Where Wars Go to Die
Page 16
I wonder how the folk in the house are feeling as the shells creep ever nearer. “Gun laid, sir,” says the telephone. “Fire!” I am looking through my glass. A flash of fire on the house, a huge pillar of dust and smoke—then it settles and an unbroken field is there. The German post has gone up. “It’s a dear little gun,” says the officer boy.
We are all led off to be introduced to “Mother,” who sits, squat and black, amid twenty of her grimy children who wait upon and feed her. She is an important person is “Mother,” and her importance grows. It gets clearer with every month that it is she, and only she, who can lead us to the Rhine. She can and she will if the factories of Britain can beat those of the Hun. See to it, you working men and women of Britain. Work now if you rest for ever after, for the fate of Europe and of all that is dear to us is in your hands. For “Mother” is a dainty eater, and needs good food and plenty …
That night we dined with yet another type of the French soldier, General A., who commands the corps of which my friend has one division. Each of these French generals has a striking individuality of his own which I wish I could fix on paper. Their only common point is that each seems to be a rare good soldier. The corps general is Athos with a touch of d’Artagnan. He is well over six feet high, bluff, jovial, with a huge, upcurling moustache, and a voice that would rally a regiment. It is a grand figure which should have been done by Van Dyck with lace collar, hand on sword, and arm akimbo. Jovial and laughing was he, but a stern and hard soldier was lurking behind the smiles.
His name may appear in history, and so may Humbert’s, who rules all the army of which the other corps is a unit. Humbert is a Lord Robert’s figure, small, wiry, quick-stepping, all steel and elastic, with a short, sharp upturned moustache, which one could imagine as crackling with electricity in moments of excitement like cat’s fur. What he does or says is quick, abrupt and to the point. He fires his remarks like pistol shots at this man or that.
Once to my horror he fixed me with his hard little eyes, and demanded, “Sherlock Holmes, est ce qu’il est un soldat dans l’armee Anglaise?”
The whole table waited in an awful hush.
“Mais, mon general,” I stammered. Il est trop vieux pour service.”
There was general laughter, and I felt that I had scrambled out of an awkward place.
And talking of awkward places, I had forgotten about that spot upon the road whence the Boche observer could see our motor-cars. He had actually laid a gun upon it, the rascal, and waited all the long day for our return. No sooner did we appear upon the slope than a shrapnel shell burst above us, but somewhat behind me, as well as to the left. Had it been straight the second car would have got it, and there might have been a vacancy in one of the chief editorial chairs in London. The General shouted to the driver to speed up, and we were soon safe from the German gunners.
One gets perfectly immune to noises in these scenes, for the guns which surround you make louder crashes than any shell which bursts about you. It is only when you actually see the cloud over you that your thoughts come back to yourself, and that you realise that in this wonderful drama you may be a useless super, but none the less you are on the stage and not in the stalls.
From A Visit to Three Fronts, by Arthur Conan Doyle; George M. Doran Co.; New York, 1916.
The Master Spirit of Hell
— W. D. Howells
The Little Children
“Suffer little children to come unto me,”
Christ said, and answering with infernal glee,
“Take them!” the arch-fiend scoffed, and from the tottering walls
Of their wrecked homes, and from the cattle’s stalls,
And the dogs’ kennels, and the cold
Of the waste fields, and from the hapless hold
Of their dead mothers’ arms, famished and bare
And maimed by shot and shell,
The master-spirit of hell
Caught them up, and through the shuddering air
Of the hope-forsaken world
The little ones he hurled,
Mocking that Pity in his pitiless might—
The anti-Christ of Schrecklickeit.
From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1916.
Vandal Guns of Dull Intent
—Edmond Rostand
The Cathedral
“Deathless” is graven deeper on thy brow;
Ghouls have no power to end thy endless sway.
The Greek of old, the Frenchman of today,
Before thy riven shrine are bending now.
A wounded fortress straightaway lieth prone,
Not so the Temple dies; its roof may fall,
The sky its covering vault, an azure pall,
Doth droop to crown its wealth of lacework stone.
Praise to you, Vandal guns of dull intent!
We lacked till now our Beauty’s monument.
Twice hallowed o’er by insult’s brutal hand,
As Pallas owns on Athens’ golden hill,
We have it now, thanks to your far-flung brand!
Your shame—our gain, misguided German skill!
From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Co., New York, 1915; translation Frances C. Fay.
These Terrific Symbols
—Rudyard Kipling
The ridge with the scattered pines might have hidden children at play. Certainly a horse would have been quite visible, but there was no hint of guns, except a semaphore which announced it was forbidden to pass that way, as the battery was fighting. The Boches must have looked for that battery, too. The ground was pitted with shell holes of all calibres—some of them as fresh as mole-casts in the misty damp morning; others where the poppies had grown from seed to flower all through the summer.
“And where are the guns?” I demanded at last.
They were almost under one’s hand, their ammunition in cellars and dug-outs beside them. As far as one can make out, the 75 gun has no pet name. The bayonet is Rosalie, the virgin of Bayonne, but the 75, the watchful nurse of the trenches and the little sister of the Line, seems to be always soixante-quinze. Even those who love her best do not insist she is beautiful. Her merits are French—logic, directness, simplicity, and the supreme gift of “occasionality.” She is equal to everything on the spur of the moment. One sees and studies the few appliances that make her do what she does, and one feels that any one could have invented her.
“As a matter of fact,” says a commandant, “anybody—or rather, everybody did. The general idea is after such-and-such a system, the patent of which has expired, and we improved it; the breech action, with slight modification, is somebody else’s; the sighting is perhaps a little special; and so is the traversing, but, at bottom, it is only an assembly of variations and arrangements.”
That, of course, is all that Shakespeare ever got out of the alphabet. The French Artillery make their own guns as he made his plays. It is just as simple as that.
The gun-servers stood back with the bored contempt of the professional for the layman who intrudes on his mysteries. Other civilians had come that way before—had seen, and grinned, and complimented and gone their way, leaving the gunners high up on the bleak hillside to grill or mildew or freeze for weeks and months.
Then she spoke. Her voice was higher pitched, it seemed, than ours—with a more shrewish tang to the speeding shell. Her recoil was as swift and as graceful as the shrug of a French-woman’s shoulders; the empty case leaped forth and clanged against the trail; the tops of two or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each other, though there was no wind.
“They’ll be bothered down below to know the meaning of our single shot. We don’t give them one dose at a time as rule,” somebody laughed.
We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came back from the mist that clogged the lower grounds, though no shell of this war was ever launched with more earnest prayers that it might do hurt …
“What made the change?”
“The Boche. If he had been quiet for another twenty years the world must have been his—rotten, but all his. Now he is saving the world.”
“How?”
“Because he has shown us what Evil is. We—you and I, England and the rest—had begun to doubt the existence of Evil. The Boche is saving us.”
Then we had another look at the animal in its trench—a little nearer this time than before, and quieter on account of the mist. Pick up the chain anywhere you please, you shall find the same observation post, table, map, observer, and telephonist; the same always-hidden, always-ready guns; the same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from Switzerland to the sea. The handling of war varies with the nature of the country, but the tools are unaltered. One looks upon them at last with the same weariness of wonder as the eye receives from endless repetitions of Egyptian hieroglyphics. A long, low profile, with a lump to one side, means the field-gun and its attendant ammunition case; a circle and slot stand for an observation-post; the trench is a bent line, studded with vertical plumes of explosion; the great guns of position, coming and going on their motors, repeat themselves as scarabs; and man himself is a small blue smudge, no larger than a foresight, crawling and creeping or watching and running among all these terrific symbols …
“This is the end of the line,” said the Staff Officer, kindest and most patient of chaperons. It buttressed itself on a fortress among the hills. Beyond that, the silence was more awful than the mixed noise of business to the westward. In mileage on the map the line must be between four and five hundred miles; in actual trench-work many times that distance. It is too much to see at full length; the mind does not readily break away from the obsession of its entirety or the grip of its detail. One visualizes the thing afterwards as a white-hot gash, worming all across France between intolerable sounds and lights, under ceaseless blasts of whirled dirt. Nor is it any relief to lose oneself among wildernesses of piling, stoning, timbering, concreting, and wire-work, or incalculable quantities of soil thrown up raw to the light and cloaked by the changing seasons—as the unburied dead are cloaked.
Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it. It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that keeps us from the Beast goes with it.
Where the rifle and bayonet serve, men use those tools along the front. Where the knife gives better results, they go in behind the hand-grenades with the naked twelve-inch knife. Each race is supposed to fight in its own way, but this war has passed beyond all known ways. They say that the Belgians in the north settle accounts with a certain dry passion which has varied very little since their agony began. Some sections of the English line have produced a soft-voiced, rather reserved type, which does its work with its mouth shut. The French carry an edge to their fighting, a precision, and a dreadful knowledge coupled with an insensibility to shock, unlike anything one has imagined of mankind.
From France at War, by Rudyard Kipling; Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, 1915.
Few Wished Themselves Elsewhere
—John Buchan
The first day of July dawned hot and cloudless, though a thin fog, the relic of the damp of the past week, clung to the hollows. At half-past five the hill just west of Albert offered a singular view. It was almost in the centre of the section allotted to the Allied attack, and from it the eye could range on the left up and beyond the Ancre to the high ground around Beaumont Hamel and Serre; in front of the great lift of tableland behind which lay Bapaume; and to the right past the woods of Fricourt to the valley of the Somme. Every gun along the front was speaking, and speaking without pause. Great spurts of dust on the slopes showed where a heavy shell had burst, and black and white gouts of smoke dotted the middle distance like the little fires in a French autumn field. Lace-like shrapnel wreaths hung in the sky, melting into the morning haze. The noise was strangely uniform, a steady rumbling, as if the solid earth were muttering in a nightmare, and it was hard to distinguish the deep tones of the heavies, the vicious whip-like crack of the field guns and the bark of the trench mortars.
About 7:15 the bombardment rose to that hurricane pitch of fury which betokened its close. It was as if titanic machine guns were at work all around the horizon. Then appeared a marvellous sight, the solid spouting of the enemy slopes—as if they were lines of reefs on which a strong tide was breaking. In such a hell it seemed that no human thing could live. Through the thin summer vapour and the thicker smoke which clung to the foreground there were visions of a countryside actually moving—moving bodily in debris into the air. And now there was a fresh sound—a series of abrupt and rapid bursts which came gustily from the first lines. These were the new trench mortars—wonderful little engines of death.
The staff officers glanced at their watches, and at half-past seven precisely there came a lull. It lasted for a second or two, and then the guns continued their tale. But the range had been lengthened everywhere, and from a bombardment the fire had become a barrage. For, on a twenty-five mile front, the Allied infantry had gone over the parapets.
The point of view of the hill-top was not that of the men in the front trenches. The crossing of the parapets is the supreme moment in modern war. The troops are outside defences, moving across the open to investigate the unknown. It is the culmination of months of training for officers and men, and the least sensitive feels the drama of the crisis. Most of the British troops engaged had twenty months before been employed in the peaceable civilian trades. In their ranks were every class and condition—miners from north central England, factory hands from the industrial centers, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers, men who in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger, and men whose chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride. Nerves may be attuned to the normal risks of trench warfare and yet shrink from the desperate hazard of a charge into the enemy’s line.
But to one who visited the front before the attack the most vivid impression was that of quiet cheerfulness. There were no shirkers and few who wished themselves elsewhere. One man’s imagination might be more active than another’s, but the will to fight, and to fight desperately, was universal. With the happy gift of the British soldier they had turned the ghastly business of war into something homely and familiar. Accordingly they took everything as part of the day’s work, and awaited the supreme moment without heroics and without tremor, confident in themselves, confident in their guns, and confident in the triumph of their cause. There was no savage lust of battle, but that far more formidable thing—a resolution which needed no rhetoric to support it. Norfolk’s words were true of every man of them:
“As gentle and as jocund as to jest
Go I to fight. Truth hath a quiet breast.”
In that stubborn action against impossible odds the gallantry was so universal and absolute that it is idle to select special cases. In each mile there were men who performed the incredible. Nothing finer was done in the war. The splendid troops, drawn from those volunteers who had banded themselves together for another cause, now shed their blood like water for the liberty of the world.
That grim struggle from Thiepval northward was responsible for by far the greater number of Allied losses of the day But, though costly, it was not fruitless, for it occupied the bulk of the German defence. It was the price that had to be paid for the advance of the rest of the front. For, while in the north the living wa
ve broke vainly and gained little, in the south “by creeks and inlets making” the tide was flowing strongly shoreward. Our major purpose was attained …
No great thing is achieved without a price, and on the Somme fell the very flower of our race, the straightest of limb, the keenest of brain, the most eager of spirit. The young men who died almost before they had gazed on the world, the makers and the doers who left their tasks unfinished, were greater in their deaths than in their lives. Out of their loss they won for mankind an enduring gain.
From The Battle of the Somme, by John Buchan; Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1917.
Nearer Than Any Other Woman
—Mrs. Humphrey Ward
A young artillery officer was asked to show us the way. We reached a ruined village from which all normal inhabitants had been long since cleared away. The shattered church was there, and I noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hanging on its chancel wall. A little farther and the boyish artillery-officer, our leader, turned and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping through seas of mud down into the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed that no aeroplane overhead could guess it.
There it was—how many of its fellows I had seen in the Midland and northern workshops!—its muzzle just showing in the dark, and nine or ten high-explosive shells lying on the bench in front of the breech. One is put in. We stand back a little, and the sergeant tells me to put my fingers in my ears and look straight at the gun. Then comes the shock—not so violent as I expected—and the cartridge case drops out. The shell has sped on its way to the German trenches—with what result to human flesh and blood? But I remember thinking very little of that.
Now indeed we were in the battle! It was discussed whether we should be taken zigzag through the fields to the entrance of the communication-trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and the Captain was evidently relieved when we elected to turn back. Shall I always regret that lost opportunity? That was the nearest that any woman could personally have come to it! But I doubt whether anything more—anything, at least, that was possible—could have deepened the whole effect. We had been already nearer than any woman—even a nurse—had been, in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of impressions was full ….