Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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There was a wild scramble over the parapet, a drop into the wet ditch,
and a race for home over No Man's Land, which was white under the
German flares and noisy with the waspish note of bullets.

The other party were longer away and had greater trouble to find a way
through, but they, too, got home, with one officer badly wounded, and
wonderful luck to escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from "the
jumps" for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their own
barbed wire, as though the English were out there again. And at the
sound of those bombs the West Yorks laughed all along their trenches.

IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those
battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many
nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British
family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches
there were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and
history, all the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition
which belong to the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about
the world.

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years of
war over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and
Lowlanders with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches
the German soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained
harmony that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into
the firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no
officer received his command unless he spoke it as fluently as running
water by Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue until
a few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form fours and know
their left hand from their right in Welsh.

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the
peasants in these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old
Saxon words which puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire
men brought the northern bur with them and the grit of the northern
spirit. And Ireland, though she would not have conscription, sent some
of the bravest of her boys out there, and in all the bloodiest battles
since that day at Mons the old fighting qualities of the Irish race
shone brightly again, and the blood of her race has been poured out
upon these tragic fields.

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with
Irish boys at the beginning of '16 that I found it hard not to believe
that a part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In
one old outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows
lay cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave
out a sweet, sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in
the loft, to which they climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs.

I went up the ladder after them--it was very shaky in the middle--and,
putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark
figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs.
One boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny
whistle very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the
straws.

"The craytures are that bold," said a boy from County Cork, "that when
we first came in they sat up smilin' and sang 'God Save Ireland.'
Bedad, and it's the truth I'm after tellin' ye."

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the
shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and
soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good
at making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a
few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no
Protestant with a grudge against the Pope.

There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the Dublins and the
Munsters were up in the firing-line at the Hohenzollern. The shelling
was so violent that it was difficult to get up the supplies, and some
of the boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was the only
complaint which one of them made when I asked him what he thought of
his first experience under fire.

"It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I'd been after thinking, if
only my appetite had not been bigger than my belt, at all."

The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who had just come out
from the old country to join their comrades in the firing-line. When
the Germans put over a number of shells, smashing the trenches and
wounding men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted to get
over the parapet and make a dash for the enemy. "'Twould taych him a
lesson," they told their officers, who had some trouble in restraining
them.

These newcomers had to take part in the digging which goes on behind
the lines at night--out in the open, without the shelter of a trench.
It was nervous work, especially when the German flares went up,
silhouetting their figures on the sky-line, and when one of the
enemy's machine-guns began to chatter. But the Irish boys found the
heart for a jest, and one of them, resting on his spade a moment,
stared over to the enemy's lines and said, "May the old devil take the
spalpeen who works that typewriter!"

It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had come fresh to
the trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of
war until then. But they came out proudly--"with their tails up," said
one of their officers--after their baptism of fire.

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn
on the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors--who were myself
and another--the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who
came striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags
under their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw
around them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they
took their breath for "the good old Irish tune" demanded by the
captain.

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish
yesterdays, and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the
yearning of them.

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round? The
shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.

She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; They're
hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.

Then the pipers played the "March of O'Neill," a wild old air as
shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish
battle-cries against Elizabeth's pikemen and Cromwell's Ironsides.

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the
old people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that
Flemish barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the
boys who were out there fighting.

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of
an Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself,
with all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which
came crying from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them
could carry across the sea.

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy,
a poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and
torn, and caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger
along. But they pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left
when they passed their brigadier, who called out words of praise to
them.

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them,
after a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps
round German redoubts, up there in the swamps.

X

Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a
glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a
good flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to
fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of
Flanders were white.

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all
the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our
soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit
from Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy
ridges on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the
rubbish heaps in Flemish farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and
sheds where British soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the
lonely country which led to the trenches, every furrow in the fields
was a thin white ridge, and the trees, which were just showing a
shimmer of green, stood ink-black against the drifting snow-clouds,
with a long white streak down each tall trunk on the side nearest to
the wind. The old windmills of Flanders which looked down upon the
battlefields had been touched by the softly falling flakes, so that
each rib of their sails and each rung of their ladders and each plank
of their ancient timbers was outlined like a frosty cobweb.

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through the blizzard with
ermine mantles over their mackintosh capes, and mounted men with their
heads bent to the storm were like white knights riding through a white
wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun--limbers drawn
up by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals,
were all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were
hushed in the great quietude.

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the
piled sand-bags and snow-men of sentries standing in the shelter of
the traverses. The tarpaulin roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts
were so changed by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places
of fairy folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a Christmas
hiding-place, and not of soldiers stamping their feet and blowing on
their fingers and keeping their rifles dry.

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty even to No Man's
Land, making a lace-work pattern of barbed wire, and lying very softly
over the tumbled ground of mine-fields, so that all the ugliness of
destruction and death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes
fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them tenderly. It was
as though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold their wings
above the obscene things of war.

For a little while the snow brought something like peace. The guns
were quieter, for artillery observation was impossible. There could be
no sniping, for the scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches.
The airplanes which went up in the morning came down quickly to the
powdered fields and took shelter in their sheds. A great hush was over
the war zone, but there was something grim, suggestive of tragic
drama, in this silent countryside, so white even in the darkness,
where millions of men were waiting to kill one another.

Behind the lines the joke of the snow was seen by soldiers, who were
quick to see a chance of fun. Men who had been hurling bombs in the
Ypres salient bombarded one another with hand-grenades, which burst
noiselessly except for the shouts of laughter that signaled a good
hit.

French soldiers were at the same game in one village I passed, where
the snow-fight was fast and furious, and some of our officers led an
attack upon old comrades with the craft of trappers and an expert
knowledge of enfilade fire. The white peace did not last long. The
ermine mantle on the battlefield was stained by scarlet patches as
soon as men could see to fight again.

XI

For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the
Chateau of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the
line, were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motor-cars
could move through that snow which drifted across the roads. We sat
indoors talking--high treason sometimes--pondering over the problem of
a war from which there seemed no way out, becoming irritable with one
another's company, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics of
war, the purpose of man, the gospel of Christ, the guilt of Germany,
and the dishonesty of British politicians. Futile, foolish arguments,
while men were being killed in great numbers, as daily routine,
without result!

Officers of a division billeted nearby came in to dine with us, some
of them generals with elaborate theories on war and a passionate
hatred of Germany, seeing no other evil in the world; some of them
brigadiers with tales of appalling brutality (which caused great
laughter), some of them battalion officers with the point of view of
those who said, "Morituri te saluant!"

There was one whose conversation I remember (having taken notes of it
before I turned in that night). It was a remarkable conversation,
summing up many things of the same kind which I had heard in stray
sentences by other officers, and month by month, years afterward,
heard again, spoken with passion. This officer who had come out to
France in 1914 and had been fighting ever since by a luck which had
spared his life when so many of his comrades had fallen round him, did
not speak with passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He said
that G.H.Q. was a close corporation in the hands of the military
clique who had muddled through the South African War, and were now
going to muddle through a worse one. They were, he said, intrenched
behind impregnable barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red tape,
and caste privilege. They were, of course, patriots who believed that
the Empire depended upon their system. They had no doubt of their
inherent right to conduct the war, which was "their war," without
interference or criticism or publicity. They spent many hours of the
days and nights in writing letters to one another, and those who wrote
most letters received most decorations, and felt, with a patriotic
fire within their breasts, that they were getting on with the war.

Within their close corporation there were rivalries, intrigues,
perjuries, and treacheries like those of a medieval court. Each
general and staff-officer had his followers and his sycophants, who
jostled for one another's jobs, fawned on the great man, flattered his
vanity, and made him believe in his omniscience. Among the General
Staff there were various grades--G.S.O. I, G.S.O. II, G.S.O. III, and
those in the lower grades fought for a higher grade with every kind of
artfulness, and diplomacy and back-stair influence. They worked late
into the night. That is to say, they went back to their offices after
dining at mess--"so frightfully busy, you know, old man!"--and kept
their lights burning, and smoked more cigarettes, and rang one another
up on the telephone with futile questions, and invented new ways of
preventing something from being down somewhere. The war to them was a
far-off thing essential to their way of life, as miners in the coal-
fields are essential to statesmen in Downing Street, especially in
cold weather. But it did not touch their souls or their bodies. They
did not see its agony, or imagine it, or worry about it. They were
always cheerful, breezy, bright with optimism. They made a little work
go a long way. They were haughty and arrogant with subordinate
officers, or at the best affable and condescending, and to superior
officers they said, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," "Quite so, sir," to any
statement, however absurd in its ignorance and dogmatism. If a major-
general said, "Wagner was a mountebank in music," G.S.O. III, who had
once studied at Munich, said, "Yes, sir," or, "You think so, sir? Of
course you're right."

If a lieutenant-colonel said, "Browning was not a poet," a staff
captain, who had read Browning at Cambridge with passionate
admiration, said: "I quite agree with you, sir. And who do you think
was a poet, sir?"

It was the army system. The opinion of a superior officer was correct,
always. It did not admit of contradiction. It was not to be
criticized. Its ignorance was wisdom.

G. H. Q. lived, said our guest, in a world of its own, rose-colored,
remote from the ugly things of war. They had heard of the trenches,
yes, but as the West End hears of the East End--a nasty place where
common people lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society
folk go slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell burst,
having braved the lice and the dirt.

"The trenches are the slums," said our guest. "We are the Great
Unwashed. We are the Mud-larks."

There was a trench in the salient called J. 3. It was away out in
advance of our lines. It was not connected with our own trench system.
It had been left derelict by both sides and was a ditch in No Man's
Land. But our men were ordered to hold it--"to save sniping." A
battalion commander protested to the Headquarters Staff. There was no
object in holding J. 3. It was a target for German guns and a
temptation to German miners.

"J. 3," came the staff command, "must be held until further orders."

We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench and all in it were
thrown up by mines. Among those killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce,
the husband of Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown.

Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve Chapelle. "This is a
death sentence," said the officers who were ordered to attack. But
they attacked, and died, with great gallantry, as usual.

"In the slums," said our guest, "we are expected to die if G. H. Q.
tells us so, or if the corps arranges our funeral. And generally we
do."

That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened to the
rumbling of the gunning away in the salient, and seemed to hear the
groans of men at Hooge, at St.-Eloi, in other awful places. The irony
of that guest of ours was frightful. It was bitter beyond justice,
though with truth in the mockery, the truth of a soul shocked by the
waste of life and heroism; . . . when I met him later in the war he
was on the staff.

XII

The world--our side of it--held its breath and felt its own heart-beat
when, in February of that year '15, the armies of the German Crown
Prince launched their offensive against the French at Verdun. It was
the biggest offensive since their first drive down to the Marne; and
as the days passed and they hurled fresh masses of men against the
French and brought up new guns to replace their losses, there was no
doubt that in this battle the Germans were trying by all their weight
to smash their way to victory through the walls which the French had
built against them by living flesh and spirit.

"Will they hold?" was the question which every man among us asked of
his neighbor and of his soul.

On our front there was nothing of war beyond the daily routine of the
trenches and the daily list of deaths and wounds. Winter had closed
down upon us in Flanders, and through its fogs and snows came the news
of that conflict round Verdun to the waiting army, which was ours. The
news was bad, yet not the worst. Poring over maps of the French front,
we in our winter quarters saw with secret terror, some of us with a
bluster of false optimism, some of us with unjustified despair, that
the French were giving ground, giving ground slowly, after heroic
resistance, after dreadful massacre, and steadily. They were falling
back to the inner line of forts, hard pressed. The Germans, in spite
of monstrous losses under the flail of the soixante-quinzes, were
forcing their way from slope to slope, capturing positions which all
but dominated the whole of the Verdun heights.

"If the French break we shall lose the war," said the pessimist.

"The French will never lose Verdun," said the optimist.

"Why not? What are your reasons beyond that cursed optimism which has
been our ruin? Why announce things like that as though divinely
inspired? For God's sake let us stare straight at the facts."

"The Germans are losing the war by this attack on Verdun. They are
just pouring their best soldiers into the furnace--burning the flower
of their army. It is our gain. It will lead in the end to our
victory."

"But, my dear good fool, what about the French losses? Don't they get
killed, too? The German artillery is flogging them with shell-fire
from seventeen-inch guns, twelve-inch, nine-inch, every bloody and
monstrous engine. The French are weak in heavy artillery. For that
error, which has haunted them from the beginning, they are now paying
with their life's blood--the life blood of France."

"You are arguing on emotion and fear. Haven't you learned yet that the
attacking side always loses more than the defense?"

"That is a sweeping statement. It depends on relative man-power and
gun-power. Given a superiority of guns and men, and attack is cheap.
Defense is blown off the earth. Otherwise how could we ever hope to
win?"

"I agree. But the forces at Verdun are about equal, and the French
have the advantage of position. The Germans are committing suicide."

"Humbug! They know what they are doing. They are the greatest soldiers
in Europe."

"Led by men with bone heads."

"By great scientists."

"By the traditional rules of medievalism. By bald--headed vultures in
spectacles with brains like penny-in--the-slot machines. Put in a
penny and out comes a rule of war. Mad egoists! Colossal blunderers!
Efficient in all things but knowledge of life."

"Then God help our British G.H.Q.!"

A long silence. The silence of men who see monstrous forces at work,
in which human lives are tossed like straws in flame. A silence
reaching back to old ghosts of history, reaching out to supernatural
aid. Then from one speaker or another a kind of curse and a kind of
prayer.

"Hell! . . . God help us all!"

So it was in our mess where war correspondents and censors sat down
together after futile journeys to dirty places to see a bit of shell-
fire, a few dead bodies, a line of German trenches through a
periscope, a queue of wounded men outside a dressing station, the
survivors of a trench raid, a bombardment before a "minor operation,"
a trench-mortar "stunt," a new part of the line. . . Verdun was the
only thing that mattered in March and April until France had saved
herself and all of us.

XIII

The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, but rendered
great service to France at that time. By February of 1915 we had taken
over a new line of front, extending from our positions round Loos
southward to the country round Lens and Arras. It was to this movement
in February that Marshal Joffre made allusion when, in a message to
our Commander-in-Chief on March 2d, he said that "the French army
remembered that its recent call on the comradeship of the British army
met with an immediate and complete response."

By liberating an immense number of French troops of the Tenth Army and
a mass of artillery from this part of the front, we had the good
fortune to be of great service to France at a time when she needed
many men and guns to repel the assault upon Verdun.

Some of her finest troops--men who had fought in many battles and had
held the trenches with most dogged courage--were here in this sector
of the western front, and many batteries of heavy and light artillery
had been in these positions since the early months of the war. It was,
therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to the defense of
Verdun when British troops replaced them at the time the enemy made
his great attack.

The French went away from this part of their battlefront with regret
and emotion. To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long
ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois,
to Hebuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the
Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.

I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw the visible
reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn there, and told the
story of all the struggle there by the upheaval of earth, the wreckage
of old trenches, the mine--craters and shell-holes, and the litter of
battle in every part of that countryside.

I went there first--to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette looking
northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, which the enemy held as
a strong barrier against us above the village of Souchez and Ablain
St.-Nazaire and Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured--
when they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I saw in their
places the men who had lived there and fought there as one may read in
the terrible and tragic narrative of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu.

I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. (Never once did he admit
any fine weather to alleviate the suffering of his comrades, thereby
exaggerating their misery somewhat.) It was raining, and there was a
white, dank mist through the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny on the way
to the spur of Notre Dame. It clung to the undergrowth, which was torn
by shell-fire, and to every blade of grass growing rankly round the
lips of shell-craters in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the
red pantaloons of the first French armies who had fought through those
woods in the beginning of the war.