The Soul of the War Part 16

There was an old chateau near Huiron in which a n.o.ble family of France had lived through centuries of war and revolution. It had many pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great yesterday of history. When I pa.s.sed it, after the Germans had gone that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion.

A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the chateau of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed, murderously, by outrageous hands.

In one of these villages of Champagne--I think it was at Blesmes--I saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow, G.o.d knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this place of desolation.

It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully, falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin. While the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet. The children of many generations had dabbled their hands in its basin. Pretty girls had peeped into their own bright eyes mirrored there. On summer days the village folk had sauntered about this symbol of grace and beauty.

Now it was as though I had discovered a white Venus in the dust- heap of a burying-place.

12

The great horror of Invasion did not reach only a few villages in France and blanch the hair of only a few poor women. During the long months of this stationary war there was a long black line on all the maps, printed day after day with depressing repet.i.tion in all the newspapers of the world. But I wonder how many people understood the meaning of that black line marking the length of the German front through France, and saw in their mind's eye the blackness of all those burnt and shattered villages, for ten miles in width, on that border-line of the war trail? I wonder how many people, searching for news of heroic bayonet charges or for thrilling stories of how Private John Smith kept an army corps at bay, single-handed, with a smile on his face, saw even faintly and from afar the flight of all the fugitives from that stricken zone, the terror of women and children trapped in its h.e.l.l-fire, and the hideous obscenity of that long track across the fields of France, where dead bodies lay rotting in the rain and sun and the homesteads of a simple people lay in heaps from Artois to Lorraine?

Along the valley of the Aisne and of the Vesle the spirit of destruction established its kingdom. It was a valley of death. In the official reports only a few villages were mentioned by name, according to their strategical importance, but there were hundreds of hamlets, unrecorded in dispatches, which were struck by death and became the charnel-houses of bones and ruins.

In the single district of Vie-sur-Aisne, the little communities of Saconin, Pernant, Ambleny, and Ressons--beautiful spots in old days of peace, where Nature displayed all her graciousness along the winding river and where Time itself seemed to slumber--French soldiers stared upon broken roofs, shattered walls, and trampled gardens, upon the twisted iron of ploughs and the broken woodwork of farmers' carts, and all the litter of war's ruthless damage. Week after week, turn and turn about, German, French, and British sh.e.l.ls crashed over these places, making dust and ashes of them.

Peasants who clung to their cots, hid in their cellars and at last fled, described all this in a sentence or two when I questioned them. They had no grievance even against fate--their own misery was swallowed up in that of their neighbours; each family knew a worse case than its own, and so, with a shake of the head, they said there were many who suffered these things.

Shopkeepers and peasants of Celles, of Conde, of Attichy, along the way to Berry-au-Bac and from Billy to Sermoise, all those who have now fled from the Valley of the Vesle and the valley of the Aisne had just the same story to tell--monotonous, yet awful because of its tragedy. It was their fate to be along the line of death. One old fellow who came from Vailly had lived for two months in a continual cannonade. He had seen his little town taken and retaken ten times in turn by the French and the Germans.

When I heard of this eye-witness I thought: "Here is a man who has a marvellous story to tell. If all he has seen, all the horrors and heroism of great engagements were written down, just as he describes them in his peasant speech, it would make an historic doc.u.ment to be read by future generations."

But what did he answer to eager questions about his experience? He was hard of hearing and, with a hand making a cup for his right ear, stared at me a little dazed. He said at last, "It was difficult to get to sleep."

That was all he had to say about it, and many of these peasants were like him, repeating some trivial detail of their experience, the loss of a dog or the damage to an old teapot, as though that eclipsed all other suffering. But little by little, if one had the patience, one could get wider glimpses of the truth. Another old man from the village of Soupir told a more vivid tale. His dwelling-place sheltered some of the Germans when they traversed the district. The inhabitants of Soupir, he said, were divided into two groups. Able-bodied prisoners were sent off to Germany, and women and children who were carried off in the retreat were afterwards allowed to go back, but not until several poor little creatures had been killed, and pretty girls subjected to gross indignities by brutal soldiers. Upon entering Soupir the French troops found in cellars where they had concealed themselves thirty people who had gone raving mad and who cried and pleaded to remain so that they could still hear the sh.e.l.ls and gibber at death.

"War is so bracing to a nation," says the philosopher. "War purges peoples of their vanities." If there is a devil--and there must be many old-time sceptics who believe now not in one but in a hundred thousand devils--how the old rogue must chuckle at such words!

13

It was astounding to any student of psychology wandering in the war zone to see how many of the peasants of France clung to their houses, in spite of all their terror of German sh.e.l.ls and German soldiers. When in the first month of 1915 the enemy suddenly swarmed over the ridges of Cuffies and Crouy, to the north of Soissons, and with overwhelming numbers smashed the French back across the Aisne at a time, when the rising of the river had broken many pontoon bridges, so that the way of escape was almost cut off, they drove out crowds of peasant folk who had remained along this fifteen miles of front until actually sh.e.l.led out in that last attack which put the ruins of their houses into the hands of the Germans. As long as three months before Crouy itself had been a target for the enemy's guns, so that hardly a cottage was standing with solid walls.

Nevertheless, with that homing instinct which is the strongest emotion in the heart of the French peasant, many of the inhabitants had been living an underground life in their cellars, obtaining food from French soldiers and cowering close together as sh.e.l.ls came shrieking overhead, and as the shattered buildings collapsed into greater ruin.

So it was in Rheims and Arras and other towns which were not spared in spite of the glories of an architecture which can never be rebuilt in beauty. Only a few days before writing these lines, I stood on the edge of the greatest battlefield in France and from an observation post perched like an eyrie in a tree above the valley, looked across to the cathedral of Rheims, that shrine of history, where the bones of kings lie, and where every stone speaks of saints and heroes and a thousand years of worship. The German sh.e.l.ls were still falling about it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke.

For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war.

Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary sh.e.l.ls and monstrous marmites had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two, always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. Nevertheless, there were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not leave their city. They lived in cellars, into which they had dragged their beds and stores, and when the sh.e.l.l fire slackened they emerged, came out into the light of day, looked around at the new damage, and went about their daily business until cleared underground again by another storm of death. There were two old ladies with an elderly daughter who used to sit at table in the salle-a-manger of a hotel in Paris a week or two ago. I saw them arrive one day, and watched the placid faces of these stately old dames in black silk with little lace caps on their white hair. It was hardly possible to believe that for three months they had lived in a cellar at Rheims, listening through the day and night to the cannonading of the city, and to the rushing of the sh.e.l.ls above their own house.

Yet I think that even in a cellar those old women of France preserved their dignity, and in spite of dirty hands (for water was very scarce) ate their meagre rations with a stately grace.

14

More miserable and less armed with courage were the people of France who lived in cities held by the enemy and secure from sh.e.l.l- fire--in Lille, and St. Quentin, and other towns of the North, where the Germans paraded in their pointed casques. For the most part in these great centres of population the enemy behaved well. Order was maintained among the soldiers with ruthless severity by German officers in high command. There were none of the wild and obscene acts which disgraced the German army in its first advance to and its retreat from the Marne. No torch bearers and tablet scatterers were let loose in the streets. On the contrary any German soldier misbehaving himself by looting, raping, or drunken beastliness found a quick death against a white wall. But to the French citizens it was a daily agony to see those crowds of hostile troops in their streets and houses, to listen to their German speech, to obey the orders of generals who had fought their way through Northern France across the bodies of French soldiers, smashing, burning, killing along the b.l.o.o.d.y track of war. These citizens of the captured soil of France knew bitterness of invasion more poignantly than those who hid in cellars under sh.e.l.l-fire. Their bodies were unwounded, but their spirits bled in agony. By official placards posted on the walls they read of German victories and French defeats. In the restaurants and cafes, and in their own houses, they had to serve men who were engaged in slaughtering their kinsfolk. It was difficult to be patient with those swaggering young officers who gave the glad eye to girls whose sweethearts lay dead somewhere between the French and German trenches.

From a lady who had been seven months in St. Quentin, I heard the story of how invasion came suddenly and took possession of the people. The arrival of the German troops was an utter surprise to the population, who had had no previous warning. Most of the French infantry had left the town, and there remained only a few detachments, and some English and Scottish soldiers who had lost their way in the great retreat, or who were lying wounded in the hospitals. The enemy came into the town at 4 P.M. on August 28, having completely surrounded it, so that they entered from every direction. The civil population, panic-stricken, remained for the most part in their houses, staring through their windows at the columns of dusty, sun-baked men who came down the streets. Some of the British soldiers, caught in this trap, decided to fight to the death, which they knew was inevitable. Several English and Scottish soldiers fired at the Germans as they advanced into the chief square and were instantly shot. One man, a tall young soldier, stationed himself at the corner of the Place du Huit Octobre, and with extraordinary coolness and rapidity fired shot after shot, so that several German soldiers were killed or wounded. The enemy brought up a machine gun and used it against this one man who tried to stop an army. He fell riddled with bullets, and was blown to pieces as he lay.

On the whole the Germans behaved well at St. Quentin. Their rule was stern but just, and although the civil population had been put on rations of black bread, they got enough and it was not, after all, so bad. As one of the most important bases of the German army in France, the town was continually filled with troops of every regiment, who stayed a little while and then pa.s.sed on. Meanwhile the permanent troops in occupation of the town settled down and made themselves thoroughly at home. They established many of their own shops--bakeries, tailoring establishments, and groceries; and in consequence of the lack of discipline and decency which prevailed in some of the cafes and restaurants, these places were conducted by German officers, who acted as censors of morals and professors of propriety.

Astounding as it seems, there were Frenchwomen in St. Quentin who sold themselves for German money and gave their kisses for a price to men who had ravaged France and killed the sons of France. Such outrageous scenes took place, that the German order to close some of the cafes was hailed as a boon by the decent citizens, who saw the women expelled by order of the German commandant with enormous thankfulness.

It is strange that the Huns, as they are called, should have been so strict in moral discipline. Many of them were not so austere in the villages when they let their pa.s.sions loose and behaved like drunken demons or satyrs with flaming torches. There is a riddle in the psychology of all these contrasts between the iron discipline and perfect organization by which all outrage was repressed in the large towns occupied for any length of time by German troops, and the lawlessness and rapine of the same race in villages through which they pa.s.sed hurriedly, giving themselves just time enough to wreak a cruel ferocity upon unoffending people. Riddle as it is, it holds perhaps the key to the mystery of the German character and to their ideal of war. Whenever there was time to establish discipline, the men were well behaved, and did not dare to disobey the orders of their chiefs. It was only when special orders for "frightfulness" had been issued, or when officers in subordinate command let their men get out of hand, or led the way to devilry by their own viciousness of action, that the rank and file of the enemy's army committed its brutalities.

Even now, after all that I have seen in the ruined villages in France, I cannot bring myself to believe that the German race is distinguished from all other peoples in Europe by the mark of the beast, or that 'they are the exclusive possession of the devil. The prisoners I have spoken to, the blue-eyed Saxons and plump Bavarians with whom I travelled for awhile after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, seemed to me uncommonly like the yokels of our own Somersetshire and Devonshire. Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I saw no sign of fiendish l.u.s.ts and cruelties. In normal moods they are a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an arrogance towards their womenfolk which is not tolerable to Englishmen, unless they have revolted from the older courtesies of English life because the Suffragettes have challenged their authority.

It was in abnormal moods that they committed their atrocities, for in the hot sun of the first September of the war their blood was overheated, and in the first intoxication of their march through France, drunk with the thrill of butcher's work as well as with French wine, brought back suddenly to the primitive l.u.s.ts of nature by the spirit of war, which strips men naked of all refinements and decent veils, they became for a time savages, with no other restraint than that of Red Indians on the warpath. They belonged to an Army of Invasion, marching through hostile territory, and the soul of war robbed the individual of his own separate soul and put a spell of madness on him, so that his eyes were bloodshot and his senses inflamed with l.u.s.t. In the Peninsular War young Englishmen from decent villages in quiet countrysides, with pious mothers praying for them at home in grey old churches, and with pretty sisters engaged in hero-worship, were bewitched by the same spell of wizardry and did foul and frightful things which afterwards made them dream of nights and wake in a cold sweat of shame and horror. There are many young Germans who will wake out of such dreams when they get back to Dusseldorf and Bingen-am-Rhein, searching back in their hearts to find a denial of the deeds which have become incredible after their awakening from the nightmare. For a little while they had been caught up in the soul of war and their heroism had been spoilt by obscenity, and their ideals debased by b.e.s.t.i.a.l acts. They will have only one excuse to their recaptured souls: "It was War." It is the excuse which man has made through all the ages of his history for the b.l.o.o.d.y thing which, in all those ages, has made him a liar to his faith and a traitor to the gentle G.o.ds.

Chapter VII The Last Stand Of The Belgians

1

During the first two and a half months of the war I was a wanderer in France, covering many hundreds of miles in zig-zag journeys between Nancy and the west coast, always on the move, backwards and forwards, between the lines of the French and British armies, and watching with a tireless though somewhat haggard interest the drama of a great people engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the most formidable army in the world. I had been in the midst of populations in flight, armies in retreat, and tremendous movements of troops hurled forward to new points of strategical importance. Now and again I had come in touch with the British army and had seen something of the men who had fought their way down from Mons to Meaux, but for the most part my experience had been with the French, and it was the spirit of France which I had done my best to interpret to the English people.

Now I was to see war, more closely and intimately than before, in another nation; and I stood with homage in my heart before the spirit of Belgium and that heroic people who, when I came upon them, had lost all but the last patch of territory, but still fought, almost alone, a tenacious, b.l.o.o.d.y and unending battle against the Power which had laid low their cities, mangled their ancient beauties, and changed their little land of peaceful industry into a muck-heap of slaughter and destruction.

Even in France I had this vision of the ruin of a nation, and saw its victims scattered. Since that day when I came upon the first trainload of Belgian soldiers near Calais, weary as lame dogs after their retreat, I had seen an interminable procession of fugitives from that stricken country and heard from them the tale of Alost, Louvain, Termonde and other towns where only horror dwelt above incinerated stones and sc.r.a.ps of human flesh. The fall of Antwerp resounded into France, and its surrender after words of false hope that it would never fall shook the soul of the French people with a great dismay. It was idle to disguise the importance of this German victory at the time when France, with every nerve strained and with England by her side, could hardly stem back the tide of those overflowing armies which had been thrust across the Marne but now pressed westward towards Calais with a smashing strength. The capture of Antwerp would liberate large numbers of the enemy's best troops. Already, within a day of this disaster to the Allied armies, squadrons of German cavalry swept across the frontiers into France, forcing their way rapidly through Lille and Armentieres towards Bethune and La Ba.s.see, cutting lines which had already been cut and then repaired, and striking terror into French villages which had so far escaped from these hussars of death. As a journalist, thwarted at every turn by the increasing severity of military orders for correspondent catching, the truth was not to be told at any cost. I had suspected the doom of Antwerp some days before its fate was sealed, and I struck northward to get as near as possible to the Belgian frontier. The nearest I could get was Dunkirk, and I came in time to see amazing scenes in that port of France. They were scenes which, even now as I write months afterwards, stir me with pity and bring back to my imagination an immense tragedy of history.

2

The town of Dunkirk, from which I went out to many adventures in the heart of war, so that for me it will always hold a great memory, was on that day in October a place of wild chaos, filled with the murmur of enormous crowds, and with the steady tramp of innumerable feet which beat out a tragic march. Those weary footsteps thumping the pavements and the cobble-stones, made a noise like the surging of waves on a pebble beach--a queer, m.u.f.fled, shuffling sound, with a rhythm in it which stupefied one's senses if one listened to it long. I think something of this agony of a people in flight pa.s.sed into my own body and brain that day. Some sickness of the soul took possession of me, so that I felt faint and overcome by black dejection. There was a physical evil among those vast crowds of Belgians who had come on foot, or in any kind of vehicle, down the big, straight roads which led to France, and now struggled down towards the docks, where thousands were encamped. From their weariness and inevitable dirtiness, from the sweat of their bodies, and the tears that had dried upon their cheeks, from the dust and squalor of bedraggled clothes, there came to one's nostrils a sickening odour. It was the stench of a nation's agony. Poor people of despair! There was something obscene and hideous in your miserable condition. Standing among your women and children, and your old grandfathers and grandmothers, I was ashamed of looking with watchful and observant eyes. There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that they were like the drabs of the slums and stews. There were young girls who had been sheltered in convent schools, now submerged in the great crowd of fugitives, so utterly without the comforts of life that the common decencies of civilization could not be regarded, but gave way to the unconcealed necessities of human nature. Peasant women, squatting on the dock-sides, fed their babes as they wept over them and wailed like stricken creatures. Children with scared eyes, as though they had been left alone in the horror of darkness, searched piteously for parents who had been separated from them in the struggle for a train or in the surgings of the crowds. Young fathers of families shouted hoa.r.s.ely for women who could not be found. Old women, with shaking heads and trembling hands, raised shrill voices in the vain hope that they might hear an answering call from sons or daughters. Like people who had escaped from an earthquake to some seash.o.r.e where by chance a boat might come for them all, these Belgian families struggled to the port of Dunkirk and waited desperately for rescue. They were in a worse plight than shipwrecked people, for no ship of good hope could take them home again.

Behind them the country lay in dust and flames, with hostile armies encamped among the ruins of their towns.

For a little while I left these crowds and escaped to the quiet sanctuary of a restaurant in the centre of the town. I remember that some English officers came in and stared at me from their table with hard eyes, suspicious of me as a spy, or, worse still, as a journalist.

In those days, having to dodge arrest at every turn, I had a most unpatriotic hatred of those British officers whose stern eyes gimletted my soul. They seemed to me so like the Prussian at his worst.

Afterwards, getting behind this mask of harness, by the magic of official papers, I abandoned my dislike and saw only the virtue of our men. I remember also that I ate at table opposite a pretty girl, with a wanton's heart, who prattled to me, because I was an Englishman, as though no war had come to make a mockery of love-in-idleness. I stood up from the table, upsetting a gla.s.s so that it broke at the stem.

Outside the restaurant was the tramp of another mult.i.tude. But the rhythm of those feet was different from the noise I had heard all day.

It was sharper and more marked. I guessed at once that many soldiers were pa.s.sing by, and that upon striding to the door I should see another tragedy. From the doorway I watched an army in retreat.

It was the army of Antwerp marching into Dunkirk. I took off my hat and watched with bared head.

They were but broken regiments, marching disorderly for the most part, yet here and there were little bodies of men keeping step, with shouldered rifles, in fine, grim pride. The munic.i.p.al guards came by, shoulder to shoulder, as on parade, but they were followed by long convoys of mounted men on stumbling horses, who came with heaps of disorderly salvage piled on to dusty wagons. Saddles and bridles and bits, the uniforms of many regiments flung out hurriedly from barrack cupboards; rifles, swords, and boots were heaped on to beds of straw, and upon the top of them lay men exhausted to the point of death, so that their heads flopped and lolled as the carts came jolting through the streets. Armoured cars with mitrailleuses, motor-cars slashed and plugged by German bullets, forage carts and ambulances, struggled by in a tide of traffic between bodies of foot- soldiers slouching along without any pride, but dazed with weariness.

Their uniforms were powdered with the dust of the roads, their faces were blanched and haggard for lack of food and sleep. Some of them had a delirious look and they stared about them with rolling eyes in which there was a gleam of madness. Many of these men were wounded, and spattered with their blood. Their bandages were stained with scarlet splotches, and some of them were so weak that they left their ranks and sat in doorways, or on the kerb-stones, with their heads drooping sideways. Many another man, footsore and lame, trudged along on one boot and a bandaged sock, with the other boot slung to his rifle barrel.

Riding alone between two patrols of mounted men was a small boy on a high horse. He was a fair-haired lad of twelve or so, in a Belgian uniform, with a ta.s.selled cap over one ear, and as he pa.s.sed the Dunquerquoises clapped hands and called out: "Bravo! Bravo!" He took the ovation with a grin and held his head high.

The cafes in this part of France were crowded with Belgian officers of all grades. I had never seen so many generals together or such a medley of uniforms. They saluted each other solemnly, and there were emotional greetings between friends and brothers who had not seen each other after weeks of fighting in different parts of the lines, in this city across the border. Most of the officers were fine, st.u.r.dy, young fellows of stouter physique than the French among whom I had been roving. But others had the student look and stared mournfully from gold-rimmed spectacles. There were many middle- aged men among them who wore military uniforms, but without a soldier's ease or swagger. When Germany tore up that "sc.r.a.p of paper" which guaranteed the integrity of Belgium, every patriotic man there volunteered for the defence of his country and shouldered a rifle, though he had never fired a blank cartridge, and put on some kind of uniform, though he had never drilled in a barrack square.

Lawyers and merchants, schoolmasters and poets, actors and singers, farmers and peasants, rushed to take up arms, and when the vanguards of the German army struck across the frontier they found themselves confronted not only by the small regular army of Belgium, but by the whole nation. Even the women helped to dig the trenches at Liege, and poured boiling water over Uhlans who came riding into Belgian villages. It was the rising of a whole people which led to so much ruthlessness and savage cruelty. The German generals were afraid of a nation of franc-tireurs, where every man or boy who could hold a gun shot at the sight of a pointed helmet. Those high officers to whom war is a science without any human emotion or pity in its rules, were determined to stamp out this irregular fighting by blood and fire, and "frightfulness" became the order of the day. I have heard English officers uphold these methods and use the same excuse for all those ma.s.sacres which has been put forward by the enemy themselves. "War is war... One cannot make war with rosewater... The franc-tireur has to be shot at sight. A civil population using arms against an invading army must be taught a b.l.o.o.d.y lesson.

If ever we get into Germany we may have to face the same trouble, so it is no use shouting words of horror." War is war, and h.e.l.l is h.e.l.l.

Let us for the moment leave it at that, as I left it in the streets of Dunkirk, where the volunteer army of Belgium and their garrison troops had come in retreat after heroic resistance against overwhelming odds, in which their courage without science was no match for the greatest death machine in Europe, controlled by experts highly trained in the business of arms.