VI
"GENTLEMEN, ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH"
ASKED by a friend at the visitors' chateau, British headquarters in France, what is my most outstanding impression after examining most of the western front, my reply was and is: "The power and calm precision of Great Britain."
This power and precision at the front is apparent even to a military tyro like myself. For a strip of at least thirty miles back of the fighting line England's great organization ceaselessly moves, wheel within wheel, cog upon cog, without haste, without creaking and screaming, without generating unnecessary heat. We saw a lorry in the ditch once or twice, but others were calmly pulling it out. We saw huge guns patiently standing under poplar trees, while men and traction engines paused for breath. We saw the field where the tanks stood in their stalls, to be groomed like—war horses, I started to say; war mastodons is better. We saw two tanks stranded on the field of Messines. We saw the airplanes in their hangars, the only things that looked impatient, as if they were caged falcons; but the young lieutenants who drive them are the calmest of the calm, with all the devil-may-care way they have about them. It was all impressive, stopped your breath at times and made your heart go fast.
As for headquarters, it is always the quietest place in the war zone. There are a few motor cars, but not so many as at a field hospital. As for the men about headquarters, the calm and the reserve cannot be said to increase with the rank of the officers, but it certainly does not diminish. These men drive or walk in exposed positions as calmly as they attend to any other parts of their concerns.
We passed through a little village where are many French people living their accustomed lives, and where British Tommies are billeted. As we drove through it we noted children going home from school. One British soldier lay on the grass by the side of the road playing with three or four little girls. I particularly marked him for his apparent love of little children. Five minutes later, from the shoulder of a hill, we looked back and saw three German shells explode in that little hamlet, throwing up masses of brick, dirt, dust and smoke. How many lives either of soldiers or non-combatants were taken in toll we never learned, but I have been unable to forget that soldier and those little ones.
Weeks after, when I mentioned the village and the circumstances, a British officer replied: "Yes, nobody goes there often, who does not expect sooner or later to get hit. It is a hot spot."
It is significant to observe, in these frontier villages, the number of commingled races engaged in the death grapple with the Hun. As we sat waiting for a bridge across a canal to close and let us by, we noted English, Portuguese, French, Algerian and Hindu allies standing about and trying to communicate. The Portuguese are neat, light built, swarthy little fellows, very smart in their light blue uniforms, quite similar to the French. We saw columns of them going to and coming from the front, their transports, consisting largely of animal drawn vehicles, and their air partaking somewhat of the jauntiness of the Japanese. They seem to have made a very favorable impression upon their British comrades, of whom, I am told, they are very fond. Portugal, the brand new republic, is likely to make a place of value for herself in international affairs by her conduct in this war.
There is evident eagerness along the front to welcome and discuss America and her entrance into the game. If nothing more than her moral support and the increased confidence which she has engendered in the breasts of the Allies, were to result, her part has not been played in vain; but there is much more that she is already doing over here. She has companies of foresters and railway men at work in England. Altogether, she is surprising her allies by the rapidity of her action. But the hope I hear expressed on all sides is that she will speed up the manufacture of war planes and the training of her young men to drive them. There is no other way so quickly and adequately to put an end to the air raids on defenceless women and children, as by filling the air with cavalry. The vexed question of reprisals, which is disturbing the British press and public, will then take care of itself.
A few hasty pictures of interesting spots must suffice for this chapter. Our car stops in the rain, at the foot of a steep and muddy path between dripping hedges. We dig in our sticks, and slip and slide and crawl, up, through paths and trenches, past dugouts and sandbag cottages, to a dizzy wooded hill, high over fighting ground. Here we look down from a perfect observatory, fitted with telescopes, telephones, and wireless, upon the ground below, held by the Bodies.
It was a point of wild beauty and grandeur, commanding view and an air of romance, fifteen hundred feet, it seemed above the plain, approached only by naturally and artificially screened ways, impregnable to attack.
Suicide Corner is the name given to a bend in a certain village street. The houses had all died of spinal meningitis, paralysis and smallpox. Such battered and punctured stucco, still to stand in the shape of walls, it is difficult to conceive. Of course the tide of battle has rolled on beyond now, but to make the scene real, a "walking wounded" man turned the corner as we drove by, his arm hanging in a bloodstained sling and his face ghastly pale. He stood, however, and chatted awhile with the military policeman who was there to direct traffic. I shall never forget that face, as he strove hard, by puffing a cigarette, to keep his features from working with pain. Several ambulances came along just at this time, filled with recumbent and sitting forms, red bandages visible, on the way from the advanced dressing station to the field hospital. There had been a bit of a raid somewhere near last night or a shellburst in a bad spot to-day.
We alighted one afternoon to view the ruins of a handsome chateau that the retreating Germans had blown up as they left. The gates and winding walks were there, the cement fish-pond and even some of the flowering plants and shrubs; but the house itself was the best illustration of the phrase "not one stone left upon another," that I ever saw. Literally there were not two bricks or stones still fastened together. Even the cement, which had remained set for centuries, was crumbled into the general sand heap. It was a house left desolate, and Nature was doing her best to cover it with weeds and wild flowers that the place thereof should know it no more forever.
Leading down the slope from that chateau for half-a-mile or so, is a deep cut road,—the famous sunken road—bordered by Roche dugouts. It is like a street of tenements, once inhabited by rabbits. When the English took it over Tommy refused to burrow and to-day he lives in tents where the Germans once lived under ground. I saw football and cricket, a rifle range and a practicing band,—the band made up largely of boys of twelve to sixteen—the bath houses with scores of naked bathers, the laundries and disinfecting plants all out above ground, and Tommy strolls about whistling, unmindful of occasional shells. Such is the difference between the two foes. They told me of a football game that was going on one day in a certain field. The Huns got wind of it and dropped a few Jack John-sons into the game. Tommy stood it a while, and then, moving to the other end of the field, calmly finished his game.
The bands play the columns up to the trenches and back again. It puts "Cheery-oh" into them. I saw a band of Highland pipers playing a column of Kitties up toward the front line, and I should not like to get in the way of a rush from these rawboned, bronzed bare-legged Scots. Some talk of the Canadians as the finest troops in Europe; some, of the French chasseurs; but who that has seen these various units of splendid fighting men, whether Irishmen, Welsh, Scotch, Lancashire, French, or territorial, can use any such expression of comparison as "the finest fighting men?"
What is to be done with all the ravaged territory when the war is over, is now engaging the attention of the French government. Expert foresters have been looking over the battle grounds of late; and it is likely that they will be planted with trees. They could not safely be farmed, on account of unexploded bombs and shells, even if the surface could be leveled to anything like a manageable area and the soil be restored.
There is a ridge back of Vimy where thousands of Frenchmen bravely died, and where you see boots with fleshless legs in them; but what is yet more problematical for the future, there are "duds," or unexploded shells and bombs. I picked up a little bomb the size of a turkey egg and said to the captain: "Is this dangerous?"
"I should say it is dangerous. Put it down. Last week I saw a doctor in the hospital. He had one finger left on one hand and two on the other because he picked up a bomb like that."
So I gingerly laid it down. A few days later, as we entered another field, the captain reminded us: "I shall have to ask you not to touch anything without permission." We, by this time, needed no warning. On Vimy Ridge I saw a whole box of unexploded hand bombs, the size and shape of a turkey egg, while ten yards away were five or six live aerial torpedoes as big as a six-inch short shell, with flanges to guide their flight. Needless to say, I walked well around the exhibition and touched none of the works of art.
As we entered upon the shell area at a certain point, officers crossing it advised us to keep moving; for said they, "The Roche knows that the King is somewhere hereabouts, and if the enemy see any party, they are sure to do a bit of strafing."
The King was at our chateau that day, in our absence. We saw the bandstand erected on the lawn, and we noted the absence of the Count's September-morn type of art on the grand staircase. When we came in at night, the most delicate and chaste porcelains and plaques adorned the walls.
No officer told us the King had been there. We simply felt it. Next day, about noon, my curiosity got the better of my discretion, and being alone with our captain, I said: "I understand royalty is somewhere in the neighborhood." A full minute of silence followed. Then he said: "I believe there is a story of that kind around." I was sorry I spoke. The English papers next week had long stories about the King at the front and pictures; but my article, written a week or two later, was censored of all mention of his majesty. Such is the intelligence and personal equation of censorship. It is all luck, after all.
It now merely remains to add that the water journey between England and the British front is admirably managed. Destroyers deploy on either side of the troop ships, and well in front, forming a triangle. As soon as we moved off from the dock, we were all ordered to put on lifebelts. The boats poured forth a thick black screen of smoke behind, blocking the open end of the triangle. Then we steam ahead as fast as we can go.
What a pity that all this genius of Great Britain, this man power, administration, skill and science, invention and ingenuity is forced, by the madness of the Hun, into destruction, smoke, wholesale death and mud! If all that power were turned into construction, what could it not accomplish? Splendid as is London, with its massive buildings and monuments, the British army and the organization back of it could build, in a few years, a finer and more perfect city than London. God grant that it soon be given a chance to build and never again be compelled to tear down!