Part 9 (1/2)

Reports had come through that the railway line had been cut between Boulogne and Abbeville. There had been mysterious movements of regiments from the town barracks. They had moved out of Amiens, and there was a strange quietude in the streets, hardly a man in uniform to be seen in places which had been filled with soldiers the day before. I think only a few people realized the actual significance of all this. Only a few--the friends of officers or the friends of officers' friends--had heard that Amiens itself was to be evacuated.

To these people it seemed incredible and horrible--an admission that France was being beaten to her knees. How could they believe the theory of an optimist among them that it was a part of a great plan to secure the safety of France? How could they realize that the town itself would be saved from possible bombardment by this withdrawal of the troops to positions which would draw the Germans into the open? They only knew that they were undefended, and presently they found that the civilian trains were being suspended, and that there would be no way of escape. It was in the last train that by a stroke of luck I escaped from Amiens. Shortly afterwards the tunnel leading to the junction was blown up by the French engineers, and the beautiful city of Amiens was cut off from all communication with the outer world.

It was on the last train that I realized to the full of its bitterness the brutality of war as it bludgeons the heart of the non-combatant. In the carriage with me were French ladies and children who had been hunted about the country in the endeavour to escape the zone of military operations. Their husbands were fighting for France, and they could not tell whether they were alive or dead. They had been without any solid food for several days, and the nerves of those poor women were tried to the uttermost, not by any fear for their own sakes, but for the sake of the little ones who were all they could save from the wreckage of their lives, all yet enough if they could save them to the end. One lady whose house had been burnt by the Germans had walked over twenty miles with a small boy and girl.

For a little while, when she told me her story she wept pa.s.sionately, yet only for a few minutes. For the sake of her handsome boy, who had a hero's courage, and for the tiny girl who clung to her, she resisted this breakdown and conquered herself.

”That is the real meaning of war, almost the worst tragedy of it” (so I wrote at the time). ”The soldier suffers less than the women and the non-combatants. His agony perhaps is sharper, but the wound of the spirit is hardest to bear.”

So it seemed to me then, before I had seen greater ghastliness. I was surprised also by the cheerfulness of some of our wounded soldiers.

They were the ”light cases,” and had the pluck to laugh at their pain.

Yet even they had had a dreadful time. It is almost true to say that the only rest they had was when they were carried into the ambulance cart or the field-hospital. The incessant marching, forwards and backwards, to new positions in the blazing sun was more awful to bear than the actual fighting under the hideous fire of the German guns. They were kept on the move constantly, except for the briefest lulls--when officers and men dropped, like brown leaves from autumn trees, on each side of the road, so utterly exhausted that they were almost senseless, and had to be dragged up out of their short sleep when once again they tramped on to a new line, to scratch up a few earthworks, to fire a few rounds before the bugle sounded the cease fire and another strategical retirement.

6

On September 2 the Germans had reached Creil and Senlis--staining their honour in these two places by unnecessary cruelty--and were no further than thirty miles from Paris, so that the shock of their guns might be heard as vague vibrations in the capital.

To the population of Paris, and to all civilians in France, it seemed a stupendous disaster, this rapid incredible advance of that great military machine of death which nothing, so far, had been able to stop--not even the unflinching courage and the utter recklessness of life with which the Allies flung themselves against it. Yet with an optimism which I could hardly justify, I, who had seen the soldiers of France, was still confident that, so far from all being lost, there was hope of victory which might turn the German advance.

I had seen the superb courage of French regiments rus.h.i.+ng up to support their left wing, and the magnificent confidence of men who after the horrors of the battlefields, and with the full consciousness that they were always retiring, still, said: ”We shall win. We are leading the enemy to its destruction. In a little while they will be in a death-trap from which there is no escape for them.”

”This spirit,” I wrote in my dispatch, ”must win in the end. It is impossible that it should be beaten in the long run. And the splendour of this French courage, in the face of what looks like defeat, is equalled at least by the calm and dogged a.s.surance of our English troops.”

They repeated the same words to me over and over again--those wounded men, those outposts at points of peril, those battalions who went marching on to another fight, without sleep, without rest, knowing the foe they had to meet.

”We are all right. You can call it a retreat if you like. But we are retreating in good order and keeping our end up.”

Retiring in good order I It had been more than that. They had retired before a million of men swarming across the country like a vast ant- heap on the move, with a valour that had gained for the British and French forces a deathless glory. Such a thing has never been done before in the history of warfare. It would have seemed incredible and impossible to military experts, who know the meaning of such fighting, and the frightful difficulty of keeping an army together in such circ.u.mstances.

7

When I escaped from Amiens before the tunnel was broken up and the Germans entered into possession of the town--on August 28--the front of the allied armies was in a crescent from Abbeville by the wooded heights south of Amiens, and thence in an irregular line to the south of Mezieres. The British forces under Sir John French were on the left centre, supporting the heavy thrust forward of the German right wing.

On Sat.u.r.day afternoon fighting was resumed along the whole line.

The German vanguard had by this time been supported by fresh army corps, which had been brought from Belgium. At least a million men were on the move, pressing upon the allied forces with a ferocity of attack which has never been equalled. Their cavalry swept across a great tract of country, squadron by squadron, like the mounted hordes of Attila, but armed with the deadly weapons of modern warfare. Their artillery was in enormous numbers, and their columns advanced under the cover of it, not like an army but rather like a moving nation. It did not move, however, with equal pressure at all parts of the line. It formed itself into a battering ram with a pointed end, and this point was thrust at the heart of the English wing with its base at St. Quentin, and advanced divisions at Peronne and Ham. It was impossible to resist this onslaught. If the British forces had stood against it they would have been crushed and broken. Our gunners were magnificent, and sh.e.l.led the advancing German columns so that the dead lay heaped up along the way which was leading down to Paris, But, as one of them told me, ”It made no manner of difference. As soon as we had smashed one lot another followed, column after column, and by sheer weight of numbers we could do nothing to check them.”

The railway was destroyed and the bridges blown up on the main line from Amiens to Paris, and on the branch lines from Dieppe. After this precaution the British forces fell back, fighting all the time, as far as Compiegne. The line of the Allies was now in the shape of a V, the Germans thrusting their main attack deep into the angle.

General d'Amade, the most popular of French generals owing to his exploits in Morocco, had established his staff at Aumale, holding the extreme left of the allied armies. Some of his reserves held the hills running east and west at Beau vais, and they were in touch with Sir John French's cavalry along the road to Amiens.

This position remained until Monday, or rather had completed itself by that date, the retirement of the troops being maintained with masterly skill and without any undue haste.

Meanwhile the French troops were sustaining a terrific attack on their centre by the German left centre, which culminated at Guise, on the River Oise, to the north-east of St. Quentin, where the river, which runs between beautiful meadows, was choked with corpses and red with blood.

From an eye-witness of this great battle who escaped with a slight wound--an officer of an infantry regiment--I learned that the German onslaught had been repelled by the work of the French gunners, followed by a series of bayonet and cavalry charges.