The winter life of 1915-16 was one of mud and frostbite in the line, and taverns and songs when out. The whole corner of Northern France about Armentières begot a sort of British character. Not that it was like any district at home. Or that the way of life resembled anything anywhere else at any time. Tommy in theestaminet, Tommy with his sing-song in billets, Tommy onthe march slogging through the mud—began as it were to belong to France and to the war. He ceased to look like an imported article. He was disposed to be at home, and like Mark Tapley, that most characteristic of English types of men, to be happy even under the most melancholy circumstances. The soldier, whatever his inward sorrows, often so deep, so poignant, always kept a cheery face and had a devil-may-care smile for whatever came along. Of course he had his grousing fits. But they passed. He was most himself when singing. To France he sang all the old songs he ever knew and more besides which he invented. How vulgar, in London how banal were the songs—"vulgar songs which make you cough and blow your nose" as Kipling put it, the seemingly maudlinHullo my dearie I want you to-nightsort of song. But in France how real, how passionate! A group of men stand in the partial shelter of a shattered building crooning together whilst it rains, whilst it pours on the mud outside! In England the words which they sing are sentimental drivel, they are the barrel-organ and its handle turning, but in France they are the voice of a suppressed yearning and suffering—
I ... shall meet you ... to-night, dear—In my beautee ... ful dream ... land.And your eyes will be bright, dear,With ... the love light ... that shines for me.
The only place where the soldier could meet her, till there came one of those madly-coveted greedily-snatched moments of leave, when a man dashed, with the mud of the trenches still on him, straight to "Blighty."
There was a curious note of self-pity in many of the sentimental songs, and men gloated over the love of home. The love of mother became warmer in imagination (Lordy, lordy lordy, how I love her!); the tenderness of wife and sweetheart became desired in a way which could only be expressed in songs—and in letters, those most precious of all tokens of the war, the letters which men sent from the front to those who loved them. The little English soldier sang his very heart out asking his Lizzie to "keep the kettle boiling," asking anyone and everyone to
Keep the home fires burningTill the boys come home!
Even so, he would not allow himself to get down-hearted or to remain for long in a sentimental mood. The humorous inventive vein came to his assistance. He did not possess ready-made chansonettes of the French type. The music-hall had not provided them, but he straightway began to invent them to satisfy the need. So sprang into beingMademoiselle from Armenteerswhich was reputed to have fifty thousand verses—anyone could invent a verse at any moment. So wasbornRoll on, my Three, that soldiers' litany and chorus,The one-eyed Riley, and many another burlesque. Then every well-known hymn and popular song had its war parody expressing the soldier's mind in lighter vein—— Some of the parodies of popular songs improved on the originals. Thus—
I wore a tunic, an old khaki tunic,But you wore civilian clothes.Whilst we were in the trenchesYou were mashing all the wenches,What a blessing no one knows!We fought at Loos whilst you scoffed the booze.
on the basis of—
I wore a tulip, a bright yellow tulip,But you wore a red red rose.
was extremely diverting, as was
I've lost my oil-bottle and pull-through,I've lost my four by two.
on the basis of "Love's beautiful garden."
Endless were these songs and parodies now fast receding into limbo. Where so much was ugly and of the burlesque there was also much that was true and simple and direct, from the heart. Perhaps the most popular song in some regiments was, after all, "Mary." There was no parody of "Mary," and one was always hearing or singing—
The sweetest blossom on the treeCannot compare with Ma ... ry!
The men lifted the roofs of the taverns with their songs. The war which increased life's suffering tenfold, increased life's music tenfold also.
So the winter was sung through, a winter of rain and snow, with low skies, with mists, mist on land and sea and in the eyes and in the mind, the melancholy interim of 1915-16, where no one understood anything except that there was suffering. Meanwhile however the munition-makers on the home fronts went on manufacturing the stuff of death in ever-increasing appalling vast quantities.
The Germans were the first to resume the struggle. 1916 presented itself as a year of destiny for Mittel-Europa and world-power. Russia lay low. Serbia was ravaged even to the shores of Greece. A galvanised Turkey had been raised from death and had driven France and Britain from the gates of the Hellespont. There remained but one vital enemy—France. Britain would soon compose the war if France were worsted. So now all the might of Prussia was forged into a weapon of assault, and the weapon was hurled in the centre.
There commenced the terrible manslaughter of Verdun. Irresistible Germany met immovable France, and men by the myriad were sent post-haste to heaven. Between the petty forts of a French city Europe heaped a great pyramid of skulls to the sky. As in Verestchagin's picture,one saw an emblem of war without compromise and without cowardice.
The French stubbornness before Verdun shone out like a miracle. It was an unexpected revelation of French tenacity and corporate strength. A Bismarckian contempt for the Frenchman had almost been the accepted measure of the French in Europe. They were considered degenerate, corrupt, lacking in spirit, loud to boast but quick to run away. The rapidity with which Germany overran France in 1914 had confirmed this opinion, despite the battle of the Marne. But Verdun revealed to Germany a new and terrible France. The whole of the rest of the war, as it were, paused to look on in wonder. France has raised now her memorials at Verdun, but it needs no monument. Verdun is written in iron upon Europe's heart. Dead called to the living there to join them. Verdun was never taken, but it always lured the enemy on—the lodestone of the charnel house.
Rightly understood, the battle of the Somme was not a greater battle than that of Verdun. It was similar; it was our Verdun battle. It also was a "blood-bath" for both sides. It also was a spending of the ammunition which the winter, spring, and summer preparations had brought forth. Tens of thousands of those who sang so light-heartedly through the winter found eternal peace, stretched like lost star-fishes in the Sommemud. From Albert with the Virgin leaning from the church-tower, to within sight of the miserable, hitherto uncoveted, town of Bapaume what a progress! One of the heaviest epics in history, the slowest, most heavy footed of charges! As if each man bore a hundredweight of lead on his feet to keep him back when he would have rushed to gain the day! Hundreds met their death, not through shot or shell, but by actual drowning in mud. Hundreds were sent back to the rear partially distraught before they got the signal to leap forth to personal attack. The massing of the Somme artillery out-Heroded Herod—the greatest concentration of noise and destruction that the world had known. The greatest strain of the Somme battle was mental, and its greatest effect was no doubt moral. The extent of territory gained was no indication of the true result of the battle. The actual numbers of the dead might have been a greater indication had they not generally been hidden at the time. For the peace-quorum of death was being approached—there was a large advance towards hate'sdesirabilia, the three and a half millions who had to be slain. Men might have taken some comfort from that dreadful thought had they known. But it was theirs to fight and labour on in blindness.
The Somme country was an extension of the British line. As our army doubled, trebled, quadrupled, so it multiplied the extent of Francewhich it defended. From the flats of Flanders and Northern France we gradually progressed to a more diversified country of long ridges and downs, pleasanter in peace but equally terrible in war. As you approach it now by train the cemeteries roll into view on every hand. The dead are as it were drawn up in solid columns to greet you as you pass, as it were one live man were monarch o'er all the dead. The Army that went to guard the line is still there, still on duty—in Plot A, Plot B, Plot C, Plot Z, of multitudinous war-cemeteries marked now by map-references. The dead challenge the living in choruses of silence from broad fields of burial. The hills remain like great mounds in the mist, the same bare ridges of Cæsar's wars two thousand years ago, the same o'er which perchance mankind will climb to death as many centuries hence, antediluvian hummocks of old earth, somnolent, green, indifferent. Earth suggests itself constantly as something mightier than man. It is not the prostrate earth of Ypres Salient, but one which war has much less power to sear. Man's habitations and cities topple down, forests are fired away, but the elemental lines and contours of the hills remain unbroken and as it were indifferent both to time and history. These rivers too, by which men name their battles, flow on, flow away without a conscious memory even of a yesterday. The innocence of the Somme, thevirginity of the Ancre, these have overcome all hate and blood, and lightly forgotten them.
The Judas trees have leafed afresh upon the banks of Ancre, and every individual leaf is chattering and shivering—because, they say, two thousand years ago the betrayer hanged himself upon an aspen bough. The aspens give voice to the wind, and beside them the little willows are all silent. Tangled wild flowers cling to the river banks, and limpid water passes in bright armfuls over green sedgy tresses. On either hand the giant reeds lift their pompous heads. Shell-pits are pits of greenery. Deep brown of sagging rusty wire seems to be the complementary colour of an intense and shadowy green. In the road where the sentry stood guarding the crossing of the rail all is empty now. No dust-covered mud-splashed lorries come blundering and tearing along the high-road any more. There is a silence which is unearthly, as if the composed deep sleep of the dead had conquered the ways of the living. The little white towns and villages lie splashed in wreckage—without the power to lift themselves again. Your Ville sur Corbie, your Meault with its dirt-choked green strewn with pontoon boats, your Fricourt and Carnoy—all prostrate, inert—they lie on the ground as if sewn to it. On the left comes into view the triple blackness of the silhouette of Notre Dame at Albert. Trees with the horror of the martyrs on their recedingwithered hands seem fixed for years in the momentary awfulness of death, menacing, aghast, uprearing. Narrow crooked trenches in disorderly array seem to be hurrying forward, carrying their old wire with them—as if they too had to follow the men they once held. But they pause on the shores of dreadful pools and ponds, dead-horse and dead-men stagnancies that ponder and are still and reflect indifferently the grey sky above and the grey, blasted, shattered timber-bits on either hand.
Oh Albert, what a place of death thou art now, with thy returned children playing hide and seek around the heaps of thy homes. How is it possible toreturnto this place. It is not a return: no one can ever return to the Albert of 1914. These that we see are revenants come to look at spectral homes. For Albert is dead. There you can realise that a human home is a living being like the woman who made it. It can prosper or decay. It can go shabby and suffer. It can be wounded or maimed—it can be killed. We mercifully hide our dead in Earth's great bosom—but we leave our dead homes long when they lie, in all their horror and terror. There stands a shrunken little house where the tiles have been swept away, the plaster also, and the bare laths of the ceiling are all exposed, but they look like a cap bashed down on the head of a dead man. Yonder lies a recumbent habitation with a welter of grey lathsand beams on its burst-out side, like the sun-dried ribs of a dead dromedary. Beyond it stands a wall that is left, and then an outraged home with madness fixed in its visage in the moment of death-agony. Here is a house with gutted entrails half congealed and terrible to behold. There is a house that died simply of shock. But its neighbourvis-à-viswas hit by some striding giant with iron fist. Rows of houses are seen cowering, as if they had had their hands up trying to ward off the dreadful fate which stalked above them. Houses lie killed as it were in the action of flight, veritably in the act of treading on one another's heels in a frenzy to get away. There are houses which are abased, houses which have fallen foremost on their faces, houses which have fallen backwards, bottom over top into confusion and debris behind, houses with their sides torn off as men's sides were torn off in the war, exposing for one instant beating hearts. There are houses where simply the life-breath has gone out—dead, blind, empty and desolate.
One can hardly think of the existence once of rooms, the marriage-bedrooms of sweet human honeymoons, the room where the baby slept a baby's untroubled sleep, the children's room where one thinks of a child's cry in the night or a child's lisped prayer before its mother or the crucifix, the room where the home met, the table round which went food and talk and laughter ina common innocence and ignorance of destiny—all gone now in shapeless ruin.
All the houses were the children of Notre Dame—the leaning Virgin who hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the Cathedral-church, and yearned o'er the city. The miracle of her suspense in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder, and the soldiers said the city would never be taken as long as she remained un-shot down from the eminence of the great church.
Alas, Albert had its day of fate and of complete sacrifice ere the war should end—when all should go, yea, Virgin and all, and only Golgotha remain, Golgotha and the Roman soldiers who smote the Master with their spears as He hung from the Cross.
Twilight settles down upon the dead, the twilight of time and misery. The dreadful reality of destruction becomes more intense and real. After all, sunlight and the noonday do not always show us truth. They are in themselves so full of life and happiness that they divert attention from ruins and death unto themselves. Only in the grey light of afternoon and evening, and looking with the empty eye-socket of night-darkness can one easily apprehend what is spread out here—the last landscape of tens of thousands who lie dead. Hamlet must go to the battlements at the time when the ghost walks. The light of dayhides the unseen world, or cannot quite hide it. But there is one moment when the ghost of Albert grows into vision majestically before the eyes. You go out through the primeval jungle of dead weeds, the tripartite crowned heads of brown teasles looking like low-lying spectral regalia of the death-kingdom, past dug-outs and deeps and quagmire, past the prostrate ribaldry and obscenity of war's doings with the earth—to the dark-flowing water which nurses its forgotten secrets, flowing on, flowing on. You wait, and whilst mist chills the marrow the ghostly moment of Albert comes once more. Night has more than heralded itself; it is here in a vast-fronted army and comes onward. Demon-eyes look over the ridges, flash angrily, greedily; the roar of battle thunder bursts up; the gas-shells cat-calling across the sky fall in showers on the mud; field-guns are advanced to point-blank range—there comes the tide of the war-worn German soldiery of March 1918, war-worn and yet exultant; the English are driven out, the leaning Virgin falls, and the city is given over to the enemy. Albert is dead; even its soul has died. English soldiers will come back in August, recapture it, but not the city they defended so long, not the city of the little Notre Dame leaning passionately o'er its life and its defence.
From Albert to Bapaume, from Fricourt by Carnoy and Maricourt to Longueval and Ginchyand Le Transloy, a pleasant day's walk now. There is the incomparable Somme silence, a silence achieved by the tremendous thunderous contrast in history, a silence from the stilled hearts of the dead, a deafness and a muteness. Then when the mist disperses, and the sun lifts his awful radiance o'er the scene, there are audible the lowly orchestras of flies and bees. The rags of horses' skeletons lie on the roadway, and beside a ruined direction-post a clean-picked horse's skull has been placed on the stump of a tree. Lifting one's eyes to the view there rolls forth to the horizon vast moors empurpled here and there and with gashes of white on wan green wastes. An organised tour by car whirls past upon the road raising phantom hosts of white dust. It will do the whole Somme campaign in an hour and bring up safely at some French hotel where hot lunch and foaming beer persuade the living that life is still worth while. There was once a picture inSimplicissimusof a Cook's guide showing a human skull to some tourists—
"This, sir," said he, "was a young man."
It was meant for irony. But surely it is good for everyone who talks of war to go and get that thought—this was a young man. It does not matter that tourists whirl past without pause in a car. Let each and everyone come and dip a corner of a handkerchief in the blood of the war—for remembrance. Come to the sacrament ofthe young man's blood which was shed instead of yours.
The road you traverse to the Somme altar is the road which hundreds of thousands of young men trod, marching to moments of destiny, moments of victory; the Manchesters to Montauban, South Africans to Delville, Royal Scots to Guillemont, the Guards to Les Boeufs, the Durham Light Infantry to the Butte of Warlencourt, the 47th Londons to Eaucourt l'Abbaye—and many others; they marched from the quiet places of the homeland and the empire, from Loos, from Laventie, from Flanders; defenders of Ypres and defenders of Arras, marching with their drums, marching with their bayonets, to Britain's quarrel and her mightiest enemy. Behind them were ranged the guns, and in front of them was Prussia. Now the desolation of Nature alone suggests what a desolation there was of men. The terrible woods are impressionist pictures of the ruined vitals of great regiments, and you can hold a forest in your mind as you would a skull in your hands and say—This was a forest.This was an army.
The generality of men and women however will not do that. The new-born generations mask their grief, and you will see if you walk into Bernafay Wood that a young Bernafay Wood is rising midst the dead masts of the old—self-sown. It will grow higher every year till the old ishidden. The masts will fall, will rot, will recede from this bright sunlight, and relapse into the shade which the new trees will give them, and then soon all will be forgotten. Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything. The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich in their masses of brown-stained wood, will pass. They will first be re-set-up in stone. 1921 will see them rolling out in new stone crosses, at first startlingly pallid and virginal, but as the months go on, getting gradually greyened and darkened, rain-washed, wind-blown, then falling a little from the straight. Flowers will bloom as new summers shine o'er the dead. Visitors will come. There will be a greater time of visiting the cemeteries and the battlefields than there yet has been. Gardeners will be conscientious, and then some less conscientious as the years roll by and visitors become less. Most of the cemeteries in the more obscure places will be half-forgotten and gone desolate. There must come a time when no more visit the burial-places of the great war than visit now the cemeteries ofthe Crimea. In 1914 the great cemetery above Sevastopol, kept by a German gardener, had become from a national point of view utterly unvisited and forgotten. A roll used to be kept there of the visitors who came in their hundreds after the Crimean war was over, dwindling to a score a year and then to less than ten, and then to twos and threes and ones. The living who survived the Crimea do not need to go to Russia now, for they have joined the dead long since. So it will be with us; we shall join the authentic dead, and the young ones will have forgotten whilst chattering of some other war.
Meanwhile look reverently at the graves of the men of the 32nd A.I.F., with little rising suns adorning the centre-posts of their crosses! See where lies Capt. Claude with his high memorial, or Private Harry who carried out an equal sacrifice with him.
Rusty old cans on ten-foot poles mark the limits of the burial-ground, and a notice says "Cemetery closed" as one might read outside a theatre at night—"Pit full" "Gallery full" "Stalls full." On the hillside above, sounds the laughter of men and the clatter of spades where a new acre of God is being dug, the foundations of a new theatre being laid. Here French Negroes, Flemings, and French peasants are at work under the guidance of British soldiers. Occasionally a car rushes up through the dust and a couple ofBritish officers come forward to see how things are going on.
Passing on to Longueval you see the masts of Longueval Wood, but before you come to it there stands now at the cross-roads a "café-restaurant," an unpainted wooden hut. Here with the sun streaming full on their faces sit two Falstaffian wights with bottles labelled Malaga between them and glasses full. On their dewy red chins and necks there are three or four folds of flesh; red veins run down their necks like gutters at the side of a house. They hold hands and sing and make everyone in the tavern laugh—then swallow—swallow—swallow, the wine rolls down their exuberant gullets.
Suddenly there is a note of warning in the restaurant, whisperings aboutl'officier, to make it appear as if the men were drinking beer, the woman comes and takes the wine-bottles and pours their contents into metal tankards, sweeps the table clean of wine driblets, and reprimands the topers.
They pull themselves together and take on a sobered gait. One of them opens a sand-bag in his possession and brings out two enormous doorsteps of bread and butter. Silence reigns. There is a suspense. Someone evidently is expected. Will it be a dapper, constrained, politely inquisitive British officer? Hardly! Ah, here he is! Enter fiery British sergeant-major with bristlingmoustache and bright crown on his sleeve, stout, smart, and red.
"Na then," says he, darting upon the Falstaffs, "play the game, play the bloomin' game. Come on, travai in the cemetery. Officeer come, no bon pour moy, bon pour vous, no bon pour moy. Com' on now or I'll jolly well have to shift yer. The Belgiques and the Algerians know all about yer. It's all over the place."
"Ca ne fait rien."
"Ca-ne-fait-rien pour vous but not pour moy. Officeer bocu faché avec moy. You no catch it, I catch it, compris?"
One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.
"Yers I know," says the sergeant-major indignantly. "Moy zig-zag las' night. But n-no zig-zag to-day."
They offer him their glasses—apparently of beer. He sips one and then drains it, and then drains the other one too.
"Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others," he continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.
"Na then," says he. "Quick March to the cemetery!" And they go.
How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the living!
The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn sunshine the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some shores when a neap-tide leaves them bare.
Cross
Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. Thesinistrésof the Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits, levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their little petrol-ploughs. The shell-splashed approaches to the line can with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real worship bending overla Franceand he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred times what he has already done—and he will do it. A hundredth part of the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and rise on full fleshy stalks,and they are thick like a wall. They grow from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible yet, though not so terrible if still impassable. You see gleaming above the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross shining afar and make it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some ship to a white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a conventional scribble on the moor—the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out on to alimy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the returned peasants makingsauter les abriswith dynamite, and then the eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from the centre of a large tableland. It is the Butte of Warlencourt, for the possession and retention of which what quantities of blood were shed, the famous Butte which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs. Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light Infantry—to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf. Regt. 159 who held the Butte against all comers in 1916 and recaptured it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their monument a concrete base. From the top of the Butte there is a complete circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods, wrecks of villages—a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the great Somme scene.
It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from Albert runs smooth and level below the Butte, a track for space-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness of the massed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorialsof the German dead—Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short of it—like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of 1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front; rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to superintend a burying party—some three hundred sodden green bundles to be disposed of—three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find "the everlasting arms." He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the war-bred cynicism of those who believed in lettingothersbe heroic. He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in "putting his back into it," and doing even the meanest duty as if it were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men. He was so energetic inthe football field playing officers versus sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his grave at C—— and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males,entre eux, a "man's man." Poor hero—from that night of burying green bundles to that morning when we buried him—he marched through the valley of the shadow of death, tormented as Pilgrim was by hobgoblins and satyrs. But when he died he shed his war body, he shed that lurid phraseology, and became once more, no doubt, the Kingsley-Carlylean hero that he was, with some sort of knowledge of human sorrow which those who lived in peace knew not. So it must have been also with those who once breathed within the sodden green bundles. They shook off something evil when they died, but in passing through it they must somehow have understood more. Sorrowdimmed the eyes even of the hardest swearer of the Army. And the dead now constrain us to a new human tenderness, they empower us to touch more delicately and to understand more deeply—to love more. Pity for us if we do not now live differently because of the dead!
Thus as one walks through Bapaume and sees the children of new Bapaume playing in their innocence in the streets and the ruins, one can look down on them more tenderly, more caressingly, for the sake of the dead, passing on, as it were, man's forgiveness to man. And in our relationships with the grown-ups, our neighbours, ourselves dressed differently, we can have more patience, more compassion, more readiness to help and to be kind. It comes from the dead, it comes from the living who were dead.
What that winter was before the Germans retreated! What the hours on the Cross were before the Saviour died! In our loathing of pain we shudder to think of it. Others bore it; we must bear it. And when the time is passed Golgotha remains, that Golgotha which was in fact so near to the gate of the Temple itself. In Bapaume, where all houses have been made vaults, stand the white ruins of a church, greyish-white and spectral as if of the material of another world. But for its pointing walls it is one white ruin, loveliness in a heap and the baleful shadow of the hand of the malefactor. In the ruins of thechurch of the leaning Virgin at Albert the first words one reads areJesus Natus Est, as if the ruins had been given tongue to say in the moment of death the supreme Christian paradox, and at Bapaume as you reverently approach this strange newPietayou see still unshattered the Church's Latin carved on stone—Ad Meum Sanctuarium—to My sanctuary. If, like Thomas, you do not believe, you must go forth and touch with your hands and feel with your eyes—to My sanctuary!
Bapaume lies more abased even than Albert. It is as if its stones had had a soul and been afraid, vibrant with the horror of humanity. The consternation of inanimate matter is expressed in its ruins. The Hotel de Ville, its seat of power, was evidently built of large granite blocks which the rising German mine of March 1917 must have scattered like hail over the town. And amidst these mighty stones flew the tender bodies and the spirits of the French deputés, Albert Taillandier and Raoul Briquet, who had just said in their hearts—The enemy hath departed, when the enemy was suddenly at their doors.
Thesinistrésare living in cellars and wooden huts. The railway-station is two "baby elephants" of rusty iron. Where were large shops and as one can imagine, in the old days, shop-fronts full of ladies' costumes and hats, windows displaying bedroom suites of furniture, windows full of stationery and books, are now diminutive piles of rubbishpathetically ticketed with the name of the old establishment—Maison Betrancourt, Maison this, Maison that—transferée à un autre lieu. In the Grande Place stands the much-shrapnelled base of a monument where the stone hero has gone to join the hero he commemorated, and the spite of a new era has even endeavoured to erase his name.
Where thousands lived and loved and pushed their trade and died, now but a few hundred hold together in the midst of the wilderness. They have assembled from all points of the compass. War whirled some to Germany, some to Paris, some to the Pyrenees. The hopeful came back and the faithful decided to stay. It is a picture of human triumph over destruction, but only a pathetic triumph, not a glorious one. In the summer, with long days and warm nights it is less unnatural to live in this waste. Warmth and light join thesinistrésto all France and Europe, but winter with its short days and cold and great darkness folds away the vision of a resurrection. A poky train, without lights, creeps at night from Achiet to Bapaume through villages of fearful name. Bapaume becomes conscious of all the dreadful places which surround it, places whose names are full of the awe of death and of the war—Riencourt, Bullecourt, Ervillers, Mory, Vaulx-Vraucourt, and a hundred others, nothing in themselves but held in the cerements of the dead.
It is a strange walk now, to the Hindenburgline. You are traversing ground which was four times overtrodden and overfought. The Germans took it in 1914. We shelled it in 1916 and drove the enemy out in 1917. The enemy swept over it in March 1918 and then let it go as he retired in September. German, French, and British lie buried beside one another. The Germans lost their dead and then recaptured them. It is an appalling country, still as it were sulphurous with the war, stinking vaguely of cordite. The dead have got a grip on it, and hold with their hands the lap of earth which the peasants are ploughing. The air which is apt to sparkle in autumn frost is full of the light of the eyes of the men who once lived. And that light rests about the broken barns and billets and churches and halls. There is an influence which is pulling one way all the time, and that is not towards this world.
The graveyards are many, and they have their history. It always seems a pity that it was not allowed during the war to make mention on the cross how and where each soldier met his death. The military mind imagined that such details might give information to the enemy or to the Press, and forbade anything beyond name, number, and regiment. Texts also were prohibited, the chaplains being over-ruled. Not that texts could entirely be kept out. In one of the cemeteries near Bapaume there stands for the time being a large wooden cross inscribed "He is nothere; he is risen," which has an astonishing effect amidst a thousand crosses which are dumb.
There are many many rows of human bodies planted out near Vaulx-Vraucourt, first a German cemetery with its old crosses torn to bits, partly no doubt by shells; and then side by side a regular British cemetery where lie many Australians, one of whom, Lieut. Pidgeon (aged 23) has a little figure of Christ riven from a crucifix stuck in the earth beside his wooden cross. Here lie also many of the Leeds Rifles, seven even in one grave, killed evidently in the terrible encounter with the German machine-gunners in September '18. The German memorials go more into decay each day, but a man is paid to keep the British bright and clean and in repair, and his dog bites at the heels of the pilgrim as he walks from the dead to the dead. Facing both are the gaunt white ruins of the village church and the hideous smashage of the French communal cemetery, and there the people have put artificial roses in old rusty shell-cases in front of their stricken memorials.
Further on, beside the light railway which runs north to Ecoust, there are tiny cemeteries. In one of these Germans and British are mingled, thus—Gefreiter Luckenmeyer of the German Field artillery betwixt a man of the Londons and a man of the Devons, and a German unknown and a British Tommy lie in a little plot togetherby themselves. In some cemeteries the bodies of our foes were buried just outside those of our own kindred, but as exhumed bodies were brought in, ever increasingly, it has come about that we have surrounded German graves with our own, and as it were accidentally forgiven our enemies and received them into the midst of the family.
Over the way at Vraucourt Copse, perched high in a sun-kissed wheatfield lies Lieut. A. S. Robinson of the Royal Scots, with 22 private soldiers' names inscribed on his cross. One wondered if it would be true to say—"Here he lies where he longed to be" and did he love Stevenson and often quote
Under the wide and starry skyDig my grave and let me lie.
These Royal Scots have the widest of all starry skies above them and the unbarred gate of heaven in its midst.
A little further still and you have the Australian cemetery at Noreuil at the corner of the road, rectilinear, handsome, clean and cared-for, neatly fenced in with wire and having a little white gate by which to enter. But outside the cemetery and as it were falling back in every attitude of banishment and despair, the old faded wood and broken crosses of the Germans, overgrown with weeds, crazy-roofed crosses, aslant, tumbled. In 1916 the enemy began to bury here.In 1917 he left his dead behind. In 1918 he recaptured them and repaired the crosses—and added to them. In 1918 it was a decent graveyard; one could read the names of all the dead. But their kindred went away and forgot. Their crosses are the monuments of the forgotten and the vague memorial of a useless sacrifice.
Doubtless the drama of the penultimate year 1917 did not centre in the supra-Somme country. Its scenes of action were at Lens and Vimy, at Pilkelm Ridge and Passchendaele. The year which ran on from the German retirement was the strangest of the war, promising everything, fulfilling nothing, beginning with Haig's victory interview and ending with the failures in Flanders and the German break-through from Cambrai. It was the year of American self-announcement, of the Russian revolution, of the pros and contras of peace at Stockholm, of the victory of the Bolsheviks, of the Italian debacle. Germany seemed to grow stronger all the year, and the morale of the Allies waned. Men no longer betted one another that it would be all over by Christmas. Lord Grey's supposed prediction was forgotten. The whisper went abroad that "it might last a lifetime," and then in mock cynicism,They say the first seven years will be the worst. New units hitherto untried in the war still made their appearance, whole battalions whose war-history commences with the conflicts about Lensor the battles for Passchendaele Ridge. The Derby drafts were reputed to come marching to the strains of "The Church's One Foundation" singing their own confession—
We are Lord Derby's ArmyJust come across the sea.We cannot march, we cannot shoot,What bloomin' good are we?
And the old army said "Where have you been this long while?" The conscripts however were to follow in even more desperate case, and when they first reached France and their tender feet struck the cobbled roadways they sang—not a hymn, but a new version of "Auld Lang Syne"—
We're here because we're here,Because we're here, because we're here,We're here because we're here,Because we're here, because we're here.
"Take me back to dear old Blighty!" was the song of the whole army and had completely displaced Tipperary.
No doubt owing to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line the Allied plan of attack for the summer had been foiled. All the machinery of assault had been arranged for a stubborn and dreadful prolongation of the Somme battle between the horizons where winter had halted it. The greatest concentration of guns which the war had seen had to be liquidated. Newgun-positions had to be dug and a new concentration achieved. Telephone and telegraph had to be brought up to a new line. Organisation work which would ordinarily have been accomplished in the quiet winter months had to be done through the campaigning season of Spring and Summer. Men looked less seriously on the war, though the war was not less serious for them. Witness the sinister stare of the Lens country which knew the 1917 army and has looked on terrible things. We made Lens in 1917 into a narrow deep pocket full of Germans. The taking of it was confidently anticipated. Fleet Street wanted it to serve on a platter to Herod. But it could not be had though thousands died for it. The enemy held it by miracle. It was impossible to hold such a position but the impossible held.
Grey and terrible is Vimy Ridge with its line of block-houses and the masts of Farbus Wood. Looking outward from Vimy o'er the vast Arras war-scape the eye is sick and returns in vision to itself as the dove returned to the Ark when it found no other mercy of the Lord above misery's tide.
Praise God the enemy could not do to Arras what we did to Lens! Arras still lives, surmounting the grandeur of her ruins. The Cathedral with the top of its massive tower gnawn off by Fate is to be preserved for ever as a memorial of these days. You can climb from the grass-grownrubble below to mountains of lime and broken stone and reach a high eminence against the pinky-grey fissured wall of the tower. It is sunset, and you look down upon widespread recuperative Arras standing in pink haze into which smoky air or fog is pouring. The houses are grey or splotchy with their shrapnel marks still on them, but there are others which are red and white, and these stand gaping with empty glassless windows. You look on spangling new red roofs, you look on Noah's Arks, you look on half-consumed unsupported walls, you look on shadows which are pits where houses were. On the one hand is the lofty massiveness of the Episcopal Palace—on the other the irrecoverable smash of poor men's homes. From all this great city below, pious men and women used to come to the Cathedral—but now no more shall they come.
You step down from the height, and cross the cobbled immensity of the Cathedral Square. Every shop all the four sides has the same façade above, the same porticos below, and from grimy and broken windows four hundred ruined wizened houses stare. Then night has come. God has called away the redness and left the murk. You turn and see the mountain of God's house. There is no tint of rose in the grey walls now, no petty detail of ruin, but one general effect. The Cathedral tower is a great black mass. It issuffering made supreme and dominant, the shadow of a mediæval Christ on the Cross. It is a romantic but dreadful pointer full of terror and power. Men creep diminutively across the vast and shoppy square, and the great feudal shadow above them makes them smaller yet.
All night the shadow reigns, becoming even mightier in the moonlight, and crowning itself with starry diadem. But there come the mists of the morning and then morn itself, and you may stand where now no longer Mass is heard—on the East side of the Cathedral, and see the white light of heaven streaming through gossamer and driving out pale silhouettes of the shadows of all the bleared houses of the Square. There are pale peaked shadows of all the façades which face the Cathedral. Over your head sounds the rush of dove's wings. Men and women everywhere are moving; men with their tools and women with their baskets. The life of the city goes on, but the dream of the ruin has fallen back into the night and limbo, and will not be recovered till the stars come again.
The city of Arras was the pilot city of the British in 1917. All Flanders looked to her from the left, all France from the right. And in '18 when the tide of Fortune changed she was our bulwark of defence and was right in the fighting line like a Coeur de Lion with battle-axe at Acre. Our mighty city of coal and steel in England haschosen specially to identify itself with Arras—Newcastle-on-Tyne—and Arras has many English sons. It is no doubt natural to say that Newcastle has adopted Arras, as we might say of a converted man that he had taken Christ to himself, but the deeper truth is that Arras has adopted Newcastle—"Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you."
The British victories at Arras and the French victories above Verdun were of happy augury. But no victory is a victory unless followed by a victory, and Time itself wilts laurels. Haig's dream of striking the enemy hard and often, leaving no time to recover from a blow at one point before calamity fell upon him at another, proved only a dream. The German invention of mustard gas and the appearance of many hostile tanks upon the scene were examples of the unforeseen. Very efficient tank-guns and studied methods of attack upon tanks reduced the usefulness of our new war-engine to comparatively low terms. In the late summer we embarked on a new campaign in Flanders, and our best weapon was a still boundless belief in our ability to "beat the Hun" whom, mentally, in every possible way, the army under-rated. The Hun, so-called, suffered nothing like so much as our fellows. He would not have stood so much. And of all war-struggles, that which sank at last to rest in the wilderness of Poelcapelle and Passchendaele inthe November of the year seemed the most hopeless.
Much of the main interest of humanity was transferred from the strife at the front to other scenes of action. 1917 was an air and water year, a submarine year, a Gotha year. London was terrified by day by wonderful almost invisible planes which ravaged East-end schools and caused the exodus from Whitechapel to Brighton. Daylight raids were followed by starlight raids, and although the papers of the time laughed at such affairs and said we liked them, there is no need to keep up that deception now. London suffered in mind excruciatingly.
With the persistent bombing of London came a more systematic bombing of the lines at night. It is more unpleasant, though really safer, to await bombs in open fields than it is in London, but the soldier loathed the bomb from air far more than he did the shell. The transverse movement of the shell no doubt gives the mind more scope for judgment and calm than does the missile falling vertically.
The Germans were so impressed by this fear of bombs that they endeavoured to give shelter underground to each and every one of their soldiers when threatened from above. There must have been a regular routine like fire-drill when our bombing planes went over, and Fritz was marched into his enormous subterranean shelters. Britishand French troops had no such organised way of escape, and they had to find what cover they could where they were. It was always surprising what a number of miscellaneous casualties were caused by the night-bombers.
Expectation of the German planes' approach was intense, and men could distinguish readily the sound of the engines of our own planes and those of the enemy. There seemed to be something peculiarly sinister in the sound of a "Jerry" and men were fond of imitating it in screeds of words in the style of "Hush hush hush, here comes the bogey man!"
A characteristic imitation given sometimes at regimental concerts used to run in this way:—
I-see-ye, I-see-ye, I-see-ye,I-see-ye.I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming.Biv-eee, biv-eee, biv-eee.Sh, sh........sh.Hah!I'm off, I'm off, I'm off,I'm off!
And a current French marching-song of the time imitated the promiscuous crump of bomb-explosions thus:—
Il pleut, il pleut des bombes(Et boum! et bon! badaboum et bon!)Il s'ecriera GuillaumeRentrons, rentrons—Zon, zon.
But no rhyme in any language ever expressed that lurid splash on the night-sky when a bomber was destroyed, that effusion of crimson which caused men's eyes to dilate looking up at it, that sense of dreadfulness and awe and satisfaction, that banishment of pity through fear's reaction which steeped men's minds, as if on the floor of their souls an answering red glow appeared. It was tragical to be bombed, but how much more so to see the bomber die. They died most dreadful deaths, those Zeppelin crews and aero-bus teams, and yet of course they merely died. They met the common soldier's destiny—— Nevertheless you could not lessen the sensation of watching an airman's death by reasonableness. In the lurid spectacle in the heavens men saw not death but a hieroglyphic—a sign.
Men did not liken them to Lucifer cast from heaven, but their fall was like the rebel angels' fall—
With hideous ruin and combustion, downTo bottomless perdition.
Day-flying was different and affected the mind in an entirely different way. Even the stricken night-bomber, when his charred remains were seen by daylight, became in enemies' eyes nothing but honourable. The triumph over him was forgotten in a sort of triumph in him. There was a naturally chivalrous attitude towards dead airmen. That chivalry was sometimes spoiled byhuman jackals—but the majority nevertheless instinctively preserved it.
Many of the graves of our airmen were marked by crosses which are adorned with carven wings, and in this speaks, not only a military but a human pride. Foot-soldiers did not see in the aeroplane a mere mechanical contrivance but a new human victory over matter. The feats of airmen flattered pedestrian souls, who knew thereby that they could fly if they would, flattered us all. Because men had to enter some section of the fighting services thousands chose to fly and fight who otherwise would not have been tempted off the firmer elements of land and sea. They conquered the first nausea of fear, and learned to live with danger as with a wife. They tumbled above us and we marvelled, not taking anywise into account the war-sting which started them, bidding neither sit nor stand but go. One is not sorry that the guns speak no more. One is not sorry that the night-bombers and Zeppelins have ceased to menace us. But the emptiness of the heavens by day has its sadness now in France, its human wanness and melancholy. One realises that the war brought out the flier—as it were before his time, and we must wait long ere we see in peace the state of air society which he prefigured.
Down below the airmen trudged heavy-footed men. The airmen were literally supermen; thosebelow were a sort of undermen. In heavily weighted boots, with backs bent and not straightened by war's routine, with clumsily encumbered bodies, trudged under-humanity, through mud, along gulleys, into holes and pits, down into subterranean chambers. The underman enjoyed no human exaltation except occasionally at the prospect of getting free; he had no mercurial lightness on his heels, no rapid quicksilver of mounting imagination; instead, he was gripped downward and held till he died or there was peace. It used to be a common saying that from the moment you stepped off at Havre you were a slave. You walked in the chains of the war. Men's hearts hardened. They told themselves they wanted nothing and cared nothing. Their minds fell victims to a dull passivity or false boisterousness. They banished the bright ego and took up with a Cerberus, yowled the dog-language of the army, and got selfishly irate over biscuits and slops and bully-beef. They grew more and more dirty and came out in boils. Coarse hair grew apace, brows grew lower, hands that had any cunning in them grew to mere claws and clutches, eyes dullened, and the ear-gate stood ajar for the sound of animal noises and animal confessions. The war was a Bacchanalia for the animal in man.
It was in 1917 that Paris leave as a supplement to the usual home leave was common.This was understood as for the soldier's health. It would stop the boils and ease the system. Men could draw a handsome arrear of pay on the strength of Paris leave, and once in Paris they went deeper than in the dug-outs of the war. Or units were withdrawn to places where the women thronged. Men were robbed by the war of their respect unto their living selves. And 1917 saw the entry of puritan America into the war, the nation of vice-hunting and prohibition, and the rest. But it did not raise the morality of rank and file. The Yanks were shipped with a thirst. The men brought up in sheltered Western communities proved to have no more power than we had to resist the temptations of European vice. The virus of the army seems to have been the same in United States training grounds as in those of England. Material conditions imposed some restraint, but imagination fed the starved side of men's souls with lurid pictures of what obtained in France. Uncle Sam's common soldiers, handsome and clean as they were, and brave, yet brought with them an expectancy which caused them to take no moral lead but on the contrary to plunge headlong into that war-mire which we had all been making. And disease ravaged the American ranks. Some few thousands fell dead on the field of battle and some tens of thousands were wounded, but disease casualties filled the hospitals. It was fortunatefor America's manhood that the war was not protracted. Their war enthusiasm was pushing them on. They did not realise that what they called "the shooting gallery" was a myriad-fold death-trap. Death in many shapes was ready to raven on America. As her men were inexperienced in war's alarms, so also were they unfitted to face the moral ordeal. Humanitarianism, materialism, and a superimposed morality do not produce men more capable of withstanding temptation. Purity depends too often on keeping temptation away. The Yanks brought their own brand of bad language with them—a language beside which lurid English was but pale. Where they had learned such verbal frightfulness seemed puzzling. But curiously enough it caused the American soldier to be hail-fellow well-met. He brought no airs of moral superiority or prudishness. It became a pastime in the British army to imitate admiringly the American type of swearing. It is all beyond the power of the pen. But those who heard it know. If the Yanks had kept to this extreme they would have remained enduringly popular—but they vaunted their prowess and exaggerated their feats and ignored the reality of the hell through which others had been, and they started the talk of their winning the war, and so lost ground. The Americans in France were on the whole perplexing to the average European. Their exaggerated thirst for war'srelaxations on the one hand tended to make them one with the other armies in the field, but their idea of superiority kept them separate.
At Calais now the boxes are stacked on the quays with the embalmed American dead. At great cost of time and labour the dead soldiers are being removed from the places where they fell and packed in crates for transport to America. In this way America's sacrifice is lessened. For while in America this is considered to be America's own concern, it is certain that it is deplored in Europe. The taking away of the American dead has given the impression of a slur on the honour of lying in France. America removes her dead because of a sweet sentiment towards her own. She takes them from a more honourable resting-place to a less honourable one. It is said to be due in part to the commercial enterprise of the American undertakers, but it is more due to the sentiment of mothers and wives and provincial pastors in America. That the transference of the dead across the Atlantic is out of keeping with European sentiment she ignores, or fails to understand. America feels that she is morally superior to Europe. American soil is God's own country and the rest is comparatively unhallowed. To be one in death with Frenchmen, Italians, Negroes, Chinamen, Portuguese, does not suit her frame of mind. Of course, lack of imagination, lack of knowledge of the war and of the greatmix-up of the dead is natural enough at a distance of three thousand miles—the vain thought that the identity of dead bodies with human beings can be retained. As it is, the inscription on every hundredth cross in France is probably a misnomer. There never was time for meticulous care, and the dead were not always buried by full daylight or identified by other than the slightest of clues. Is it remarkable if someone receives instead of soldier son the body of a coolie from China, or if a citizen should receive what portends to be his own corpse? By risking such accidents the majesty of the dead is offended. If love desired its dead again, love should come and lift its dead with its own hands and carry it home.
Politically understood, there should be no property in the dead bodies of this great war. There is only one totality of death and suffering. The dead of the war are a blend. One high stone might stand at the head of each cemetery, and on it all the names be inscribed. The little crosses with name and numbers on each are but desperate human reminders of individuality. But for a dreadful peace, worse than the war, America would have been convinced, as was her war-commander Pershing, that it was nobler to leave her sacrifices on the altar with the others.
Had America's ideal won all had been different, but only the side she joined won and not the ideal. France and England broke the spirit of America'sgreat President and ruined him as the Kaiser was ruined, relegated him to another Amerongen, drove him to his Ekaterinburg too, the third great monarch and leader of men to lose his crown in the war. The American masses were left leaderless, bereft of their ideal. In contempt for a vain France and distrust of a lip-serving inimical England they plunged for "America first and always and one hundred per cent." But had Wilson carried his great program there had been no estrangement, no exhuming of the American dead. America would have gloried in her European shrines. Therefore in looking upon the collapsed heaps of coffins in the harbour and the dead glowering through riven wood, one is really looking upon an aspect of the Treaty of Versailles. In the second year after the war you see terrible things. Who could have foreseen thousands of dead stacked in the holds of Atlantic vessels, making their unmurmurous return across the ocean!
It is night again in human history, deep night, when we dream things of evil and look upon sights of horror which we have no power to dispel. In the gathering gloom of the autumn of 1920 see a whole succession of phantoms stalking. Ireland goes wailing and clanking her chains. Exultant France struts and threatens. Ghosts of Tsar and Tsarina are crying pitifully from Siberian dust. Red demons, mirthless and terrible, stareat us from Russia. Italia stabs nightly fair Fiume. And all the while maledictory shouts and cries are heard on all hands.
Spectres and ghosts and things of evil stalk around and terrify us, and there is only one way to lay them low, and that is by the token of the Cross—by the token of the crosses, the hundreds of thousands of them that run out like rows of pins in France. It is only coming from France that the right approach can be made to new life. Let each new man faring forth into this beset enchanted world dip his soul in the blood of the Altar of France—or if not his very soul, let him at least dip a kerchief or a flag there—for remembrance. With that charm he can uncurse curses and disenchant enchantment and break through the chimeras and fogs which cling to the base of the mountain of the world, and he will reach the singing-bird and the water of life at the top of the mountain, and then restore, as in the Arabian tale, the dead to life.
Doubtless every man who was in the Army and took a chance of death and yet escaped, must have reflected on his good fortune, the strange light of Providence which fell upon his destiny and spared him whilst on all hands his friends and neighbours and fellow-countrymen had fallen. As the soldier left the Army and became civilian again he inevitably thought to himself—"Whereas I might have been dead I am alive; whereas I mightbe bond I am free." And some indeed could add "Whereas I might have been a cripple, or blind, or lamed, or a neurasthenic or a shell-shocked broken man I am sound and fit and have a whole life and freedom to give to the new time which comes with the blessing of peace."
The Frenchman came back to a glorified and magnified France; to a proved capacity to defeat and hold in check a deadly and historical enemy. The Englishman came back to a free England, to a nation who was queen of the nations, to a larger and more untrammelled world-empire; the Belgian to a justified and safeguarded Belgium; the American to an America which had achieved for the first time in history a complete sense of nationhood and unity. The Serbian returned to a resurrected Serbia and a prospective future of Southern Slav greatness. Of the Italian, who joined in the war as a bargain with the others and did not fight primarily for our ideals, we will say nothing. But how near we all were to being beaten, and to realising the very opposite of the present happy potentialities. But a turn in the wheel or a hair in the scale, and the French would have been slaves, the Englishman beaten on land if not on sea would have returned cowering to his little island, empire falling from his grasp and almost the whole bill of the war to defray by the efforts of his restive working-class population; the Belgian a German subject; the American floutedand anxious with the shadow of a terrible new war to fight all by himself in the years to come; the Serbian a peon of Bulgaria or shackled in the heavy rusty Austrian irons. When we are in despair in 1920, 1921, 1922 we should all say to ourselves—"Whereas we might have been slaves we are free; whereas we might have been dead we are alive——" It is what the graveyards of France tell those who look at them. The dead are all pointing mutely to themselves. Their crosses are the direction-posts of new life.
Our enemy came nearer to overthrowing us by the result of the Russian Revolution than by anything else. The defection of Russia, the liberation of the German and Austrian Eastern armies, nearly took victory away from us, and we have God and our cause to thank for salvation. In the late summer and autumn of 1917 the tide of victory turned and began to roll the other way. At the battle for Passchendaele commenced the last year of the war. In that year we experienced every emotion of victory and defeat. The year opened inauspiciously at Passchendaele where so many fell trying to traverse an infernal area of wire and pits and mud, facing the reinforced machine-gunners, facing the new gas, facing the fire of a vastly increased artillery. Many a cheery boy with muddy uniform and bright morning face stood up for the last time at Passchendaele, and unexpectedly—died for England. You may seektheir bodies in the Flemish earth to-day. Perhaps one of them is the unknown soldier in the Abbey. But their spirits are far away from here. They are watchful and radiant and celestial now—not so lovable perhaps in their immortality, for how can mortals feel for the immortals, but enormously more lovable in our mortal conception of them than ever they were when alive—the dead of the last year of the war.
Passchendaele was followed by the sudden triumph of the Austrian armies in the Italian Alps, and the surrender of a hundred thousand Italians and a thousand guns. Revolutionary propaganda was said to have been ravaging the Italian soldier's mind. Others said the Italians sold the day to the enemy. But the prime cause of Austrian victory was to be sought in the great accession of strength due to the Russian lapse from war. No more offensives of Brusilof; no Grand Duke Nicholas any more to terrify Vienna; not even a Kornilof! Austria naturally rounded upon her Southern foe with double might. Vienna bells rang forth and Berlin floated in military joy. Wilhelmstrasse, the street of the Kaiser, reflected deeply and sucked in the significance of the new victory. After a desperate summer of peace-seeking suddenly a last hope of triumph dawned like a fiery star late in the night and nigh unto morning. The thought of coming with a white flag to the Council of Europe was banished. Insteadthe stern decree of war to the uttermost bound the German mind to the old choice of "complete victory or downfall." Despite our opinion of the enemy conveyed in sneers at concrete dug-outs and funk-holes and the "Kamerad" cry, the Germans decided to come all out and win or lose on a gambler's throw. It was perhaps more calculated and more calculable than the cast of the dice, but if the Allies won, Germany had no second chance and would know that she had lost.
Teutonic preparations went ahead. The Allies took little stock of these preparations, not believing that the enemy had much kick left in him. Instead of organising our defence we planned a new attack upon the Germans, and to the astonishment and chagrin of the latter the Byng Boys carried off the laurels of the Battle of Cambrai. Fritz was taken by surprise in late November, and we nearly went all the way to Cambrai. Fleet Street wished to have joy-bells rung in London, but the Church wisely bade us wait, while wrathful Germany averred that we had gone into a trap in which we should presently be terribly caught. Then in the break-through of Gouzeaucourt we learned the lesson that a new and more dangerous enemy was in front of us.
As you walk now along the Byng Boys way on a November afternoon and the sun goes down in greyness and gloom you can feel the mystery of the battle as if it had occurred hundreds ofyears ago. Reality has become remote, remote as the last songs and shouts of the men who went through. Sadness has covered the earth. It is all incredibly empty and desolate. On a post on the road you discern through the evening mistIci Boursiesand then after much plodding you pass the grey empty Canal du Nord with its crumpled rusty bridges, and skirt the naked bones of Bourlon Wood. Then by the side of the road all the dead of Anneux are lined up to see you pass. You go on, buttheyremain. It seems as if when you have passed some spectral sergeant must say to all those pallid ranks "Fall out!" and the order is broken up, and the dead mingle and commingle till another comes past upon the broad highway. Night settles like a curtain shutting off Cambrai from the view, and no light on any hand tells of a return to home or of happiness restored. Suddenly the silence is broken by three blundering lorries—old lorries of the war tearing past you back on the road to Bapaume—ghostly lorries laden with doors, doors only, to be dumped at some wilderness somewhere which was once a town. They pass, and the night-silence resumes its sway, and there are no stars but it is utter peace. Again a spectral post—Ici Fontaine, Ici Fontaine Notre Dame, and you have reached the end of the fight, and the bridge where life met death and both stood at last immobile, unyielding.