The Challenge of the Dead Part 5

At dawn therefore parties went over, and whole battalions might have followed them had not the artillery at once set up a barrage. It was found also that sentries on both sides had been ordered to fire. Some obeyed, some did not. One Guards sentry was proud of having fired fifteen rounds. But he did not hit anyone. Meanwhile the troops about Neuve Chapelle and Aubers got across in large bodies. Even on the Guards' front men risked their lives to shake hands. Did not one thus lose his life that morning!

There is a little old cemetery by the side of the road a mile or so from Laventie, and there lie prominently side by side two corporals of the Sixth Black Watch (Newell and Willis) and behind their graves is that of a certain Sergeant Oliver who perished on Christmas Day. A tall rose tree with crimson roses blooming even in the autumn is growing from the earth where he lies. Beside him lies one who was both captain and knight, with only a dock rising from his feet. On all graves are weeds except on that of the man who gave his life to shake hands on Christmas Day.

The winter life of 1915-16 was one of mud and frostbite in the line, and taverns and songs when out. The whole corner of Northern France about Armentieres begot a sort of British character. Not that it was like any district at home. Or that the way of life resembled anything anywhere else at any time. Tommy in the _estaminet_, Tommy with his sing-song in billets, Tommy on the march slogging through the mud--began as it were to belong to France and to the war. He ceased to look like an imported article. He was disposed to be at home, and like Mark Tapley, that most characteristic of English types of men, to be happy even under the most melancholy circ.u.mstances. The soldier, whatever his inward sorrows, often so deep, so poignant, always kept a cheery face and had a devil-may-care smile for whatever came along. Of course he had his grousing fits. But they pa.s.sed. He was most himself when singing. To France he sang all the old songs he ever knew and more besides which he invented. How vulgar, in London how ba.n.a.l were the songs--"vulgar songs which make you cough and blow your nose" as Kipling put it, the seemingly maudlin _Hullo my dearie I want you to-night_ sort of song.

But in France how real, how pa.s.sionate! A group of men stand in the partial shelter of a shattered building crooning together whilst it rains, whilst it pours on the mud outside! In England the words which they sing are sentimental drivel, they are the barrel-organ and its handle turning, but in France they are the voice of a suppressed yearning and suffering--

I ... shall meet you ... to-night, dear-- In my beautee ... ful dream ... land.

And your eyes will be bright, dear, With ... the love light ... that shines for me.

The only place where the soldier could meet her, till there came one of those madly-coveted greedily-s.n.a.t.c.hed moments of leave, when a man dashed, with the mud of the trenches still on him, straight to "Blighty."

There was a curious note of self-pity in many of the sentimental songs, and men gloated over the love of home. The love of mother became warmer in imagination (_Lordy, lordy lordy, how I love her!_); the tenderness of wife and sweetheart became desired in a way which could only be expressed in songs--and in letters, those most precious of all tokens of the war, the letters which men sent from the front to those who loved them. The little English soldier sang his very heart out asking his Lizzie to "keep the kettle boiling," asking anyone and everyone to

Keep the home fires burning Till the boys come home!

Even so, he would not allow himself to get down-hearted or to remain for long in a sentimental mood. The humorous inventive vein came to his a.s.sistance. He did not possess ready-made chansonettes of the French type. The music-hall had not provided them, but he straightway began to invent them to satisfy the need. So sprang into being _Mademoiselle from Armenteers_ which was reputed to have fifty thousand verses--anyone could invent a verse at any moment. So was born _Roll on, my Three_, that soldiers' litany and chorus, _The one-eyed Riley_, and many another burlesque. Then every well-known hymn and popular song had its war parody expressing the soldier's mind in lighter vein---- Some of the parodies of popular songs improved on the originals. Thus--

I wore a tunic, an old khaki tunic, But you wore civilian clothes.

Whilst we were in the trenches You were mashing all the wenches, What a blessing no one knows!

We fought at Loos whilst you scoffed the booze.

on the basis of--

I wore a tulip, a bright yellow tulip, But you wore a red red rose.

was extremely diverting, as was

I've lost my oil-bottle and pull-through, I've lost my four by two.

on the basis of "Love's beautiful garden."

Endless were these songs and parodies now fast receding into limbo.

Where so much was ugly and of the burlesque there was also much that was true and simple and direct, from the heart. Perhaps the most popular song in some regiments was, after all, "Mary." There was no parody of "Mary," and one was always hearing or singing--

The sweetest blossom on the tree Cannot compare with Ma ... ry!

The men lifted the roofs of the taverns with their songs. The war which increased life's suffering tenfold, increased life's music tenfold also.

So the winter was sung through, a winter of rain and snow, with low skies, with mists, mist on land and sea and in the eyes and in the mind, the melancholy interim of 1915-16, where no one understood anything except that there was suffering. Meanwhile however the munition-makers on the home fronts went on manufacturing the stuff of death in ever-increasing appalling vast quant.i.ties.

The Germans were the first to resume the struggle. 1916 presented itself as a year of destiny for Mittel-Europa and world-power. Russia lay low.

Serbia was ravaged even to the sh.o.r.es of Greece. A galvanised Turkey had been raised from death and had driven France and Britain from the gates of the h.e.l.lespont. There remained but one vital enemy--France. Britain would soon compose the war if France were worsted. So now all the might of Prussia was forged into a weapon of a.s.sault, and the weapon was hurled in the centre.

There commenced the terrible manslaughter of Verdun. Irresistible Germany met immovable France, and men by the myriad were sent post-haste to heaven. Between the petty forts of a French city Europe heaped a great pyramid of skulls to the sky. As in Verestchagin's picture, one saw an emblem of war without compromise and without cowardice.

The French stubbornness before Verdun shone out like a miracle. It was an unexpected revelation of French tenacity and corporate strength. A Bismarckian contempt for the Frenchman had almost been the accepted measure of the French in Europe. They were considered degenerate, corrupt, lacking in spirit, loud to boast but quick to run away. The rapidity with which Germany overran France in 1914 had confirmed this opinion, despite the battle of the Marne. But Verdun revealed to Germany a new and terrible France. The whole of the rest of the war, as it were, paused to look on in wonder. France has raised now her memorials at Verdun, but it needs no monument. Verdun is written in iron upon Europe's heart. Dead called to the living there to join them. Verdun was never taken, but it always lured the enemy on--the lodestone of the charnel house.

Rightly understood, the battle of the Somme was not a greater battle than that of Verdun. It was similar; it was our Verdun battle. It also was a "blood-bath" for both sides. It also was a spending of the ammunition which the winter, spring, and summer preparations had brought forth. Tens of thousands of those who sang so light-heartedly through the winter found eternal peace, stretched like lost star-fishes in the Somme mud. From Albert with the Virgin leaning from the church-tower, to within sight of the miserable, hitherto uncoveted, town of Bapaume what a progress! One of the heaviest epics in history, the slowest, most heavy footed of charges! As if each man bore a hundredweight of lead on his feet to keep him back when he would have rushed to gain the day!

Hundreds met their death, not through shot or sh.e.l.l, but by actual drowning in mud. Hundreds were sent back to the rear partially distraught before they got the signal to leap forth to personal attack.

The ma.s.sing of the Somme artillery out-Heroded Herod--the greatest concentration of noise and destruction that the world had known. The greatest strain of the Somme battle was mental, and its greatest effect was no doubt moral. The extent of territory gained was no indication of the true result of the battle. The actual numbers of the dead might have been a greater indication had they not generally been hidden at the time. For the peace-quorum of death was being approached--there was a large advance towards hate's _desirabilia_, the three and a half millions who had to be slain. Men might have taken some comfort from that dreadful thought had they known. But it was theirs to fight and labour on in blindness.

The Somme country was an extension of the British line. As our army doubled, trebled, quadrupled, so it multiplied the extent of France which it defended. From the flats of Flanders and Northern France we gradually progressed to a more diversified country of long ridges and downs, pleasanter in peace but equally terrible in war. As you approach it now by train the cemeteries roll into view on every hand. The dead are as it were drawn up in solid columns to greet you as you pa.s.s, as it were one live man were monarch o'er all the dead. The Army that went to guard the line is still there, still on duty--in Plot A, Plot B, Plot C, Plot Z, of mult.i.tudinous war-cemeteries marked now by map-references.

The dead challenge the living in choruses of silence from broad fields of burial. The hills remain like great mounds in the mist, the same bare ridges of Caesar's wars two thousand years ago, the same o'er which perchance mankind will climb to death as many centuries hence, antediluvian hummocks of old earth, somnolent, green, indifferent. Earth suggests itself constantly as something mightier than man. It is not the prostrate earth of Ypres Salient, but one which war has much less power to sear. Man's habitations and cities topple down, forests are fired away, but the elemental lines and contours of the hills remain unbroken and as it were indifferent both to time and history. These rivers too, by which men name their battles, flow on, flow away without a conscious memory even of a yesterday. The innocence of the Somme, the virginity of the Ancre, these have overcome all hate and blood, and lightly forgotten them.

The Judas trees have leafed afresh upon the banks of Ancre, and every individual leaf is chattering and shivering--because, they say, two thousand years ago the betrayer hanged himself upon an aspen bough. The aspens give voice to the wind, and beside them the little willows are all silent. Tangled wild flowers cling to the river banks, and limpid water pa.s.ses in bright armfuls over green sedgy tresses. On either hand the giant reeds lift their pompous heads. Sh.e.l.l-pits are pits of greenery. Deep brown of sagging rusty wire seems to be the complementary colour of an intense and shadowy green. In the road where the sentry stood guarding the crossing of the rail all is empty now. No dust-covered mud-splashed lorries come blundering and tearing along the high-road any more. There is a silence which is unearthly, as if the composed deep sleep of the dead had conquered the ways of the living.

The little white towns and villages lie splashed in wreckage--without the power to lift themselves again. Your Ville sur Corbie, your Meault with its dirt-choked green strewn with pontoon boats, your Fricourt and Carnoy--all prostrate, inert--they lie on the ground as if sewn to it.

On the left comes into view the triple blackness of the silhouette of Notre Dame at Albert. Trees with the horror of the martyrs on their receding withered hands seem fixed for years in the momentary awfulness of death, menacing, aghast, uprearing. Narrow crooked trenches in disorderly array seem to be hurrying forward, carrying their old wire with them--as if they too had to follow the men they once held. But they pause on the sh.o.r.es of dreadful pools and ponds, dead-horse and dead-men stagnancies that ponder and are still and reflect indifferently the grey sky above and the grey, blasted, shattered timber-bits on either hand.

Oh Albert, what a place of death thou art now, with thy returned children playing hide and seek around the heaps of thy homes. How is it possible to _return_ to this place. It is not a return: no one can ever return to the Albert of 1914. These that we see are revenants come to look at spectral homes. For Albert is dead. There you can realise that a human home is a living being like the woman who made it. It can prosper or decay. It can go shabby and suffer. It can be wounded or maimed--it can be killed. We mercifully hide our dead in Earth's great bosom--but we leave our dead homes long when they lie, in all their horror and terror. There stands a shrunken little house where the tiles have been swept away, the plaster also, and the bare laths of the ceiling are all exposed, but they look like a cap bashed down on the head of a dead man.

Yonder lies a rec.u.mbent habitation with a welter of grey laths and beams on its burst-out side, like the sun-dried ribs of a dead dromedary. Beyond it stands a wall that is left, and then an outraged home with madness fixed in its visage in the moment of death-agony. Here is a house with gutted entrails half congealed and terrible to behold.

There is a house that died simply of shock. But its neighbour _vis-a-vis_ was. .h.i.t by some striding giant with iron fist. Rows of houses are seen cowering, as if they had had their hands up trying to ward off the dreadful fate which stalked above them. Houses lie killed as it were in the action of flight, veritably in the act of treading on one another's heels in a frenzy to get away. There are houses which are abased, houses which have fallen foremost on their faces, houses which have fallen backwards, bottom over top into confusion and debris behind, houses with their sides torn off as men's sides were torn off in the war, exposing for one instant beating hearts. There are houses where simply the life-breath has gone out--dead, blind, empty and desolate.

One can hardly think of the existence once of rooms, the marriage-bedrooms of sweet human honeymoons, the room where the baby slept a baby's untroubled sleep, the children's room where one thinks of a child's cry in the night or a child's lisped prayer before its mother or the crucifix, the room where the home met, the table round which went food and talk and laughter in a common innocence and ignorance of destiny--all gone now in shapeless ruin.

All the houses were the children of Notre Dame--the leaning Virgin who hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the Cathedral-church, and yearned o'er the city. The miracle of her suspense in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder, and the soldiers said the city would never be taken as long as she remained un-shot down from the eminence of the great church.

Alas, Albert had its day of fate and of complete sacrifice ere the war should end--when all should go, yea, Virgin and all, and only Golgotha remain, Golgotha and the Roman soldiers who smote the Master with their spears as He hung from the Cross.

Twilight settles down upon the dead, the twilight of time and misery.

The dreadful reality of destruction becomes more intense and real. After all, sunlight and the noonday do not always show us truth. They are in themselves so full of life and happiness that they divert attention from ruins and death unto themselves. Only in the grey light of afternoon and evening, and looking with the empty eye-socket of night-darkness can one easily apprehend what is spread out here--the last landscape of tens of thousands who lie dead. Hamlet must go to the battlements at the time when the ghost walks. The light of day hides the unseen world, or cannot quite hide it. But there is one moment when the ghost of Albert grows into vision majestically before the eyes. You go out through the primeval jungle of dead weeds, the tripart.i.te crowned heads of brown teasles looking like low-lying spectral regalia of the death-kingdom, past dug-outs and deeps and quagmire, past the prostrate ribaldry and obscenity of war's doings with the earth--to the dark-flowing water which nurses its forgotten secrets, flowing on, flowing on. You wait, and whilst mist chills the marrow the ghostly moment of Albert comes once more. Night has more than heralded itself; it is here in a vast-fronted army and comes onward. Demon-eyes look over the ridges, flash angrily, greedily; the roar of battle thunder bursts up; the gas-sh.e.l.ls cat-calling across the sky fall in showers on the mud; field-guns are advanced to point-blank range--there comes the tide of the war-worn German soldiery of March 1918, war-worn and yet exultant; the English are driven out, the leaning Virgin falls, and the city is given over to the enemy. Albert is dead; even its soul has died. English soldiers will come back in August, recapture it, but not the city they defended so long, not the city of the little Notre Dame leaning pa.s.sionately o'er its life and its defence.

From Albert to Bapaume, from Fricourt by Carnoy and Maricourt to Longueval and Ginchy and Le Transloy, a pleasant day's walk now. There is the incomparable Somme silence, a silence achieved by the tremendous thunderous contrast in history, a silence from the stilled hearts of the dead, a deafness and a muteness. Then when the mist disperses, and the sun lifts his awful radiance o'er the scene, there are audible the lowly orchestras of flies and bees. The rags of horses' skeletons lie on the roadway, and beside a ruined direction-post a clean-picked horse's skull has been placed on the stump of a tree. Lifting one's eyes to the view there rolls forth to the horizon vast moors empurpled here and there and with gashes of white on wan green wastes. An organised tour by car whirls past upon the road raising phantom hosts of white dust. It will do the whole Somme campaign in an hour and bring up safely at some French hotel where hot lunch and foaming beer persuade the living that life is still worth while. There was once a picture in _Simplicissimus_ of a Cook's guide showing a human skull to some tourists--

"This, sir," said he, "was a young man."

It was meant for irony. But surely it is good for everyone who talks of war to go and get that thought--_this was a young man_. It does not matter that tourists whirl past without pause in a car. Let each and everyone come and dip a corner of a handkerchief in the blood of the war--for remembrance. Come to the sacrament of the young man's blood which was shed instead of yours.

The road you traverse to the Somme altar is the road which hundreds of thousands of young men trod, marching to moments of destiny, moments of victory; the Manchesters to Montauban, South Africans to Delville, Royal Scots to Guillemont, the Guards to Les Boeufs, the Durham Light Infantry to the b.u.t.te of Warlencourt, the 47th Londons to Eaucourt l'Abbaye--and many others; they marched from the quiet places of the homeland and the empire, from Loos, from Laventie, from Flanders; defenders of Ypres and defenders of Arras, marching with their drums, marching with their bayonets, to Britain's quarrel and her mightiest enemy. Behind them were ranged the guns, and in front of them was Prussia. Now the desolation of Nature alone suggests what a desolation there was of men. The terrible woods are impressionist pictures of the ruined vitals of great regiments, and you can hold a forest in your mind as you would a skull in your hands and say--_This was a forest._ _This was an army._

The generality of men and women however will not do that. The new-born generations mask their grief, and you will see if you walk into Bernafay Wood that a young Bernafay Wood is rising midst the dead masts of the old--self-sown. It will grow higher every year till the old is hidden.

The masts will fall, will rot, will recede from this bright sunlight, and relapse into the shade which the new trees will give them, and then soon all will be forgotten. Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything.

The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich in their ma.s.ses of brown-stained wood, will pa.s.s. They will first be re-set-up in stone. 1921 will see them rolling out in new stone crosses, at first startlingly pallid and virginal, but as the months go on, getting gradually greyened and darkened, rain-washed, wind-blown, then falling a little from the straight. Flowers will bloom as new summers shine o'er the dead. Visitors will come. There will be a greater time of visiting the cemeteries and the battlefields than there yet has been.

Gardeners will be conscientious, and then some less conscientious as the years roll by and visitors become less. Most of the cemeteries in the more obscure places will be half-forgotten and gone desolate. There must come a time when no more visit the burial-places of the great war than visit now the cemeteries of the Crimea. In 1914 the great cemetery above Sevastopol, kept by a German gardener, had become from a national point of view utterly unvisited and forgotten. A roll used to be kept there of the visitors who came in their hundreds after the Crimean war was over, dwindling to a score a year and then to less than ten, and then to twos and threes and ones. The living who survived the Crimea do not need to go to Russia now, for they have joined the dead long since.

So it will be with us; we shall join the authentic dead, and the young ones will have forgotten whilst chattering of some other war.

Meanwhile look reverently at the graves of the men of the 32nd A.I.F., with little rising suns adorning the centre-posts of their crosses! See where lies Capt. Claude with his high memorial, or Private Harry who carried out an equal sacrifice with him.

Rusty old cans on ten-foot poles mark the limits of the burial-ground, and a notice says "Cemetery closed" as one might read outside a theatre at night--"Pit full" "Gallery full" "Stalls full." On the hillside above, sounds the laughter of men and the clatter of spades where a new acre of G.o.d is being dug, the foundations of a new theatre being laid.

Here French Negroes, Flemings, and French peasants are at work under the guidance of British soldiers. Occasionally a car rushes up through the dust and a couple of British officers come forward to see how things are going on.

Pa.s.sing on to Longueval you see the masts of Longueval Wood, but before you come to it there stands now at the cross-roads a "cafe-restaurant,"

an unpainted wooden hut. Here with the sun streaming full on their faces sit two Falstaffian wights with bottles labelled Malaga between them and gla.s.ses full. On their dewy red chins and necks there are three or four folds of flesh; red veins run down their necks like gutters at the side of a house. They hold hands and sing and make everyone in the tavern laugh--then swallow--swallow--swallow, the wine rolls down their exuberant gullets.