Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.

  With the Wounded I was at Home

  —Hugh Walpole

  There comes now a difficult matter. During the later months when I was to reflect on the whole affair I saw quite clearly that the hour between our leaving the wooden house and arriving in the trenches bridged quite clearly for me the division between imagination and reality: that is, I was never after this to speak of war as I would have spoken of it an hour before. I was never again to regard the paraphernalia of it with the curiosity of a stranger—I had become part of it. This hour then may be regarded as in some ways the most important of all my experiences. It is certainly the occasion to which if I were using my invention I should make the most. Here then is my difficulty.

  I have nothing to say about it. There’s nothing at all to be made of it.

  I may say at once there was no atom of drama in it. At one moment I was standing with Maria Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from beneath a tree at my side. There had, of course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven road while the sun rose gallantly in the heavens and the clanging of the iron door grew, with every roll of our wheels, louder and louder. But it was rather as though I had been lifted in a sheet from one life—a life of speculation, of viewing war from a superior and safe distance, of viewing indeed all catastrophe and reality from the same distance—into the other. I had been caught up, had hung for a moment in mid-air, had been “planted” in this new experience. For all of us there must have been at this moment something of this passing from an old life into a new one, and yet I dare swear that not for any one of us was there any drama, any thrill, any excitement. We stood, a rather lonely little group, in the forest clearing whilst the soldiers in the trench flung us a careless glance, then turned back to their business of the day with an indifference that showed how ordinary and drab a thing custom had made it …

  A dream, I know, yesterday’s experiences seemed to me as I settled down to the business that had filled so much of my earlier period at the war. Here, with the wounded, I was at home—the bare little room, the table with the bottles and bandages and scissors, the basins and dishes, the air even thicker and thicker with that smell of dried blood, unwashed bodies, and iodine that is like no other smell in the world. The room would be crowded, the sanitars supporting legs and arms and heads, nurses dashing to the table for bandages or iodine or scissors, three or four stretchers occupying the floor of the room with the soldiers who were too severely wounded to sit or stand, these soldiers often utterly quiet, dying perhaps, or watching with eyes that realised only dreams and shadows, the little window square, the strip of sky, the changing colours of the day; then the sitting soldiers, on ordinary of a marvellous and most simple patience, watching the bandaging of their arms and hands and legs, whispering sometimes “Boje moi! Boje moi!” dragging themselves up from their desperate struggle for endurance to answer the sanitars who asked their name, their regiments, the nature of their wounds. Sometimes they would talk, telling how the thing had happened to them:

  “And there, your Honour, before I could move, she had come—such a noise—eh, eh, a terrible thing—I called out ‘Zemliac. Here it is!’ I said, and he …”

  But as a rule they were very quiet, starting perhaps at the sting of iodine, asking for a bandage to be tighter or not so tight, suddenly slipping in a faint to the ground, and then apologising afterwards. And in their eyes always that look as though, very shortly, they would hear some story so marvellous that it would compensate for all their present pain and distress.

  And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be the same man again. “No, your Honour,” one soldier said to me. “It isn’t my arm … That is nothing, Slava Bogu … but life isn’t so real now. It is half gone.” He would explain no more.

  In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn almost in half, legs hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one … in those early morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.

  There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else, before or since, that attacked on those early mornings. It was not a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like a cold hand pressed upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the blood seemed to stop in its course, one’s heart beat feebly and things were dim before one’s eyes. One was stupid and chose one’s words slowly, looking at people closely to see whether one really knew them, even unsure about oneself, one’s history, neither sad nor joyful, neither excited nor dull, only with the cold hand upon one’s brow, catching the beating of one’s heart.

  While there was work to do nothing mattered, but now in the silence the whole world seemed as empty and foul as a drained and stinking tub.

  From The Dark Forest, by Hugh Walpole; George M. Doran Co., New York, 1916.

  The Boche Bread is Bad

  —Henry Beston

  That night we were given orders to be ready to evacuate the chateau in case the Boches advanced from Verdun. The drivers slept in the ambulances, rising at intervals through the night to warm their engines. The buzz of the motors sounded through the pines of the chateau park, drowning out the rumbling of the bombardment and then the monotonous roaring of the flood. Now and then a trench light, rising like a spectral star over the lines on the Hauts de Meuse, would shine reflected in the river. At intervals attendants carried down the swampy paths to the chapel the bodies of soldiers who had died during the night. The cannon flashing was terrific. Just before dawn, half a dozen batteries of seventy-fives came in a swift trot down the shelled road; the men leaned over on their steaming horses, the harnesses rattled and jingled, and the cavalcade swept on, outlined a splendid instant against the motor flashes and the streaks of day.

  On my morning trip a soldier with bandaged arm was put beside me on the front seat. He was about forty years old; a wiry black beard gave a certain fullness to his thin face, and his hands were pudgy and short of finger. When he removed his helmet, I saw that he was bald. A bad cold caused him to speak in a curious whispering tone, giving to everything he said the character of a grotesque confidence.

  “What do you do en civil?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “I am a pastry cook,” he went on. “My speciality is Saint-Denis apple tarts. Have you ever had one? They are very good when made with fresh cream.”

  “How did you get wounded?”

  “Eclat d’obus,” he replied, as if that were the whole story. After a pause he added, “Douamon
t—yesterday.”

  I thought of the shells I had seen bursting over that fort.

  “Do you put salt in chocolate?” he asked professionally.

  “Not as a rule,” I replied.

  “It improves it,” he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidential dogma. “The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year ago. Full of crumbles and lumps. Degoutant!”

  The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry cook alighted.

  “When the war is over, come to my shop,” he whispered benevolently, “and you shall have some tartes aux pommes a la mode de Saint-Denis with my wife and me.”

  “With fresh cream?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he replied seriously.

  I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address.

  Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and the organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I went again to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles of debris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses. Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above the Meuse, above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose the shell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of the still, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died away. The river was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side street well protected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials.

  To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump. There were old clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen—retired gendarmes who had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from Lyonnais. Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the outbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. On that day only a few explosive shells had fallen.

  “Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?” said one of the pompiers to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, deserted house. The snow had blown through the shell-splintered window-panes. In the dining-room stood a table, the cloth was laid and the silver spread; but a green feathery fungus had grown in a dish of food and broken straws of dust floated on the wine in the glasses. The territorial took my arm, his eyes showing the pleasure of my responding curiosity, and whispered,—

  “There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly. I saw the servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed.”

  Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor. The snow continued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the storm, fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city.

  From A Volunteer Poilu, by Henry Beston; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1916.

  I Was Wishing for the Return of a Soldier

  —Rebecca West

  The house lies on the crest of Harroweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald pastureland lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek hills blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it ranges the suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar whose branches are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntness of the topmost pines in the wood that break downwards, its bare boughs a close texture of browns and purple, from the pond on the hill’s edge.

  That day in its beauty was an affront to me, because like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By night I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No Man’s Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety—if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers would say that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice, that rings indomitable yet has most of its gay notes flattened, of the modern subaltern.

  “We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came along. My pal sang out, ‘Help me, old man I’ve got no legs!’ and I had to answer, ‘I can’t, old man, I’ve got no hands!’”

  Well, such are the dreams of Englishwomen today; I could not complain. But I wished for the return of our soldier.

  (From The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West; The Century Co.; New York, 1918.)

  On Leave

  —H. M. Tomlinson

  Coming out of Victoria Station into the stir of London again, on leave from Flanders, must give as near the sensation of being thrust suddenly into life from the beyond and the dead as mortal man may expect to know. It is a surprising and providential wakening into a world which long ago went dark. That world is strangely loud, bright and alive. Plainly it did not stop when, somehow, it vanished once upon a time. There its vivid circulation moves, and the buses are so usual, the people so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs so startlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubt that he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform must surely mean something, and its stains something more!

  And there can be no doubt about it, as you stand there a trifle dizzy in London once more. You really have come back from another world; and you have the curious idea that you may be invisible in this old world in a sense you know you are unseen. These people will never know what you know. There they gossip in the hall, and leisurely survey the bookstall, and they would never guess it, but you have just returned from hell. What could they say if you told them? They would be embarrassed, polite, forbearing, kindly, and smiling, and they would mention the matter afterwards as a queer adventure with a poor devil who was evidently a little overwrought; shell shock, of course. Beastly thing, shell shock. Seems to affect the nerves.

  They would not understand. They will never understand. What is the use of standing in veritable daylight, and telling the living, who have never been dead, of the other place?

  The man who comes back from the line has lost more than years. He has lost his original self. People failed to recognize Rip Van Winkle because they did not know his beard. Our friends do recognize us when they greet us on our return from the front, but they do not know us because we are not the men they remember. They are the same as ever; but when they address us, they talk to a mind which is not there, though the eyes betray nothing of the difference. They talk to those who have come back to life to see them again, but who cannot tell them what has happened, and dare not try …

  The youngster who is home on leave, though he may not have reasoned it out, knows that what he wants to say, often prompted by indignation, cannot be said. He feels intuitively that this is beyond his power to express. Besides, if he were to begin, where would he end? He cannot trust himself. What would happen if he uncovered, in a sunny and innocent breakfast-room, the horror he knows? If he spoke out? His people would not understand him. They would think he was mad. They would be sorry, dammit. Sorry for him! Why, he is not sorry for himself. He can stand it now he knows what it is like. He can stand it—if they can. And he realizes they can stand it, and are merely anxious about his welfare, the welfare which does not trouble him in the least, for he has looked into the depth of evil, and for him the earth has changed; and he rather despises it. He has seen all he wants to see of it. Let it go, dammit. If they don’t mind the change, and don’t kick, why should he? What a hell of a world to be born into; and once it did look so jolly good,
too! He is shy, cheery, but inexorably silent on what he knows. Some old fool said to him once, “It must be pretty bad out there?” Pretty bad? What a lark!

  It is difficult for him to endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it, has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think there can be no other view and they bear out their mathematical arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He understands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected from his world that was, and that now he cannot come near them. Yet though he knows, they do not. The greatest evil of war—that is what staggers you when you come home, feeling you know the worst of it—is the unconscious indifference to war’s obscene blasphemy against life of the men and women who have the assurance that they will never be called on to experience it. Out there, comrades in a common and unlightened affliction shake a fist humorously at the disregarding stars, and mock them. Let the Fates do their worst. The sooner it is over, the better; and, while waiting, they will take it out of Old Jerry. He is the only one out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their world and die, so they must take it out on somebody.

  But what is the matter with London? The men on leave, when they meet each other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion of their confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they would sooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than at home. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish the day for them, they will be with those who understand, with comrades who rarely discuss the war except obliquely and with quiet and bitter jesting. Seeing the world has gone wrong, how much better and easier it is to take the likelihood of extinction with men who have the same mental disgust as your own, and can endure it till they die, but who, while they live in the same torment with you, have the unspoken but certain conviction that Europe is a decadent old beast eating her young with insatiable appetite, than to sit in sunny breakfast-rooms with the newspaper maps and positive arguments of the unsaved!