Part 14 (1/2)

The field was strewn with great jagged pieces of metal, and to the old Alsatian it seemed a huge joke that the Germans had had to leave behind so much ”food for the guns.” After all it was not a bad joke as far as we are concerned.

On that Sunday in September I saw many things which helped me to understand the meaning of war, and yet afterwards became vague memories of blurred impressions, half obliterated by later pictures. I remember that I saw the movements of regiments moving up to support the lines of the Allies, and the carrying up of heavy guns for the great battle which had now reached its sixth day, and the pa.s.sing, pa.s.sing, of Red Cross trains bringing back the wounded from that terrible front between Vic and Noyon, where the trenches were being filled and refilled with dead and wounded, and regiments of tired men struggled forward with heroic endurance to take their place under the fire of those sh.e.l.ls which had already put their souls to the test of courage beyond anything that might be demanded, in reason, from the strongest heart.

And through the mud and the water-pools, through the wet bracken and undergrowth, in a countryside swept by heavy rainstorms, I went tramping with the gravedigger, along the way of the German retreat, seeing almost in its nakedness the black ravage of war and its foul litter.

Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted telegraph wires. At various places great water-tanks and reservoirs had been toppled over and smashed as though some diabolical power had made c.o.c.ks.h.i.+es of them. I peered down upon the broken bridge of a railway line, and stumbled across uprooted rails torn from their sleepers and hurled about the track.

My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had buried a French cuira.s.sier who had been shot as he kept a lonely guard at the edge of a wood.

He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and British. The graves were everywhere--mile after mile, on the slopes of the hills and in the fields and the valleys, though still on the battleground my friend had work to do.

I picked up bullets from shrapnels. They are scattered like peas for fifteen miles between Betz and Mortefontaine, and thicker still along the road to Vic. The jagged pieces of sh.e.l.l cut my boots. I carried one of the German helmets for which the peasants were searching among cabbages and turnips. And always in my ears was the deep rumble of the guns, those great booming thunder-blows, speaking from afar and with awful significance of the great battle, which seemed to be deciding the destiny of our civilization and the new life of nations which was to come perhaps out of all this death.

Chapter VI Invasion

1

Before this year has ended England will know something of what war means. In English country towns there will be many familiar faces missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts.

Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will understand the misery of war and its brutalities. But in spite of all our national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and Belgium. They will not know the meaning of invasion.

It is a great luck to be born in an island. The girdle of sea is a safeguard which gives a sense of security to the whole psychology of a race, and for that reason there is a gulf of ignorance about the terrors of war which, happily, may never be bridged by the collective imagination of English and Scottish people. A continental nation, divided by a few hills, a river, or a line on the map, from another race with other instincts and ideals, is haunted throughout its history by a sense of peril. Even in times of profound peace, the thought is there, in the background, with a continual menace. It shapes the character of a people and enters into all their political and educational progress.

To keep on friendly terms with a powerful next-door neighbour, or to build defensive works high enough to make hostility a safe game, is the lifework of its statesmen and its politicians. Great crises and agitations shake the nation convulsively when cowardice or treachery or laziness has allowed that boundary wall to crumble or has made a breach in it. The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against them.

The necessity of conscription is obvious beyond argument to a continental people still cheris.h.i.+ng old traditions of nationality, and the military training which is compulsory for all young men of average health, not only shapes the bodies of their lads, but also shapes their minds, so that their outlook upon life is largely different from that of an island people protected by the sea. They know that they have been born of women for one primary object--to fight when the time comes in, defence of the Fatherland, to make one more human brick in the great wall of blood and spirit dividing their country and race from some other country and race. At least that is the lesson taught them from first to last in the schools and in the national a.s.semblies, and there are only a few minds which are able to see another way of life when the walls of division may be removed and when the fear of a next-door neighbour may be replaced by friends.h.i.+p and common interests.

The difference between the intellectual instincts of an island people and that of a continental race was the cause of the slow way in which England groped her way to an understanding of the present war, so that words of scorn and sarcasm, a thousand mean tricks of recruiting sergeants in high office, and a thousand taunts had to be used to whip up the young men of Great Britain, and induce them to join the Army. Their hearths and homes were not in immediate danger. They could not see any reasonable prospect of danger upon English soil. Their women were safe. Their property, bought on the hire system out of hard-earned wages, was not, they thought, in the least likely to be smashed into small bits or carried off as loot. They could not conceive the idea of jerry-built walls which enshrined all the treasures of their life suddenly falling with a crash like a house of cards, and burying their babies. The British Expeditionary Force which they were asked to join was after all only a sporting party going out to foreign fields for a great adventure.

2

In France there were no such illusions. As soon as war was imminent the people thought of their frontiers, and prayed G.o.d in divers ways that the steel hedges there were strong enough to keep back the hostile armies until the general call to the colours had been answered. Every able-bodied man in France was ready, whatever the cowardice in his heart, to fling himself upon the frontier to keep out, with his own body, the inrus.h.i.+ng tide of German troops. The memory of 1870 had taught them the meaning of Invasion.

I saw the meaning of it during the first months of the war, when I wandered about France. In the north, nearest to the enemy, and along the eastern frontier, it was a great fear which spread like a plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's troops. It made the bravest men grow pale when they thought of their women and children. It made the most callous man pitiful when he saw those women with their little ones and old people, whose place was by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger and weariness, or pleading for places in cattle-trucks already overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about un-lighted towns at night for any kind of lodging, and then, finding none, sleeping on the doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of overhanging gables.

For months, in every part of France there were thousands of husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of retreats from a brutal soldiery. They had disappeared into the maelstrom of fugitives--wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French newspapers there were long lists of inquiries.

”M. Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can inform him of the whereabouts of his wife, Suzanne, and of his two little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Armentieres.”

”Mme. Tardieu would be profoundly grateful for information about her daughter, Mme. des Rochers, who fled from the destroyed town of Albert on October 10, with her four children.”

Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line, and wondering whether any of these missing people were among those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley below the hills where German guns were vomiting their shrapnel.

Imagine such a case in England. A man leaves his office in London and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are waiting supper for him. At Weybridge the train comes to a dead-halt.

The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back to say that the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy. It is reported that Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded. Families flying from Guildford describe the bombardment of the town. A part of it is in flames. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been killed. Most of the others have fled.

The man who was going home to supper wants to set out to find his wife and children. His friends hold him back in spite of his struggles.