The Soul of the War Part 13

"That is the way with your British gunners. They are different from the French, who are always best when they are moving forward, but do not like to stay in one position. But when your men have taken up their ground, nothing can move them. Nothing on earth!"

"And yet the German sh.e.l.ls were terrifying. I confess to you that there were times when my nerves were absolutely gone. I crouched down with my men--we were in open formation--and ducked my head at the sound of the bursting 'obus' and trembled in every limb as though I had a fit of ague. G.o.d rebuked me for the bombast with which I had spoken to my men."

"One hears the zip-zip of the bullets, the boom of the great guns, the tang of our sharp French artillery, and in all this infernal experience of noise and stench, the screams of dying horses and men joined with the fury of the gun-fire, and rose shrill above it. No man may boast of his courage. Dear G.o.d, there were moments when I was a coward with all of them!"

"But one gets used to it, as to all things. My ague did not last long.

Soon I was cheering and shouting again. We cleared the enemy out of the village of Bregy, and that was where I fell wounded in the arm pretty badly, by a bit of sh.e.l.l. I bled like a stuck pig, as you can see, but when I came to myself again a brother officer told me that things were going on well, and that we had rolled back the German right.

That was better than a bandage to me. I felt very well again, in spite of my weakness."

"It is the beginning of the end. The Germans are on the run. They are exhausted and demoralized. Their pride has been broken. They are short of ammunition. They know that their plans have failed. Now that we have them on the move nothing will save them. This war is going to finish quicker than people thought. I believe that in a few days the enemy will be broken, and that we shall have nothing more to do than kill them as they fight back in retreat."

That is the story without any re-touching of my own, of the young lieutenant of Zouaves whom I met after the battle of Meaux, with the blood still splashed upon his uniform.

It is a human story, giving the experience of only one individual in a great battle, but clearly enough there emerges from it the truth of that great operation which did irreparable damage to the German right wing in its plan of campaign. The optimism with which this officer ended his tale makes one smile a little now, though in a pitiful way.

The words in which he prophesied a quick finish to the war were spoken in September 1914, before the agony of the winter campaign, the awful monotony of that siege warfare, and the tides of blood that came in the spring of another year.

7

The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony fields strewn already with the debris of fighting, on through villages where they burned arid looted as they pa.s.sed, left a trail of muck and blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on gra.s.s nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight.

Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver. No horrors lurked in the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming undertone of nature's organists. Little French towns stood white on the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest, peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church clocks, without any terror in their hearts. War had been declared, but it seemed remote in its actual cruelty. There was only the faint thrill of unaccustomed drama in the scenes which pa.s.sed through these village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a squadron of light blue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy. It is true that in some of these villages mothers of France had clasped their sons to their bosoms and wept a little over their nestling heads and wept still more in loneliness when the boys had gone away. The shadow of the war had crept into all these villages of France, but outwardly they were still at peace and untroubled by the far-off peril.

Nature was indifferent to the stupid ways of men. Her beauty had the ripeness of the full-blown summer and the somnolence of golden days when the woods are very still in the shimmering heat and not a gra.s.s-blade moves except when a cricket stirs it with its chirruping.

Now, along the line of the retreat, nature itself was fouled and the old dwelling-places of peace were wrecked. Fighting their way back the enemy had burned many villages, or had defended them against a withering fire from the pursuing troops, so that their blackened stumps of timber, and charred, broken walls, with heaps of ashes which were once farmhouses and barns, remained as witnesses of the horror that had pa.s.sed. Along the roadways were the bodies of dead horses. Swarms of flies were black upon them, browsing on their putrefying flesh, from which a stench came poisoning the air and rising above the scent of flowers and the sweet smell of hay in eddying waves of abominable odour. In villages where there had been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramee and Chevreville, the whitewashed cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the German soldiers before they were driven out by sh.e.l.l-fire or bayonet charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house had escaped. It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage. A cafe restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact. Here and there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled over by the hand of a petulant child. In other villages it was difficult to believe that war had pa.s.sed that way. It was rather as though a plague had driven their inhabitants to flight. The houses were still shuttered as when the bourgeoisie and peasant had fled at the first news of the German advance. It was only by the intense solitude and silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation, only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark ma.s.s of unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.

Spent cartridges lay about, and fragments of sh.e.l.l, and here and there sh.e.l.ls which had failed to burst until they buried their nozzles in the earth.

French peasants prowled about for these trophies, though legally they had no right to them, as they came under the penalties attached to loot. In many of the cottages which were used by the German officers there were signs of a hasty evacuation. Capes and leather pouches still lay about on chairs and bedsteads. Half finished letters, written to women in the Fatherland who will never read those words, had been trampled under heel by hurrying boots.

I saw similar scenes in Turkey when the victorious Bulgarians marched after the retreating Turks. I never dreamed then that such scenes would happen in France in the wake of a German retreat. It is a little thing, like one of those unfinished letters from a soldier to his wife, which overwhelms one with pity for all the tragedy of war.

"Meine liebe Frau." Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for the sc.r.a.p of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I picked up in the Forest of Compiegne She would wait week after week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word which would make her say, "Gott sei dank!" as she knelt by the bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last. I found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down that I could only read a word or two in German script. They fluttered about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields.

Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded, by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned villages. Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the effects of sh.e.l.l-fire on living men. I was still groping towards the heart of the business and wandering in its backyards.

I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September.

By that time the enemy's retreat had finished and the German army under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against entrenched positions.

All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines, stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the greatest battles in history had continued.

As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crepy-en-Valois, which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked the air with thunderous reverberations.

Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature--the spirit of these woods and hills--listened with strained ears and a frightened hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague, distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they could not find the range of our own artillery.

Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void s.p.a.ces. These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the marshlands of the Aisne--the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged all pieces in the French or British lines. With that marvellous foresight which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris. The Germans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way back.

I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the guns. My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.

His ordinary profession is that of a garde champetre, or village policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side. With other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to burn the German corpses.

His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield, as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.

I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy's dead who were awaiting their funeral pyres.

My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond the abandoned village of Levignen.

"See there," he said; "they take some time to burn."

He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a gardener pointing to a bonfire of autumn leaves.

But there in line with his forefinger rose a heavy rolling smoke, sluggish in the rain under a leaden sky, and I knew that those leaves yonder had fallen from the great tree of human life, and this bonfire was made from an unnatural harvesting.

The French and British dead were laid in the same graves--"Are they not brothers?" asked the man with the spade--and as soon as the peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth among which I wandered, as heroes' wreaths. But no such honour was paid to the enemy, and with a little petrol and straw they were put to the flames until only their charred ashes, windswept and wet with heavy rain, marked the place of their death.

It is the justice of men. It makes no difference. But as I stood and watched these smoky fires, between the beauty of great woods stretching away to the far hills, and close to a village which seemed a picture of human peace, with its old church-tower and red-brown roofs, I was filled with pity at all this misery and needless death which has flung its horror across the fair fields of France.

What was the sense of it? Why, in G.o.d's name, or the devil's, were men killing each other like this on the fields of France, so that human life was of no more value than that of vermin slaughtered ruthlessly?

Each one of the German corpses whose flesh was roasting under those oily clouds of smoke had been a young man with bright hopes, and a gift of laughter, and some instincts of love in his heart. At least he had two eyes and a nose, and other features common to the brotherhood of man. Was there really the mark of the beast upon him so that he should be killed at sight, without pity? I wondered if in that roasting ma.s.s of human flesh were any of the men who had been kind to me in Germany--the young poet whose wife had plucked roses for me in her garden, and touched them with her lips and said, "Take them to England with my love"; or the big Bavarian professor who had shared his food with me in the hills above Adrianople; or any of the Leipzig students who had clinked gla.s.ses with me in the beer- halls.

It was Germany's guilt--this war. Well, I could not read all the secrets of our Foreign Office for twenty years or more to know with what tact or tactlessness, with what honesty or charity, or with what arrogance or indifference our statesmen had dealt with Germany's claims or Germany's aspirations. But at least I knew, as I watched those smouldering death-fires, that no individual corpse among them could be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and that not a soul hovering above that ma.s.s of meat could be made responsible at the judgment seat of G.o.d. They had obeyed orders, they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed, as we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen, playing one race against another as we play with p.a.w.ns in a game of chess. The old witchcraft was better than this new witchcraft, and not so fraudulent in its power of duping the ignorant ma.s.ses.

My guide had no such sentiment. As he led me through a fringe of forest land he told me his own adventures, and heaped curses upon the enemy.

He had killed one of them with his own hand. As he was walking on the edge of a wood a Solitary Uhlan came riding over the fields, below the crest of a little hill. He was one of the outposts of the strong force in Crepy-en-Valois, and had lost his way to that town. He demanded guidance, and to point his remarks p.r.i.c.ked his lance at the chest of the garde champetre.

But the peasant had been a soldier, and he held a revolver in the side pocket of his jacket. He answered civilly, but shot through his pocket and killed the man at the end of the lance. The Uhlan fell from his horse, and the peasant seized his lance and carbine as souvenirs of a happy moment.

But the moment was brief. A second later and the peasant was sick with fear for what he had done. If it should be discovered that he, a civilian, had killed a German soldier, every living thing in his village would be put to the sword--and among those living things were his wife and little ones.

He dragged his trophies into the forest, and lay in hiding there for two days until the enemy had pa.s.sed.

Afterwards I saw the lance--it reached from the floor to the ceiling of his cottage--and for years to come in the village of Rouville it will be the centre-piece of a thrilling tale.

Other peasants joined my friendly gravedigger, and one of them--the giant of his village--told me of his own escape from death. He was acting as the guide of four British officers through a part of the forest.

Presently they stopped to study their maps; and it was only the guide who saw at the other end of the glade a patrol of German cavalry.

Before he could call out a warning they had unslung their carbines and fired. The British officers fell dead without a cry, and the peasant fell like a dead man also, rolling into a ditch, unwounded but paralysed with fear. They did not bother about him--that little German patrol. They rode off laughing, as though amused with this jest of death.

There have been many jests like that--though I see no mirth in them-- and I could fill this chapter with the stories I have heard of this kind of death coming quite quickly in woods and fields where peasants raised their heads for a moment to find that the enemy was near. It is these isolated episodes among the homesteads of France, and in quiet villages girdled by silent woods, which seemed to reveal the spirit of war more even than the ceaseless fighting on the battle front with its long lists of casualties.

On that Sunday I saw the trail of this great spirit of evil down many roads.

I walked not only among the dead, but, what affected me with a more curious emotion, through villages where a few living people wrung their hands amidst the ruins of their homes.

Even in Crepy-en-Valois, which had suffered less than other towns through which the enemy had pa.s.sed, I saw a wilful, wanton, stupid destruction of men--no worse I think than other men, but with their pa.s.sions let loose and unrestrained. They had entered all the abandoned houses, and had found some evil pleasure in smashing chairs and tables and lampshades and babies' perambulators, and the cheap but precious ornaments of little homes. They had made a pigsty of many a neat little cottage, and it seemed as though an earthquake had heaped everything together into a shapeless, senseless litter. They entered a musical instrument shop, and diverted themselves, naturally enough, with gramophones and mouth-organs and trumpets and violins. But, unnaturally, with just a devilish mirth, they had then smashed all these things into twisted metal and broken strings. In one cottage an old man and woman, among the few inhabitants who remained, told me their story.

They are Alsatians, and speak German, and with the craftiness which accompanies the simplicity of the French peasant, made the most of this lucky chance. Nine German soldiers were quartered upon them, and each man demanded and obtained nine eggs for the meal, which he washed down with the peasant's wine. Afterwards, they stole everything they could find, and with their comrades swept the shops clean of shirts, boots, groceries, and everything they could lay their hands on. They even took the hea.r.s.es out of an undertaker's yard and filled them with loot. Before they left Crepy-en-Valois, they fired deliberately, I was told, upon Red Cross ambulances containing French wounded.

Yet it was curious that the old Alsatian husband who told me some of these things had amus.e.m.e.nt rather than hatred in his voice when he described the German visit before their quick retreat from the advancing British. He cackled with laughter at the remembrance of a moment of craftiness when he crept out of his back door and wrote a German sentence on his front door in white chalk. It was to the effect that the inhabitants of his house were honest folk--gute leute--who were to be left in peace... He laughed in a high old man's treble at this wily trick. He laughed again, until the tears came into his eyes, when he took me to a field where the French and British had blown up 3000 German sh.e.l.ls abandoned by the enemy at the time of their retreat.