Now It Can Be Told Part 27

"But, my dear good fool, what about the French losses? Don't they get killed, too? The German artillery is flogging them with sh.e.l.l-fire from seventeen-inch guns, twelve-inch, nine-inch, every b.l.o.o.d.y 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 man-power 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 G.o.d 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.

"h.e.l.l!... G.o.d 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 sh.e.l.l-fire, 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 2d, 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sault 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 Hebuterne, 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 sh.e.l.l-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 sh.e.l.l-fire, and to every blade of gra.s.s growing rankly round the lips of sh.e.l.l-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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sky-line, 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 'Marmite,'" he said, "but I have escaped so often I have a kind of fatalism."

I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch sh.e.l.ls 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 sledge-hammers.

Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which afterward I pa.s.sed 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. "'Cre nom de Dieu!-my men are not gay to-day. 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 sh.e.l.ling 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 to-day! 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 sand-bags 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 pa.s.sed, with brooding eyes.

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

We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sand-bags 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. To-day 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!")