My Year of the War Part 32

We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said, France would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten, just as the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell were clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had more money than they knew what to do with--as Europeans universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution--and if they would lend the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany was surely beaten.

A busy man, the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge.

These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great, conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the pain de menage that the baker sold. So the peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.

One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual.

But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own--their soldiers of France!

When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pa.s.s you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at the British front who wears the wreath-circled crossed batons of a field-marshal.

It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander, though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when the trench-line remains stationary. He goes here and there on inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They suddenly recognized in a figure coming through an opening in a hedge the supreme head of the British army in France. No need of a call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those crossed batons represented a dizzy alt.i.tude to that battery which had just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking over men and guns after their nine months' drill at home, and said, "Very good!" and was away to other inspections where he might not necessarily say, "Very good!"

Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was enough. It was the last of such platforms erected for him.

"Inspections! They are second nature to us!" said a new army man.

"We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the general's own fault if it isn't found out. When a general is not inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting."

Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing twenty men and one officer, for this is chalked on .the door. Before they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of their voices is pleasant.

A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on the sleeve. The sergeant-major was an old regular, the knowing back-bone of the battalion, who had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were hoping that Jones or Smith hadn't got some dust in his rifle-barrel at the last moment.

Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all cla.s.ses. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road.

Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the other an architect. They were "bunkies," pals, chums.

"When did you enlist?" I asked.

"In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was our duty, then; but we've been a long time arriving."

"How do you like it?"

"We are not yet masters of the language, we find," said the schoolmaster, "though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it."

"I'm learning the gestures fast, though," said the architect.

"The French are glad to see us," said the schoolmaster. "They call us the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming.

But now we are here, I think they will find that we can keep up our end."

They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor work. There was something engaging in their boyishness and their views. For they had a wider range of interests than that professional soldier, Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew what trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.

"Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never are," said the schoolmaster.

"We ought to be well grounded in the principles," said the architect thoughtfully, "and they say that in a week or two of actual experience you will have mastered the details that could not be taught in England. Then, too, having sh.e.l.ls burst around you will be strange at first. But I think our battalion will give a good account of itself, sir.

All the Bucks men have!" There crept in the pride of regiment, of locality, which is so characteristically Anglo-Saxon.

They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming--a millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for serving his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and the schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war they had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army, which had not become trench stale, could not have a free s.p.a.ce in which to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go against that solid battle front from Switzerland to the North Sea.

We have heard enough--quite enough for most of us?--about the German Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army in France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk smoking a brier-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather not accompany him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He makes regular reports of his observations, and he has opportunities for learning which other subalterns lack, for he may have both the staff and the army as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of any other subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British Const.i.tution which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to learn, is Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the willing prince.

This was one of the sh.e.l.ls that hit--one of the hundred that hit. The time was summer; the place, the La Ba.s.see region. Probably the fighting was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When you cannot see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping sh.e.l.ls into the area which he occupies; you take no risks with him.

The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La Ba.s.see region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading in the gra.s.s. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That "hot corner" is all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while shrapnel trims the hedges.

A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which had escaped destruction by sh.e.l.ls, and above the door was chalked some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was only natural when you have been as close as they had to a sh.e.l.l- burst--a sh.e.l.l that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this effect.

A third man was the best ill.u.s.tration of sh.e.l.l-destructiveness. Bullets make only holes. Sh.e.l.ls make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak, with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would have been killed instantly. He was also an ill.u.s.tration of how hard it is to kill a man even with several sh.e.l.l-fragments, unless some of them strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten the German sh.e.l.l, after all.

Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot- soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at the estaminet by the st.u.r.dy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.

Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance pa.s.sed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the sh.e.l.l-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house--taken without a jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers--for any re- dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey, with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England the next night.

It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a great city.

XXVI Finding The Grand Fleet

Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts.

But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week; more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. The transition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea, in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy behind the curtains for forty years.

At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we pa.s.sed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a scattered sprinkling among the dim ma.s.ses of the hills. A man might have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.

The Frenchmen of our party--M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign Minister, M. Rene Bazin, of the Academie Francaise, M. Joseph Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri Ponsot--who had never been in Scotland before, were on the look out for a civilian Scots in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find a single one.

This night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be moving about in England under the guise of c.o.c.kney or of Lancashire dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotsman at heart.

The officer of the Royal Navy who was in the car with me confessed to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations' bred burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries to block the road.

After an hour's run inland, as the car rose over a ridge and descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving fringes of foam along the irregular sh.o.r.e cut by the indentations of the firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy scouts on patrol.

"They have done remarkably well, these boys!" said the officer. "Our fears that, boy like, they would see all kinds of things which didn't exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their experience will be a precious memory. They realize that it isn't play, but a serious business, and act accordingly."

With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red twinkles of warning.

"The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!" said one obdurate sentry.

We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to anyone at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that our chauffeur could produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee.

Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of- factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie's time.

"Captain R------, of the Royal Navy!" explained the officer, introducing himself.

"I'll take your name and address!" said the sentry.