They are poor trenches—the mere staves that lined them to keep up the mud are all warped and good dug-outs are few.
The Germans of course swept o'er all this in 1918. Witness the "busted" concrete telegraph posts growing dozens of rusty iron wires from their stumps, witness the lumpy solid cement-bags by the side of the road. But between 1914 and 1918 what a history! A little way beyond the British line is a cemetery called "V.C. corner." There are two hundred and thirty crosses and on every cross is exactly the same legend—"G.R.U. Unknown Australian soldier." There is no name in the whole of the cemetery. Some time some band of Australians charged here and did not come back and were not taken prisoner. Old rifles with broken rusty bayonets have been placed against the white-washed cross-surmounted entrance. Not many paces on one comes to the German line wrought in impregnable concrete, a line of snug beds in which it seems one might comfortably await the Last Day. But one concrete structure has been mined and looks as if it had been thrown bodily into the air without flying intobits. Now it stands poised upside down on a heap of dirt beside a profound pit. The Germans who were there when that happened are nearer now to the unknown Australian soldiers than we are.
In 1914 there was none of this concrete. Both sides were equal in the mud, and the same no-man's land lay between. Even the wire had not been thrown out—or was of a most rudimentary kind. Friend and foe heard one another talking from across the wet fields—even called to one another and were without especial bitterness. On the right and towards Laventie a nervous Indian division kept up a heavy rifle fire all night long, but otherwise the war was mild. Frost-bite harmed more than iron. The first night raids were planned—sporting expeditions in which the thrills were sufficiently novel. Pleasantries were often exchanged with the enemy who was found to be possessed of plenty of English slang, and occasionally an English soldier who knew some German risked being thought a spy by his comrades and replied.
Someone however planned a sharp attack on Lille. It was really the predecessor of the battle of Neuve Chapelle and should be called perhaps the battle of Fromelles. But it was completely abortive and the details were removed from public news—the first and last night attack of its kind. The date was exactly one week before Christmas, and looking at that narrow strip of no-man's landin which the attack spent itself one realises afresh how ineffectual were all these little battles of the war. Men died: that was all their effect.
The attack was timed to start at six in the evening. Men were hoisted to the parapets and lay flat awaiting a signal, the blowing of a whistle. At the sound of the whistle they stood up and walked slowly and cautiously forward not to disturb the Germans. The moment the enemy discerned them and fired they were to rush forward as one man and enter the German trenches. Some men walked hand in hand; some unfortunately lost their heads and ran forward at once. The night was black as pitch and full of the unknown. It was not long before the enemy began to fire, and men dropped rapidly, leaving the inevitable gaps and disconnections in the line. It is incredible to realise it: the affair lasted all night long, and scarcely anyone knew where anyone else was. But back and forth they ranged in that fatal width of eighty yards of no-man's land, and in one battalion alone a hundred and eighty men were lost. As was to be expected, the troops were highly complimented and medals were plentifully awarded to the heroes who survived. Lille was safe as ever. Little Fromelles, just behind the enemy lines, was safe as Lille. The dead lay in front of the German trenches, and the foe carried some of them to the graveyard at Fromelles and buried them. But seven days later, on theChristmas Day armistice, many still lay green on the green earth where they had fallen.
A curious day in the war—that first twenty-fifth of December. It was surely a moment of hope after great suffering and in the midst of the great anxiety. Probably all the nations engaged felt horrified by what they had done, and a sort of penitence ranged in men's minds, a belated regret that a better way than war had not been found to solve Europe's problems. By most of the private soldiers and young officers it was fervently believed that all would be over soon. And away at home there was such idealistic hope as that the soldiers on both sides might unanimously refuse to fight and that thus war might die of old age and prove that it had truly been an anachronism. Immense new armies were drilling in England, France, Germany, Russia, but they would never be needed. Germany would speedily be forced back to the Rhine and would capitulate, indemnifying France and Belgium handsomely and owning herself in the wrong. Our armies held the Germans on the West and the enemy was short of shells. The Russian "steamroller" was at work on the other side of Europe, and men were betting one another that Przemysl would fall before the New Year. Germany also was short of food, and our sea power would cause her to starve. In Germany on the other hand, a sense of great military superiority prompted thethought that soon all the enemies of the Fatherland would be crushed.
Despite the details of atrocities on both sides there was not the extent of international bitterness that existed later. There was much talk of an armistice, and there would have been official sanction for a general temporary peace if Germany had not been so deeply distrusted. As it was, there was a cessation of hostilities in many parts of the line and meetings of enemies which amounted to fraternisation. This first Christmas was the only one on which there was innocent and bloodless armistice. Next year men were killed; and in 1916 despite the hopes of rank and file there were few handshakes, few interchanges of civility and greeting.
But the first Christmas Day was a holiday. A party of Germans came over from Fromelles and a party of ours went over to the German trenches. Here in this narrow no-man's land where but a week ago had been that "clash by night," foes met as friends. The Germans agreed to bring over those of the dead which had not been buried. This was a matter of great solemnity. The grey German soldiers put the bodies on stretchers and brought them to the midst of no-man's land. Graves were dug there and then. Detachments of British and German troops formed up in line, and a German and an English chaplain read prayers alternately in the two languages. It must havebeen heart-rending for our fellows to look on the faces of the dead they knew so well, some of whom had set out for the attack in such high spirits. And they lay with their terrible wounds, the silent and ghastly fruits of the war, and it seemed they had nothing in common with Christmas and the festival of peace and goodwill.
The arrangements for the armistice had been made in this way. On the night of Christmas Eve the German trenches were lit up with lanterns and there was much singing of carols and popular German music. Now and then there would be shouting across at the British lines, Christmas wishes and attempts to enter into conversation. Early on Christmas morning one of our scouts went out accordingly and met a German patrol. The latter gave him a glass of whisky and some cigars with a message that if we didn't fire at them they wouldn't fire at us. There had been no firing since nightfall and an armistice was agreed to. At about dawn a party of Germans came over to our wire fence and a party of our men went out to meet them. The meeting was most friendly, and there was a general exchange of small souvenirs and much mirth. Out of their abundance our men gave the Germans of their Christmas puddings which were received with great appreciation. Cigarettes were smoked, and there was much conversation in which Tommy made himself understood and the German mustered allhis English. They all said they were tired of the war but were convinced Germany would soon win. One or two had lived in England, one even had an English wife, another had had an English sweetheart in Suffolk, and these were very eager to get back, so they said. The German opinion about the war was that France was on her last legs; Russia had had a tremendous defeat in Poland and would soon be ready to make peace. England remained to be broken, but with France and Russia out of the way it would not be difficult to come to terms. They thought the war might come to an end in January, 1915, in the following month. They professed to hate their officers but were evidently afraid of them. It was clear that discipline was carried further in the German army than in ours and that it was very much harsher.
The German officers, without tokens of rank, seemed much less at ease than their men and were inclined to observe a sort of official silence. One pointed to the dead and said in French "Les braves!" indicating a reverence for fallen foes. Another volunteered the information that the officers who had died a week ago had been buried in the graveyard at Fromelles. There were dignified exchanges of tokens of remembrance among officers—not very convincing perhaps as evidence of brotherly love, but there was no mistaking the good-humour and camaraderie of rank and file which continued all the while.
What a sad moment when officers saluted and the men marched back to continue the bitterness and folly of Europe's suicide. Andfeu de joieat midnight and massed choruses of carol singing! Christmas 1914 how far away wert thou from happiness and peace!
And Fromelles church on the hill has been rased to the ground. The English dead have been taken away—only French remain, and amidst the great smash-up of tombstones are seven or eight wooden crosses for Chasseurs Alpins and French dragoons.
So 1914 passed and the new year opened with a long war penitence when in two months a battalion in the line lost but four or five men. Both sides were short of shells and were saving themselves for the Spring. We shall march soon to Neuve Chapelle. Meanwhile men are practising in the use of the jam-tin and the hair-brush bombs—for the British army went to war without a bomb, despised bombs. It went also without helmets, without metal hats. Men went to war in service hats. It will take some maniac-(sic) patriot to jump from the gallery of the House of Commons into the midst of dreaming politicians, yelling "Give them metal helmets" ere something of the kind be furnished. There are now proceeding rehearsals of a battle behind the lines. Neuve Chapelle is being thoroughly rehearsed against a dummy foe. The power of shrapnel todestroy barbed wire is being tried—the verdict being that the narrower the front attacked the more chance of completely destroying the wire. As the war was eventually decided on the broadest of fronts, so the new phase of the war which started with Neuve Chapelle was begun on the narrowest of fronts. Be it noted, a continuation of the grand strategic movements of 1914 has already been rendered impracticable by the organisation of trench defences.
On March 10th was the first concentration on the enemy's line, the first attempt to pierce it. Behold the once crowded breastworks on the road to Aubers and Neuve Chapelle. The great shaggy earthwork is covered with dense thistle now. There are mounds of filled sand-bags all hanging in clots like shirt-tails of innumerable men. This was the jumping-off point for the attack. It was bristling with tense excited soldiers that wild March morning, but no one lives there now—only swarms of whispering grasshoppers. The earth-wave goes on across the flat country; it is uncontrollably wild, and the peasants who work on the fields before and in front of it have left it alone as a work of despair to clear. It looks like an old Roman line.
It is pitiful and pathetic now to walk to Neuve Chapelle and Aubers—where officers clutched their revolvers, and men with bayonets fixed thought their last thoughts of home whilst they plunged perchance to death. All the German defences arein concrete—the wonderful 1916 concrete, massive, impregnable. At Aubers there are six hundred and eighty block-houses of concrete, with walls three feet thick. There are impudent watch-towers of it.
The roadway, still littered with shrapnel and fragments of rifles and bombs, crawls across disintegrated Nature to ramshackle Neuve Chapelle, and then there is that beautiful wood beyond, so often sketched, not dead, leafing from all its trunks. As one looks on its lacework of loveliness set against the sky one thinks of a martyr whose faith has been proved—rescued from fire in time to avert destruction.
Neuve Chapelle however was no victory as also it was no defeat.GOOD NEWS TO-NIGHTsaid the placards of the London papers, but what had happened was merely a rehearsal with many accidents. The fighting lasted three days. The enemy gave as much as he took. Men spent the night in trenches waist-deep in water, and were shelled mercilessly. They got up prematurely to attack; to face fires of execution—the serried array of the enemy's machine gunnery. Did not a battalion of Guards lose three officers and a hundred men whilst speeding over a mere hundred and fifty yards? On the other hand certainly German positions were isolated and hundreds of foemen walked demurely into captivity behind the British lines.
You will look in vain for the graves of thousands of heroes. The bodies have been taken far away, but Neuve Chapelle has its cemetery of exhumés covered with brown level-raked earth behind a fertile beanfield. Captain Sir Edward Hulse, hero of a night raid at Fromelles, lies buried by the wayside, and he died at Neuve Chapelle. As for German dead, there is a strange absence of graves, but beyond Neuve Chapelle is a field of outrageous thistles and broad-bladed rotting crosses, some down, some standing, all with faded inscriptions, but the thistles are so thick and high one might easily pass by without observing an old graveyard of our dread enemy. It would be interesting to read a German account, oh, not an official one, of this battle of Neuve Chapelle, an account by one of the common soldiers who fraternised with his enemy on Christmas Day and had to kill him ere Easter had arrived.
A long black touring-car has drawn up at the side of the road at Neuve Chapelle, and a handsome grey-haired English gentleman looks on the ruins. Says a small boy to him, "Daddy, what did the Germans do here?"
"I don't know, my boy," says he. "But there was a great battle here early in the war, and we tried to win it. I don't think anybody won."
So the Army went back to its football leagues and boxing competitions which afforded a happysubsidiary interest. True, some of the athletes and bright particular sporting stars had fallen, but others constantly arrived from inexhaustible old England. As regards the war a rigorous optimism set in. Complete victory was postponed for two months. There must be more and better rehearsals, that was all. A passion for discipline and the shooting of cowards set in. Poor R—— was shot beside Laventie. Sergeant-majors "came into their own."
Now however a new peace has settled upon Laventie. Even the workmen seem working quietly. Most of the old billets of 1914-15 lie in tumultuous heaps of brick dust and beams, though here and there are houses with the number of the billet marked and the number of men it would hold. Many a tap-room where our fellows gave voice to beer andvin blanchas passed into nothingness—the heavy boots clattering under the tables, the red faces above, the bottles and glasses, the gambling-boards, the pale-faced non-committal French women unashamed by the filth of the talk—where are they all? The old owners have gone, dead perhaps, or they found better business elsewhere. Often those who served in those taverns behind the line were not the real owners but a sort of adventurer who came in when the real people fled in panic. Tommy was the source of their profit, they plied him with beer and girls, and gave shelter to gambling sharps and gotFrance a bad name. Anyhow, the people you see now are a sober quiet-faced folk with a real unending gratitude and affection for the British soldier. They preserve nothing but good memories of him, and no calculations enter into their love.
The old tavern of the Blue Horse seems to be down, but the Grand Cheval Blanc still stands and other taverns of the horse—Laventie was a horse-breeding place in days gone by. To-day it has only a tiny population—and is nothing. It perhaps will not be a notable place again.
The mind goes on to the rest-billets of Hinges and Busnes and to the march to Festubert across a country less scarred by war than there, less gassed perhaps, for gas killed more than shells. There are new plans of battle, more auguries of complete victory. Brigadiers themselves come to lesser commanders to explain in person the secrets of the Festubert attack. It amounts to little more than an intensification of the bombardment rehearsed at Neuve Chapelle, and the pouring of a greater number of men through the neck of devastation thus made, a pitiful suicide trap as it turned out, but a natural experiment.
Hinges, though in 1915 far enough from shell fire to be a place of rest-billets and the drilling of new drafts and the bringing of musketry practice up to high regimental standards, is now a wreck, its church as completely ruined as our Wenlock Abbey and looking not unlike it.Hinges has a commanding position with a view far o'er the strickenNord du France. Behind its ridge of high land Bethune remained comparatively immune, its centre alone being utterly destroyed. No doubt parts of Bethune would have fallen into German hands in 1918 had Hinges not held. The neighbouring village of Locon fell—a mile or so to the North-east. Merville which is due North fell also, and shells from three sides screamed against this little village and the Canadians defending it.
Hinges now is quietly rebuilding itself and is a little-visited war hamlet. A memory and shrine of the Festubert fight is the wayside cemetery with its Gordons and Black Watch and Lancs men. Here lie two unknown British soldiers of Lancashire regiments and on their temporary wooden crosses have been nailed metal discs of the Lancastrians with bright red roses and the words:—"They win or die who wear the rose of Lancashire." Some devotee of his county has placed this disc on thousands of the graves of the Lancastrians.
On the evening of the 15th May 1915, 2nd and 6th Gordons, 1st Grenadiers, 2nd Scots and Borders marched out to the junction of the roads rue de Bois and rue de l'Epinette, then filed through trenches held by Indian troops, and reached an allotted storming position west of "Princes Road." An elaborate time-table hadbeen arranged, and each unit knew its angle relative to the "gap in the wire" which the artillery were going to make. At midnight all the troops were in position. At a quarter past three in the morning Scots Guards and Borders started up to lead the assault. What a narrow-fronted concentrated effort it was may be judged by the battalion formation, which was in eight lines of two platoons each.
One cannot be sure now what trenches each unit filled, but the trenches are there and it is not difficult to imagine the crush of khaki in the warm May night, the shrieking and thundering of the bombardment. Three o'clock in the morning and the rum being doled out and the men poised and ready for the race of death.
Near the corner of rue de l'Epinette and just before the village of Richebourg l'Avoué lie three Colonels and a Major side by side—they are the commanders of the Grenadiers and of the 2nd Border regiment, Major Kennet the second in command of the 1st Grenadiers, and Colonel Alexander of a Yorkshire regiment—all four perished at Festubert. The corner of rue de l'Epinette has now a cottage of wood and bricks with a cast-iron roof, a bright garden of flowers and beans. Opposite stands a new estaminet. There is a jolly field of gathered haricots hanging to dry on ten-foot poles. Once more, iron thorn-bushes of barbed wire each side of the way, andwhere the men dug themselves in by the side of the road—water and reeds. The Indian section has become the Indian cemetery, and the brave dusky boys of Asian hills have passed away. Festubert is a little place where the pile of old white stone and cement which was the village church is higher than the huts which have sprung up around it. But where are those blossoming orchards through which our boys charged in the dawn twilight, where are the dead who lay so long unrecovered in that pitiful no-man's land beyond? Unrecovered then and irrecoverable now.
On the 27th May 1915, ten days after the battle, General Joffre inspected the whole Seventh Division, which was drawn up in three great columns, a brigade in each, and with the 20th Brigade and its pipers leading, all marched past to the salute. Another day came the Divisional Commander General Gough, and perched high up on the central pile of straw and midden in a large farm-yard he thanked the men for Festubert—they had done what was asked and more—"as always," he added.
Yet the Seventh Division had been destroyed at the First battle of Ypres, only its framework had remained; its large reinforcements had been worked off in the night-raids and at Neuve Chapelle, and its second reinforcements had been almost exhausted at this Festubert. The speecheswere made, not so much to the heroes as to new drafts. Kitchener's army was however flooding into France, and despite enormous casualties we were beginning in a way to have a national army. What was left of the old army became the instructors of the new. The regular army gave way to the volunteers.
It was a time of heart-searching in England. Optimism and pessimism began to be sharply defined. Russia had been routed. Lord Northcliffe made his sensational effort to make an easy-going London face bitter reality. Mr. Lloyd George at the Ministry of Munitions began to take a larger broader view of the military aspect of the war than did most of his colleagues. Preparations were made for the manufacture of shells for the terrific onslaught of the Somme next year. Whilst many poor fools still thought that 1915 would see us through the strife, plans on the basis of a three or four years struggle were being definitely made. Then we were beginning to manufacture poison gas and had at last invented a handy bomb—the Mills grenade, our answer to the stick-bombs which dangled from the belts of German soldiers. It was a time of far-reaching military plans and dreams. All grown-up children who were not themselves tin soldiers were playing soldiers. Flying men carried terror across the skies, and sailors of submarines carried it under the sea. No prophet knew the number of menwho would have to be killed before the politicians would be ready to come to Versailles to discuss the matter. From England, France and Germany three or four million must actually die—that fact was unknown. In the summer of 1915 the number who had died was far from that figure. It is curious however to think of the many who had laid themselves down in earth's earthy bed in the full faith that their sacrifice would not be in vain—to think of the proud Germans, the fine ones, not the base ones, who believed in their Kaiser and that wonderful German Fatherland to which they owed their life before they owed their death, and to think of what was to come. Germany and her Kaiser not only defeated but humiliated and cast lower than all nations in old Europe; to think of the loyal Russian soldiers who perished in the first enthusiasm of the war with a bright starry faith in Russia, her Church and her Tsar, of the Grand Duke Oleg for instance, that young hero whose warm blood grew cold whilst the street-bred people of Berlin knocked nails in great Hindenburg's wooden statue—to think of these first Russians who lay dead with their weapons beside them in 1914-15, and then to think of the hideous revolution and those murders in Ekaterinburg when all Russia fell; to think of the fine youth of England and Scotland, of France, of Serbia, who died in the faith not only of national victory but of a victory for humanity,the boys whose fragment of iron destiny clove their brains or rived their hearts at the outset of the fray, and then to think of that sordid clash of selfishness at Versailles and of the untamed menagerie of Europe let loose in 1920. The spiritualists quickly claimed to get special messages from the dead. But did the dead only speak to the spiritualists? Did they say nothing more than was said to them? Most of us alas, hear nothing or only a "Dinna ye hear it?" a wailing of the pipes at an infinite number of poor soldiers' funerals.
Well, the war enters a new phase in the summer of 1915. It will be fought in a larger more terrible way, the number of millions of deaths will begin after a while to seem not so far off. Killing becomes the religion of the hour.
The first hundreds of thousands of the volunteers roll up. The old Seventh Division which we have been following is broken up and reconstructed. The Guards Division was formed. So Scots Guards and Grenadiers marched away to join new comrades, to leave behind brave Borders and Gordons and Devons and Duke of Wellingtons. The 92nd feted the Scots, the Devons the Grenadiers; the Gordon pipers played all the laments of the clans and "Will ye no come back again!"
And they went to Wizernes to prepare forthe battle of Loos—a conflict which the gallant Highland lads were destined to enter first and the bright polished Guards but second, yet both to shine and die.
In June General Foch's Tenth Army launched its Artois attack against the great ridge of "Notre Dame de Lorette" which commands the Lens country from the South as the high ground of Loos does from the North. A hundred thousand Frenchmen perished for Notre Dame and it is henceforth a place of pilgrimage for France. The battle was the prelude to our battle of Loos and whilst the great new British army in reserve drilled and marched away to the North, it heard each night the drum-fire of the 75's rolling from the South. Later in the war when the British took over all the line 'twixt Lens and Arras the Canadians took Foch's victory a step further and captured Vimy Ridge. What Foch did in the summer of '15 was however to be eclipsed by what the combined armies should do in the autumn. Reliance was placed chiefly on the new man-power. The earlier battles of Neuve Chapelle and Festubert had been tests of the relationship of gun-power and man-power. Opinion inclined to support the theory that a superiority in numbers was the most telling factor in a battle. This seemingly was disproved, and the next theory was that in order to obtain victory there must be overwhelming superiority both inguns and in men. The Somme battle proved that even these were not enough.
In the battle of Loos however all the interest was centred on men, men personally. The new base was St. Omer, the picturesque ecclesiastical town with its castellated church towers in relief against the sky—all so thronged with khaki—henceforth till the war ends to be a great war centre. France lies in a bower beyond, and there are squads of poplar trees on hills, and green and happy meadows never scarred by shells or wilted by gas. On the left on the road out to Wizernes is now a large cemetery, and here lie French dead with the tricolour upon them, British with an infinity of flowers and wreaths, Americans with grim and tall white crosses—American dead who will not be exhumed perhaps. Behind the American graves stand wedges of unpainted wood—a Chinese plot where lie what was mortal of many unknown coolies. On the right lie Germans, on the leftsoldadosof Portugal. This is called playfully the souvenir cemetery—there are so many of the dead they can be thus arranged, as children might arrange their toys. St. Omer was known as a great base hospital to which alas, so many were called to look their last upon their dying children, dying sons of England breathing out their last words before their bodies were laid away. There are those who are fond of saying that everything began at St. Omer. But formany also it was the place where it all—ended.
The cemetery past, (How it rains on it now!) you come to aerodromes all tortured and torn, indications of Handley Page but no indications of those who fly, the cages are all empty and there stands not a sentry. In plain blunt English the passer-by is told that "Trespassers will be shot" but in the heavy rain of a Saturday afternoon a muddy crowd of French boys are playing a football match. Chinamen evidently worked beside these aerodromes, for you see their scrawls on the sheds and shelters.
Wizernes, where the Guards Division was formed, lies in a hollow below a long green ridge. Most of it is painted white—includingAu bon Diablea tavern of some name. The people know a passing Englishman, not by the cut of his clothes alone but by his walk and his complexion and style. Standing at their doorways old men give military salutes to any Englishman who happens to go by. All know bits of our tongue, of which they are as proud as if they had wounds to show. A poor woman in a little beer-house has eight daughters, five of whom are married and a sixth has a child by a Canadian. Little Renée, flaxen-haired, ruddy-cheeked, is getting on very well and the mother adores her, though a father in the New World his progeny has forgotten. This sixth daughter of substantial mother was inservice at Havre and met the soldier there; she is now in service at St. Omer and not at all "ruined." There are thousands of baby tokens of the war in France. Some died no doubt, through lack of care; lightly they came and lightly they go, but a widespread sentimental feeling about departed Tommy shields those who now, live from any feeling of disgrace.
Of course the men at the base begot more infants than the men in the line, the latter were too much used up for "love" or "lust," saw fewer girls and had less time on their hands. But all had their opportunities. As we know, a great number of marriages were effected, and not a few overseas men are now living with French wives.
That has little however to do with Wizernes, whence behold Lord Cavan's men marching away one dull September morn. The music of the bands is refracted from that long parallel ridge of hill which goes with the road toward Arques—the drums, the fifes, the brilliant array; each company compact, glittering—the new Division. Some of it is utterly new, such as 4th Grenadiers and 1st Welsh straight from Little Sparta, others trail already a great war history from other divisions of the old army. But the numbers are good. Sergeants are yelling at men who will be dead in a few weeks' time. Men are silently reviling those on whom destiny itself will quicklytake revenge. All looks very authentic and lasting. Unchecked optimism moreover reigns supreme. These compact units in their unhurried and ever regular quick march believe that they will win the war. Lens will be taken by others. They will come into action at the critical moment, somewhere near Douai. They will pierce the German belt of defence, split the enemy army, "roll up their line," and Germany realising that she is beaten will at once sue for peace. There may be some delay in formalities—then home for Christmas!
Behold in the Grand Place at Arques immaculate General Heywood inspecting his Third Brigade with its new units. Arques has a tall obelisk there now—a ses cent cinquante heroiques et glorieux enfants, mort pour la France et la liberté.
These inspections were as great an ordeal as the going into battle itself. In the line at least there were no drill-sergeants and regimental sergeant-majors. However, inspections cease and the long march in the rain begins, and new leather beats cobbled highways for many a long fifty minutes, and weary backs and feet find ten minutes in the hour all too little for recuperation. A little-touched happy agricultural country, with Calvaries here and there erected and blessed in 1919 in token of thanks that the land was spared from invasion. By Aire to Fontaine St. Hilaire,to the sight of the first coal pyramids of the Lens country and to the hearing of the first mighty thunders of the opening great battle. The Guards were told that they were intended for a sort of anchor to the cavalry. The Division would press on, and somewhere beyond Loos the cavalry would come up from behind, pass through the ranks, and press on to Douai. The Division would perhaps come into action at the Canal at Douai. So when the cavalry overtook the Guards whilst yet on the road to Loos it was assumed that the whole British army was in advance of its program, Douai taken, and the enemy in disorderly retreat. But on the day when optimism reached its height a Colonel in a motor coming back from the front gave the duller tidings that the attack had been held up. However, the sight of the cavalry regiments going past in all their splendour was a sort of lasting encouragement in the simple soldier's mind.
It is a gloomy sordid country with dirty mining villages placarded with yellow appeals to the proletariat and "Vive la Russie!" "Vive la revolution sociale!" and dirty homes and black-faced men in sooty coaly shirts—miserable Sailly, miserable Vermelles. Then the road debouches upon wide open country, the terrain and the landscape of the battle. It is a chalky heath interlaced and inter-run with trenches and barbed wire. The trenches were mostly dug by Scottishminers and were said to be the admiration of the troops in 1915. But standards in trench digging were low in the first year of the war, and one does not admire them now. The landmarks of the horizon are peaked coal-heaps. The road which goes to Lens is bare and hard. Loos and Hulluch are on the left, and also the German line. Close in to the suburbs of Lens the line crosses the road. Shells must have come thick and fast on these September days. It is not a covetable country to march over under fire. One wonders what exactly the first divisions accomplished here on the days before the Guards came up. Special correspondents were given facilities at the time and one remembers among other things Mr. Buchan's despatch with its native pride in Highland regiments, and a sort of belief that they themselves had won the day. One had the impression of a sort of trial charge of kilted lads which showed what they would do later on. Indeed some of the Highlanders must have actually got into Lens. Nothing could stop them but death. Were the lines between Vermelles and Loos German? These were supposed to have been captured during the first days of the attack. The Guards in artillery formation swept across leftward to Loos, past the spent legions—to the line, to Hill 70, the barrier to Lens city.
It is memorable to be in Loos on the anniversary of the opening of the battle, to walk upHill 70 by the sharp-dug clumsy communication-trench, to reach the lateral lines on the brow of the hill and look down toward the shattered town. And Loos lies in disruption and dejection. It lost every roof, now it has perhaps a score of new ones visible to the eye. The machinery of the pit-head is all down, likewise the clangorous iron tower which shells seemed unable to destroy. Rusty wreckage runs along the base of the coal heap, the length of a long train. Heavy green shrub almost covers the coal embankment. On Hill 70 itself the old rusty wire remains, though so scanty as if much had corroded away. Shell-holes seem to afford more cover than the pitiful scrapings in the chalk of the old trenches. There is a burnt-out wood on the left; on the right is the insurgent industrialism of unruined fosses; ahead are chalk-pits, chalk-mounds, thistles, dry grass, poppies, all dazzling in a bright September noon. Innumerable grasshoppers are whispering in the breeze, and from all horizons one hears also the softened clatter of building. You can even hear what is going on in Lens.
There is little of the debris of the fight—a rotten butt-end of a rifle, a few shreds of German bombs, an old-fashioned gas bag. One recalls that the British first used gas at Loos. The air on Hill 70 on that September day was pregnant with gas. Many of our fellows died of it. The Germans on their side made much use ofstick-bombs. The hill was strewn with "buckshee" bombs. Did not a young soldier valiantly digging drive a pick through one, and send himself and Lord Petre of the Grenadiers to better country? The enemy manufactured vast quantities of this bomb—it was a pet toy of his, curiously exemplifying his mind. Its stated object was to terrify rather than to kill, and Englishmen believing more in iron and "good shrapnel effects" always despised it. But it was responsible for an enormous number of accidents.
On the brow of the hill and beyond there are increasing signs of German habitation. Near a vast white wallowing mine-crater there is a barricade of sand-bags and wire, the point of difference 'twixt friend and foe. After that one soon comes upon those wooden framed cellarways which plunge from the side of the trench into the bowels of the earth. They go down and down and are seldom explored by soldier or civilian. Some of these have their gruesome secrets in their dark depths. Many Germans were killed in them. Fear and industry conceived them. They were safe enough at ordinary times, but death-traps in an attack; a man at the bottom of a steep pit stood little chance against an enemy at the door with a bomb. The British and French in this case understood the war better than the Germans. A slighter cover or shelter whilst giving less sense of security did give vigilance and alertness.Germany dug the grave of her cause far from the ends she had in view and settled down to a war of concrete and defence when she should have understood her lines as the merest temporary abiding places on the way to victory. It prolonged the settlement for years.
How the cornflowers blossom on the German side! Did not they sow the seeds here for their Kaiser. They sowed the seed—and now it blossoms on the wilderness. Bright blue flowers shine in the midst of withered nature, otherwise in September 1920 the crest of Hill 70 is so covered with brittle yellow weeds that a match would set it aflame from end to end. It is like a dried inland beach of the old war. The waves no longer roll up with thunder and expire as once they did. But you can see in imagination the young Guards officer in his Burberry, cane in hand leading his flower of manhood—forward, forward, toward the shore of Lens—see the expiring first line and the second line that follows passing through and over it, the third that goes again—— They were the waves which at last crumbled all defences.
Not that Loos was a triumph of attack. Little justice will no doubt be done on our side to the German defence of Lens, but it was a defence which rivalled ours of Ypres. The enemy was driven back on both sides of it during the later campaigns of the war (chiefly in 1917). Technically and theoretically the Germans could beforced to yield it at any moment. But in practice it could not be taken from them. We'd take it were it of iron; they'd hold it were it of butter. Artillery laid the town flat, but artillery could not destroy the cellars, and of every cellar the German, with the reinforcement of iron and concrete, made a machine-gun nest or post for riflemen. For the rest, we held nearly all the Vermelles—Lens road, and the greater part of that from La Bassee to Lens. From Hill 70 one sees geographically a wide landscape of the war. It was a remarkable vantage-ground for beholding the doings of one's own side.
One aspect of the fighting on Hill 70 ought not to be forgotten, and that was the work of the stretcher-bearers who for the sake of each wounded comrade they brought in exposed themselves constantly to death. The heavy bodies, the uneven and entangled way down an exposed hillside, the shells howling and bursting, the sniper's bullet whipping through the air—these made up the stretcher-bearers' Calvary-walk. They did their duty and ceased to think of whether they themselves would live or die. And Loos was nothing to the Somme—as those will tell you who came through both.
But the battle of Loos was not ended at Loos. All the worst of the fighting was away to the left by Bois de Hugo and Chalk-pit wood where Scots and Coldstream strove again and again to establisha continuous line. The German system of trenches was entered, and Hulluch-ward, La Bassee-ward, a strife more bloody than Loos itself continued. On the night of the 29th September there is a relief on Hill 70—the 22nd Londons come in. The survivors of the Guards march off to billets in Sailly and about. But the fight continues for halves of trenches, for corners, for turnings. German and British are living in the same madhouse together and fighting for complete possession room by room.
Now the new British bomb appears—the Mills grenade, the trench-clearer. Germans are fought in the white alleys with bombs, bombs only and bombs ever. October 1915 was the great month of bomb-mania. Its emblem should be the man and the bomb ready to throw. The Guards were soon back in the fray, and on the night when the bombs came up so great was the fascination that "Jocks" and "Bill Browns" were bombing one another—each thinking the other was the enemy.
It is all indescribably wild now—Gun trench, Grab Alley, Big Willie, Hohenzollern and the rest, cement-coloured, or yellow with a withered prairie of weeds. Notices at various points indicatechasse reservée: the shooting rights are now reserved. Frenchmen with shot-guns and dogs prowl along the parapets, peppering the noisy partridges which they rouse up in scores.Decaying rifles lie in the trenches, rusty bayonets, and muddy shreds of belts and pouches. On the German side the inevitable litter of unexploded but sodden bombs; undo the metal protectors and you find the very string which caused them to explode has rotted in its case. No tourists turn up on these wild wastes. It is too terrible for them—and you cannot motor over innumerable pits.
On Sunday October 3rd you can picture the survivors of Loos at "Divine Service" at Sailly la Bourse. On the evening of the Sunday they marched to Gun trench. The trench was so called because the enemy had a gun on it. Fifty yards of the centre the Germans held, and the British were in the trench both on the left and on the right of the enemy, and strove to bomb him out of it entirely.
The gun was worked heavily, and shell after shell landed on parapet or parados scattering solid slag, ravaging chalk, burying men. The unburied were engaged all night digging out lost comrades and trench-repairing. It seems mere matter-of-fact when set down in dull print—but oh, the physical agonies of apprehension, the shuddering, the shattering of nerves physically under such conditions. It is easily understood how men were glad to be hit to get away and find peace. Death must at times have been eagerly desired and sought. It was called hell: it was hell. Thenew Kitchener divisions were thus not long in getting to the reality of war.
In the diaries of the time you find much reference to gas fatigue. British gas was used whenever the wind seemed favourable. Gas did not seem however to have power to stifle many enemy defenders. Gas fatigue was the carrying of the cylinders to the line. Emplacements were dug for cylinders below the parapet of the trench and "riveted" with sand-bags. Twenty or thirty cylinders would be thus ranged together at intervals of twenty-five yards. The cylinders contained the gas in liquid form, and ejection was worked on the syphon principle. This use of gas was seldom justified by results, and added an infernal torture and ugliness. It was a true diabolism. Almost always it afflicted the side which operated it as much as it did the enemy. Protection against gas was clumsy and inadequate. We started with the "stokers' pad" which was proved useless. Then we had a cotton pad soaked in hypo and tied on by veiling which was supposed to protect the eyes. And then followed cloth helmets soaked in hypo, helmets with mica eyes, very smelly, clammy, and unreliable. Mustard gas at a later date brought the respirator. But the protection at Loos and Hulluch was the old hypo bag of which not a few still lie about.
The war was becoming quite complicated andnew. A Lewis gun was first used in the battle for Hohenzollern Redoubt, and in time each battalion, nay, each company, will have its Lewis gunners. Steel helmets were also issued at Hohenzollern and were considered curiosities. One battalion received five helmets! They were supposed to be for the special use of the bombers. But then everyone became a bomber in that battle.
It is with awe that one looks on the silent empty Hohenzollern system now, where trenches for many days were choked with dead. Some commanders in those days thought double rum-rations put the necessary devil into men to carry them through the ordeal of a fray, and it is common talk in the Army that some of the units that went into the storming of Hohenzollern Redoubt knew very little of what they were doing. One thing is certain: alcohol has power to banish fear from men's minds, if fear there happen to be. It dulls the brain to danger. But then alas, it often dulls it to much else. Cool heads were needed to meet the German. And the night-attack at Hohenzollern failed. The dead lay as if emptied out of sacks into the pits, into the trenches, some head downward, some with legs alone visible. Whilst it rained in London, and the evening crowds glided along Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly talking of anything and everything, happily, snugly,—away out there in the darknesslay such a scene. It was most near, but an impenetrable black curtain hid it from the eyes.
War in 1915 failed. We failed; the Germans failed. The German failure was the greater because it was not their rôle to stand and be attacked. Germans and Allies were not unequally matched. The result was a deadlock. Both sides came to the conclusion that no one in his wildest dreams of preparation for war had foreseen the number of shells and guns necessary to obtain victory. Fighting therefore slackened off in the trenches, and the real centre of war-activity was transferred to what we called "the home front," to the factories and war-industries of England, France, and Germany and Austria. All the wet and gloomy winter saw the ammunition heaping up for the myriad-fold destruction of men in 1916. Germany prepared a mountain of death to hurl at Verdun; Britain a mountain of death to hurl from the Somme. No serious discussion of the campaigns of 1915 was allowed to the peoples of the countries. Gallipoli however was evacuated and Serbia over-run, and Bulgaria came into the war on the other side. With the military power of the Tsar lying low Germany had fair hopes of victory. Neither Britain nor France had much to cheer them, but they knew that their resources were mighty, and they knew that their enemy on the Western front did not seem to want to fight and was continually on the defensive.
It did not stir the mind of the soldier much. The autumn leaves fell for the Germans, and Christmas came for the British Tommy, and unfulfilled promises in plenty. A winter of rain and mist above, and water and mud below, and a sense of "a long long way to Tipperary and to everywhere else" were the lot of the British soldier. The war lost its tension after the Hulluch fighting was over. Unofficial fraternisation set in on many fronts. This was a mutual understanding by the rank and file of both sides. The Germans were quickest in arranging it—indeed their alacrity in this direction suggested the belief that it was organised from above and was intended as a way of winning the war, by undermining discipline and worming out secrets and spying. This however was not so. For if it undermined one side it undermined the other as much also, and if one side learned secrets so could the other. Moreover officers on both sides disliked it, and they for their part could not fraternise with enemy officers. Their quarrel was more serious. Officers understood more about the war and had more of the collective guilt of the war upon their minds than had the rank and file. Not that a winter lull was not to their liking. They were glad enough of the effects of thesepetites armistices. On the French fronts more was arranged than on that held by the British. Parties came over into one another's trenches. In Russiaunfortunately fraternisation resulted in a constant loss of Muscovite rifles and material in exchange forSchnapps. Probably the British fraternised least of all, and though one has heard of Tommy's concert party in which "Brother 'Ans was arst ter sing the 'im of 'ate" it did not amount to more than tacit agreements not to shoot.
The crack regiments on both sides were however indisposed for any kind of truce. They set the tone in discipline and were far from that Charlie Chaplin attitude towards the war which characterised some others. What was the astonishment of some of the Guardsmen when "taking over" at Laventie, after Loos and Hohenzollern, to see the easy-going way of warfare which had developed. "I saw a Jerry on top of the enemy parapet working away in broad daylight as cool as could be," said a sergeant. "Of course I at once got a bead on him."
"What're you going to do? You're surely not going to fire on him?" asked one of the men of the outgoing regiment. "You'll spoil the game."
"How's that?"
"Why, they'll begin shooting at you."
"What d'you think of that?" said the sergeant. "I fired just to let them know the Guards had come."
Nevertheless even the Guards were mollified. Warfare dwindled to nothing. "Jerry" was veryconfiding. Christmas was coming. The war after all was not so serious and perhaps would not be renewed in the Spring. Inactivity always seems to soften opposing rank and file toward one another. It tends to bring them back to the natural human relationship. By Christmas there was a widespread popular sense for a thoroughgoing reconciliation in no-man's land. What had happened at Christmas in 1914 was the needful precedent. It was a sort of playful legend in the army. On Christmas Day there would be a going over and a shaking of hands and exchange of souvenirs and drinks. Both sides looked forward to it.
But the authorities evidently thought it dangerous. Orders to the effect that there should be no fraternisation were sent out, and a staff-officer here and there spent Christmas Eve in the trenches to see that the orders were carried out. He could not however effect very much. At ten o'clock that night the men in all the trenches both German and English were talking without restraint, and the dark muddy lines of Laventie had a voice as of some great club at night when all the members are discussing at once. Germans were shouting invitations across, British were shouting invitations; and promises were made for next day. At dawn therefore parties went over, and whole battalions might have followed them had not the artillery at once set up a barrage. Itwas found also that sentries on both sides had been ordered to fire. Some obeyed, some did not. One Guards sentry was proud of having fired fifteen rounds. But he did not hit anyone. Meanwhile the troops about Neuve Chapelle and Aubers got across in large bodies. Even on the Guards' front men risked their lives to shake hands. Did not one thus lose his life that morning!
There is a little old cemetery by the side of the road a mile or so from Laventie, and there lie prominently side by side two corporals of the Sixth Black Watch (Newell and Willis) and behind their graves is that of a certain Sergeant Oliver who perished on Christmas Day. A tall rose tree with crimson roses blooming even in the autumn is growing from the earth where he lies. Beside him lies one who was both captain and knight, with only a dock rising from his feet. On all graves are weeds except on that of the man who gave his life to shake hands on Christmas Day.