Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 4

Chapter V

Paris Again--And Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs

These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France. I had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away from the front instead of toward it--down to see Bordeaux while it was still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the French provincial towns in war time.

It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the street-door--yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken gloom.

One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were no such thing as sun---recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be-- woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning, enchanted tropical dawns.

Through this viscous envelope--a sort of fungi thrown off by it-- newspapers kept appearing--slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill. One looked for fairness almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very qualities they were denied.

They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into another--even as one read "Huns" for the thousandth time the Huns turned into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs. In the same way the England of tradition--Shakespeare, d.i.c.kens, Meredith, jolly old rumbling London, rides 'cross country, rows on the river--faded into this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight. The psychology was very simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors. And, unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but newspapers are likely to be an outsider's most constant companions.

A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. But why staggering? "Can you not take coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris cafe"? It would seem so, yet it cannot be done. The mere sight and sound--or lack of sound-- of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy, inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the already weakened will like an opiate. At the first bewildering '"Q?"

from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow before porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade, toast, more toast, more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the proverbial boa--except that in this case the rabbit swallows its own asphyxiator.

Another breakfast like this, another day of rain and fog, another '"Q?"

--it was in some such state of mind as this that I packed up one night and took the early train for Folkestone.

Folkestone, Friday.

Sunshine at last--a delicious autumn afternoon--clean air, quiet, and the sea. Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling slowly in; along the horizon a streak of smoke from some patrolling destroyer or battleship. And all along this cliff walk, Belgians--strolling with their children, sitting on the benches, looking out to sea. Just beyond that hazy white wall to the east--the cliffs of France--the fight for Calais is being fought--they can almost hear the cannon.

In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk:

"It was two o'clock in the morning when we left Antwerp."

"And imagine--it was not three metres from our doorstep that the sh.e.l.l burst."

"We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morning-------"

On the balcony of some one's summer-house, now turned into a hospital, four Belgian soldiers, one with his head bandaged, are playing cards-- jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly tipped over one ear, slamming the cards down as if that were the only thing in the world. In the garden others taking the sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through the shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse-maids and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo.

The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint picture, for sun and s.p.a.ce and quiet seem to have wiped out their terror--that pa.s.sed through is as far away as that now hidden in the east. Is it merely quiet and sun? Perhaps it is the look of a "nice little people" who know that now they have a history. "Refugees," to be sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight little villages, ca.n.a.ls, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on the days of their great adventure--when they could sit in the sun above the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for the last corner of their country.

Calais, Sat.u.r.day.

Belgian officers, parks of Belgian military automobiles; up-country a little way the Germans going down in tens of thousands to win their "gate to England"--yet we came across on the Channel boat last evening as usual and had little trouble finding a room. There were tons of Red Cross supplies on board--cotton, chloroform, peroxide; Belgian soldiers patched up and going back to fight; and various volunteer nurses, including two handsome young Englishwomen of the very modern aviatrix type--coming over to drive motor-cycle ambulances--and so smartly gotten up in boots and khaki that a little way off you might have taken them for British officers. At the wharf were other nurses, some of whom I had last seen that Thursday afternoon in Antwerp as they and their wounded rolled away in London buses from the hospital in the Boulevard Leopold.

This morning, strolling round the town, I ran into a couple of English correspondents. There were yet several hours before they need address themselves to the arduous task of describing fighting they had not seen, and they talked, with a good humor one sometimes misses in their correspondence, of German collectivism and similar things. One had spent a good deal of time in Germany.

"They're the only people who have solved the problem of industrial cities without slums--you must say that for them. Of course, in those model towns of theirs, you've got to brush your teeth at six minutes past eight and sleep on your left side if the police say so--they're astonishing people for doing what they're told.

"One day in Dresden I walked across a bit of gra.s.s the public weren't supposed to cross. An old gentleman fairly roared the instant he saw me. He was ready to explode at the mere suggestion that any one could think of disobeying a rule made for all of them.

"'Das kann man nicht thun! Es ist verboten!'"

The other quoted the answer of an English factory-owner to some of his employees who did not want to enlist. "They've done a lot for working men over there," the man said. "Accident-insurance, old-age pensions, and all that--what do we want to fight the Kaiser for? We'd just about as soon be under Billy as George." And X------said to them: "If you were under Kaiser Billy, you'd enlist right enough, there's no doubt of that!"

Boulogne, Sat.u.r.day.

He sat in the corner of our compartment coming down from Calais this afternoon, an old Algerian soldier, homeward bound, with a big, round loaf of bread and a military pa.s.s. He had a blue robe, bright-red, soft boots, a white turban wound with a sort of scarf of brown cord and baggy corduroy underneath, concealing various mysterious pockets.

"Paris? To-night?" he grunted in his queer French. The big Frenchman next him, who had served in Africa in his youth and understood the dialect, shook his head. "To-morrow morning!" he said. He laid his head on his hand to suggest a man sleeping, and held up three fingers.

"Three days--Ma.r.s.eilles!" The old goumier's dark eyes blazed curiously, and he opened and shut his mouth in a dry yawn--like a tiger yawning.

Wounded? No--he pointed to his eyes, which were bloodshot, patted his forehead to suggest that it was throbbing, rubbed his legs, and scowled.

"Rheumatism!" said the Frenchman. The Algerian pressed his palms together six times, then held up two fingers. "He's sixty-two years old!" said the Frenchman, and the old warrior obligingly opened his jaws and pointed to two or three lone brown fangs to prove it. They talked for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman explained again, "Volunteer!" and then, "Scout!"

The old Arab made the motion of sighting along a rifle, then of brushing something over, and tapped himself on the chest.

"Deux!" he said. "Two Germans--me!" Evidently he was going back to the desert satisfied.

Train after train pa.s.sed us, northward bound, some from Boulogne, some from the trenches north of Paris evidently, bringing artillery caked with mud--all packed with British soldiers leaning from doors of their cattle-cars, hats pushed back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking.

At the end of each train, in pa.s.senger-coaches, their officers--tall, slim-legged young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats, with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather superior sort of sport.

The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, efficient, light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and Shakespeare, as d.i.c.kens and Dumas--and in the same ways!

An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few nights before of the "extraordinary detachment" of Tommy Atkins.

"Take almost any of those little French soldiers--they've got a pretty good idea what the war is about--at any rate, they've got a sentiment about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll go to their death shouting for la patrie. Now, Tommy Atkins isn't the least like that.

He doesn't fight--and you know how he does fight--for patriotism or glory, at least not in the same conscious way. He'd fight just as well against another of his own regiments--if you know what I mean. He's just--well, look at the soldiers' letters. The Germans are sentimental --they are all martyrs. The Frenchmen are all heroes. But Tommy Atkins --well, he's just playing football!"

The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Rogue.

Imagine, for a moment, that scene--the three great ships going over like stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea, boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing:

"Smash the blighter's head!"

There are phrases like these which could only have been said by the people who say them; they are like windows suddenly opening down cycles of racial history and difference. At a Regent Street moving-picture show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke a little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her companion.

There were pictures of the silk industry in j.a.pan--moths emerging from coc.o.o.ns, the breeding process, the hatching of the eggs, the life history of these anonymous little specks magnified until for the moment they almost had a sort of personality. And one murmured:

"Comme c'est drole, la nature!"

Sunday.

It was dusk when we reached Boulogne last night--frosty dusk, with the distant moan of a fog-horn, and under the mist hilly streets busy with soldiers and bright with lights. It made one think of a college town at home on the eve of the great game, so keen and happy seemed all these fit young men--officers swinging by with their walking-sticks, soldiers spinning yarns in smoky cafes--for the great game of war.

The hotels were full of wounded or officers--to Boulogne comes the steady procession of British transports--but an amiable porter led me to a little side street and a place kept by a retired English merchant-marine officer who had married a Frenchwoman. Paintings, such as sailor-artists make, of the ships he had served in were on the walls, a photograph of himself and his mates taken in the sunshine of some tropical port; and with its cheerful hot stove, the place combined the air of a French cafe with the cosiness of an English inn.

Very comfortable, indeed, I leaned over one of the tables that ran along the wall, while two British soldiers alongside gossiped and sipped their beer, and ran over the columns of La Boulonnaise. Here, too, war seemed a jolly man's game, and I came to "Military Court Sitting at Boulogne,"

and beneath it the following: