Great Britain at War Part 8

Here and there, on either side this narrow street, ugly gaps showed where houses had once stood, comfortable homes, now only unsightly heaps of rubbish, a confusion of broken beams and rafters, amid which divers familiar objects obtruded themselves, broken chairs and tables, a grandfather clock, and a shattered piano whose melody was silenced for ever.

Through all these gloomy relics of a vanished people I went slow-footed and heedless of direction, until by chance I came out into the wide Place and saw before me all that remained of the stately building which for centuries had been the Hotel de Ville, now nothing but a crumbling ruin of n.o.ble arch and ma.s.sive tower; even so, in shattered facade and mullioned window one might yet see something of that beauty which had made it famous.

Oblivious of driving rain I stood bethinking me of this ancient city: how in the dark ages it had endured the horrors of battle and siege, had fronted the catapults of Rome, heard the fierce shouts of barbarian a.s.sailants, known the merciless savagery of religious wars, and remained a city still only for the cultured barbarian of to-day to make of it a desolation.

Very full of thought I turned away, but, as I crossed the desolate square, I was aroused by a voice that hailed me, seemingly from beneath my feet, a voice that echoed eerily in that silent Place.

Glancing about I beheld a beshawled head that rose above the littered pavement, and, as I stared, the head nodded and smiling wanly, accosted me again.

Coming thither I looked into a square opening with a flight of steps leading down into a subterranean chamber, and upon these steps a woman sat knitting busily. She enquired if I wished to view the catacombs, and pointed where a lamp burned above another opening and other steps descended lower yet, seemingly into the very bowels of the earth. To her I explained that my time was limited and all I wished to see lay above ground, and from her I learned that some few people yet remained in ruined Arras, who, even as she, lived underground, since every day at irregular intervals the enemy fired into the town haphazard. Only that very morning, she told me, another sh.e.l.l had struck the poor Hotel de Ville, and she pointed to a new, white scar upon the shapeless tower. She also showed me an ugly rent upon a certain wall near by, made by the sh.e.l.l which had killed her husband. Yes, she lived all alone now, she told me, waiting for that good day when the Boches should be driven beyond the Rhine, waiting until the townsfolk should come back and Arras wake to life again: meantime she knitted.

Presently I saluted this solitary woman, and, turning away, left her amid the desolate ruin of that once busy square, her beshawled head bowed above feverishly busy fingers, left her as I had found her--waiting.

And now as I traversed those deserted streets it seemed that this seemingly dead city did but swoon after all, despite its many grievous wounds, for here was life even as the woman had said; evidences of which I saw here and there, in battered stovepipes that had writhed themselves snake-like through rusty cellar gratings and holes in wall or pavement, miserable contrivances at best, whose fumes blackened the walls whereto they clung. Still, nowhere was there sound or sight of folk save in one small back street, where, in a shop that apparently sold everything, from pickles to picture postcards, two British soldiers were buying a pair of braces from a smiling, haggard-eyed woman, and being extremely polite about it in cryptic Anglo-French; and here I foregathered with my companions. Our way led us through the railway station, a much-battered ruin, its clock tower half gone, its platforms cracked and splintered, the iron girders of its great, domed roof bent and twisted, and with never a sheet of gla.s.s anywhere. Between the rusty tracks gra.s.s and weeds grew and flourished, and the few waybills and excursion placards which still showed here and there looked unutterably forlorn. In the booking office was a confusion of broken desks, stools and overthrown chairs, the floor littered with sodden books and ledgers, but the racks still held thousands of tickets, bearing so many names they might have taken any one anywhere throughout fair France once, but now, it seemed, would never take any one anywhere.

All at once, through the battered swing doors, marched a company of soldiers, the tramp of their feet and the lilt of their voices filling the place with strange echoes, for, being wet and weary and British, they sang cheerily. Packs a-swing, rifles on shoulder, they tramped through sh.e.l.l-torn waiting room and booking hall and out again into wind and wet, and I remember the burden of their chanting was: "Smile! Smile! Smile!"

In a little while I stood amid the ruins of the great cathedral; its mighty pillars, chipped and scarred, yet rose high in air, but its long aisles were choked with rubble and fallen masonry, while through the gaping rents of its lofty roof the rain fell, wetting the shattered heap of particoloured marble that had been the high altar once. Here and there, half buried in the debris at my feet, I saw fragments of memorial tablets, a battered corona, the twisted remains of a great candelabrum, and over and through this mournful ruin a cold and rising wind moaned fitfully. Silently we clambered back over the mountain of debris and hurried on, heedless of the devastation around, heartsick with the gross barbarity of it all.

They tell me that churches and cathedrals must of necessity be destroyed since they generally serve as observation posts. But I have seen many ruined churches--usually beautified by Time and hallowed by tradition--that by reason of site and position could never have been so misused--and then there is the beautiful Chateau d'Eau!

Evening was falling, and as the shadows stole upon this silent city, a gloom unrelieved by any homely twinkle of light, these dreadful streets, these stricken homes took on an aspect more sinister and forbidding in the half-light. Behind those flapping curtains were pits of gloom full of unimagined terrors whence came unearthly sounds, stealthy rustlings, groans and sighs and sobbing voices. If ghosts did flit behind those crumbling walls, surely they were very sad and woeful ghosts.

"d.a.m.n this rain!" murmured K. gently.

"And the wind!" said F., pulling up his collar. "Listen to it! It's going to play the very deuce with these broken roofs and things if it blows hard. Going to be a beastly night, and a forty-mile drive in front of us. Listen to that wind! Come on--let's get away!"

Very soon, buried in warm rugs, we sped across dim squares, past wind-swept ruins, under battered arch, and the dismal city was behind us, but, for a while, her ghosts seemed all about us still.

As we plunged on through the gathering dark, past rows of trees that leapt at us and were gone, it seemed to me that the soul of Arras was typified in that patient, solitary woman who sat amid desolate ruin--waiting for the great Day; and surely her patience cannot go unrewarded. For since science has proved that nothing can be utterly destroyed, since I for one am convinced that the soul of man through death is but translated into a fuller and more infinite living, so do I think that one day the woes of Arras shall be done away, and she shall rise again, a City greater perhaps and fairer than she was.

XI

THE BATTLEFIELDS

To all who sit immune, far removed from war and all its horrors, to those to whom when Death comes, he comes in shape as gentle as he may--to all such I dedicate these tales of the front.

How many stories of battlefields have been written of late, written to be scanned hastily over the breakfast table or comfortably lounged over in an easy-chair, stories warranted not to shock or disgust, wherein the reader may learn of the glorious achievements of our armies, of heroic deeds and n.o.ble self-sacrifice, so that frequently I have heard it said that war, since it produces heroes, is a goodly thing, a necessary thing.

Can the average reader know or even faintly imagine the other side of the picture? Surely not, for no clean human mind can compa.s.s all the horror, all the brutal, grotesque obscenity of a modern battlefield. Therefore I propose to write plainly, briefly, of that which I saw on my last visit to the British front; for since in blood-sodden France men are dying even as I pen these lines, it seems only just that those of us for whom they are giving their lives should at least know something of the manner of their dying. To this end I visited four great battlefields and I would that all such as cry up war, its necessity, its inevitability, might have gone beside me. Though I have sometimes written of war, yet I am one that hates war, one to whom the sight of suffering and bloodshed causes physical pain, yet I forced myself to tread those awful fields of death and agony, to look upon the ghastly aftermath of modern battle, that, if it be possible, I might by my testimony in some small way help those who know as little of war as I did once, to realise the horror of it, that loathing it for the h.e.l.lish thing it is, they may, one and all, set their faces against war henceforth, with an unshakeable determination that never again shall it be permitted to maim, to destroy and blast out of being the n.o.blest works of G.o.d.

What I write here I set down deliberately, with no idea of phrase-making, of literary values or rounded periods; this is and shall be a plain, trite statement of fact.

And now, one and all, come with me in spirit, lend me your mind's eyes, and see for yourselves something of what modern war really is.

Behold then a stretch of country--a sea of mud far as the eye can reach, a grim desolate expanse, its surface ploughed and churned by thousands of high-explosive sh.e.l.ls into ugly holes and tortured heaps like muddy waves struck motionless upon this muddy sea. The guns are silent, the cheers and frenzied shouts, the screams and groans have long died away, and no sound is heard save the noise of my own going.

The sun shone palely and a fitful wind swept across the waste, a noxious wind, cold and dank, that chilled me with a sudden dread even while the sweat ran from me. I walked amid sh.e.l.l craters, sometimes knee-deep in mud; I stumbled over rifles half buried in the slime, on muddy knapsacks, over muddy bags half full of rusty bombs, and so upon the body of a dead German soldier. With arms wide-flung and writhen legs grotesquely twisted he lay there beneath my boot, his head half buried in the mud, even so I could see that the maggots had been busy, though the ....[1] had killed them where they clung. So there he lay, this dead Boche, skull gleaming under shrunken scalp, an awful, eyeless thing, that seemed to start, to stir and shiver as the cold wind stirred his muddy clothing. Then nausea and a deadly faintness seized me, but I shook it off, and shivering, sweating, forced myself to stoop and touch that awful thing, and, with the touch, horror and faintness pa.s.sed, and in their place I felt a deep and pa.s.sionate pity, for all he was a Boche, and with pity in my heart I turned and went my way.

[Footnote 1: Deleted by censor. J. F.]

But now, wherever I looked were other shapes, that lay in att.i.tudes frightfully contorted, grotesque and awful. Here the battle had raged desperately. I stood in a very charnel-house of dead. From a mound of earth upflung by a bursting sh.e.l.l a clenched fist, weather-bleached and pallid, seemed to threaten me; from another emerged a pair of crossed legs with knees up-drawn, very like the legs of one who dozes gently on a hot day. Hard by, a pair of German knee-boots topped a sh.e.l.l crater, and drawing near, I saw the grey-green breeches, belt and pouches, and beyond--nothing but unspeakable corruption. I started back in horror and stepped on something that yielded underfoot--glanced down and saw a bloated, discoloured face, that, even as I looked, vanished beneath my boot and left a bare and grinning skull.

Once again the faintness seized me, and lifting my head I stared round about me and across the desolation of this h.e.l.lish waste. Far in the distance was the road where men moved to and fro, busy with picks and shovels, and some sang and some whistled and never sound more welcome. Here and there across these innumerable sh.e.l.l holes, solitary figures moved, men, these, who walked heedfully and with heads down-bent. And presently I moved on, but now, like these distant figures, I kept my gaze upon that awful mud lest again I should trample heedlessly on something that had once lived and loved and laughed. And they lay everywhere, here stark and stiff, with no pitiful earth to hide their awful corruption--here again, half buried in slimy mud; more than once my nailed boot uncovered mouldering tunic or things more awful. And as I trod this grisly place my pity grew, and with pity a profound wonder that the world with its so many millions of reasoning minds should permit such things to be, until I remembered that few, even the most imaginative, could realise the true frightfulness of modern men-butchering machinery, and my wonder changed to a pa.s.sionate desire that such things should be recorded and known, if only in some small measure, wherefore it is I write these things.

I wandered on past sh.e.l.l holes, some deep in slime, that held nameless ghastly messes, some a-brim with b.l.o.o.d.y water, until I came where three men lay side by side, their hands upon their levelled rifles. For a moment I had the foolish thought that these men were weary and slept, until, coming near, I saw that these had died by the same sh.e.l.l-burst. Near them lay yet another shape, a mangled heap, one muddy hand yet grasping muddy rifle, while, beneath the other lay the fragment of a sodden letter--probably the last thing those dying eyes had looked upon.

Death in horrible shape was all about me. I saw the work wrought by shrapnel, by gas, and the mangled red havoc of high explosive. I only seemed unreal, like one that walked in a nightmare. Here and there upon this sea of mud rose the twisted wreckage of aeroplanes, and from where I stood I counted five, but as I tramped on and on these five grew to nine. One of these lying upon my way I turned aside to glance at, and stared through a tangle of wires into a pallid thing that had been a face once comely and youthful; the leather jacket had been opened at the neck for the ident.i.ty disc, as I suppose, and glancing lower, I saw that this leather jacket was discoloured, singed, burnt--and below this, a charred and unrecognisable ma.s.s.

Is there a man in the world to-day who, beholding such horrors, would not strive with all his strength to so order things that the h.e.l.l of war should be made impossible henceforth? Therefore, I have recorded in some part what I have seen of war.

So now, all of you who read, I summon you in the name of our common humanity, let us be up and doing. Americans--Anglo-Saxons, let our common blood be a bond of brotherhood between us henceforth, a bond indissoluble. As you have now entered the war, as you are now our allies in deed as in spirit, let this alliance endure hereafter.

Already there is talk of some such League, which, in its might and unity, shall secure humanity against any recurrence of the evils the world now groans under. Here is a n.o.ble purpose, and I conceive it the duty of each one of us, for the sake of those who shall come after, that we should do something to further that which was once looked upon as only an Utopian dream--the universal Brotherhood of Man.

"The flowers o' the forest are a' faded away."

Far and wide they lie, struck down in the flush of manhood, full of the joyous, unconquerable spirit of youth. Who knows what n.o.ble ambitions once were theirs, what splendid works they might not have wrought? Now they lie, each poor, shattered body a ma.s.s of loathsome corruption. Yet that diviner part, that no bullet may slay, no steel rend or mar, has surely entered into the fuller living, for Death is but the gateway into Life and infinite possibilities.

But, upon all who sit immune, upon all whom as yet this bitter war has left untouched, is the blood of these that died in the cause of humanity, the cause of Freedom for us and the generations to come, this blood is upon each one of us--consecrating us to the task they have died to achieve, and it is our solemn duty to see that the wounds they suffered, the deaths they died, have not been, and shall not be, in vain.

XII

FLYING MEN

A few short years ago flying was in its experimental stage; to-day, though man's conquest of the air is yet a dream unrealised, it has developed enormously and to an amazing degree; to-day, flying is one of the chief factors of this world war, both on sea and land. Upon the Western front alone there are thousands upon thousands of aeroplanes--monoplanes and biplanes--of hundreds of different makes and designs, of varying shapes and many sizes. I have seen giants armed with batteries of swivel guns and others mounting veritable cannon. Here are huge bomb-dropping machines with a vast wing spread; solid, steady-flying machines for photographic work, and the light, swift-climbing, double-gunned battle-planes, capable of mounting two thousand feet a minute and attaining a speed of two hundred kilometres. Of these last they are building scores a week at a certain factory I visited just outside Paris, and this factory is but one of many. But the men (or rather, youths) who fly these aerial marvels--it is of these rather than the machines that I would tell, since of the machines I can describe little even if I would; but I have watched them hovering unconcernedly (and quite contemptuous of the barking attention of "Archie") above white shrapnel bursts--fleecy, innocent-seeming puffs of smoke that go by the name of "woolly bears." I have seen them turn and hover and swoop, swift and graceful as great eagles. I have watched master pilots of both armies, English and French, perform soul-shaking gyrations high in air, feats quite impossible hitherto and never attempted until lately. There is now a course of aerial gymnastics which every flier must pa.s.s successfully before he may call himself a "chasing" pilot; and, from what I have observed, it would seem that to become a pilot one must be either all nerve or possess no nerve at all.

Conceive a biplane, thousands of feet aloft, suddenly flinging its nose up and beginning to climb vertically as if intending to loop the loop; conceive of its pausing suddenly and remaining, for perhaps a full minute, poised thus upon its tail--absolutely perpendicular.

Then, the engines switched off, conceive of it falling helplessly, tail first, reversing suddenly and plunging earthwards, spinning giddily round and round very like the helpless flutter of a falling leaf. Then suddenly, the engine roars again, the twisting, fluttering, dead thing becomes instinct with life, rights itself majestically on flashing pinions, swoops down in swift and headlong course, and turning, mounts the wind and soars up and up as light, as graceful, as any bird.

Other nerve-shattering things they do, these soaring young demiG.o.ds of the air, feats so marvellous to such earth-bound ones as myself--feats indeed so wildly daring it would seem no ordinary human could ever hope to attain unto. But in and around Paris and at the front, I have talked with, dined with, and known many of these bird-men, both English, French and American, and have generally found them very human indeed, often shy, generally simple and unaffected, and always modest of their achievements and full of admiration for seamen and soldiers, and heartily glad that their lives are not jeopardised aboard ships, or submarines, or in muddy trenches; which sentiment I have heard fervently expressed--not once, but many times.

Surely the mentality of the flier is beyond poor ordinary understanding!

It was with some such thought in my mind that with my friend N., a well-known American correspondent, I visited one of our flying squadrons at the front. The day was dull and cloudy, and N., deep versed and experienced in flying and matters pertaining thereto, shook doubtful head.

"We shan't see much to-day," he opined, "low visibility--_plafond_ only about a thousand!" Which cryptic sentence, by dint of pertinacious questioning, I found to mean that the clouds were about a thousand feet from earth and that it was misty. "_Plafond_", by the way, is aeronautic for cloud strata. Thus I stood with my gaze lifted heavenward until the Intelligence Officer joined us with a youthful flight-captain, who, having shaken hands, looked up also and stroked a small and very young moustache. And presently he spoke as nearly as I remember on this wise:

"About twelve hundred! Rather rotten weather for our business--expecting some new machines over, too."

"Has your squadron been out lately?" I enquired (I have the gift of enquiry largely developed).

"Rather! Lost four of our chaps yesterday--'Archie' got 'em. Rotten bad luck!"