I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men⁠—ours and the enemy’s. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916⁠–⁠17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world by the immense martyrdom of boys⁠—British, French, and German⁠—on the western front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counterattack, and from the intensity of gunfire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.

But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing a vision of the war’s end.

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground we had gained⁠—the new horror of that new salient⁠—had sapped into the confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, “We’ve got ’em beat!” when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only “asking for trouble” from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas, flamethrowers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of death.

“It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men,” said the generals. “We must maintain an aggressive policy.”

They searched their trench maps for good spots where another “small operation” might be organized. There was a competition among the corps and divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine explosions, trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.

“My corps,” one old general told me over a cup of tea in his headquarters mess, “beats the record for raids.” His casualties also beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just bluntly and simply, “Our old murderer.” They disliked the necessity of dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition with the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited for the explosion of a mine which afterward they had to “rush” in a race with the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the proceeding, but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off by German stick-bombs or shells. “What’s the good of it?” they asked, and could find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man listening to the distant roar of the new tumult by which he had “raised hell” again.

II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled down⁠—knee-deep where the trenches were worst⁠—for the winter campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the slimy parapets.

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept out of the ground, so that rifles were clammy to the touch and a blanket of moisture settled on every stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be seen through the veil of vapor to the enemy’s lines, where he stayed invisible.

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the battlefields were in that quagmire state. An advancing wave of men would have been clogged in the mud after the first jump over the slimy sandbags, and to advance artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done on either side but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and minings which had no object except “to keep up the spirit of the men.” There was always work to do in the trenches⁠—draining them, strengthening their parapets, making their walls, tiling or boarding their floorways, timbering the dugouts, and after it was done another rainstorm or snowstorm undid most of it, and the parapets slid down, the water poured in, and spaces were opened for German machine-gun fire, and there was less head cover against shrapnel bullets which mixed with the raindrops, and high explosives which smashed through the mud. The working parties had a bad time and a wet one, in spite of waders and gum boots which were served out to lucky ones. Some of them wore a new kind of hat, seen for the first time, and greeted with guffaws⁠—the “tin” hat which later became the headgear of all fighting-men. It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds, and every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in which there was “Nothing to report.”

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dugouts. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their “bully,” and endured it all with the philosophy of “grin and bear it!” and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places between explosive curses.

On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were more miserable, not because their plight was worse, but because I think they lacked the English sense of humor. In some places they had the advantage of our men in better trenches, with better drains and dugouts⁠—due to an industry with which ours could never compete. Here and there, as in the ground to the north of Hooge, they were in a worse state, with such rivers in their trenches that they went to enormous trouble to drain the Bellewarde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season. Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to their line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together⁠—only a few yards apart⁠—our men could hear their boots squelching in the mud with sucking, gurgling noises.

“They’re drinking soup again!” said our humorists.

There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of their common misery.

“How deep is it with you?” shouted a German soldier.

His voice came from behind a pile of sandbags which divided the enemy and ourselves in a communication trench between the main lines.

“Up to our blooming knees,” said an English corporal, who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.

“So?⁠ ⁠… You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it.”

It was so bad in parts of the line during November storms that whole sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze. It was the frost as well as the rain which caused this ruin, making the earthworks sink under their weight of sandbags. German and English soldiers were exposed to one another like ants upturned from their nests by a minor landslide. They ignored one another. They pretended that the other fellows were not there. They had not been properly introduced. In another place, reckless because of their discomfort, the Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on top to dry their legs, and shouted: “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets drying their legs, and grinning at the gray ants yonder, until these incidents were reported back to G.H.Q.⁠—where good fires were burning under dry roofs⁠—and stringent orders came against “fraternization.” Every German who showed himself was to be shot. Of course any Englishman who showed himself⁠—owing to a parapet falling in⁠—would be shot, too. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other, as always, in this trench warfare, but the dignity of G.H.Q. would not be outraged by the thought of such indecent spectacles as British and Germans refusing to kill each other on sight. Some of the men obeyed orders, and when a German sat up and said, “Don’t shoot!” plugged him through the head. Others were extremely shortsighted⁠ ⁠… Now and again Germans crawled over to our trenches and asked meekly to be taken prisoner. I met a few of these men and spoke with them.

“There is no sense in this war,” said one of them. “It is misery on both sides. There is no use in it.”

That thought of war’s futility inspired an episode which was narrated throughout the army in that winter of ’15, and led to curious conversations in dugouts and billets. Above a German front-line trench appeared a plank on which, in big letters, was scrawled these words:

“The English are fools.”

“Not such bloody fools as all that!” said a sergeant, and in a few minutes the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire.

Another plank appeared, with other words:

“The French are fools.”

Loyalty to our allies caused the destruction of that board.

A third plank was put up:

“We’re all fools. Let’s all go home.”

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some laughter, and men repeating it said: “There’s a deal of truth in those words. Why should this go on? What’s it all about? Let the old men who made this war come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The fighting-men have no real quarrel with one another. We all want to go home to our wives and our work.”

But neither side was prepared to “go home” first. Each side was in a trap⁠—a devil’s trap from which there was no escape. Loyalty to their own side, discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of old tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste which ruled them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by pastors, newspapers, generals, staff-officers, old men at home, exalted women, female furies, a deep and simple love for England and Germany, pride of manhood, fear of cowardice⁠—a thousand complexities of thought and sentiment prevented men, on both sides, from breaking the net of fate in which they were entangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a shout of, “We’re all fools!⁠ ⁠… Let’s all go home!”

In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, too. As an army and a nation they went on to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and their doom. But many German soldiers were converted to that gospel of “We’re all fools!” and would not fight again with any spirit, as we found at times, after August 8th, in the last year of war.

III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mineshafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go “dead,” and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations. So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees, and the socks that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new disease⁠—“trench-foot.” Those medical officers looked serious as the number of cases increased.

“This is getting beyond a joke,” they said. “It is pulling down the battalion strength worse than wounds.”

Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and cursed the new affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted wounds by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out of the trenches.

There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were being carried pick-a-back to the ambulance-trains at Rémy siding, near Poperinghe, with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton-wool. The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burning fagots for conscience’ sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West Riding) Division there were over four hundred cases in that winter of ’15. Other battalions in the Ypres salient suffered as much.

It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was taken up to the trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, two or three times a day, that the malady of trench-foot was reduced, and at last almost eliminated.

The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and would not be beaten by it.

A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly wounded as he stood thigh-high in water. A bomb or a trench-mortar smashed one of his legs into a pulp of bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down to the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed to the neck in mud, with his instruments held high. The operation was done in the water, red with the blood of the wounded man, who was then brought down, less a leg, to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a man about to die⁠ ⁠… But that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked with the priest who came to anoint him, and wrote a letter to his wife.

“I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me,” he began. He mentioned that he had had an “accident” which had taken one of his legs away. “But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg,” he wrote, and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed marveled at him, though day after day they saw great courage; such courage as that of another man who was brought in mortally wounded and lay next to a comrade on the operating table.

“Stick it, lad!” he said, “stick it!” and turned his head a little to look at his friend.

Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by duckboards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.

IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under concentrated gunfire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks) nicknamed “Big Willie,” near another trench called “Little Willie.” Our enemies forced their way back into some of their old trenches in this outpost beyond their main lines, and in spite of the chaos produced by our shellfire built up new parapets and sandbag barricades, flung out barbed wire, and dug themselves into this graveyard where their dead and ours were strewn.

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the spell of a high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was partly ours and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any beauty in the spot, or any value in it⁠—so close to the German lines that one could not cough for fear of losing one’s head. It seemed to me a place not to gain and not to hold. If I had been a general (appalling thought!) I should have said: “Let the enemy have that little hell of his. Let men live there among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and the stench of rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, and for him will be an abomination, dreaded by his men.”

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to “bite it off,” that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line. It was an operation that would be good to report in the official communiqué. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our men after their dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and their losses forgotten.

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was given on October 13th, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of Nottingham, and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of Leicester, North Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters, on the night of the 12th.

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire upon the redoubt, followed at 1 p.m. by volumes of smoke and gas. The chief features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a group of colliers’ houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag heap known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called Fosse 8, and on the left another group of cottages, and another black hillock farther to the right of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of the Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack.

It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery fire had been, it failed to destroy the enemy’s barbed wire and front trenches sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still working their machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire lifted, and the gas-clouds rolled away.

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and the beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our heavy guns. It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners living round the pitheads on our side of the battle line climbed up iron ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle of war which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their lives, because the intensity of our gunfire and the volumes of smoke-clouds, and a certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our lines toward the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily din of guns, to a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells in their part of the war zone.

“The English are attacking again!” was the message which brought out these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of the slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt in the September battle⁠—a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line. To the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of smoke, and beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the golden light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village churches, red roofs shattered by shellfire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines against the gray-blue of the sky.

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the battle by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed as though our shells came from every field and village for miles back, behind the lines.

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of innumerable mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound. The whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then curled forward to the enemy’s lines.

“That’s our gas!” said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group of observers⁠—English and French officers.

“And the wind is dead right for it,” said another voice. “The Germans will get a taste of it this time!”

Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath as though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a little. They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind its curtain⁠—men caught in those fumes, the terror-stricken flight before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy trapped in their dugouts. Imagination leaped out, through invisibility, to the realization of the things that were happening beyond.

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across a stretch of flat ground beyond some of those zigzag lines of trenches little black things were scurrying forward. They were not bunched together in close groups, but scattered. Some of them seemed to hesitate, and then to fall and lie where they fell, others hurrying on until they disappeared in the drifting clouds.

It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by the bombers. The Germans were firing tempests of shells. Some of them were curiously colored, of a pinkish hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of vivid green. They were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the chemistry of death was poured out on both sides⁠—and through it went the men of the Midland Division.

The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of Staffordshire men, who advanced in four lines toward the Big Willie trench which formed the southeast side of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading companies, who were first over our own parapets, made a quick rush, half blinded by the smoke and the gaseous vapors which filled the air, and were at once received by a deadly fire from many machine-guns. It swept their ranks, and men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little parties flung out in extended order.

Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and as they fell cheered their men on, while others ran forward shouting, followed by numbers which dwindled at every yard, so that only a few reached the Big Willie trench in the first assault.

A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at the German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again they kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the communication trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of them to bits as bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass. Other Germans followed, flinging their own stick-bombs.

The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man was wounded and many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still flinging grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel pomegranates which burst with the noise of a high-explosive shell.

The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade made in the Big Willie trench by some of their men behind. Behind them again was another barrier, in case the first should be rushed.

It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Germans were swarming up Big Willie with strong bombing-parties, and would soon blast a way through unless they were thrust beyond the range of hand-grenades. It was a young lieutenant named Hawker, with some South Staffordshire men, who went forward to meet this attack and kept the enemy back until four o’clock in the afternoon, when only a few living men stood among the dead and they had to fall back to the second barrier.

Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the trenches, and in the darkness the wounded men were carried back to the rear, while those who had escaped worked hard to strengthen their defenses by sandbags and earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life lay in fierce industry.

Early next morning an attempt was made by other battalions to come to the relief of those who held on behind those barriers in Big Willie trench. They were Nottingham men⁠—Robin Hoods and other Sherwood lads⁠—and they came across the open ground in two directions, attacking the west as well as the east ends of the German communication trenches which formed the face of the Hohenzollern redoubt.

They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their advance was met by intense fire from artillery and machine-guns, so that many were blown to bits or mangled or maimed, and none could reach their comrades in Big Willie trench.

While one brigade of the Midland men had been fighting like this on the right, another brigade had been engaged on the left. It contained Sherwood, Leicester, and Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October 13th, went forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor. Advancing in four lines, the leading companies were successful in reaching the Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed through the barbed wire, part of which was uncut, and reached the Fosse trench which forms the north base of the salient.

Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely and the two remaining lines were heavily shelled by German artillery. It was an hour in which the courage of those men was agonized. They were exposed on naked ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with gas and smoke; all the abomination of battle⁠—the moaning of the wounded, the last cries of the dying, the death-crawl of stricken beings holding their broken limbs and their entrails⁠—was around them, and in front a hidden enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a better position.

The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were sustained in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through the old yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those who had not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past these poor, bloody, moaning men, to the German trenches behind the redoubt.

At 2:15 p.m. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their bombers were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun to a point within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed till dark, and then were forced to fall back.

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up the Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here ghastly fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three hundred yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other Midland lads went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades until they fell or until few comrades were left to support them as they stood among their dead and dying.

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength in their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet the business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into the deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in the Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed that night.

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but determined to hold the ground they had won.

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by other Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers was found in the way that won him his V.C.

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they could not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or more clear before them, and any man who flung himself forward was the target of a hand-grenade.

From front and from flank German bombs came whizzing, falling short sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore down lumps of trench, and sometimes falling very close⁠—close enough to kill.

Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the barrier still intact by bombing and bombing.

When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he wondered how long the barrier would last, and gave orders for another to be built behind him, so that when the rush came it would be stopped behind him⁠—and over him.

Men worked at that barricade, piling up sandbags, and as it was built that young lieutenant knew that his own retreat was being cut off and that he was being coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were with him⁠—I never learned their names⁠—and they were hardly enough to hand up bombs as quickly as he wished to throw them.

Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting for a pounce. Though wounded so that he felt faint and giddy, he called out for more bombs. “More!” he said, “More!” and his hand was like a machine reaching out and throwing.

Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was hauled over the barricade which he had ordered to be built behind him, closing up his way of escape.

All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th Division held on to their ground, and some of the Sherwoods made a new attack, clearing the enemy out of the east portion of the redoubt.

It was lucky that it coincided with a counterattack made by the enemy at a different point, because it relieved the pressure there. Bombing duels continued hour after hour, and human nature could hardly have endured so long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of men.

So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on the night of October 15th the enemy attacked along the whole line of redoubts, and the Midland men, who were just about to leave the trenches, found themselves engaged in a new action. They had to fight again before they could go, and they fought like demons or demigods for their right of way and home, and bombed the enemy back to his holes in the ground.

So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Midland men of England, whose division, years later, helped to break the Hindenburg line along the great canal south of St.-Quentin.

What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless the generals who planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony. It demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the best they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great courage, before they died or fell, and it left some living men, and others who relieved them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so close to the enemy that one could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers.

And through the winter of ’15, and the years that followed, the Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood, and Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted themselves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls stank of new and ancient death.

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern. It was there the English battalions learned the worst things of war and showed the quality of English courage.

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in spirit, stronger than the flesh.

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an enemy trench, but his own bombing-party was cut off, owing to heavy casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle⁠—the miracle of human courage⁠—he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench, mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk⁠—but made his way along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a violent counterattack.

Men fell rapidly under the enemy’s bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only one leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were beginning to have the windup, as they say, issued orders, controlled the fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was repulsed after two hours’ fighting, and only then did Cotter allow his wounds to be bandaged. From the dugout where he lay while the bombardment still continued he called out cheery words to the men, until he was carried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V.C., but died of his wounds.

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward, round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes of shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by German bombers until it jammed.

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his, flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until reinforcements reached him.

Another officer of the Buff’s⁠—by name Smeltzer⁠—withdrew his platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of nothing except that “when the Boches began shelling I got into a dugout, and when they stopped I came out again.”

There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare⁠—one V.C., sixteen D.S.C.’s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military Medals⁠—were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time, made up by new drafts, was 100 percent; and the Hohenzollern took the highest toll of life and limbs.

V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, “Listen!”

Through the open door came the music of a mouth-organ, and it was playing an old tune:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen.
Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ, our Saviour,
Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine, rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the windowpanes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of distant guns.

“Christmas Eve!” said an officer. “Nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago⁠ ⁠… and now⁠—this!”

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its feast-day, in places where Death had been busy⁠—and where the spirit of evil lay in ambush!

So it was when I went through Armentières within easy range of the enemy’s guns. Already six hundred civilians⁠—mostly women and children⁠—had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting together through broken windowpanes, and children were staring into little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier’s boots⁠—a French Hop o’ My Thumb in the giant’s boots⁠—was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers read their legends and laughed at them: “My heart is to you.” “Good luck.” “To the success!” “Remind France.”

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was spending it.

“The people at home will be glad of ’em,” he said. “I s’pose one can’t forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain’t the same thing out here.”

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their batteries and limber down a road that had become a riverbed, fountains of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motorcars lurching in the mud beyond the pavé, despatch-riders side-slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply-columns churning up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white beard must have lifted his red gown high⁠—waist-high⁠—when he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy’s lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, “It’s best to get a move on here,” and, “This road is swept by machine-gun fire,” and, “I don’t like this corner; it’s quite unhealthy.”

But that absurd idea⁠—of Santa Claus in the trenches⁠—came into my head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a whizzbang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the glint of his red cloak.

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.

“Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?” asked a lad, grinning down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.

“Likely, ain’t it?” said the other boy. “Father Christmas would be a bloody fool to come out here⁠ ⁠… They’d be full of water in the morning.”

“You’ll get some presents,” I said. “They haven’t forgotten you at home.”

At that word “home” the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was a girlish-looking fellow⁠—perhaps that was why his comrades were chaffing him⁠—and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back to some village in Yorkshire.

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas with contemptuous irony.

“A happy Christmas!” said one of them, with a laugh. “Plenty of crackers about this year! Tom Smith ain’t in it.”

“And I hope we’re going to give the Boches some Christmas presents,” said another. “They deserve it, I don’t think!”

“No truce this year?” I asked.

“A truce?⁠ ⁠… We’re not going to allow any monkey-tricks on the parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We’ve got to get on with the war. That’s my motto.”

Other men said: “We wouldn’t mind a holiday. We’re fed up to the neck with all this muck.”

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle on the keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into a bit of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel shells were bursting, and behind the lines our “heavies” were busily at work firing at long range.

“On earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines, and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells which came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of great guns.

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by the splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.

VI

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year, and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and there was no peace on earth.

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of war. I heard the New-Year’s chorus when I went to see the last of the year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence. It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories, to thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The “heavies” were indulging in a special strafe this New-Year’s eve. As I went down a road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and the roar of all this artillery stupefied one’s sense of sound. All about me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was no other sound, no noise of human life. There were no New-Year’s eve rejoicings among those rows of miners’ cottages on the edge of the battlefield. Half those little redbrick houses were blown to pieces, and when here and there through a cracked windowpane I saw a woman’s white face peering out upon me as I passed I felt as though I had seen a ghost-face in some black pit of hell.

For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always under the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there passed all belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hulluch were jagged against the skyline. And here, on New-Year’s eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the broad desolation and listened to the enormous clangor of great guns.

Coming back that day through Béthune I met some very human life. It was a big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to see what “Tommy” was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and saw a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that sector and the naval men did their little bit by the side of the lads in khaki, who liked this visit. They discovered the bomb store and opened such a Brock’s benefit that the enemy must have been shocked with surprise. One young marine was bomb-slinging for four hours, and grinned at the prodigious memory as though he had had the time of his life. Another confessed to me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off all night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the dugouts, and every hour was a long thrill.

“I don’t mind saying,” said a petty officer who had fought in several naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, “that I had a fair fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. ‘I suppose I’ve got to look through a periscope,’ I said. ‘Not you,’ said the sergeant. ‘At night you puts your head over the parapet.’ So over the parapet I put my head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack⁠ ⁠… But I’m blessed if it wasn’t a swarm of rats!”

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.

“Come up and have a look, Jack,” he said to one of the bluejackets.

“Not in these trousers, old mate!” said that young man.

“All as cool as cucumbers,” said a petty officer, “and take the discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It’s marvelous. Good luck to them in the new year!”

Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed to die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that New-Year’s day.

They were the heroes of Loos⁠—or some of them⁠—Camerons and Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away to the Cité St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their battalions have been filled up with new drafts⁠—of the same type as themselves and of the same grit⁠—but that day no ghost of grief, no dark shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in those days of the September battle.

There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship which burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the platform above the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came in, and this hall in France was filled with the wild strains of it.

“And they’re grand, the pipes,” said one of the Camerons. “When I’ve been sae tired on the march I could have laid doon an’ dee’d the touch o’ the pipes has fair lifted me up agen.”

The piper made way for a Kiltie at the piano, and for Highlanders, who sang old songs full of melancholy, which seemed to make the hearts of his comrades grow glad as when they helped him with “The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.” But the roof nearly flew off the hall to “The March of the Cameron Men,” and the walls were greatly strained when the regimental marching song broke at every verse into wild Highland shouts and the war-cry which was heard at Loos of “Camerons, forward!” “Forward, Camerons!”

“An Englishman is good,” said one of the Camerons, leaning over the table to me, “and an Irishman is good, but a Scot is the best of all.” Then he struck the palm of one hand with the fist of another. “But the London men,” he said, with a fine, joyous laugh at some good memory, “are as good as any fighting-men in France. My word, ye should have seen ’em on September 25th. And the London Irish were just lions!”

Out in the rain-slashed street I met the colonel of a battalion of Argylls and Sutherlands, with several of his officers; a tall, thin officer with a long stride, who was killed when another year had passed. He beckoned to me and said: “I’m going the rounds of the billets to wish the men good luck in the new year. It’s a strain on the constitution, as I have to drink their health each time!”

He bore the strain gallantly, and there was something noble and chivalrous in the way he spoke to all his men, gathered together in various rooms in old Flemish houses, round plum-pudding from home or feasts provided by the army cooks. To each group of men he made the same kind of speech, thanking them from his heart for all their courage.

“You were thanked by three generals,” he said, “after your attack at Loos, and you upheld the old reputation of the regiment. I’m proud of you. And afterward, in November, when you had the devil of a time in the trenches, you stuck it splendidly and came out with high spirits. I wish you all a happy new year, and whatever the future may bring I know I can count on you.”

In every billet there were three cheers for the colonel, and another three for the staff captain, and though the colonel protested that he was afraid of spending a night in the guardroom (there were shouts of laughter at this), he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the custom of the day.

“Toodle-oo, old bird!” said a kilted cockney, halfway up a ladder, on which he swayed perilously, being very drunk; but the colonel did not hear this familiar way of address.

In many billets and in many halls the feast of New Year’s day was kept in good comradeship by men who had faced death together, and who in the year that was coming fought in many battles and fell on many fields.

VII

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for a long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never knew what they might do next. When they were most quiet they were most dangerous. They used cunning as well as courage, and went out on red-Indian adventures over No Man’s Land for fierce and scientific slaughter.

I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when a big party of them⁠—all volunteers⁠—went out one night with intent to get through the barbed wire outside a strong German position, to do a lot of killing there. They had trained for the job and thought out every detail of this hunting expedition. They blacked their faces so that they would not show white in the enemy’s flares. They fastened flash-lamps to their bayonets so that they might see their victims. They wore rubber gloves to save their hands from being torn on the barbs of the wire.

Stealthily they crawled over No Man’s Land, crouching in shell-holes every time a rocket rose and made a glimmer of light. They took their time at the wire, muffling the snap of it by bits of cloth. Reliefs crawled up with more gloves, and even with tins of hot cocoa. Then through the gap into the German trenches, and there were screams of German soldiers, terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes, and black faces above them, and bayonets already red with blood. It was butcher’s work, quick and skilful, like red-Indian scalping. Thirty Germans were killed before the Canadians went back, with only two casualties⁠ ⁠… The Germans were horrified by this sudden slaughter. They dared not come out on patrol work. Canadian scouts crawled down to them and insulted them, ingeniously, vilely, but could get no answer. Later they trained their machine-guns on German working-parties and swept crossroads on which supplies came up, and the Canadian sniper, in one shell-hole or another, lay for hours in sulky patience, and at last got his man⁠ ⁠… They had to pay for all this, at Maple Copse, in June of ’15, as I shall tell. But it was a vendetta which did not end until the war ended, and the Canadians fought the Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skilful patience which at last brought them to Mons on the day before armistice.

I saw a good deal of the Canadians from first to last, and on many days of battle saw the tough, hard fighting spirit of these men. Their generals believed in common sense applied to war, and not in high mysteries and secret rites which cannot be known outside the circle of initiation. I was impressed by General Currie, whom I met for the first time in that winter of 1915⁠–⁠16, and wrote at the time that I saw in him “a leader of men who in open warfare might win great victories by doing the commonsense thing rapidly and decisively, to the surprise of an enemy working by elaborate science. He would, I think, astound them by the simplicity of his smashing stroke.” Those words of mine were fulfilled⁠—on the day when the Canadians helped to break the Drocourt⁠–⁠Quéant line, and when they captured Cambrai, with English troops on their right, who shared their success. General Currie, who became the Canadian Corps Commander, did not spare his men. He led them forward whatever the cost, but there was something great and terrible in his simplicity and sureness of judgment, and this real-estate agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was undoubtedly a man of strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and tradition which swathed round so many of our own leaders.

He cut clean to the heart of things, ruthlessly, like a surgeon, and as I watched that man, immense in bulk, with a heavy, thoughtful face and stern eyes that softened a little when he smiled, I thought of him as Oliver Cromwell. He was severe as a disciplinarian, and not beloved by many men. But his staff-officers, who stood in awe of him, knew that he demanded truth and honesty, and that his brain moved quickly to sure decisions and saw big problems broadly and with understanding. He had good men with him⁠—mostly amateurs⁠—but with hard business heads and the same hatred of red tape and niggling ways which belonged to their chief. So the Canadian Corps became a powerful engine on our side when it had learned many lessons in blood and tragedy. They organized their publicity side in the same masterful way, and were determined that what Canada did the world should know⁠—and damn all censorship. They bought up English artists, photographers, and writing-men to record their exploits. With Lord Beaverbrook in England they engineered Canadian propaganda with immense energy, and Canada believed her men made up the British army and did all the fighting. I do not blame them, and only wish that the English soldier should have been given his share of the honors that belonged to him⁠—the lion’s share.

VIII

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. It became part of the routine of war, that quick killing in the night, for English and Scottish and Irish and Welsh troops, and some had luck with it, and some men liked it, and to others it was a horror which they had to do, and always it was a fluky, nervy job, when any accident might lead to tragedy.

I remember one such raid by the 12th West Yorks in January of ’15, which was typical of many others, before raids developed into minor battles, with all the guns at work.

There were four lieutenants who drew up the plan and called for volunteers, and it was one of these who went out first and alone to reconnoiter the ground and to find the best way through the German barbed wire. He just slipped out over the parapet and disappeared into the darkness. When he came back he had a wound in the wrist⁠—it was just the bad luck of a chance bullet⁠—but brought in valuable knowledge. He had found a gap in the enemy’s wire which would give an open door to the party of visitors. He had also tested the wire farther along, and thought it could be cut without much bother.

“Good enough!” was the verdict, and a detachment started out for No Man’s Land, divided into two parties.

The enemy trenches were about one hundred yards away, which seems a mile in the darkness and the loneliness of the dead ground. At regular intervals the German rockets flared up so that the hedges and wire and parapets along their line were cut out ink-black against the white illumination, and the two patrols of Yorkshiremen who had been crawling forward stopped and crouched lower and felt themselves revealed, and then when darkness hid them again went on.

The party on the left were now close to the German wire and under the shelter of a hedge. They felt their way along until the two subalterns who were leading came to the gap which had been reported by the first explorer. They listened intently and heard the German sentry stamping his feet and pacing up and down. Presently he began to whistle softly, utterly unconscious of the men so close to him⁠—so close now that any stumble, any clatter of arms, any word spoken, would betray them.

The two lieutenants had their revolvers ready and crept forward to the parapet. The men had to act according to instinct now, for no order could be given, and one of them found his instinct led him to clamber right into the German trench a few yards away from the sentry, but on the other side of the traverse. He had not been there long, holding his breath and crouching like a wolf, before footsteps came toward him and he saw the glint of a cigarette.

It was a German officer going his round. The Yorkshire boy sprang on to the parapet again, and lay across it with his head toward our lines and his legs dangling in the German trench. The German officer’s cloak brushed his heels, but the boy twisted round a little and stared at him as he passed. But he passed, and presently the sentry began to whistle again, some old German tune which cheered him in his loneliness. He knew nothing of the eyes watching him through the darkness nor of his nearness to death.

It was the first lieutenant who tried to shoot him. But the revolver was muddy and would not fire. Perhaps a click disturbed the sentry. Anyhow, the moment had come for quick work. It was the sergeant who sprang upon him, down from the parapet with one pounce. A frightful shriek, with the shrill agony of a boy’s voice, wailed through the silence. The sergeant had his hand about the German boy’s throat and tried to strangle him and to stop another dreadful cry.

The second officer made haste. He thrust his revolver close to the struggling sentry and shot him dead, through the neck, just as he was falling limp from a blow on the head given by the butt-end of the weapon which had failed to fire. The bullet did its work, though it passed through the sergeant’s hand, which had still held the man by the throat. The alarm had been raised and German soldiers were running to the rescue.

“Quick!” said one of the officers.

There was a wild scramble over the parapet, a drop into the wet ditch, and a race for home over No Man’s Land, which was white under the German flares and noisy with the waspish note of bullets.

The other party were longer away and had greater trouble to find a way through, but they, too, got home, with one officer badly wounded, and wonderful luck to escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from “the jumps” for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their own barbed wire, as though the English were out there again. And at the sound of those bombs the West Yorks laughed all along their trenches.

IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition which belong to the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about the world.

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years of war over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and Lowlanders with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches the German soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained harmony that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into the firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no officer received his command unless he spoke it as fluently as running water by Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue until a few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form fours and know their left hand from their right in Welsh.

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the peasants in these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old Saxon words which puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought the northern bur with them and the grit of the northern spirit. And Ireland, though she would not have conscription, sent some of the bravest of her boys out there, and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons the old fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly again, and the blood of her race has been poured out upon these tragic fields.

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with Irish boys at the beginning of ’16 that I found it hard not to believe that a part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In one old outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows lay cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave out a sweet, sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the loft, to which they climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs.

I went up the ladder after them⁠—it was very shaky in the middle⁠—and, putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs. One boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny whistle very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the straws.

“The craytures are that bold,” said a boy from County Cork, “that when we first came in they sat up smilin’ and sang ‘God Save Ireland.’ Bedad, and it’s the truth I’m after tellin’ ye.”

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no Protestant with a grudge against the Pope.

There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the Dublins and the Munsters were up in the firing-line at the Hohenzollern. The shelling was so violent that it was difficult to get up the supplies, and some of the boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was the only complaint which one of them made when I asked him what he thought of his first experience under fire.

“It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I’d been after thinking, if only my appetite had not been bigger than my belt, at all.”

The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who had just come out from the old country to join their comrades in the firing-line. When the Germans put over a number of shells, smashing the trenches and wounding men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted to get over the parapet and make a dash for the enemy. “ ’Twould taych him a lesson,” they told their officers, who had some trouble in restraining them.

These newcomers had to take part in the digging which goes on behind the lines at night⁠—out in the open, without the shelter of a trench. It was nervous work, especially when the German flares went up, silhouetting their figures on the skyline, and when one of the enemy’s machine-guns began to chatter. But the Irish boys found the heart for a jest, and one of them, resting on his spade a moment, stared over to the enemy’s lines and said, “May the old devil take the spalpeen who works that typewriter!”

It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had come fresh to the trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of war until then. But they came out proudly⁠—“with their tails up,” said one of their officers⁠—after their baptism of fire.

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn on the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors⁠—who were myself and another⁠—the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their breath for “the good old Irish tune” demanded by the captain.

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish yesterdays, and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the yearning of them.

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that’s going round?
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.
⋮
She’s the most distressful country that ever yet was seen;
They’re hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.

Then the pipers played the “March of O’Neill,” a wild old air as shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish battle-cries against Elizabeth’s pikemen and Cromwell’s Ironsides.

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the old people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that Flemish barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the boys who were out there fighting.

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of an Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself, with all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which came crying from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could carry across the sea.

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy, a poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and torn, and caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger along. But they pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when they passed their brigadier, who called out words of praise to them.

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them, after a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps round German redoubts, up there in the swamps.

X

Early in the morning of February 23rd there was a clear sky with a glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of Flanders were white.

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy ridges on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the rubbish heaps in Flemish farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where British soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely country which led to the trenches, every furrow in the fields was a thin white ridge, and the trees, which were just showing a shimmer of green, stood ink-black against the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak down each tall trunk on the side nearest to the wind. The old windmills of Flanders which looked down upon the battlefields had been touched by the softly falling flakes, so that each rib of their sails and each rung of their ladders and each plank of their ancient timbers was outlined like a frosty cobweb.

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through the blizzard with ermine mantles over their mackintosh capes, and mounted men with their heads bent to the storm were like white knights riding through a white wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun-limbers drawn up by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals, were all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed in the great quietude.

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the piled sandbags and snowmen of sentries standing in the shelter of the traverses. The tarpaulin roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts were so changed by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places of fairy folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a Christmas hiding-place, and not of soldiers stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers and keeping their rifles dry.

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty even to No Man’s Land, making a lacework pattern of barbed wire, and lying very softly over the tumbled ground of minefields, so that all the ugliness of destruction and death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them tenderly. It was as though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold their wings above the obscene things of war.

For a little while the snow brought something like peace. The guns were quieter, for artillery observation was impossible. There could be no sniping, for the scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches. The airplanes which went up in the morning came down quickly to the powdered fields and took shelter in their sheds. A great hush was over the war zone, but there was something grim, suggestive of tragic drama, in this silent countryside, so white even in the darkness, where millions of men were waiting to kill one another.

Behind the lines the joke of the snow was seen by soldiers, who were quick to see a chance of fun. Men who had been hurling bombs in the Ypres salient bombarded one another with hand-grenades, which burst noiselessly except for the shouts of laughter that signaled a good hit.

French soldiers were at the same game in one village I passed, where the snow-fight was fast and furious, and some of our officers led an attack upon old comrades with the craft of trappers and an expert knowledge of enfilade fire. The white peace did not last long. The ermine mantle on the battlefield was stained by scarlet patches as soon as men could see to fight again.

XI

For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the Château of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the line, were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motorcars could move through that snow which drifted across the roads. We sat indoors talking⁠—high treason sometimes⁠—pondering over the problem of a war from which there seemed no way out, becoming irritable with one another’s company, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics of war, the purpose of man, the gospel of Christ, the guilt of Germany, and the dishonesty of British politicians. Futile, foolish arguments, while men were being killed in great numbers, as daily routine, without result!

Officers of a division billeted nearby came in to dine with us, some of them generals with elaborate theories on war and a passionate hatred of Germany, seeing no other evil in the world; some of them brigadiers with tales of appalling brutality (which caused great laughter), some of them battalion officers with the point of view of those who said, “Morituri te saluant!”

There was one whose conversation I remember (having taken notes of it before I turned in that night). It was a remarkable conversation, summing up many things of the same kind which I had heard in stray sentences by other officers, and month by month, years afterward, heard again, spoken with passion. This officer who had come out to France in 1914 and had been fighting ever since by a luck which had spared his life when so many of his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak with passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He said that G.H.Q. was a close corporation in the hands of the military clique who had muddled through the South African War, and were now going to muddle through a worse one. They were, he said, intrenched behind impregnable barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red tape, and caste privilege. They were, of course, patriots who believed that the Empire depended upon their system. They had no doubt of their inherent right to conduct the war, which was “their war,” without interference or criticism or publicity. They spent many hours of the days and nights in writing letters to one another, and those who wrote most letters received most decorations, and felt, with a patriotic fire within their breasts, that they were getting on with the war.

Within their close corporation there were rivalries, intrigues, perjuries, and treacheries like those of a medieval court. Each general and staff-officer had his followers and his sycophants, who jostled for one another’s jobs, fawned on the great man, flattered his vanity, and made him believe in his omniscience. Among the General Staff there were various grades⁠—G.S.O. I, G.S.O. II, G.S.O. III, and those in the lower grades fought for a higher grade with every kind of artfulness, and diplomacy and backstair influence. They worked late into the night. That is to say, they went back to their offices after dining at mess⁠—“so frightfully busy, you know, old man!”⁠—and kept their lights burning, and smoked more cigarettes, and rang one another up on the telephone with futile questions, and invented new ways of preventing something from being down somewhere. The war to them was a far-off thing essential to their way of life, as miners in the coalfields are essential to statesmen in Downing Street, especially in cold weather. But it did not touch their souls or their bodies. They did not see its agony, or imagine it, or worry about it. They were always cheerful, breezy, bright with optimism. They made a little work go a long way. They were haughty and arrogant with subordinate officers, or at the best affable and condescending, and to superior officers they said, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “Quite so, sir,” to any statement, however absurd in its ignorance and dogmatism. If a major-general said, “Wagner was a mountebank in music,” G.S.O. III, who had once studied at Munich, said, “Yes, sir,” or, “You think so, sir? Of course you’re right.”

If a lieutenant-colonel said, “Browning was not a poet,” a staff captain, who had read Browning at Cambridge with passionate admiration, said: “I quite agree with you, sir. And who do you think was a poet, sir?”

It was the army system. The opinion of a superior officer was correct, always. It did not admit of contradiction. It was not to be criticized. Its ignorance was wisdom.

G.H.Q. lived, said our guest, in a world of its own, rose-colored, remote from the ugly things of war. They had heard of the trenches, yes, but as the West End hears of the East End⁠—a nasty place where common people lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society folk go slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell burst, having braved the lice and the dirt.

“The trenches are the slums,” said our guest. “We are the Great Unwashed. We are the Mud-larks.”

There was a trench in the salient called J. 3. It was away out in advance of our lines. It was not connected with our own trench system. It had been left derelict by both sides and was a ditch in No Man’s Land. But our men were ordered to hold it⁠—“to save sniping.” A battalion commander protested to the Headquarters Staff. There was no object in holding J. 3. It was a target for German guns and a temptation to German miners.

“J. 3,” came the staff command, “must be held until further orders.”

We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench and all in it were thrown up by mines. Among those killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce, the husband of Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown.

Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve Chapelle. “This is a death sentence,” said the officers who were ordered to attack. But they attacked, and died, with great gallantry, as usual.

“In the slums,” said our guest, “we are expected to die if G.H.Q. tells us so, or if the corps arranges our funeral. And generally we do.”

That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened to the rumbling of the gunning away in the salient, and seemed to hear the groans of men at Hooge, at St.-Eloi, in other awful places. The irony of that guest of ours was frightful. It was bitter beyond justice, though with truth in the mockery, the truth of a soul shocked by the waste of life and heroism;⁠ ⁠… when I met him later in the war he was on the staff.

XII

The world⁠—our side of it⁠—held its breath and felt its own heartbeat when, in February of that year ’15, the armies of the German Crown Prince launched their offensive against the French at Verdun. It was the biggest offensive since their first drive down to the Marne; and as the days passed and they hurled fresh masses of men against the French and brought up new guns to replace their losses, there was no doubt that in this battle the Germans were trying by all their weight to smash their way to victory through the walls which the French had built against them by living flesh and spirit.

“Will they hold?” was the question which every man among us asked of his neighbor and of his soul.

On our front there was nothing of war beyond the daily routine of the trenches and the daily list of deaths and wounds. Winter had closed down upon us in Flanders, and through its fogs and snows came the news of that conflict round Verdun to the waiting army, which was ours. The news was bad, yet not the worst. Poring over maps of the French front, we in our winter quarters saw with secret terror, some of us with a bluster of false optimism, some of us with unjustified despair, that the French were giving ground, giving ground slowly, after heroic resistance, after dreadful massacre, and steadily. They were falling back to the inner line of forts, hard pressed. The Germans, in spite of monstrous losses under the flail of the soixante-quinzes, were forcing their way from slope to slope, capturing positions which all but dominated the whole of the Verdun heights.

“If the French break we shall lose the war,” said the pessimist.

“The French will never lose Verdun,” said the optimist.

“Why not? What are your reasons beyond that cursed optimism which has been our ruin? Why announce things like that as though divinely inspired? For God’s sake let us stare straight at the facts.”

“The Germans are losing the war by this attack on Verdun. They are just pouring their best soldiers into the furnace⁠—burning the flower of their army. It is our gain. It will lead in the end to our victory.”

“But, my dear good fool, what about the French losses? Don’t they get killed, too? The German artillery is flogging them with shellfire from seventeen-inch guns, twelve-inch, nine-inch, every bloody and monstrous engine. The French are weak in heavy artillery. For that error, which has haunted them from the beginning, they are now paying with their life’s blood⁠—the life blood of France.”

“You are arguing on emotion and fear. Haven’t you learned yet that the attacking side always loses more than the defense?”

“That is a sweeping statement. It depends on relative manpower and gun-power. Given a superiority of guns and men, and attack is cheap. Defense is blown off the earth. Otherwise how could we ever hope to win?”

“I agree. But the forces at Verdun are about equal, and the French have the advantage of position. The Germans are committing suicide.”

“Humbug! They know what they are doing. They are the greatest soldiers in Europe.”

“Led by men with bone heads.”

“By great scientists.”

“By the traditional rules of medievalism. By bald-headed vultures in spectacles with brains like penny-in-the-slot machines. Put in a penny and out comes a rule of war. Mad egoists! Colossal blunderers! Efficient in all things but knowledge of life.”

“Then God help our British G.H.Q.!”

A long silence. The silence of men who see monstrous forces at work, in which human lives are tossed like straws in flame. A silence reaching back to old ghosts of history, reaching out to supernatural aid. Then from one speaker or another a kind of curse and a kind of prayer.

“Hell!⁠ ⁠… God help us all!”

So it was in our mess where war correspondents and censors sat down together after futile journeys to dirty places to see a bit of shellfire, a few dead bodies, a line of German trenches through a periscope, a queue of wounded men outside a dressing station, the survivors of a trench raid, a bombardment before a “minor operation,” a trench-mortar “stunt,” a new part of the line⁠ ⁠… Verdun was the only thing that mattered in March and April until France had saved herself and all of us.

XIII

The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, but rendered great service to France at that time. By February of 1915 we had taken over a new line of front, extending from our positions round Loos southward to the country round Lens and Arras. It was to this movement in February that Marshal Joffre made allusion when, in a message to our Commander-in-Chief on March 2nd, he said that “the French army remembered that its recent call on the comradeship of the British army met with an immediate and complete response.”

By liberating an immense number of French troops of the Tenth Army and a mass of artillery from this part of the front, we had the good fortune to be of great service to France at a time when she needed many men and guns to repel the assault upon Verdun.

Some of her finest troops⁠—men who had fought in many battles and had held the trenches with most dogged courage⁠—were here in this sector of the western front, and many batteries of heavy and light artillery had been in these positions since the early months of the war. It was, therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to the defense of Verdun when British troops replaced them at the time the enemy made his great attack.

The French went away from this part of their battlefront with regret and emotion. To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to Hébuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.

I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw the visible reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn there, and told the story of all the struggle there by the upheaval of earth, the wreckage of old trenches, the mine-craters and shell-holes, and the litter of battle in every part of that countryside.

I went there first⁠—to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette looking northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, which the enemy held as a strong barrier against us above the village of Souchez and Ablain St.-Nazaire and Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured⁠—when they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I saw in their places the men who had lived there and fought there as one may read in the terrible and tragic narrative of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu.

I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. (Never once did he admit any fine weather to alleviate the suffering of his comrades, thereby exaggerating their misery somewhat.) It was raining, and there was a white, dank mist through the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny on the way to the spur of Notre Dame. It clung to the undergrowth, which was torn by shellfire, and to every blade of grass growing rankly round the lips of shell-craters in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the red pantaloons of the first French armies who had fought through those woods in the beginning of the war.

I roamed about a graveyard there, where shells had smashed down some of the crosses, but had not damaged the memorial to the men who had stormed up the slope of Notre Dame de Lorette and had fallen when their comrades chased the Germans to the village below.

A few shells came over the hill as I pushed through the undergrowth with a French captain, and they burst among the trees with shattering boughs. I remember that little officer in a steel helmet, and I could see a Norman knight as his ancestor with a falcon as his crest. He stood so often on the skyline, in full view of the enemy (I was thankful for the mist), that I admired but deplored his audacity. Without any screen to hide us we walked down the hillside, gathering clots of greasy mud in our boots, stumbling, and once sprawling. Another French captain joined us and became the guide.

“This road is often ‘Marmité,’ ” he said, “but I have escaped so often I have a kind of fatalism.”

I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells which a few minutes before had burst in our immediate neighborhood, cutting off twigs of trees and one branch with a scatter of steel as sharp as knives and as heavy as sledgehammers.

Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which afterward I passed through scores of times on the way to Vimy when that ridge was ours. The ragged ruin of its church was white and ghostly in the mist. On the right of the winding road which led through it was Souchez Wood, all blasted and riven, and beyond a huddle of bricks which once was Souchez village.

“Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground,” said the French officer. “Their bodies lie thick below the soil. Poor France! Poor France!”

He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all that youth of France which even then, in March of ’16, had been offered up in vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war. Rain was slashing down now, beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of French soldiers who stood shivering by the ruined walls while trench-mortars were making a tumult in the neighborhood. They were the men of Henri Barbusse⁠—his comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed together in a confraternity of misery. They were plastered with wet clay, and their boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue coats were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and made pools round their feet. They were unshaven, and their wet faces were smeared with the soil of the trenches.

“How goes it?” said the French captain with me.

“It does not go,” said the French sergeant. “ ’Cré nom de Dieu!⁠—my men are not gay today. They have been wet for three weeks and their bones are aching. This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a little fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the dirty Boche starts shelling again. So we do not get dry, and we have no warmth, and we cannot make even a cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up there on Vimy looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his sleeve and says those poor devils of Frenchmen are not gay today! That is true, mon Capitaine. Mais, que voulez-vous? C’est pour la France.”

“Oui. C’est pour la France.”

The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of Neuville St.-Vaast.

“Poor fellows,” he said, presently. “Not even a cup of hot coffee!⁠ ⁠… That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes⁠—afterward! But at what a price!”

So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little streets of comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old hill of Vimy, and within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish heap mingled with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies’ perambulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts.

Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay under a blood-soaked blanket.

“It is a bad wound?” asked the captain.

The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face, waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.

“He may live as far as the dressing station,” said one of the Frenchmen. “It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just now, over there.”

The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sandbags at the end of a street of ruin.

Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, hobbling gait. Both of them were wounded in the legs, and had tied rags round their wounds tightly. They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed, with brooding eyes.

“The German trench-mortars are very evil,” said the captain.

We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sandbags to look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and thrust out by communication trenches to the edge of the village in which we walked. A boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the captain, who stepped back and said, in an emotional way:

“Tiens! C’est toi, Edouard?”

“Oui, mon Capitaine.”

The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes and long, black eyelashes.

“You are a lieutenant, then? How does it go, Edouard?”

“It does not go,” answered the boy like that French sergeant in Ablain St.-Nazaire. “This is a bad place. I lose my men every day. There were three killed yesterday, and six wounded. Today already there are two killed and ten wounded.”

Something broke in his voice.

“Ce n’est pas bon du tout, du tout!” (“It is not good at all, at all!”)

The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.

“Courage, mon vieux!”

The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud. Sharp stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the high, long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette. Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells cut through the air above us like scythes. The cauldron in this pit of war was being stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us, covered by a bloody blanket like the other one. From slimy sandbags and wet ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. A boot with some pulp inside protruded from a mud-bank where I stood, and there was a human head, without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of a shell-hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year before, when swarms of boys, of the ’16 class, boys of eighteen, the flower of French youth, rushed forward from the crossroads at La Targette, a few hundred yards away, to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They captured them, and it cost them seven thousand in killed and wounded⁠—at least three thousand dead. They fought like young demons through the flaming streets. They fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire. Machine-guns cut them down as though they were ripe corn under the sickle. But these French boys broke the Prussian Guard that day.

Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing below earth at the Labyrinth⁠—sapping, mining, gaining a network of trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German saphead, by frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight with their teeth and hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground in the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sandbags. So for something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the Labyrinth, until in February of ’16 they went away after greeting our khaki men who came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in disused trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.

XIV

It was then, in that February of ’15, that the city of Arras passed for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in the surging tide of traffic that poured through to victory that cost as much sometimes as defeat.

When I first went into Arras during its occupation by the French I remembered a day, fifteen months before, near the town of St.-Pol in Artois, where I was caught up in one of those tides of fugitives which in those early days of war used to roll back in a state of terror before the German invasion. “Where do they come from?” I asked, watching this long procession of gigs and farmers’ carts and tramping women and children. The answer told me everything. “They are bombarding Arras, m’sieur.”

Since then “They” had never ceased to bombard Arras. From many points of view, as I had come through the countryside at night, I had seen the flashes of shells over that city and had thought of the agony inside. Four days before I went in first it was bombarded with one hundred and fifty seventeen-inch shells, each one of which would destroy a cathedral. It was with a sense of being near to death⁠—not a pleasant feeling, you understand⁠—that I went into Arras for the first time and saw what had happened to it.

I was very near to the Germans. No more than ten yards away, when I stood peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the suburb of Blangy⁠—it was a redbrick villa, torn by shells, with a piano in the parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of sandbags⁠—and no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy’s lines when I paced up and down the great railway station of Arras, where no trains ever traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been encamped outside the city, and for all that time had tried to batter a way into and through it. An endless battle had surged up against its walls, but in spite of all their desperate attacks no German soldier had set foot inside the city except as a prisoner of war. Many thousands of young Frenchmen had given their blood to save it.

The enemy had not been able to prevail over flesh and blood and the spirit of heroic men, but he had destroyed the city bit by bit. It was pitiful beyond all expression. It was worse than looking upon a woman whose beauty had been scarred by bloody usage.

For Arras was a city of beauty⁠—a living expression in stone of all the idealism in eight hundred years of history, a most sweet and gracious place. Even then, after a year’s bombardment, some spiritual exhalation of human love and art came to one out of all this ruin. When I entered the city and wandered a little in its public gardens before going into its dead heart⁠—the Grande Place⁠—I felt the strange survival. The trees here were slashed by shrapnel. Enormous shell-craters had plowed up those pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were beaten down.

Almost every house had been hit, every building was scarred and slashed, but for the most part the city still stood, so that I went through many long streets and passed long lines of houses, all deserted, all dreadful in their silence and desolation and ruin.

Then I came to the cathedral of St.-Vaast. It was an enormous building of the Renaissance, not beautiful, but impressive in its spaciousness and dignity. Next to it was the bishop’s palace, with long corridors and halls, and a private chapel. Upon these walls and domes the fury of great shells had spent itself. Pillars as wide in girth as giant trees had been snapped off to the base. The dome of the cathedral opened with a yawning chasm. High explosives burst through the walls. The keystones of arches were blown out, and masses of masonry were piled into the nave and aisles.

As I stood there, rooks had perched in the broken vaulting and flew with noisy wings above the ruined altars. Another sound came like a great beating of wings, with a swifter rush. It was a shell, and the vibration of it stirred the crumbling masonry, and bits of it fell with a clatter to the littered floor. On the way to the ruin of the bishop’s chapel I passed a group of stone figures. They were the famous “Angels of Arras” removed from some other part of the building to what might have been a safer place.

Now they were fallen angels, mangled as they lay. But in the chapel beyond, where the light streamed through the broken panes of stained-glass windows, one figure stood untouched in all this ruin. It was a tall statue of Christ standing in an attitude of meekness and sorrow, as though in the presence of those who crucified Him.

Yet something more wonderful than this scene of tragedy lived in the midst of it. Yet there were still people living in Arras.

They lived an underground life, for the most part, coming up from the underworld to blink in the sunlight, to mutter a prayer or a curse or two, to gaze for a moment at any change made by a new day’s bombardment, and then to burrow down again at the shock of a gun.

Through low archways just above the pavement, I looked down into some of the deep-vaulted cellars where the merchants used to stock their wine, and saw old women, and sometimes young women there, cooking over little stoves, pottering about iron bedsteads, busy with domestic work. Some of them looked up as I passed, and my eyes and theirs stared into each other. The women’s faces were lined and their eyes sunken. They had the look of people who have lived through many agonies and have more to suffer.

Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. There was a greengrocer’s shop still carrying on a little trade. I went into another shop and bought some picture postcards of the ruins within a few yards of it. The woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and laughed because she had no change. Only two days before a seventeen-inch shell had burst fifty yards or so away from her shop, which was close enough for death. I marveled at the risk she took with cheerful smiles. Was it courage or stupidity?

One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in a friendly way and called me cher petit ami, and described how she had been nearly killed a hundred times. When I asked her why she stayed she gave an old woman’s cackling laugh and said, “Que voulez-vous, jeune homme?” which did not seem a satisfactory answer. As dusk crept into the streets of Arras I saw small groups of boys and girls. They seemed to come out of holes in the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. “Are you afraid of the shells?” I asked. They grimaced up at the sky and giggled. They had got used to the hell of it all, and dodged death as they would a man with a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his lash. In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to stay. Overhead shells were howling. Their city was stricken with death. These women lived like witches in a cave⁠—a strange and dreadful life.

I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great factory of some kind⁠—probably for beet sugar⁠—and then a street of small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sandbags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a chink no wider than my finger I could see the redbrick ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai⁠ ⁠… The road to Douai as seen through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks.

The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there were many places where one had to step quietly and duck one’s head, or get behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper’s bullet or the rattle of bullets from a machine-gun.

As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its ruined streets and shells were crashing over the city from French guns, answered now and then by enemy batteries. But in a moment of rare silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly way.

XV

While we hung on the news from Verdun⁠—it seemed as though the fate of the world were in Fort Douaumont⁠—our own lists of death grew longer.

In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one hand clutching at a comrade’s arm. More, and more, and more, with head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas.

“O Christ!” said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-bed in the ambulance-train.

“Now you will be comfortable and happy,” said the R.A.M.C. orderly.

The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears away and said:

“I’m lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed.”

So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.

It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the shellfire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our little hells.

“Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.” For days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2’s flinging up volumes of sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs.

“It seemed like years!” said one of the Irish crowd. “None of us expected to come out alive.”

Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black coffee.

Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge⁠—you remember Hooge?⁠—the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in one battalion The German gunfire lengthened, and men were killed on their way out to “rest”⁠—camps to the left of the road between Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe.

On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers⁠—the old Fighting Fifth⁠—captured six hundred yards of German trenches near St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built of earth and sandbags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the fork of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this place and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil in a black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs through barbed wire and over sandbags which had escaped the radius of the mine-burst⁠—in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got to work on them. It was knocked out by a bomb flung by an officer who saved his company. The machine-gunners were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was chaos out of which living men came, shaking and moaning.

I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers come back from this exploit, exhausted, caked from head to foot in wet clay. Their steel helmets were covered with sandbagging, their trench-waders, their rifles, and smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white earth, and they looked a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered from the fields of France. Some of them had shawls tied about their helmets, and some of them wore the shiny black helmets of the Jaeger Regiment and the gray coats of German soldiers. They had had luck. They had not left many comrades behind, and they had come out with life to the good world. Tired as they were, they came along as though to carnival. They had proved their courage through an ugly job. They had done “damn well,” as one of them remarked; and they were out of the shellfire which ravaged the ground they had taken, where other men lay.

XVI

At the beginning of March there was a little affair⁠—costing a lot of lives⁠—in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It was a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had been held for a long time by the 3rd Division under General Haldane, whose men were at last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the 17th Division commanded by General Pilcher. The Germans took advantage of the change in defense by a sudden attack after the explosion of a mine, and the men of the 17th Division, new to this ground, abandoned a position of some local importance.

General Haldane was annoyed. It was ground of which he knew every inch. It was ground which men of his had died to hold. It was very annoying⁠—using a feeble word⁠—to battalion officers and men of the 3rd Division⁠—Suffolks and King’s Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal Scots⁠—who had first come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow and slush and shellfire, to a pretty village far behind the lines, on the road to Calais, where they were getting back to a sense of normal life again. Sleeping in snug billets, warming their feet at wood fires, listening with enchantment to the silence about them, free from the noise of artillery. They were hugging themselves with the thought of a month of this⁠ ⁠… Then because they had been in the salient so long and had held this line so stubbornly, they were ordered back again to recapture the position lost by new men.

After a day of field sports they were having a boxing-match in an old barn, very merry and bright, before that news came to them. General Haldane had given me a quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing, and the faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity for the frightful disappointment that was about to fall on them, like a sledgehammer. I knew some of their officers⁠—Colonel Dyson of the Royal Scots, and Captain Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways with a deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and of their own officers. Colonel Dyson was the seventeenth commanding officer of his battalion, which had been commanded by every officer down to second lieutenant, and had only thirty men left of the original crowd. They had been slain in large numbers in that “holding attack” by Hooge on September 25th, during the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they were “going in” again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid their feelings from their men. The men were tough and stalwart lads, tanned by the wind and rain of a foul winter, thinned down by the ordeal of those months in the line under daily bouts of fire. In a wooden gallery of the barn a mass of them lay in deep straw, exchanging caps, whistling, shouting, in high spirits. Not yet did they know the callback to the salient. Then word was passed to them after the boxing finals. That night they had to march seven miles to entrain for the railroad nearest to Ypres. I saw them march away, silently, grimly, bravely, without many curses.

They were to recapture the Bluff, and early on the morning of March 2nd, before dawn had risen, I went out to the salient and watched the bombardment which preceded the attack. There was an incessant tumult of guns, and the noise rolled in waves across the flat country of the salient and echoed back from Kemmel Hill and the Wytschaete Ridge. There was a white frost over the fields, and all the battlefront was veiled by a mist which clung round the villages and farmsteads behind the lines and made a dense bank of gray fog below the rising ground.

This curtain was rent with flashes of light and little glinting stars burst continually over one spot, where the Bluff was hidden beyond Zillebeke Lake. When daybreak came, with the rim of a red sun over a clump of trees in the east, the noise of guns increased in spasms of intensity like a rising storm. Many batteries of heavy artillery were firing salvos. Field-guns, widely scattered, concentrated their fire upon one area, where their shells were bursting with a twinkle of light. Somewhere a machine-gun was at work with sharp, staccato strokes, like an urgent knocking at the door. High overhead was the song of an airplane coming nearer, with a high, vibrant humming. It was an enemy searching through the mist down below him for any movement of troops or trains.

It was the 76th Brigade of the 3rd Division which attacked at four thirty-two that morning, and they were the Suffolks, Gordons, and King’s Own Liverpools who led the assault, commanded by General Pratt. They flung themselves into the German lines in the wake of a heavy barrage fire, smashing through broken belts of wire and stumbling in and out of shell-craters. The Germans, in their front-lines, had gone to cover in deep dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on the Bluff and its neighborhood during the previous ten days and nights. At first only a few men, not more than a hundred or so, could be discovered alive. The dead were thick in the maze of trenches, and our men stumbled across them.

The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed by the shellfire, and cold with terror when our men sprang upon them in the darkness before dawn. Small parties were collected and passed back as prisoners⁠—marvelously lucky men if they kept their sanity as well as their lives after all that hell about them. Hours later, when our battalions had stormed their way up other trenches into a salient jutting out of the German line and beyond the boundary of the objective that had been given to them, other living men were found to be still hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be induced to come out. Terror kept them in those holes, and they were like wild beasts at bay, still dangerous because they had their bombs and rifles. An ultimatum was shouted down to them by men too busy for persuasive talk. “If you don’t come out you’ll be blown in.” Some of them came out and others were blown to bits. After that the usual thing happened, the thing that inevitably happened in all these little murderous attacks and counterattacks. The enemy concentrated all its power of artillery on that position captured by our men, and day after day hurled over storms of shrapnel and high explosives, under which our men cowered until many were killed and more wounded. The first attack on the Bluff and its recapture cost us three thousand casualties, and that was only the beginning of a daily toll of life and limbs in that neighborhood of hell. Through driving snowstorms shells went rushing across that battleground, ceaselessly in those first weeks of March, but the 3rd Division repulsed the enemy’s repeated attacks in bombing fights which were very fierce on both sides.

I went to General Pilcher’s headquarters at Reninghelst on March 4th, and found the staff of the 17th Division frosty in their greeting, while General Pratt, the brigadier of the 3rd Division, was conducting the attack in their new territory. General Pilcher himself was much shaken. The old gentleman had been at St.-Eloi when the bombardment had begun on his men. With Captain Rattnag his A.D.C. he lay for an hour in a ditch with shells screaming overhead and bursting close. More than once when I talked with him he raised his head and listened nervously and said: “Do you hear the guns?⁠ ⁠… They are terrible.”

I was sorry for him, this general who had many theories on war and experimented in light-signals, as when one night I stood by his side in a dark field, and had a courteous old-fashioned dignity and gentleness of manner. He was a fine old English gentleman and a gallant soldier, but modern warfare was too brutal for him. Too brutal for all those who hated its slaughter.

Those men of the 3rd Division⁠—the “Iron Division,” as it was called later in the war⁠—remained in a hideous turmoil of wet earth up by the Bluff until other men came to relieve them and take over this corner of hell.

What remained of the trenches was deep in water and filthy mud, where the bodies of many dead Germans lay under a litter of broken sandbags and in the holes of half-destroyed dugouts. Nothing could be done to make it less horrible. Then the weather changed and became icily cold, with snow and rain.

One dugout which had been taken for battalion headquarters was six feet long by four wide, and here in this waterlogged hole lived three officers of the Royal Scots to whom a day or two before I had wished “good luck.”

The servants lived in the shaft alongside which was a place measuring four feet by four feet. There were no other dugouts where men could get any shelter from shells or storms, and the enemy’s guns were never silent.

But the men held on, as most of our men held on, with a resignation to fate and a stoic endurance beyond that ordinary human courage which we seemed to know before the war.

The chaplain of this battalion had spent all the long night behind the lines, stoking fires and going round the cookhouses and looking at his wristwatch to see how the minutes were crawling past. He had tea, rum, socks, oil, and food all ready for those who were coming back, and the lighted braziers were glowing red.

At the appointed time the padre went out to meet his friends, pressing forward through the snow and listening for any sound of footsteps through the great hush.

But there was no sound except the soft flutter of snowflakes. He strained his eyes for any moving shadows of men. But there was only darkness and the falling snow.

Two hours passed, and they seemed endless to that young chaplain whose brain was full of frightful apprehensions, so that they were hours of anguish to him.

Then at last the first men appeared. “I’ve never seen anything so splendid and so pitiful,” said the man who had been waiting for them.

They came along at about a mile an hour, sometimes in groups, sometimes by twos or threes, holding on to each other, often one by one. In this order they crept through the ruined villages in the falling snow, which lay thick upon the masses of fallen masonry. There was a profound silence about them, and these snow-covered men were like ghosts walking through cities of death.

No man spoke, for the sound of a human voice would have seemed a danger in this great white quietude. They were walking like old men, weak-kneed, and bent under the weight of their packs and rifles.

Yet when the young padre greeted them with a cheery voice that hid the water in his heart everyone had a word and a smile in reply, and made little jests about their drunken footsteps, for they were like drunken men with utter weariness.

“What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir?” was one man’s joke.

The last of those who came back⁠—and there were many who never came back⁠—were some hours later than the first company, having found it hard to crawl along that Via Dolorosa which led to the good place where the braziers were glowing.

It was a heroic episode, for each one of these men was a hero, though his name will never be known in the history of that silent and hidden war. And yet it was an ordinary episode, no degree worse in its hardship than what happened all along the line when there was an attack or counterattack in foul weather.

The marvel of it was that our men, who were very simple men, should have “stuck it out” with that grandeur of courage which endured all things without self-interest and without emotion. They were unconscious of the virtue that was in them.

XVII

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentières, or Loos, I noticed in those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side of the lines and a growing intensity of gunfire on both sides.

Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells, saving them up anxiously for hours of great need, when the SOS rocket shot up a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was concentrating “hate.”

Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being shelled to pieces by long-range howitzers, or from engineers whose working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and piling up the casualties. It was hard to say: “Sorry!⁠ ⁠… We’ve got to go slow with ammunition.”

That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate the “heavies” had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the battlefields by day and night.

There was a larger supply of shells for all those pieces, and no longer the same need for thrift when there was urgent need for artillery support. Retaliation was the order of the day, and if the enemy asked for trouble by any special show of “hate” he got it quickly and with a double dose.

Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance of life, except in places where, as in the salient, the German observers stared down at them from high ground and saw every gun flash and registered every battery. Going round the salient one day with General Burstall⁠—and a very good name, too!⁠—who was then the Canadian gunner-general, I was horrified at the way in which the enemy had the accurate range of our guns and gun-pits and knocked them out with deadly shooting.

Here and there our amateur gunners⁠—quick to learn their job⁠—found a good place, and were able to camouflage their position for a time, and give praise to the little god of Luck, until one day sooner or later they were discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were not caught too soon.

So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond Kemmel village, where I went to see a boy who had once been a rising hope of Fleet Street.

He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it⁠—that was before his men were blown to bits around him and he was sent down as a tragic case of shell-shock⁠—and as we walked through the village of Kemmel he chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it topping. His bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by the scene around him. He walked in a jaunty, boyish way through that ruined place. It was not a pleasant place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been blown to bits, except where, on the outskirts, the château with its racing-stables remained untouched⁠—“German spies!” said the boy⁠—and where a little grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church was battered and broken, and there were enormous shell-pits in the churchyard and open vaults where old dead had been tumbled out of their tombs. We walked along a sunken road and then to a barn in open fields. The roof was pierced by shrapnel bullets, which let in the rain on wet days and nights, but it was cozy otherwise in the room above the ladder where the officers had their mess. There were some homemade chairs up there, and Kirchner prints of naked little ladies were tacked up to the beams, among the trench maps, and round the fireplace where logs were burning was a canvas screen to let down at night. A gramophone played merry music and gave a homelike touch to this parlor in war.

“A good spot!” I said. “Is it well hidden?”

“As safe as houses,” said the captain of the battery. “Touching wood, I mean.”

There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.

“What’s happened?” I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.

“Nothing,” said the boy, “except touching wood. The captain spoke too loudly.”

We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the battlefield, all white after a morning’s snowstorm, except where the broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill showed black as ink.

The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle of fire.

“It’s a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench,” said a bright-eyed boy by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he became a gunner officer in Flanders). “With any luck we shall get ’em in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal⁠ ⁠… And my gun’s ready first, as usual.”

The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull roar of a “heavy.”

A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a mile away.

Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.

“Repeat!”

“We’ve got ’em,” said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way.

The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.

“We may as well give them a salvo. They won’t like it a bit.”

A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns fired together. “Repeat!” came the high voice through the megaphone.

The still air was rent again⁠ ⁠… In a waterlogged trench, which we could not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.

The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping for the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in the billet below.

The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches slithered down under the weight of sandbags.

The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station from which he looked straight across the enemy’s trenches. But, once there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from above or a little mining operation underneath.

He made a seat of a well-filled sandbag (it was rather a shock when he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat there very solitary and watchful.

The rats worried him a little⁠—they were bold enough to bare their teeth when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to kill⁠ ⁠… until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the boy was broken.

It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in evening dress⁠—boiled shirt, white tie, and all⁠—with a bowler hat bent to the storm.

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

“It isn’t true,” he said. “I don’t believe it⁠ ⁠… We’re mad, that’s all!⁠ ⁠… The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?”

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise of gunfire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard of snow.

A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters.

Cimetière reservé

Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me with a world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and laughed.

“Mad!” he said. “We’re all mad!”

XVIII

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were “bunkered” forever, and that all their training and tradition were made futile by the digging in of armies. Now and again, when the infantry was hard pressed, as in the second battle of Ypres and the battle of Loos, they were called on to leave their horses behind and take a turn in the trenches, and then they came back again, less some of their comrades, into dirty billets remote from the fighting-lines, to exercise their horses and curse the war.

Before they went into the line in February of ’16 I went to see some of those cavalry officers to wish them good luck, and saw them in the trenches and afterward when they came out. In the headquarters of a squadron of “Royals”⁠—the way in was by a ladder through the window⁠—billeted in a village, which on a day of frost looked as quaint and pretty as a Christmas card, was a party of officers typical of the British cavalry as a whole.

A few pictures cut out of La Vie Parisienne were tacked on to the walls to remind them of the arts and graces of an older mode of life, and to keep them human by the sight of a pretty face (oh, to see a pretty girl again!).

Now they were going to change this cottage for the trenches, this quiet village with a church-bell chiming every hour, for the tumult in the battlefront⁠—this absolute safety for the immediate menace of death. They knew already the beastliness of life in trenches. They had no illusions about “glory.” But they were glad to go, because activity was better than inactivity, and because the risk would give them back their pride, and because the cavalry should fight anyhow and somehow, even if a charge or a pursuit were denied them.

They had a hot time in the trenches. The enemy’s artillery was active, and the list of casualties began to tot up. A good officer and a fine fellow was killed almost at the outset, and men were horribly wounded. But all those troopers showed a cool courage.

Things looked bad for a few minutes when a section of trenches was blown in, isolating one platoon from another. A sergeant-major made his way back from the damaged section, and a young officer who was going forward to find out the extent of damage met him on the way.

“Can I get through?” asked the officer.

“I’ve got through,” was the answer, “but it’s chancing one’s luck.”

The officer “chanced his luck,” but did not expect to come back alive. Afterward he tried to analyze his feelings for my benefit.

“I had no sense of fear,” he said, “but a sort of subconscious knowledge that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a conscious determination to go on at all costs and find out what had happened.”

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an amiable suggestion.

“Don’t you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack upon the enemy?”

There was something in those words, “a slight attack,” which is irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern trench war. But they were not spoken in jest.

So the cavalry did its “bit” again, though not as cavalry, and I saw some of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone through that bloody business so that no man might fling a scornful word as they passed with their horses.

“It is queer,” said my friend, “how we go from this place of peace to the battlefield, and then come back for a spell before going up again. It is like passing from one life to another.”

In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. Those officers belonged to the old families of England, the old caste of aristocracy, but the foul outrage of the war⁠—the outrage against all ideals of civilization⁠—had made them think, some of them for the first time, about the structure of social life and of the human family.

They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but they looked deeper than that and saw how the leaders of all great nations in Europe had maintained the philosophy of forms and had built up hatreds and fears and alliances over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with passion or duped with lies.

“The politicians are the guilty ones,” said one cavalry officer. “I am all for revolution after this bloody massacre. I would hang all politicians, diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict impartiality.”

“I’m for the people,” said another. “The poor, bloody people, who are kept in ignorance and then driven into the shambles when their rulers desire to grab some new part of the earth’s surface or to get their armies going because they are bored with peace.”

“What price Christianity?” asked another, inevitably. “What have the churches done to stop war or preach the gospel of Christ? The Bishop of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all those conventional, patriotic, cannon-blessing, banner-baptizing humbugs. God! They make me tired!”

Strange words to hear in a cavalry mess! Strange turmoil in the souls of men! They were the same words I had heard from London boys in Ypres, spoken just as crudely. But many young gentlemen who spoke those words have already forgotten them or would deny them.

XIX

The winter of 1915⁠–⁠16 passed with its misery, and spring came again to France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth was not made barren by the fire of war and all trees killed.

For men there was no promise of life, but only new preparations for death, and continued killing.

The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France had saved herself from a mortal blow at the heart by a desperate, heroic resistance which cost her five hundred and fifty thousand in dead and wounded. On the British front there were still no great battles, but those trench raids, artillery duels, mine fighting, and small massacres which filled the casualty clearing stations with the average amount of human wreckage. The British armies were being held in leash for a great offensive in the summer. New divisions were learning the lessons of the old divisions, and here and there generals were doing a little fancy work to keep things merry and bright.

So it was when some mines were exploded under the German earthworks on the lower slopes of the Vimy Ridge, where the enemy had already blown several mines and taken possession of their craters. It was to gain those craters, and new ones to be made by our mine charges, that the 74th Brigade of the 25th Division, a body of Lancashire men, the 9th Loyal North Lancashires and the 11th Royal Fusiliers, with a company of Royal Engineers and some Welsh pioneers, were detailed for the perilous adventure of driving in the mine shafts, putting tremendous charges of high explosives in the sapheads, and rushing the German positions.

It was on the evening of May 15th, after two days of wet and cloudy weather preventing the enemy’s observation, that our heavy artillery fired a short number of rounds to send the Germans into their dugouts. A few minutes later the right group of mines exploded with a terrific roar and blew in two of the five old German craters. After the long rumble of heaving earth had been stilled there was just time enough to hear the staccato of a German machine-gun. Then there was a second roar and a wild upheaval of soil when the left group of mines destroyed two more of the German craters and knocked out the machine-gun.

The moment for the infantry attack had come, and the men were ready. The first to get away were two lieutenants of the 9th Loyal North Lancashires, who rushed forward with their assaulting-parties to the remaining crater on the extreme left, which had not been blown up.

With little opposition from dazed and terror-stricken Germans, bayoneted as they scrambled out of the chaotic earth, our men flung themselves into those smoking pits and were followed immediately by working-parties, who built up bombing posts with earth and sandbags on the crater lip and began to dig out communication trenches leading to them. The assaulting-parties of the Lancashire Fusiliers were away at the first signal, and were attacking the other groups of craters under heavy fire.

The Germans were shaken with terror because the explosion of the mines had killed and wounded a large number of them, and through the darkness there rang out the cheers of masses of men who were out for blood. Through the darkness there now glowed a scarlet light, flooding all that turmoil of earth and men with a vivid, red illumination, as flare after flare rose high into the sky from several points of the German line. Later the red lights died down, and then other rockets were fired, giving a green light to this scene of war.

The German gunners were now at work in answer to those beacons of distress, and with every caliber of gun from howitzers to minenwerfers they shelled our front-lines for two hours and killed for vengeance. They were too late to stop the advance of the assaulting troops, who were fighting in the craters against groups of German bombers who tried to force their way up to the rescue of a position already lost. One of our officers leading the assault on one of the craters on the right was killed very quickly, but his men were not checked, and with individual resolution and initiative, and the grit of the Lancashire man in a tight place, fought on grimly, and won their purpose.

A young lieutenant fell dead from a bullet wound after he had directed his men to their posts from the lip of a new mine-crater, as coolly as though he were a master of ceremonies in a Lancashire ballroom. Another, a champion bomb-thrower, with a range of forty yards, flung his hand-grenades at the enemy with untiring skill and with a fierce contempt of death, until he was killed by an answering shot. The N.C.O.’s took up the command and the men “carried on” until they held all the chain of craters, crouching and panting above mangled men.

They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who lay wounded and half buried, or quite buried, in the chaos, of earth made by those mine-craters now doubly upheaved. Their screams and moans sounding above the guns, the frantic cries of men maddened under tons of earth, which kept them prisoners in deep pits below the crater lips, and awful inarticulate noises of human pain coming out of that lower darkness beyond the light of the rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than our men could endure, even in the heat of battle. They shouted across to the German grenadiers:

“We will cease fire if you will, and let you get in your wounded⁠ ⁠… Cease fire for the wounded!”

The shout was repeated, and our bombers held their hands, still waiting for an answer. But the answer was a new storm of bombs, and the fighting went on, and the moaning of the men who were helpless and unhelped.

Working-parties followed up the assault to “consolidate” the position. They did amazing things, toiling in the darkness under abominable shellfire, and by daylight had built communication trenches with head-cover from the crater lips to our front-line trenches.

But now it was the enemy’s turn⁠—the turn of his guns, which poured explosive fire into those pits, churning up the earth again, mixing it with new flesh and blood, and carving up his own dead; and it was the turn of his bombers, who followed this fire in strong assaults upon the Lancashire lads, who, lying among their killed and wounded, had to repel those fierce attacks.

On May 17th I went to see General Doran of the 25th Division, an optimistic old gentleman who took a bright view of things, and Colonel Crosby, who was acting-brigadier of the 74th Brigade, which had made the attack. He, too, was enthusiastic about the situation, though his brigade had suffered eight hundred casualties in a month of routine warfare.

In my simple way I asked him a direct question:

“Do you think your men can hold on to the craters, sir?”

Colonel Crosby stared at me sternly.

“Certainly. The position cannot be retaken overground. We hold it strongly.”

As he spoke an orderly came into his billet (a small farmhouse), saluted, and handed him a pink slip, which was a telephone message. I watched him read it, and saw the sudden pallor of his face, and noticed how the room shook with the constant reverberation of distant gunfire. A big bombardment was in progress over Vimy way.

“Excuse me,” said the colonel; “things seem to be happening. I must go at once.”

He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad tidings went with him.

His men had been blown out of the craters.

A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-brigadier had gone raised his head and looked across to me.

“I am a critic of these affairs,” he said. “They seem to me too expensive. But I’m here to do what I am told.”

We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.

XX

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes.

Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that believed once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The enemy had been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare. No more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit (Rawlinson’s) and a quick breakthrough. It was to be “The Great Push.” The last battles were to be fought before the year died again, though many men would die before that time.

Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way off. It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly thing.

On June 2nd a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their lines in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres, and tragedy befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and stood in the presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of that hell which had been invented by human beings out of the earth’s chemistry, and yet had kept their reason.

The enemy’s bombardment began suddenly, with one great crash of guns, at half past eight on Friday morning. Generals Mercer and Williams had gone up to inspect the trenches at six o’clock in the morning.

It had been almost silent along the lines when the enemy’s batteries opened fire with one enormous thunderstroke, which was followed by continuous salvos. The shells came from nearly every point of the compass⁠—north, east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was over our men again.

In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry, with some battalions of the Royal Canadian Regiment south of them, and some of the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been dismounted), and units from another Canadian division at the extreme end of their line of front. It was those men who had to suffer the tempest of the enemy’s shells.

Earth below them opened up into great craters as high-explosive shells burst continually, flinging up masses of soil, flattening out breastworks and scattering sandbags into dust.

Canadians in the front trenches held on in the midst of this uproar. “They took it all,” said one of the officers, and in that phrase, spoken simply by a man who was there, too, lies the spirit of pride and sacrifice. “They took it all” and did not budge, though the sky seemed to be opening above them and the earth below them.

The bombardment continued without a pause for five hours, by which time most of our front trenches had been annihilated. At about a quarter past one the enemy’s guns lifted a little, and through the dense smoke-clouds which made a solid bar across No Man’s Land appeared a mass of German infantry. They wore their packs and full field-kit, as though they had come to stay.

Perhaps they expected that no one lived in the British trenches, and it was a reasonable idea, but wrong. There were brave men remaining there, alive and determined to fight. Although the order for retirement had been given, single figures here and there were seen to get over the broken parapets and go forward to meet the enemy halfway. They died to a man, fighting. It seemed to me one of the most pitiful and heroic things of this war, that little crowd of men, many of them wounded, some of them dazed and deaf, stumbling forward to their certain death to oppose the enemy’s advance.

From the network of trenches behind, not altogether smashed, there was time for men to retire to a second line of defense, if they were still unwounded and had strength to go. An officer⁠—Captain Crossman⁠—in command of one of these support companies, brought several men out of a trench, but did not follow on. He turned again, facing the enemy, and was last seen⁠—“a big, husky man,” says one of his comrades⁠—as he fired his revolver and then flung it into a German’s face.

Colonel Shaw of the 1st Battalion, C.M.R., rallied eighty men out of the Cumberland dugouts, and died fighting. The Germans were kept at bay for some time, but they flung their bombs into the square of men, so that very few remained alive. When only eight were still fighting among the bodies of their comrades these tattered and blood-splashed men, standing there fiercely contemptuous of the enemy and death, were ordered to retire by Major Palmer, the last officer among them.

Meanwhile the battalions in support were holding firm in spite of the shellfire, which raged above them also, and it was against this second line of Canadians that the German infantry came up⁠—and broke.

In the center the German thrust was hard toward Zillebeke Lake. Here some of the Canadian Rifles were in support, and as soon as the infantry attack began they were ordered forward to meet and check the enemy. An officer in command of one of their battalions afterward told me that he led his men across country to Maple Copse under such a fire as he had never seen. Because of the comrades in front, in dire need of help, no notice was taken as the wounded fell, but the others pressed on as fast as they could go.

Maple Copse was reached, and here the men halted and awaited the enemy with another battalion who were already holding this wood of six or seven acres. When the German troops arrived they may have expected to meet no great resistance. They met a withering fire, which caused them bloody losses. The Canadians had assembled at various points, which became strongholds of defense with machine-guns and bomb stores, and the men held their fire until the enemy was within close range, so that they worked havoc among them. But the German guns never ceased and many Canadians fell. Col. E. H. Baker, a member of the Canadian Parliament, fell with a piece of shell in his lung.

Hour after hour our gunners fed their breeches and poured out shells. The edge of the salient was swept with fire, and, though the Canadian losses were frightful, the Germans suffered also, so that the battlefield was one great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought back, owe their lives to the stretcher-bearers, who were supreme in devotion. They worked in and out across that shell-swept ground hour after hour through the day and night, rescuing many stricken men at a great cost in life to themselves. Out of one party of twenty only five remained alive. “No one can say,” said one of their officers, “that the Canadians do not know how to die.”

No one would deny that.

Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade their casualties were twenty-two hundred.

There were 151 survivors from the 1st Battalion Canadian Mounted Rifles, 130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 from the 5th, 520 from the 2nd. Those are the figures of massacre.

Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. Their own guns were but a small part of the huge orchestra of “heavies” and field batteries which played the devil’s tattoo upon the German positions in our old trenches. It was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to endure the same experience as their guns had given to Canadian troops on the same ground. Trenches already battered were smashed again. The earth, which was plowed with shells in their own attack, was flung up again by our shells. It was hell again for poor human wretches.

The Canadian troops charged at two o’clock in the morning. Their attack was directed to the part of the line from the southern end of Sanctuary Wood to Mount Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh Wood, Observatory Hill, and Mount Gorst itself.

The attack went quickly and the men expected greater trouble. The enemy’s shellfire was heavy, but the Canadians got through under cover of their own guns, which had lengthened their fuses a little and continued an intense bombardment behind the enemy’s first line. The men advanced in open order and worked downward and southward into their old positions.

In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought desperately, were killed almost to a man, just as Colonel Shaw had died on June 2nd with his party of eighty men who had rallied round him. It was one shambles for another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems.

One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surrendered. The officer was glad to escape from the death to which he had resigned himself when our bombardment began.

“I knew how it would be,” he said. “We had orders to take this ground, and took it; but we knew you would come back again. You had to do so. So here I am.”

Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. In one place the stores which had been buried by the Canadians before they left were still there, untouched by the enemy. Our bombardment had made it impossible for his troops to consolidate their position and to hold the line steady.

They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, in shell-holes and craters, and behind scattered sandbags, and had been pounded there. The Canadians were back again.