Books: Now It Can Be Told

P >> Philip Gibbs >> Now It Can Be Told

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41

This Etext Prepared by Alan Earls

Now It Can Be Told

by Philip Gibbs

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Part One OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS

Part Two THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE

Part Three THE NATURE OF A BATTLE

Part Four A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

Part Five THE HEART OF A CITY

Part Six PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME

Part Seven THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON

Part Eight FOR WHAT MEN DIED

PREFACE

In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I
believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of
men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen
again--surely--if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of
the hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not
only as it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to
soldiers on all the fronts where conditions were the same.

What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, nor deny anything
in my daily narratives of events on the western front as they are now
published in book form. They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly,
as a truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in France
and Belgium during the years of war, broadly pictured out as far as I
could see and know. My duty, then, was that of a chronicler, not
arguing why things should have happened so nor giving reasons why they
should not happen so, but describing faithfully many of the things I
saw, and narrating the facts as I found them, as far as the censorship
would allow. After early, hostile days it allowed nearly all but
criticism, protest, and of the figures of loss.

The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war
and of all war--not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather
as the truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out of
their experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however
painful, to add something to the world's knowledge out of which men of
good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one
people and another, some new code of international morality,
preventing or at least postponing another massacre of youth like that
five years' sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness.

I

When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and
England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of
German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but
saw only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and
a glorious adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out
from London to report the proceedings, and I was one of them.

We went in civilian clothes without military passports--the War Office
was not giving any--with bags of money which might be necessary for
the hire of motor-cars, hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in
the antechambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan War, and
others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office
for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior
staff-officers who knew that "K" hated these men and thought the press
ought to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into false
hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them and were told to
buy horses and sleeping-bags and be ready to start at a moment's
notice for the front.

The moment's notice was postponed for months . . . .

The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of
"seeing something," without authority, and made wild, desperate
efforts to break through the barrier that had been put up against them
by French and British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were
arrested, put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places,
rearrested, and expelled from France. That was after fantastic
adventures in which they saw what war meant in civilized countries
where vast populations were made fugitives of fear, where millions of
women and children and old people became wanderers along the roads in
a tide of human misery, with the red flame of war behind them and
following them, and where the first battalions of youth, so gay in
their approach to war, so confident of victory, so careless of the
dangers (which they did not know), came back maimed and mangled and
blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently
became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, swamping over
many cities and thousands of villages and many fields. Those young
writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to
Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the
things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen
and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which
would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing
of all civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in
terms of heroic pageantry.

"Had a good time?" asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly
waiting for an answer.

"A good time!" . . . God! . . . Did people think it was amusing to be
an onlooker of world-tragedy? . . . One of them remembered a lady of
France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in
flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled
skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the
battle that was now being fought round their own town. She was brave--
pointed out the line of the German advance on the map--and it was in a
troop-train crowded with French soldiers--and then burst into wild
weeping, clasping the hand of an English writing-man so that her nails
dug into his flesh. I remember her still.

"Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!" said the boy of eight.

Through Amiens at night had come a French army in retreat. There were
dead and wounded on their wagons. Cuirassiers stumbled as they led
their tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in
the darkness, stared at their men retreating like this through their
city, and knew that the enemy was close behind.

"Nous sommes perdus!" whispered a woman, and gave a wailing cry.

People were fighting their way into railway trucks at every station
for hundreds of miles across northern France. Women were beseeching a
place for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on
journeys of nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and hunger.
An old woman died, and her corpse blocked up the lavatory. At night
they slept on the pavements in cities invaded by fugitives.

At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of France, there
were columns of ambulances bringing in an endless tide of wounded.
They were laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-yards, five
hundred at a time. Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood.
Some of their bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with a hard
snuffle. A foul smell came from them.

At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with disinfecting
fluid after getting through with one day's wounded. The French doctor
in charge had received a telegram from the director of medical
services: "Make ready for forty thousand wounded." It was during the
first battle of the Marne.

"It is impossible!" said the French doctor. . . .

Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which
big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened
themselves against the walls and said, "God in heaven!" Two hundred
and fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats,
sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no
food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in
their breasts. It was cold at night and there were only a few canal-
boats and fishermen's cottages, and in them were crowds of fugitives.
The odor of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, and
sicken in remembrance . . . .

Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many other towns from the
Belgian coast to Switzerland. In Dixmude young boys of France--
fusiliers marins--lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall,
falling to bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting
for death amid the dead bodies of his men--one so young, so handsome,
lying there on his back, with a waxen face, staring steadily at the
sky through the broken roof. . . .

At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the
esplanade, and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of
a red-brick villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a
town that had been built for love and pretty women and the lucky
people of the world. British monitors lying close into shore were
answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by
Ostend. From one monitor came a group of figures with white masks of
cotton-wool tipped with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with
the dead body of an officer tied up in a sack . . . .

"O Jesu! . . . O maman! . . . O ma pauvre p'tite femme! . . . O Jesu!
O Jesu!"

From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or parched in the
burning sun before the battle of the Marne these cries went up to the
blue sky of France in August of '14. They were the cries of youth's
agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and
saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the victory that
saved France and us. The German dead had been gathered into heaps like
autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising
from them . . . .

That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all
their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw
our little Regular Army, the "Old Contemptibles," on their way back,
with the German hordes following close. Sir John French had his
headquarters for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish
soldiers, stragglers from units still keeping some kind of order, were
coming in, bronzed, dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied
round with rags, with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty,
thirsty as dogs, crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been
retreating and retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty
bridges of France. Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied
out the diary of their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men.
"Wait," they said. "In a few days we shall give them a hard knock.
They will never get Paris. Jamais de la vie!" . . .

In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English
correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German
hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to
blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and
broken bottles . . . In Paris there was a great fear and solitude,
except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for
escape and where French and British soldiers--stragglers all--drank
together, and sang above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and
the Germans.

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of
that first six months of war--as afterward--came back the tide of
wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals
crowded with blind and dying and moaning men . . . .

"Had an interesting time?" asked a man I wanted to kill because of his
smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity
of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes
which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I
had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons.
As an onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because
they could not understand. All these things I had seen in the first
nine months I put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that
some might know; but it was only a few who understood. . . .

II

In 1915 the War Office at last moved in the matter of war
correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against them, was being
broken down a little by the pressure of public opinion (mentioned from
time to time by members of the government), which demanded more news
of their men in the field than was given by bald communiqués
from General Headquarters and by an "eye-witness" who, as one paper
had the audacity to say, wrote nothing but "eye-wash." Even the
enormous, impregnable stupidity of our High Command on all matters of
psychology was penetrated by a vague notion that a few "writing
fellows" might be sent out with permission to follow the armies in the
field, under the strictest censorship, in order to silence the popular
clamor for more news. Dimly and nervously they apprehended that in
order to stimulate the recruiting of the New Army now being called to
the colors by vulgar appeals to sentiment and passion, it might be
well to "write up" the glorious side of war as it could be seen at the
base and in the organization of transport, without, of course, any
allusion to dead or dying men, to the ghastly failures of
distinguished generals, or to the filth and horror of the
battlefields. They could not understand, nor did they ever understand
(these soldiers of the old school) that a nation which was sending all
its sons to the field of honor desired with a deep and poignant
craving to know how those boys of theirs were living and how they were
dying, and what suffering was theirs, and what chances they had
against their enemy, and how it was going with the war which was
absorbing all the energy and wealth of the people at home.

"Why don't they trust their leaders?" asked the army chiefs. "Why
don't they leave it to us?"

"We do trust you--with some misgivings," thought the people, "and we
do leave it to you--though you seem to be making a mess of things--but
we want to know what we have a right to know, and that is the life and
progress of this war in which our men are engaged. We want to know
more about their heroism, so that it shall be remembered by their
people and known by the world; about their agony, so that we may share
it in our hearts; and about the way of their death, so that our grief
may be softened by the thought of their courage. We will not stand for
this anonymous war; and you are wasting time by keeping it secret,
because the imagination of those who have not joined cannot be fired
by cold lines which say, 'There is nothing to report on the western
front.'"

In March of 1915 I went out with the first body of accredited war
correspondents, and we saw some of the bad places where our men lived
and died, and the traffic to the lines, and the mechanism of war in
fixed positions as were then established after the battle of the Marne
and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an experimental
visit. It was not until June of that year, after an adventure on the
French front in the Champagne, that I received full credentials as a
war correspondent with the British armies on the western front, and
joined four other men who had been selected for this service, and
began that long innings as an authorized onlooker of war which ended,
after long and dreadful years, with the Army of Occupation beyond the
Rhine.

III

In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by
courtesy a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General
Headquarters at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time
to time, according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was
very peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women
worked while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied
us by the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick
ride over Cassel Hill to the edge of the Ypres salient and the
farthest point where any car could go without being seen by a watchful
enemy and blown to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we walked, up
sinister roads, or along communication trenches, to the fire-step in
the front line, or into places like "Plug Street" wood and Kemmel
village, and the ruins of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle--
the training-schools of British armies--where always birds of death
were on the wing, screaming with high and rising notes before coming
to earth with the cough that killed. . . After hours in those hiding-
places where boys of the New Army were learning the lessons of war in
dugouts and ditches under the range of German guns, back again to the
little white chateau at Tatinghem, with a sweet scent of flowers from
the fields, and nightingales singing in the woods and a bell tinkling
for Benediction in the old church tower beyond our gate.

"To-morrow," said the colonel--our first chief--before driving in for
a late visit to G. H. Q., "we will go to Armentieres and see how the
'Kitchener' boys are shaping in the line up there. It ought to be
interesting."

The colonel was profoundly interested in the technic of war, in its
organization of supplies and transport, and methods of command. He was
a Regular of the Indian Army, a soldier by blood and caste and
training, and the noblest type of the old school of Imperial officer,
with obedience to command as a religious instinct; of stainless honor,
I think, in small things as well as great, with a deep love of
England, and a belief and pride in her Imperial destiny to govern many
peoples for their own good, and with the narrowness of such belief.
His imagination was limited to the boundaries of his professional
interests, though now and then his humanity made him realize in a
perplexed way greater issues at stake in this war than the challenge
to British Empiry.

One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield,
with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in
chalky ditches below their breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a
colleague of mine and said in a startled way:

"This must never happen again! Never!"

It will never happen again for him, as for many others. He was too
tall for the trenches, and one day a German sniper saw the red glint
of his hat-band--he was on the staff of the 11th Corps--and thought,
"a gay bird"! So he fell; and in our mess, when the news came, we were
sad at his going, and one of our orderlies, who had been his body-
servant, wept as he waited on us.

Late at night the colonel--that first chief of ours--used to come home
from G. H. Q., as all men called General Headquarters with a sense of
mystery, power, and inexplicable industry accomplishing--what?--in
those initials. He came back with a cheery shout of, "Fine weather to-
morrow!" or, "A starry night and all's well!" looking fine and
soldierly as the glare of his headlights shone on his tall figure with
red tabs and a colored armlet. But that cheeriness covered secret
worries. Night after night, in those early weeks of our service, he
sat in his little office, talking earnestly with the press officers--
our censors. They seemed to be arguing, debating, protesting, about
secret influences and hostilities surrounding us and them. I could
only guess what it was all about. It all seemed to make no difference
to me when I sat down before pieces of blank paper to get down some
kind of picture, some kind of impression, of a long day in place where
I had been scared awhile because death was on the prowl in a noisy way
and I had seen it pounce on human bodies. I knew that tomorrow I was
going to another little peep-show of war, where I should hear the same
noises. That talk downstairs, that worry about some mystery at G. H.
Q. would make no difference to the life or death of men, nor get rid
of that coldness which came to me when men were being killed nearby.
Why all that argument?

It seemed that G. H. Q.--mysterious people in a mysterious place--were
drawing up rules for war correspondence and censorship; altering rules
made the day before, formulating new rules for to-morrow, establishing
precedents, writing minutes, initialing reports with, "Passed to you,"
or, "I agree," written on the margin. The censors who lived with us
and traveled with us and were our friends, and read what we wrote
before the ink was dry, had to examine our screeds with microscopic
eyes and with infinite remembrance of the thousand and one rules. Was
it safe to mention the weather? Would that give any information to the
enemy? Was it permissible to describe the smell of chloride-of-lime in
the trenches, or would that discourage recruiting? That description of
the traffic on the roads of war, with transport wagons, gun-limbers,
lorries, mules--how did that conflict with Rule No. 17a (or whatever
it was) prohibiting all mention of movements of troops?

One of the censors working late at night, with lines of worry on his
forehead and little puckers about his eyes, turned to me with a queer
laugh, one night in the early days. He was an Indian Civil Servant,
and therefore, by every rule, a gentleman and a charming fellow.

"You don't know what I am risking in passing your despatch! It's too
good to spoil, but G. H. Q. will probably find that it conveys
accurate information to the enemy about the offensive in 1925. I shall
get the sack--and oh, the difference to me!"

It appeared that G. H. Q. was nervous of us. They suggested that our
private letters should be tested for writing in invisible ink between
the lines. They were afraid that, either deliberately for some
journalistic advantage, or in sheer ignorance as "outsiders," we might
hand information to the enemy about important secrets. Belonging to
the old caste of army mind, they believed that war was the special
prerogative of professional soldiers, of which politicians and people
should have no knowledge. Therefore as civilians in khaki we were
hardly better than spies.

The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in the moonlight,
after a day up the line, where young men were living and dying in
dirty ditches. I could see that he was worried, even angry.

"Those people!" he said.

"What people?"

"G. H. Q."

"Oh, Lord!" I groaned. "Again?" and looked across the fields of corn
to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were
learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn
came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that
day--or yesterday was it?--kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with
his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer. . . How sweet
was the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star twinkled above
the low flashes of gun-fire away there in the salient.

"They want us to waste your time," said the officer. "Those were the
very words used by the Chief of Intelligence--in writing which I have
kept. 'Waste their time!' . . . I'll be damned if I consider my work
is to waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good fools see
that this is not a professional adventure, like their other little
wars; that the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to
know what its men are doing? They have a right to know."

IV

Just at first--though not for long--there was a touch of hostility
against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but
not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their
quarters, wondered why we should come "spying around," trying to "see
things." I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early
times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a
brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not
easy nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy
clouds in a blue sky. There was a long straight road leading to the
village of Vermelles, with a crisscross of communication trenches on
one side, and, on the other, fields where corn and grass grew rankly
in abandoned fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though
this were Arcady in days of peace. It was not. The red ruins of
Vermelles, a mile or so away, were sharply defined, as through
stereoscopic lenses, in the quiver of sunlight, and had the sinister
look of a death-haunted place. It was where the French had fought
their way through gardens, walls, and houses in murderous battle,
before leaving it for British troops to hold. Across it now came the
whine of shells, and I saw that shrapnel bullets were kicking up the
dust of a thousand yards down the straight road, following a small
body of brown men whose tramp of feet raised another cloud of dust,
like smoke. They were the only representatives of human life--besides
ourselves--in this loneliness, though many men must have been in
hiding somewhere. Then heavy "crumps" burst in the fields where the
sheep were browsing, across the way we had to go to the brigade
headquarters.

"How about it?" asked the captain with me. "I don't like crossing that
field, in spite of the buttercups and daisies and the little frisky
lambs."

"I hate the idea of it," I said.

Then we looked down the road at the little body of brown men. They
were nearer now, and I could see the face of the officer leading
them--a boy subaltern, rather pale though the sun was hot. He halted
and saluted my companion.