Part 8 (1/2)
There were refugees who had seen the beginning of battles, taking flight before the end of them. I met some from Le Cateau, who had stared speechlessly at familiar hills over which came without warning great forces of foreign soldiers. The English had come first, in clouds of dust which powdered their uniforms and whitened their sun-baked faces. They seemed in desperate hurry and scratched up mounds of loose earth, like children building sand castles, and jumped down into wayside ditches which they used as cover, and lay on their stomachs in the beetroot fields. They were cheerful enough, and laughed as they littered the countryside with beef tins, and smoked cigarettes incessantly, as they lay scorched under the glare of the sun, with their rifles handy. Their guns were swung round with their muzzles nosing towards the rising ground from which these English soldiers had come. It seemed as though they were playing games of make believe, for the fun of the thing. The French peasants had stood round grinning at these English boys who could not understand a word of French, but chattered cheerfully all the time in their own strange language. War seemed very far away. The birds were singing in a shrill chorus. Golden flowerlets spangled the green slopes. The sun lay warm upon the hillside, and painted black shadows beneath the full foliage of the trees. It was the harvest peace which, these peasants had known all the years of their lives. Then suddenly the click of rifle bolts, a rapid change in the att.i.tude of the English soldier boys, who stared northwards where the downs rose and fell in soft billows, made the French peasants j gaze in that direction, shading their eyes from the hot sun. What was that grey shadow moving?
What were those little glints and flashes in the greyness of it? What were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over the slopes? Thousands and scores of thousands of--men, and horses and guns!
”Les Anglais? Toujours les Anglais?” An English officer laughed, in a queer way, without any mirth in his eyes.
”Les Allemands, mon vieux. Messieurs les Boches!”
”L'enemi? Non--pas possible!”
It only seemed possible that it was the enemy when from that army of ants on the hillsides there came forth little puffs of white smoke, and little stabbing flames, and when, quite soon, some of those English boys lay in a huddled way over their rifles, with their sunburned faces on the warm earth. The harvest peace was broken by the roar of guns and the rip of bullets. Into the blue of the sky rose clouds of greenish smoke. Pieces of jagged steel, like flying scythes, sliced the trees on the roadside. The beetroot fields spurted up earth, and great holes were being dug by unseen ploughs. Then, across the distant slopes behind the smoke clouds and the burst of flame came, and came, a countless army, moving down towards those British soldiers.
So the peasants had fled with a great fear.
2
There was an extraordinary quietude in some of the port towns of northern France. At first I could not understand the meaning of it when I went from Calais to Boulogne, and then to Havre. In Calais I saw small bodies of troops moving out of the town early in the morning, so that afterwards there was not a soldier to be seen about the streets. In Boulogne the same thing happened, quietly, and without any bugle calls or demonstrations. Not only had all the soldiers gone, but they were followed by the police, whom I saw marching away in battalions, each man carrying a little bundle, like the refugees who carried all their worldly goods with them, wrapped in a blanket or a pocket-handkerchief, according to the haste of their flight. Down on the quay there were no custom-house officers to inspect the baggage of the few travellers who had come across the Channel and now landed on the deserted siding, bewildered because there were no porters to clamour for their trunks and no douane to utter the familiar ritual of ”Avez-vous quelque-chose a declarer?
Tabac? Cigarettes?” For the first time in living memory, perhaps in the history of the port, the Douane of Boulogne had abandoned its office. What did it all mean? Why were the streets so deserted as though the town had been stricken with the plague?
There was a look of plague in the faces of the few fishermen and harbour folk who stood in groups at the street corners. There was a haggard fear in their eyes and they talked in low voices, as though discussing some doom that had come upon them. Even the houses had a plaguy aspect, with shuttered windows and barred doors. The town, which had resounded to the tramp of British regiments and to the tune of ”Tipperary,” these streets through which had surged a tide of fugitives, with wave after wave of struggling crowds, had become a silent place, with only a few shadows creeping through the darkness of that evening in war, and whispering a fear.
The truth came to me as a shock. The ports of France had been abandoned. They lay open to the enemy, and if any Uhlans came riding in, or a German officer in a motorcar with three soldiers to represent an army, Calais and Boulogne would be surrendered without a shot.
Looking back upon those days the thing seems inconceivable.
Months afterwards the enemy tried to fight its way to Calais and failed after desperate attacks which cost the lives of thousands of German soldiers and a stubborn defence which, more than once, was almost pierced and broken. ”The Fight for Calais” is a chapter of history which for the Germans is written in blood. It is amazing to remember that in the last days of August Calais was offered as a free gift, with Boulogne and Dieppe to follow, if they cared to come for them.
Even Havre was to be abandoned as the British base. It was only a little while since enormous stores had been dumped here for the provisioning and equipment of our Expeditionary Force. Now I saw a great packing up. ”K.” had issued an amazing order which made certain young gentlemen of the A.S.C. whistle between their teeth and say rather quietly: ”Ye G.o.ds! things must be looking a bit blue up there.” The new base was to be much further south, at St. Nazaire, to which the last tin of bully beef or Maconochie was to be consigned, without delay. Yes, things were looking very ”blue,” just then.
3
One may afford now to write about mistakes, even the mistakes of our French Allies, who have redeemed them all by a national heroism beyond the highest words of praise, and by a fine struggle for efficiency and organization which were lamentably lacking in the early days of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the splendid things in the world's history which wipe out all rankling criticism.
Yet then, before the transformation, the days were full of torture for those who knew something of the truth. By what fatal microbe of folly had the French generals been tempted towards that adventure in Alsace? Sentiment, overwhelming common sense, had sent the finest troops in France to the frontiers of the ”lost provinces,” so that Paris might have its day of ecstasy round the statue of Quand-Meme.
While the Germans were smas.h.i.+ng their way through Belgium, checked only a little while at Liege and giving a clear warning of the road by which they would come to France, the French active army was ma.s.sed in the east from Luxembourg to Nancy and wasting the strength which should have been used to bar the northern roads, in pressing forward to Mulhouse and Altkirch. It gave Georges Scott the subject of a beautiful allegory in L'Ill.u.s.tration--that French soldier clasping the Alsatian girl rescued from the German grip. It gave Parisian journalists, gagged about all other aspects of the war zone, a chance of heroic writing, filled with the emotion of old heartaches now changed to joy. Only the indiscretion of a deputy hinted for a moment at a bad reverse at Mulhouse, when a regiment recruited from the South, broke and fled under the fire of German guns because they were unsupported by their own artillery. ”Two generals have been cas.h.i.+ered.” ”Some of the officers have been shot.” Tragic rumours leaked into Paris, spoiling the dream of an irresistible advance.
So far, however, neither Paris nor the French public as a whole had any inkling of graver things than this. They did not know--how could they know anything of this secret war?--that on all parts of the front the French armies' were falling back before the German invasion which bore down upon them in five great columns of overwhelming strength; and that on the extreme left, nearest to Paris, the French army was miserably weak, made up for the most part of old Territorials who were never meant to be in the first line of defence, and of African regiments who had never seen sh.e.l.l-fire, so that the main German attack could only be held back by a little British army which had just set foot on the soil of France.
Everywhere, from east to west, the French were yielding before the terrific onslaught of the German legions, who came on in close formation, reckless of their losses, but always advancing, over the bodies of their dead, with ma.s.ses of light artillery against which the French gunners, with all their skill and courage, could not hold ground. By a series of strange adventures, which took me into the vortex of the French retreat, into the midst of confused movements of troops rushed up to various points of menace and into the tide of wounded which came streaming back from the fighting lines, I was able to write the first account which gave any clear idea of the general situation--sharing this chance with the Philosopher and the Strategist who were my fellow travellers--and, by good luck again, the censor was kind to me in England. French officers and soldiers with bandaged heads and limbs told me their stories, while their wounds were still wet, and while their clothes still reeked of the smoke of battle. Women who had fled with empty hands from little chateaux on the hillsides of France, with empty hearts too because they had no hope for husbands still fighting in the inferno, described to me the scenes which still made them pant like wild animals caught after a chase. And with my own eyes I saw the unforgettable drama of the French army in retreat, blowing up bridges on its way, s.h.i.+fting to new lines of defence, awaiting with its guns ready for a new stage of the enemy's advance.
Out of a wild confusion of impressions, the tumult of these scenes, the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies and imaginings of men and women drunk with the excitement of this time, I sorted out some clear threads of fact and with the aid of the Strategist, who spread out his maps on wayside banks, blotting out the wild flowers, or on the marble-topped tables outside fly-blown estaminets in village streets, tracked out the line of the German advance and saw the peril of the French.
From one of my dispatches I transcribe a narrative which records one of the most b.l.o.o.d.y battles in the first phase of the war. Written to the jolt of a troop train, in which wounded men hugged their bandaged hands, it tells how five thousand Frenchmen did their best to check a German army corps.
4
August 29
It was nearly a fortnight ago that the Germans concentrated their heaviest forces upon Namur, and began to press southwards and over the Meuse Valley. After the battle of Dinant the French army, among whom, at this point, were the 2nd and the 7th Corps, were heavily outnumbered at the time, and had to fall back gradually in order to gain time for reinforcements to come up to their support. The French artillery was up on the wooded heights above the river, and swept the German regiments with a storm of fire as they advanced.
On the right bank the French infantry was entrenched, supported by field guns and mitrailleuses, and did very deadly work before leaping from the trenches which they occupied and taking up position in new trenches further back, which they held with great tenacity. In justice to the Germans, it must be said that they were heroic in their courage.
They were reckless of their lives, and the valley of the Meuse was choked with their corpses. The river itself was strewn with dead bodies of men and horses, and literally ran red with blood. The most tremendous fighting took place for the possession of the bridges, but the French engineers blew them up one after the other as they retired southwards. No fewer than thirty-three bridges were destroyed in this way before they could be seized by the German advance guard. The fighting was extended for a considerable distance on either side of the Meuse, and many engagements took place between the French and German cavalry and regiments working away from the main armies.