The Challenge of the Dead Part 6

Suddenly there is a note of warning in the restaurant, whisperings about _l'officier_, to make it appear as if the men were drinking beer, the woman comes and takes the wine-bottles and pours their contents into metal tankards, sweeps the table clean of wine driblets, and reprimands the topers.

They pull themselves together and take on a sobered gait. One of them opens a sand-bag in his possession and brings out two enormous doorsteps of bread and b.u.t.ter. Silence reigns. There is a suspense. Someone evidently is expected. Will it be a dapper, constrained, politely inquisitive British officer? Hardly! Ah, here he is! Enter fiery British sergeant-major with bristling moustache and bright crown on his sleeve, stout, smart, and red.

"Na then," says he, darting upon the Falstaffs, "play the game, play the bloomin' game. Come on, travai in the cemetery. Officeer come, no bon pour moy, bon pour vous, no bon pour moy. Com' on now or I'll jolly well have to shift yer. The Belgiques and the Algerians know all about yer.

It's all over the place."

"Ca ne fait rien."

"Ca-ne-fait-rien pour vous but not pour moy. Officeer bocu fache avec moy. You no catch it, I catch it, compris?"

One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.

"Yers I know," says the sergeant-major indignantly. "Moy zig-zag las'

night. But n-no zig-zag to-day."

They offer him their gla.s.ses--apparently of beer. He sips one and then drains it, and then drains the other one too.

"Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others," he continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.

"Na then," says he. "Quick March to the cemetery!" And they go.

How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the living!

The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn sunshine the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some sh.o.r.es when a neap-tide leaves them bare.

Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. The _sinistres_ of the Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits, levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their little petrol-ploughs. The sh.e.l.l-splashed approaches to the line can with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real worship bending over _la France_ and he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred times what he has already done--and he will do it. A hundredth part of the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and rise on full fleshy stalks, and they are thick like a wall. They grow from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible yet, though not so terrible if still impa.s.sable. You see gleaming above the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross shining afar and make it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some ship to a white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a conventional scribble on the moor--the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out on to a limy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the returned peasants making _sauter les abris_ with dynamite, and then the eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from the centre of a large tableland. It is the b.u.t.te of Warlencourt, for the possession and retention of which what quant.i.ties of blood were shed, the famous b.u.t.te which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs.

Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light Infantry--to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf.

Regt. 159 who held the b.u.t.te against all comers in 1916 and recaptured it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their monument a concrete base. From the top of the b.u.t.te there is a complete circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods, wrecks of villages--a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the great Somme scene.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from Albert runs smooth and level below the b.u.t.te, a track for s.p.a.ce-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness of the ma.s.sed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorials of the German dead--Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short of it--like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of 1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front; rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to superintend a burying party--some three hundred sodden green bundles to be disposed of--three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find "the everlasting arms." He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the war-bred cynicism of those who believed in letting _others_ be heroic.

He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in "putting his back into it," and doing even the meanest duty as if it were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men.

He was so energetic in the football field playing officers versus sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his grave at C---- and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males, _entre eux_, a "man's man." Poor hero--from that night of burying green bundles to that morning when we buried him--he marched through the valley of the shadow of death, tormented as Pilgrim was by hobgoblins and satyrs. But when he died he shed his war body, he shed that lurid phraseology, and became once more, no doubt, the Kingsley-Carlylean hero that he was, with some sort of knowledge of human sorrow which those who lived in peace knew not. So it must have been also with those who once breathed within the sodden green bundles. They shook off something evil when they died, but in pa.s.sing through it they must somehow have understood more.

Sorrow dimmed the eyes even of the hardest swearer of the Army. And the dead now constrain us to a new human tenderness, they empower us to touch more delicately and to understand more deeply--to love more. Pity for us if we do not now live differently because of the dead!

Thus as one walks through Bapaume and sees the children of new Bapaume playing in their innocence in the streets and the ruins, one can look down on them more tenderly, more caressingly, for the sake of the dead, pa.s.sing on, as it were, man's forgiveness to man. And in our relationships with the grown-ups, our neighbours, ourselves dressed differently, we can have more patience, more compa.s.sion, more readiness to help and to be kind. It comes from the dead, it comes from the living who were dead.

What that winter was before the Germans retreated! What the hours on the Cross were before the Saviour died! In our loathing of pain we shudder to think of it. Others bore it; we must bear it. And when the time is pa.s.sed Golgotha remains, that Golgotha which was in fact so near to the gate of the Temple itself. In Bapaume, where all houses have been made vaults, stand the white ruins of a church, greyish-white and spectral as if of the material of another world. But for its pointing walls it is one white ruin, loveliness in a heap and the baleful shadow of the hand of the malefactor. In the ruins of the church of the leaning Virgin at Albert the first words one reads are JESUS NATUS EST, as if the ruins had been given tongue to say in the moment of death the supreme Christian paradox, and at Bapaume as you reverently approach this strange new _Pieta_ you see still unshattered the Church's Latin carved on stone--AD MEUM SANCTUARIUM--to My sanctuary. If, like Thomas, you do not believe, you must go forth and touch with your hands and feel with your eyes--to My sanctuary!

Bapaume lies more abased even than Albert. It is as if its stones had had a soul and been afraid, vibrant with the horror of humanity. The consternation of inanimate matter is expressed in its ruins. The Hotel de Ville, its seat of power, was evidently built of large granite blocks which the rising German mine of March 1917 must have scattered like hail over the town. And amidst these mighty stones flew the tender bodies and the spirits of the French deputes, Albert Taillandier and Raoul Briquet, who had just said in their hearts--_The enemy hath departed_, when the enemy was suddenly at their doors.

The _sinistres_ are living in cellars and wooden huts. The railway-station is two "baby elephants" of rusty iron. Where were large shops and as one can imagine, in the old days, shop-fronts full of ladies' costumes and hats, windows displaying bedroom suites of furniture, windows full of stationery and books, are now diminutive piles of rubbish pathetically ticketed with the name of the old establishment--Maison Betrancourt, Maison this, Maison that--_transferee a un autre lieu_. In the Grande Place stands the much-shrapnelled base of a monument where the stone hero has gone to join the hero he commemorated, and the spite of a new era has even endeavoured to erase his name.

Where thousands lived and loved and pushed their trade and died, now but a few hundred hold together in the midst of the wilderness. They have a.s.sembled from all points of the compa.s.s. War whirled some to Germany, some to Paris, some to the Pyrenees. The hopeful came back and the faithful decided to stay. It is a picture of human triumph over destruction, but only a pathetic triumph, not a glorious one. In the summer, with long days and warm nights it is less unnatural to live in this waste. Warmth and light join the _sinistres_ to all France and Europe, but winter with its short days and cold and great darkness folds away the vision of a resurrection. A poky train, without lights, creeps at night from Achiet to Bapaume through villages of fearful name.

Bapaume becomes conscious of all the dreadful places which surround it, places whose names are full of the awe of death and of the war--Riencourt, Bullecourt, Ervillers, Mory, Vaulx-Vraucourt, and a hundred others, nothing in themselves but held in the cerements of the dead.

It is a strange walk now, to the Hindenburg line. You are traversing ground which was four times overtrodden and overfought. The Germans took it in 1914. We sh.e.l.led it in 1916 and drove the enemy out in 1917. The enemy swept over it in March 1918 and then let it go as he retired in September. German, French, and British lie buried beside one another.

The Germans lost their dead and then recaptured them. It is an appalling country, still as it were sulphurous with the war, stinking vaguely of cordite. The dead have got a grip on it, and hold with their hands the lap of earth which the peasants are ploughing. The air which is apt to sparkle in autumn frost is full of the light of the eyes of the men who once lived. And that light rests about the broken barns and billets and churches and halls. There is an influence which is pulling one way all the time, and that is not towards this world.

The graveyards are many, and they have their history. It always seems a pity that it was not allowed during the war to make mention on the cross how and where each soldier met his death. The military mind imagined that such details might give information to the enemy or to the Press, and forbade anything beyond name, number, and regiment. Texts also were prohibited, the chaplains being over-ruled. Not that texts could entirely be kept out. In one of the cemeteries near Bapaume there stands for the time being a large wooden cross inscribed "He is not here; he is risen," which has an astonishing effect amidst a thousand crosses which are dumb.

There are many many rows of human bodies planted out near Vaulx-Vraucourt, first a German cemetery with its old crosses torn to bits, partly no doubt by sh.e.l.ls; and then side by side a regular British cemetery where lie many Australians, one of whom, Lieut. Pidgeon (aged 23) has a little figure of Christ riven from a crucifix stuck in the earth beside his wooden cross. Here lie also many of the Leeds Rifles, seven even in one grave, killed evidently in the terrible encounter with the German machine-gunners in September '18. The German memorials go more into decay each day, but a man is paid to keep the British bright and clean and in repair, and his dog bites at the heels of the pilgrim as he walks from the dead to the dead. Facing both are the gaunt white ruins of the village church and the hideous smas.h.a.ge of the French communal cemetery, and there the people have put artificial roses in old rusty sh.e.l.l-cases in front of their stricken memorials.

Further on, beside the light railway which runs north to Ecoust, there are tiny cemeteries. In one of these Germans and British are mingled, thus--Gefreiter Luckenmeyer of the German Field artillery betwixt a man of the Londons and a man of the Devons, and a German unknown and a British Tommy lie in a little plot together by themselves. In some cemeteries the bodies of our foes were buried just outside those of our own kindred, but as exhumed bodies were brought in, ever increasingly, it has come about that we have surrounded German graves with our own, and as it were accidentally forgiven our enemies and received them into the midst of the family.

Over the way at Vraucourt Copse, perched high in a sun-kissed wheatfield lies Lieut. A. S. Robinson of the Royal Scots, with 22 private soldiers'

names inscribed on his cross. One wondered if it would be true to say--"Here he lies where he longed to be" and did he love Stevenson and often quote

Under the wide and starry sky Dig my grave and let me lie.

These Royal Scots have the widest of all starry skies above them and the unbarred gate of heaven in its midst.

A little further still and you have the Australian cemetery at Noreuil at the corner of the road, rectilinear, handsome, clean and cared-for, neatly fenced in with wire and having a little white gate by which to enter. But outside the cemetery and as it were falling back in every att.i.tude of banishment and despair, the old faded wood and broken crosses of the Germans, overgrown with weeds, crazy-roofed crosses, aslant, tumbled. In 1916 the enemy began to bury here. In 1917 he left his dead behind. In 1918 he recaptured them and repaired the crosses--and added to them. In 1918 it was a decent graveyard; one could read the names of all the dead. But their kindred went away and forgot.

Their crosses are the monuments of the forgotten and the vague memorial of a useless sacrifice.

Doubtless the drama of the penultimate year 1917 did not centre in the supra-Somme country. Its scenes of action were at Lens and Vimy, at Pilkelm Ridge and Pa.s.schendaele. The year which ran on from the German retirement was the strangest of the war, promising everything, fulfilling nothing, beginning with Haig's victory interview and ending with the failures in Flanders and the German break-through from Cambrai.

It was the year of American self-announcement, of the Russian revolution, of the pros and contras of peace at Stockholm, of the victory of the Bolsheviks, of the Italian debacle. Germany seemed to grow stronger all the year, and the morale of the Allies waned. Men no longer betted one another that it would be all over by Christmas. Lord Grey's supposed prediction was forgotten. The whisper went abroad that "it might last a lifetime," and then in mock cynicism, _They say the first seven years will be the worst_. New units. .h.i.therto untried in the war still made their appearance, whole battalions whose war-history commences with the conflicts about Lens or the battles for Pa.s.schendaele Ridge. The Derby drafts were reputed to come marching to the strains of "The Church's One Foundation" singing their own confession--

We are Lord Derby's Army Just come across the sea.

We cannot march, we cannot shoot, What bloomin' good are we?

And the old army said "Where have you been this long while?" The conscripts however were to follow in even more desperate case, and when they first reached France and their tender feet struck the cobbled roadways they sang--not a hymn, but a new version of "Auld Lang Syne"--

We're here because we're here, Because we're here, because we're here, We're here because we're here, Because we're here, because we're here.

"Take me back to dear old Blighty!" was the song of the whole army and had completely displaced Tipperary.

No doubt owing to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line the Allied plan of attack for the summer had been foiled. All the machinery of a.s.sault had been arranged for a stubborn and dreadful prolongation of the Somme battle between the horizons where winter had halted it. The greatest concentration of guns which the war had seen had to be liquidated. New gun-positions had to be dug and a new concentration achieved. Telephone and telegraph had to be brought up to a new line.

Organisation work which would ordinarily have been accomplished in the quiet winter months had to be done through the campaigning season of Spring and Summer. Men looked less seriously on the war, though the war was not less serious for them. Witness the sinister stare of the Lens country which knew the 1917 army and has looked on terrible things. We made Lens in 1917 into a narrow deep pocket full of Germans. The taking of it was confidently antic.i.p.ated. Fleet Street wanted it to serve on a platter to Herod. But it could not be had though thousands died for it.

The enemy held it by miracle. It was impossible to hold such a position but the impossible held.

Grey and terrible is Vimy Ridge with its line of block-houses and the masts of Farbus Wood. Looking outward from Vimy o'er the vast Arras war-scape the eye is sick and returns in vision to itself as the dove returned to the Ark when it found no other mercy of the Lord above misery's tide.

Praise G.o.d the enemy could not do to Arras what we did to Lens! Arras still lives, surmounting the grandeur of her ruins. The Cathedral with the top of its ma.s.sive tower gnawn off by Fate is to be preserved for ever as a memorial of these days. You can climb from the gra.s.s-grown rubble below to mountains of lime and broken stone and reach a high eminence against the pinky-grey fissured wall of the tower. It is sunset, and you look down upon widespread recuperative Arras standing in pink haze into which smoky air or fog is pouring. The houses are grey or splotchy with their shrapnel marks still on them, but there are others which are red and white, and these stand gaping with empty gla.s.sless windows. You look on spangling new red roofs, you look on Noah's Arks, you look on half-consumed unsupported walls, you look on shadows which are pits where houses were. On the one hand is the lofty ma.s.siveness of the Episcopal Palace--on the other the irrecoverable smash of poor men's homes. From all this great city below, pious men and women used to come to the Cathedral--but now no more shall they come.

You step down from the height, and cross the cobbled immensity of the Cathedral Square. Every shop all the four sides has the same facade above, the same porticos below, and from grimy and broken windows four hundred ruined wizened houses stare. Then night has come. G.o.d has called away the redness and left the murk. You turn and see the mountain of G.o.d's house. There is no tint of rose in the grey walls now, no petty detail of ruin, but one general effect. The Cathedral tower is a great black ma.s.s. It is suffering made supreme and dominant, the shadow of a mediaeval Christ on the Cross. It is a romantic but dreadful pointer full of terror and power. Men creep diminutively across the vast and shoppy square, and the great feudal shadow above them makes them smaller yet.

All night the shadow reigns, becoming even mightier in the moonlight, and crowning itself with starry diadem. But there come the mists of the morning and then morn itself, and you may stand where now no longer Ma.s.s is heard--on the East side of the Cathedral, and see the white light of heaven streaming through gossamer and driving out pale silhouettes of the shadows of all the bleared houses of the Square. There are pale peaked shadows of all the facades which face the Cathedral. Over your head sounds the rush of dove's wings. Men and women everywhere are moving; men with their tools and women with their baskets. The life of the city goes on, but the dream of the ruin has fallen back into the night and limbo, and will not be recovered till the stars come again.

The city of Arras was the pilot city of the British in 1917. All Flanders looked to her from the left, all France from the right. And in '18 when the tide of Fortune changed she was our bulwark of defence and was right in the fighting line like a Coeur de Lion with battle-axe at Acre. Our mighty city of coal and steel in England has chosen specially to identify itself with Arras--Newcastle-on-Tyne--and Arras has many English sons. It is no doubt natural to say that Newcastle has adopted Arras, as we might say of a converted man that he had taken Christ to himself, but the deeper truth is that Arras has adopted Newcastle--"Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you."

The British victories at Arras and the French victories above Verdun were of happy augury. But no victory is a victory unless followed by a victory, and Time itself wilts laurels. Haig's dream of striking the enemy hard and often, leaving no time to recover from a blow at one point before calamity fell upon him at another, proved only a dream. The German invention of mustard gas and the appearance of many hostile tanks upon the scene were examples of the unforeseen. Very efficient tank-guns and studied methods of attack upon tanks reduced the usefulness of our new war-engine to comparatively low terms. In the late summer we embarked on a new campaign in Flanders, and our best weapon was a still boundless belief in our ability to "beat the Hun" whom, mentally, in every possible way, the army under-rated. The Hun, so-called, suffered nothing like so much as our fellows. He would not have stood so much.

And of all war-struggles, that which sank at last to rest in the wilderness of Poelcapelle and Pa.s.schendaele in the November of the year seemed the most hopeless.

Much of the main interest of humanity was transferred from the strife at the front to other scenes of action. 1917 was an air and water year, a submarine year, a Gotha year. London was terrified by day by wonderful almost invisible planes which ravaged East-end schools and caused the exodus from Whitechapel to Brighton. Daylight raids were followed by starlight raids, and although the papers of the time laughed at such affairs and said we liked them, there is no need to keep up that deception now. London suffered in mind excruciatingly.