Books: Now It Can Be Told

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There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the
English way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere
Dawson, of the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he
met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to
his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his
men, and remained with them until the German night attack was
repulsed. He was again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not
trouble the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of March
18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained
by the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare--one V. C.,
sixteen D. S. C.'s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military
Medals--were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen
thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that
time, made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern
took the highest toll of life and limbs.

V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but
afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots,
among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with
moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, "Listen!"

Through the open door came the music of a mouth--organ, and it was
playing an old tune:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus
Christ, our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine,
rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the window-
panes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull
rumble of distant guns.

"Christmas Eve!" said an officer. "Nineteen hundred and fifteen years
ago . . . and now--this!"

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which
was followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet
in Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought
of the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and
contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few
words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many
comrades had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and
had the courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of
Christmas, the little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and
trinkets of its feast-day, in places where Death had been busy--and
where the spirit of evil lay in ambush!

So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of the
enemy's guns. Already six hundred civilians--mostly women and
children--had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting
together through broken window-panes, and children were staring into
little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken
walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier's boots--a French Hop o' My Thumb
in the giant's boots--was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and
inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying
some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for
the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other
soldiers read their legends and laughed at them: "My heart is to you."
"Good luck." "To the success!" "Remind France."

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked
up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was
spending it.

"The people at home will be glad of 'em," he said. "I s'pose one can't
forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain't the same thing out here."

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside
and found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving
their batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed,
fountains of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military
motor-cars lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side-
slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply--columns churning
up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come
that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with
his white beard must have lifted his red gown high--waist-high--when
he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines,
and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep
in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five
feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy
sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of
youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across
open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order
to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead
ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge
of the enemy's lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a
hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the
scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there
nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with
me said, "It's best to get a move on here," and, "This road is swept
by machine--gun fire," and, "I don't like this corner; it's quite
unhealthy."

But that absurd idea--of Santa Claus in the trenches--came into my
head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a
whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught
the glint of his red cloak.

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a
small group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.

"Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?" asked a lad,
grinning down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.

"Likely, ain't it?" said the other boy. "Father Christmas would be a
bloody fool to come out here. . . They'd be full of water in the
morning."

"You'll get some presents," I said. "They haven't forgotten you at
home."

At that word "home" the boy flushed and something went soft in his
eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained
uniform, he was a girlish-looking fellow--perhaps that was why his
comrades were chaffing him--and I fancy the thought of Christmas made
him yearn back to some village in Yorkshire.

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas
with contemptuous irony.

"A happy Christmas!" said one of them, with a laugh. "Plenty of
crackers about this year! Tom Smith ain't in it."

"And I hope we're going to give the Boches some Christmas presents,"
said another. "They deserve it, I don't think!"

"No truce this year?" I asked.

"A truce? . . . We're not going to allow any monkey--tricks on the
parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We've got
to get on with the war. That's my motto."

Other men said: "We wouldn't mind a holiday. We're fed up to the neck
with all this muck."

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only
carol I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on
both sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle
on the keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells
into a bit of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel
shells were bursting, and behind the lines our "heavies" were busily
at work firing at long range.

"On earth peace, good-will toward men."

The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that
long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-
machines, and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the
Christmas bells which came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the
reverberation of great guns.

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and
the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by
the splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.

VI

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year,
and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept
fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth,
and there was no peace on earth.

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of
war. I heard the New-Year's chorus when I went to see the last of the
year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence.
It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories, to
thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The "heavies" were
indulging in a special strafe this New--Year's eve. As I went down a
road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash
of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and
the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's sense of sound. All
about me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was
no other sound, no noise of human life. There were no New-Year's eve
rejoicings among those rows of miners' cottages on the edge of the
battlefield. Half those little red-brick houses were blown to pieces,
and when here and there through a cracked window-pane I saw a woman's
white face peering out upon me as I passed I felt as though I had seen
a ghost-face in some black pit of hell.

For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always
under the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there
passed all belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across
the field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge
of Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the
rain and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de
Lorette, where many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins
of Haisnes and Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on
New--Year's eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it,
but stared at the broad desolation and listened to the enormous
clangor of great guns.

* * *

Coming back that day through Bethune I met some very human life. It
was a big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to
see what "Tommy" was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and
saw a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that
sector and the naval men did their little bit by the side of the lads
in khaki, who liked this visit. They discovered the bomb store and
opened such a Brock's benefit that the enemy must have been shocked
with surprise. One young marine was bomb-slinging for four hours, and
grinned at the prodigious memory as though he had had the time of his
life. Another confessed to me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which
he fired off all night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the
dugouts, and every hour was a long thrill.

"I don't mind saying," said a petty officer who had fought in several
naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, "that I had a fair
fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to
look through a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. 'At
night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the parapet I put
my head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My
rifle began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open
ground. I fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack. . . But I'm
blessed if it wasn't a swarm of rats!"

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and
some of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a
young fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.

"Come up and have a look, Jack," he said to one of the bluejackets.

"Not in these trousers, old mate!" said that young man.

"All as cool as cucumbers," said a petty officer, "and take the
discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It's
marvelous. Good luck to them in the new year!"

* * *

Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed to
die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that New-
Year's day.

They were the heroes of Loos--or some of them--Camerons and Seaforths,
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish
Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away to
the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their
battalions have been filled up with new drafts--of the same type as
themselves and of the same grit--but that day no ghost of grief, no
dark shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked
round a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded
came in those days of the September battle.

There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from
Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship
which burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the
platform above the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came
in, and this hall in France was filled with the wild strains of it.

"And they're grand, the pipes," said one of the Camerons. "When I've
been sae tired on the march I could have laid doon an' dee'd the touch
o' the pipes has fair lifted me up agen."

The piper made way for a Kiltie at the piano, and for Highlanders, who
sang old songs full of melancholy, which seemed to make the hearts of
his comrades grow glad as when they helped him with "The Bonnie,
Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond." But the roof nearly flew off the hall to
"The March of the Cameron Men," and the walls were greatly strained
when the regimental marching song broke at every verse into wild
Highland shouts and the war-cry which was heard at Loos of "Camerons,
forward!" "Forward, Camerons!"

"An Englishman is good," said one of the Camerons, leaning over the
table to me, "and an Irishman is good, but a Scot is the best of all."
Then he struck the palm of one hand with the fist of another. "But the
London men," he said, with a fine, joyous laugh at some good memory,
"are as good as any fighting-men in France. My word, ye should have
seen 'em on September 25th. And the London Irish were just lions!"

Out in the rain-slashed street I met the colonel of a battalion of
Argylls and Sutherlands, with several of his officers; a tall, thin
officer with a long stride, who was killed when another year had
passed. He beckoned to me and said: "I'm going the rounds of the
billets to wish the men good luck in the new year. It's a strain on
the constitution, as I have to drink their health each time!"

He bore the strain gallantly, and there was something noble and
chivalrous in the way he spoke to all his men, gathered together in
various rooms in old Flemish houses, round plum-pudding from home or
feasts provided by the army cooks. To each group of men he made the
same kind of speech, thanking them from his heart for all their
courage.

"You were thanked by three generals," he said, "after your attack at
Loos, and you upheld the old reputation of the regiment. I'm proud of
you. And afterward, in November, when you had the devil of a time in
the trenches, you stuck it splendidly and came out with high spirits.
I wish you all a happy new year, and whatever the future may bring I
know I can count on you."

In every billet there were three cheers for the colonel, and another
three for the staff captain, and though the colonel protested that he
was afraid of spending a night in the guard-room (there were shouts of
laughter at this), he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the
custom of the day.

"Toodle-oo, old bird!" said a kilted cockney, halfway up a ladder, on
which he swayed perilously, being very drunk; but the colonel did not
hear this familiar way of address.

In many billets and in many halls the feast of New Year's day was kept
in good comradeship by men who had faced death together, and who in
the year that was coming fought in many battles and fell on many
fields.

VII

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for
a long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never
knew what they might do next. When they were most quiet they were most
dangerous. They used cunning as well as courage, and went out on red-
Indian adventures over No Man's Land for fierce and scientific
slaughter.

I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when a big party
of them--all volunteers--went out one night with intent to get through
the barbed wire outside a strong German position, to do a lot of
killing there. They had trained for the job and thought out every
detail of this hunting expedition. They blacked their faces so that
they would not show white in the enemy's flares. They fastened flash-
lamps to their bayonets so that they might see their victims. They
wore rubber gloves to save their hands from being torn on the barbs of
the wire.

Stealthily they crawled over No Man's Land, crouching in shell-holes
every time a rocket rose and made a glimmer of light. They took their
time at the wire, muffling the snap of it by bits of cloth. Reliefs
crawled up with more gloves, and even with tins of hot cocoa. Then
through the gap into the German trenches, and there were screams of
German soldiers, terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes,
and black faces above them, and bayonets already red with blood. It
was butcher's work, quick and skilful, like red-Indian scalping.
Thirty Germans were killed before the Canadians went back, with only
two casualties. . . The Germans were horrified by this sudden
slaughter. They dared not come out on patrol work. Canadian scouts
crawled down to them and insulted them, ingeniously, vilely, but could
get no answer. Later they trained their machine--guns on German
working-parties and swept crossroads on which supplies came up, and
the Canadian sniper, in one shell-hole or another, lay for hours in
sulky patience, and at last got his man. . . They had to pay for all
this, at Maple Copse, in June of '15, as I shall tell. But it was a
vendetta which did not end until the war ended, and the Canadians
fought the Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skilful patience
which at last brought them to Mons on the day before armistice.

I saw a good deal of the Canadians from first to last, and on many
days of battle saw the tough, hard fighting spirit of these men. Their
generals believed in common sense applied to war, and not in high
mysteries and secret rites which cannot be known outside the circle of
initiation. I was impressed by General Currie, whom I met for the
first time in that winter of 1915-16, and wrote at the time that I saw
in him "a leader of men who in open warfare might win great victories
by doing the common-sense thing rapidly and decisively, to the
surprise of an enemy working by elaborate science. He would, I think,
astound them by the simplicity of his smashing stroke." Those words of
mine were fulfilled--on the day when the Canadians helped to break the
Drocourt-Queant line, and when they captured Cambrai, with English
troops on their right, who shared their success. General Currie, who
became the Canadian Corps Commander, did not spare his men. He led
them forward whatever the cost, but there was something great and
terrible in his simplicity and sureness of judgment, and this real--
estate agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was undoubtedly
a man of strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and
tradition which swathed round so many of our own leaders.

He cut clean to the heart of things, ruthlessly, like a surgeon, and
as I watched that man, immense in bulk, with a heavy, thoughtful face
and stern eyes that softened a little when he smiled, I thought of him
as Oliver Cromwell. He was severe as a disciplinarian, and not beloved
by many men. But his staff-officers, who stood in awe of him, knew
that he demanded truth and honesty, and that his brain moved quickly
to sure decisions and saw big problems broadly and with understanding.
He had good men with him--mostly amateurs--but with hard business
heads and the same hatred of red tape and niggling ways which belonged
to their chief. So the Canadian Corps became a powerful engine on our
side when it had learned many lessons in blood and tragedy. They
organized their publicity side in the same masterful way, and were
determined that what Canada did the world should know--and damn all
censorship. They bought up English artists, photographers, and
writing--men to record their exploits. With Lord Beaverbrook in
England they engineered Canadian propaganda with immense energy, and
Canada believed her men made up the British army and did all the
fighting. I do not blame them, and only wish that the English soldier
should have been given his share of the honors that belonged to him--
the lion's share.

VIII

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. It became part
of the routine of war, that quick killing in the night, for English
and Scottish and Irish and Welsh troops, and some had luck with it,
and some men liked it, and to others it was a horror which they had to
do, and always it was a fluky, nervy job, when any accident might lead
to tragedy.

I remember one such raid by the 12th West Yorks in January of '15,
which was typical of many others, before raids developed into minor
battles, with all the guns at work.

There were four lieutenants who drew up the plan and called for
volunteers, and it was one of these who went out first and alone to
reconnoiter the ground and to find the best way through the German
barbed wire. He just slipped out over the parapet and disappeared into
the darkness. When he came back he had a wound in the wrist--it was
just the bad luck of a chance bullet--but brought in valuable
knowledge. He had found a gap in the enemy's wire which would give an
open door to the party of visitors. He had also tested the wire
farther along, and thought it could be cut without much bother.

"Good enough!" was the verdict, and a detachment started out for No
Man's Land, divided into two parties.

The enemy trenches were about one hundred yards away, which seems a
mile in the darkness and the loneliness of the dead ground. At regular
intervals the German rockets flared up so that the hedges and wire and
parapets along their line were cut out ink-black against the white
illumination, and the two patrols of Yorkshiremen who had been
crawling forward stopped and crouched lower and felt themselves
revealed, and then when darkness hid them again went on.

The party on the left were now close to the German wire and under the
shelter of a hedge. They felt their way along until the two subalterns
who were leading came to the gap which had been reported by the first
explorer. They listened intently and heard the German sentry stamping
his feet and pacing up and down. Presently he began to whistle softly,
utterly unconscious of the men so close to him--so close now that any
stumble, any clatter of arms, any word spoken, would betray them.

The two lieutenants had their revolvers ready and crept forward to the
parapet. The men had to act according to instinct now, for no order
could be given, and one of them found his instinct led him to clamber
right into the German trench a few yards away from the sentry, but on
the other side of the traverse. He had not been there long, holding
his breath and crouching like a wolf, before footsteps came toward him
and he saw the glint of a cigarette.

It was a German officer going his round. The Yorkshire boy sprang on
to the parapet again, and lay across it with his head toward our lines
and his legs dangling in the German trench. The German officer's cloak
brushed his heels, but the boy twisted round a little and stared at
him as he passed. But he passed, and presently the sentry began to
whistle again, some old German tune which cheered him in his
loneliness. He knew nothing of the eyes watching him through the
darkness nor of his nearness to death.

It was the first lieutenant who tried to shoot him. But the revolver
was muddy and would not fire. Perhaps a click disturbed the sentry.
Anyhow, the moment had come for quick work. It was the sergeant who
sprang upon him, down from the parapet with one pounce. A frightful
shriek, with the shrill agony of a boy's voice, wailed through the
silence. The sergeant had his hand about the German boy's throat and
tried to strangle him and to stop another dreadful cry.

The second officer made haste. He thrust his revolver close to the
struggling sentry and shot him dead, through the neck, just as he was
falling limp from a blow on the head given by the butt-end of the
weapon which had failed to fire. The bullet did its work, though it
passed through the sergeant's hand, which had still held the man by
the throat. The alarm had been raised and German soldiers were running
to the rescue.

"Quick!" said one of the officers.