The officers pooh-poohed the idea. But Miss С——stuck to her point.
“They are getting information somehow,” she said. “You may laugh if you like. I am sure I am right.”
Later on an officer explained to me something about the secret service of the war.
“It is a war of spies,” he said. “That is one reason for the deadlock. Every movement is reported to the other side and checkmated almost before it begins. In the eastern field of war the system is still inadequate; that accounts for the great movements that have taken place there.”
Perhaps he is right. It sounds reasonable. I do not know with what authority he spoke. But certainly everywhere I found this talk of spies. One of the officers that night told of a recent experience of his.
“I was in a church tower at——,” he said. “There were three of us. We had been looking over toward the German lines. Suddenly I looked down into the street below. Some one with an electric flash was signalling across. It was quite distinct. All of us saw it. There was an answer from the German trenches immediately. While one of us kept watch on the tower the others rushed down into the street. There was no one there. But it is certain that that sort of thing goes on all the time.”
A quarter to eleven!
Suddenly the whole thing seemed impossible—that the noise at the foot of the street was really guns; that I should be there; that these two young women should live there day and night in the midst of such horrors. For the whole town is a graveyard. Bodies in numbers have been buried in shell-holes and hastily covered, or float in the stagnant water of the canal. Every heavy rain uncovers shallow graves in the fields, allowing a dead arm, part of a rotting trunk, to show.
And now, after this lapse of time, it still seems incredible. Are they still there? Report has it that the Germans captured this town and held it for a time, only to lose it later. What happened to the little “sick and sorry” house during those fearful days? Did the German officers sit about that pine table and throw a nut to summon an orderly? Did they fill the lamp while it was lighted, and play on the cracked piano, and pick up shrapnel cases as they landed on the doorstep and set them on the mantel?
Ten minutes to eleven!
The chauffeur came to the door and stuck his head in.
“I have found petrol in a can in an empty shed,” he explained. “It is now possible to go.”
We went. We lost no time on the order of our going. The rain was over, but the fog had descended again. We lighted our lamps, and were curtly ordered by a sentry to put them out. In the moment that they remained alight, carefully turned away from the trenches, it was possible to see the hopeless condition of the street.
At last we reached a compromise. One lamp we might have, but covered with heavy paper. It was very little. The car bumped ominously, sagged into shell-holes.
I turned and looked back at the house. Faint rays of light shone through its boarded windows. A wounded soldier had been brought up the street and stood, leaning heavily on his companion, at the doorstep. The door opened, and he was taken in.
Good-bye, little “sick and sorry” house, with your laughter and tears, your friendly hands, your open door! Good-bye!
Five minutes later, as we reached the top of the street, the bombardment began.
CHAPTER XXV
VOLUNTEERS AND PATRIOTS
I HOLD a strong brief for the English: For the English at home, restrained, earnest, determined and unassuming; for the English in the field, equally all of these things.
The British Army has borne attacks at La Bassée and Ypres, positions so strategically difficult to hold that the Germans have concentrated their assaults at these points. It has borne the horrors of the retreat from Mons, when what the Kaiser called “General French’s contemptible little army” was forced back by oncoming hosts of many times its number. It has fought, as the English will always fight, with unequalled heroism but without heroics.
To-day, after many months of war, the British Army in the field is as smart, in a military sense, as tidy—if it will forgive me the word—as well ordered, as efficiently cared for, as the German Army was in the beginning. Partly this is due to its splendid equipment. Mostly it is due to that fetish of the British soldier wherever he may be—personal neatness.
Behind the lines he is jaunty, cheerful, smart beyond belief. He hates the trenches—not because they are dangerous or monotonous but because it is difficult to take a bath in them. He is four days in the trenches and four days out. On his days out he drills and marches, to get back into condition after the forced inaction of the trenches. And he gets his hair trimmed.
There is something about the appearance of the British soldier in the field that got me by the throat. Perhaps because they are, in a sense, my own people, speaking my tongue, looking at things from a viewpoint that I could understand. That partly. But it was more than that.
These men and boys are volunteers, the very flower of England. They march along the roads, heads well up, eyes ahead, thousands of them. What a tragedy for the country that gives them up! Who will take their places?—these splendid Scots with their picturesque kilts, their bare, muscular knees, their great shoulders; the cheery Irish, swaggering a bit and with a twinkle in their blue eyes; these tall young English boys, showing race in every line; these dashing Canadians, so impressive that their every appearance on a London street was certain to set the crowds to cheering.
I saw them in London, and later on I saw them at the front. Still later I saw them again, prostrate on the ground, in hospital trains, on hospital ships. I saw mounds, too, marked with wooden crosses.
Volunteers and patriots! A race incapable of a mean thing, incapable of a cruelty. A race of sportsmen, playing this horrible game of war fairly, almost too honestly. A race, not of diplomats, but of gentlemen.
“You will always be fools,” said a captured German naval officer to his English captors, “and we shall never be gentlemen!”
But they are not fools. It is that attitude toward the English that may defeat Germany in the end.
Every man in the British Army to-day has counted the cost. He is there because he elected to be there. He is going to stay by until the thing is done, or he is. He says very little about it. He is uncomfortable if any one else says anything about it. He is rather matter of fact, indeed, and nonchalant as long as things are being done fairly. But there is nothing calm about his attitude when his opponent hits below the belt. It was a sense of fair play, as well as humanity, that made England rise to the call of Belgium. It is England’s sense of fair play that makes her soldiers and sailors go white with fury at the drowning of women and children and noncombatants; at the unprincipled employment of such trickery in war as the. use of asphyxiating gases, or at the insulting and ill-treating of those of their army who have been captured by the Germans. It is at the English, not at the French or the Belgians, that Germany is striking in this war. Her whole attitude shows it. British statesmen knew this from the beginning, but the people were slow to believe it. But escaped prisoners have told that they were discriminated against. I have talked with a British officer who made a sensational escape from a German prison camp. German soldiers have called across to the French trenches that it was the English they were after.
In his official order to his troops to advance, the German Emperor voiced the general sentiment.
“It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and walk over General French’s contemptible little army.
“Headquarters,
“Aix-la-Chapelle, August 19th, 1914.”
In the name of the dignity of great nations, compare that order with Lord Kitchener’s instructions to his troops, given at the same time.
“You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasi
on of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience. Remember that the honour of the British Army depends on your individual conduct. It will be your duty not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire, but also to maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle.
“The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better service than in showing yourselves in France and Belgium in the true character of a British soldier.
“Be invariably courteous, considerate, and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome and to be trusted; your conduct will justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty cannot be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.
“Do your duty bravely,
“Fear God,
“Honour the King.
“(Signed) KITCHENER, Field Marshal.”
CHAPTER XXVI
A LUNCHEON AT BRITISH HEADQUARTERS
THE same high-crowned roads, with pitfalls of mud at each side; the same lines of trees; the same coating of ooze, over which the car slid dangerously. But a new element—khaki.
Khaki everywhere—uniforms, tents, transports, all of the same hue. Skins, too, where one happens on the Indian troops. It is difficult to tell where their faces end and their yellow turbans begin.
Except for the slightly rolling landscape and the khaki one might have been behind the Belgian or French Army. There were as usual aëroplanes overhead, clouds of shrapnel smoke, and not far away the thunder of cannonading. After a time even that ceased, for I was on my way to British General Headquarters, well back from the front.
I carried letters from England to Field Marshal Sir John French, to Colonel Brinsley Fitzgerald, aidde-camp to the “Chief,” as he is called, and to General Huguet, the liaison between the French and English Armies. His official title is something entirely different, but the French word is apt. He is the connecting link between the English and French Armies.
I sent these letters to headquarters, and waited in the small hotel for developments. The British antipathy to correspondents was well known. True, there were indications that a certain relaxation was about to take place. Frederick Palmer in London had been notified that before long he would be sent across, and I had heard that some of the London newspapers, the Times and a few others, were to be allowed a day at the lines.
But at the time my machine drew into that little French town and deposited me in front of a wretched inn, no correspondent had been to the British lines. It was terra incognita. Even London knew very little. It was rumoured that such part of the Canadian contingent as had left England up to that time had been sent to the eastern field, to Egypt or the Dardanelles. With the exception of Sir John French’s reports and the “Somewhere in France” notes of “Eyewitness,” a British officer at the front, England was taking her army on faith.
And now I was there, and there frankly as a writer. Also I was a woman. I knew how the chivalrous English mind recoiled at the idea of a woman near the front. Their nurses were kept many miles in the rear. They had raised loud protests when three English women were permitted to stay at the front with the Belgian Army.
My knees were a bit weak as I went up the steps and into the hotel. They would hardly arrest me. My letters were from very important persons indeed. But they could send me away with expedition and dispatch. I had run the Channel blockade to get there, and I did not wish to be sent away with expedition and dispatch.
The hotel was cold and bare. Curious-eyed officers came in, stared at me and went out. A French gentleman in a military cape walked round the bare room, spoke to the canaries in a great cage in the corner, and came back to where I sat with my fur coat, lap-robe fashion, over my knees.
“Pardon!” he said. “Are you the Duchess of Sutherland?”
I regretted that I was not the Duchess of Sutherland.
“You came just now in a large car?”
“I did.”
“You intend to stay here for some time?”
“I have not decided.”
“Where did you come from?”
“I think,” I said after a rather stunned pause, “that I shall not tell you.”
“Madame is very cautious!”
I felt convinced that he spoke with the authority of the army, or of the town gendarmerie, behind him. But I was irritated. Besides, I had been cautioned so much about telling where I had been, except in general terms, that I was even afraid to talk in my sleep.
“I think,” I said, “that it does not really matter where I came from, where I am going, or what I am doing here.”
I expected to see him throw back his cape and exhibit a sheriff’s badge, or whatever its French equivalent. But he only smiled.
“In that case,” he said cheerfully, “I shall wish you a good-morning.”
“Good-bye,” I said coldly. And he took himself off.
I have never solved the mystery of that encounter. Was he merely curious? Or scraping acquaintance with the only woman he had seen in months? Or was he as imposing a person as he looked, and did he go away for a warrant or whatever was necessary, and return to find me safe in the lap of the British Army?
The canary birds sang, and a porter with a leather apron, having overcome a national inability to light a fire in the middle of the day, came to take me to my room. There was an odour of stewing onions in the air, and soapsuds, and a dog sniffed at me and barked because I addressed him in English.
And then General Huguet came, friendly and smiling, and speaking English. And all was well.
Afterward I learned how that same diplomacy which made me comfortable and at home with him at once has made smooth the relations between the English and French Armies. It was Chesterfield, wasn’t it, who spoke of “Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re”? That is General Huguet. A tall man, dark, keen and of most soldierly bearing; beside the genial downrightness of the British officers he was urbane, suave, but full of decision. His post requires diplomacy but not concession.
Sir John French, he regretted to say, was at the front and would not return until late in the evening. But Colonel Fitzgerald hoped that I would come to luncheon at headquarters, so that we might talk over what was best to be done. He would, if the arrangement suited me, return at one o’clock for me.
It was half past twelve. I made such concessions to the occasion as my travelling bag permitted, and, prompt to the minute, General Huguet’s car drew up at the inn door. It was a wonderful car. I used it all that afternoon and the next day, and I can testify both to its comfort and to its speed. I had travelled fast in cars belonging to the Belgian and French staffs, but never have I gone as I did in that marvel of a car. Somewhere among my papers I have a sketch that I made of the interior of the limousine body, with the two soldier-chauffeurs outside in front, the two carbines strapped to the speedometer between the υis-à-υis seats inside the car, and the speedometer registering ninety kilometres and going up.
We went at once to British Headquarters, with its sentries and its flag; a large house, which had belonged to a notary, its grim and forbidding exterior gave little promise of the comfort within. A passage led to a square centre hall from which opened various rooms—— a library, with a wood fire, the latest possible London and Paris papers, a flat-topped desk and a large map; a very large drawing-room, which is Sir John French’s private office, with white walls panelled with rose brocade, a marble mantel, and a great centre table, covered, like the library desk, with papers; a dining room, wainscoted and comfortable. There were other rooms, which I did not see. In the square hall an orderl
y sat all day, waiting for orders of various sorts.
Colonel Fitzgerald greeted me amiably. He regretted that Sir John French was absent, and was curious as to how I had penetrated to the fastnesses of British Headquarters without trouble. Now and then, glancing at him unexpectedly during the excellent luncheon that followed, I found his eyes fixed on me thoughtfully, intently. It was not at all an unfriendly gaze. Rather it was the look of a man who is painstakingly readjusting his mental processes to meet a new situation.
He made a delightful host. I sat at his right. At the other end of the table was General Huguet, and across from me a young English nobleman, attached to the field marshal’s staff, came in, a few minutes late, and took his place. The Prince of Wales, who lives there, had gone to the trenches the day before.
Two soldier-servants served the meal. There was red wine, but none of the officers touched it. The conversation was general and animated. We spoke of public opinion in America, of the resources of Germany and her starvation cry, of the probable length of the war. On this opinions varied. One of the officers prophesied a quick ending when the Allies were finally ready to take the offensive. The others were not so optimistic. But neither here, nor in any of the conversations I have heard at the headquarters of the Allies, was there a doubt expressed as to ultimate victory. They had a quiet confidence that was contagious. There was no bluster, no assertion; victory was simply accepted as a fact; the only two opinions might be as to when it would occur, and whether the end would be sudden or a slow withdrawal of the German forces.
The French Algerian troops and the Indian forces of Great Britain came up for discussion, their bravery, their dislike for trench fighting and intense longing to charge, the inroads the bad weather had made on them during the winter.
One of the officers considered the American press rather pro-German. The recent American note to Sir Edward Grey and his reply, with the press comments on both, led to this statement. The possibility of Germany’s intentionally antagonising America was discussed, but not at length.
Kings, Queens, and Pawns Page 22
