Books: Now It Can Be Told

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I roamed about a graveyard there, where shells had smashed down some
of the crosses, but had not damaged the memorial to the men who had
stormed up the slope of Notre Dame de Lorette and had fallen when
their comrades chased the Germans to the village below.

A few shells came over the hill as I pushed through the undergrowth
with a French captain, and they burst among the trees with shattering
boughs. I remember that little officer in a steel helmet, and I could
see a Norman knight as his ancestor with a falcon as his crest. He
stood so often on the sky-line, in full view of the enemy (I was
thankful for the mist), that I admired but deplored his audacity.
Without any screen to hide us we walked down the hillside, gathering
clots of greasy mud in our boots, stumbling, and once sprawling.
Another French captain joined us and became the guide.

"This road is often 'Marmite,'" he said, "but I have escaped so often
I have a kind of fatalism."

I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells which a few
minutes before had burst in our immediate neighborhood, cutting off
twigs of trees and one branch with a scatter of steel as sharp as
knives and as heavy as sledge-hammers.

Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which
afterward I passed through scores of times on the way to Vimy when
that ridge was ours. The ragged ruin of its church was white and
ghostly in the mist. On the right of the winding road which led
through it was Souchez Wood, all blasted and riven, and beyond a
huddle of bricks which once was Souchez village.

"Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground," said the French
officer. "Their bodies lie thick below the soil. Poor France! Poor
France!"

He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all
that youth of France which even then, in March of '16, had been
offered up in vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war. Rain was
slashing down now, beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of
French soldiers who stood shivering by the ruined walls while trench-
mortars were making a tumult in the neighborhood. They were the men of
Henri Barbusse--his comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys
mixed together in a confraternity of misery. They were plastered with
wet clay, and their boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of
mud on them. Their blue coats were soddened, and the water dripped out
of them and made pools round their feet. They were unshaven, and their
wet faces were smeared with the soil of the trenches.

"How goes it?" said the French captain with me.

"It does not go," said the French sergeant. "'Cre nom de Dieu!--my men
are not gay to-day. They have been wet for three weeks and their bones
are aching. This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a
little fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the dirty Boche
starts shelling again. So we do not get dry, and we have no warmth,
and we cannot make even a cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up
there on Vimy looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his sleeve
and says those poor devils of Frenchmen are not gay to-day! That is
true, mon Capitaine. Mais, que voulez-vous ? C'est pour la France."

"Oui. C'est pour la France."

The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those
comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of
Neuville St.-Vaast.

"Poor fellows," he said, presently. "Not even a cup of hot coffee! . .
. That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes--afterward! But at what a
price!"

So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine
church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little
streets of comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old
hill of Vimy, and within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish
heap mingled with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies'
perambulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts.

Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay
under a blood-soaked blanket.

"It is a bad wound?" asked the captain.

The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face,
waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a
pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.

"He may live as far as the dressing station," said one of the
Frenchmen. "It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just
now, over there."

The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sand--bags at the end of
a street of ruin.

Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, hobbling gait.
Both of them were wounded in the legs, and had tied rags round their
wounds tightly. They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as
they passed, with brooding eyes.

"The German trench-mortars are very evil," said the captain.

We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sand-bags
to look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and
thrust out by communication trenches to the edge of the village in
which we walked. A boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the
captain, who stepped back and said, in an emotional way:

"Tiens! C'est toi, Edouard?"

"Oui, mon Capitaine."

The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes and long,
black eyelashes.

"You are a lieutenant, then? How does it go, Edouard?"

"It does not go," answered the boy like that French sergeant in Ablain
St.-Nazaire. "This is a bad place. I lose my men every day. There were
three killed yesterday, and six wounded. To-day already there are two
killed and ten wounded."

Something broke in his voice.

"Ce n'est pas bon du tout, du tout!" ("It is not good at all, at
all!")

The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.

"Courage, mon vieux!"

The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud.
Sharp stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the
high, long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette.
Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells
cut through the air above us like scythes. The caldron in this pit of
war was being stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us,
covered by a bloody blanket like the other one. From slimy sand-bags
and wet ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. A boot
with some pulp inside protruded from a mud--bank where I stood, and
there was a human head, without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in
the puddle of a shell--hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th,
a year before, when swarms of boys, of the '16 class, boys of
eighteen, the flower of French youth, rushed forward from the
crossroads at La Targette, a few hundred yards away, to capture these
ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They captured them, and it cost them
seven thousand in killed and wounded--at least three thousand dead.
They fought like young demons through the flaming streets. They fell
in heaps under the German barrage-fire. Machine--guns cut them down as
though they were ripe corn under the sickle. But these French boys
broke the Prussian Guard that day.

Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the
fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing
below earth at the Labyrinth--sapping, mining, gaining a network of
trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by
frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and
hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground
in the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for
something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the
Labyrinth, until in February of '16 they went away after greeting our
khaki men who came into their old places and found the bones and
bodies of Frenchmen there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in
disused trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down
and uncovered them.

XIV

It was then, in that February of '15, that the city of Arras passed
for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our
strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted
forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many
days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in
steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of
wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets
where their laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in
the surging tide of traffic that poured through to victory that cost
as much sometimes as defeat.

When I first went into Arras during its occupation by the French I
remembered a day, fifteen months before, near the town of St.-Pol in
Artois, where I was caught up in one of those tides of fugitives which
in those early days of war used to roll back in a state of terror
before the German invasion. "Where do they come from?" I asked,
watching this long procession of gigs and farmers' carts and tramping
women and children. The answer told me everything. "They are
bombarding Arras, m'sieur."

Since then "They" had never ceased to bombard Arras. From many points
of view, as I had come through the countryside at night, I had seen
the flashes of shells over that city and had thought of the agony
inside. Four days before I went in first it was bombarded with one
hundred and fifty seventeen-inch shells, each one of which would
destroy a cathedral. It was with a sense of being near to death--not a
pleasant feeling, you understand--that I went into Arras for the first
time and saw what had happened to it.

I was very near to the Germans. No more than ten yards away, when I
stood peering through a hole in the wall of the Maison Rouge in the
suburb of Blangy--it was a red-brick villa, torn by shells, with a
piano in the parlor which no man dared to play, behind a shelter of
sand-bags--and no more than two hundred yards away from the enemy's
lines when I paced up and down the great railway station of Arras,
where no trains ever traveled. For more than a year the enemy had been
encamped outside the city, and for all that time had tried to batter a
way into and through it. An endless battle had surged up against its
walls, but in spite of all their desperate attacks no German soldier
had set foot inside the city except as a prisoner of war. Many
thousands of young Frenchmen had given their blood to save it.

The enemy had not been able to prevail over flesh and blood and the
spirit of heroic men, but he had destroyed the city bit by bit. It was
pitiful beyond all expression. It was worse than looking upon a woman
whose beauty had been scarred by bloody usage.

For Arras was a city of beauty--a living expression in stone of all
the idealism in eight hundred years of history, a most sweet and
gracious place. Even then, after a year's bombardment, some spiritual
exhalation of human love and art came to one out of all this ruin.
When I entered the city and wandered a little in its public gardens
before going into its dead heart--the Grande Place--I felt the strange
survival. The trees here were slashed by shrapnel. Enormous shell-
craters had plowed up those pleasure-grounds. The shrubberies were
beaten down.

Almost every house had been hit, every building was scarred and
slashed, but for the most part the city still stood, so that I went
through many long streets and passed long lines of houses, all
deserted, all dreadful in their silence and desolation and ruin.

Then I came to the cathedral of St.-Vaast. It was an enormous building
of the Renaissance, not beautiful, but impressive in its spaciousness
and dignity. Next to it was the bishop's palace, with long corridors
and halls, and a private chapel. Upon these walls and domes the fury
of great shells had spent itself. Pillars as wide in girth as giant
trees had been snapped off to the base. The dome of the cathedral
opened with a yawning chasm. High explosives burst through the walls.
The keystones of arches were blown out, and masses of masonry were
piled into the nave and aisles.

As I stood there, rooks had perched in the broken vaulting and flew
with noisy wings above the ruined altars. Another sound came like a
great beating of wings, with a swifter rush. It was a shell, and the
vibration of it stirred the crumbling masonry, and bits of it fell
with a clatter to the littered floor. On the way to the ruin of the
bishop's chapel I passed a group of stone figures. They were the
famous "Angels of Arras" removed from some other part of the building
to what might have been a safer place.

Now they were fallen angels, mangled as they lay. But in the chapel
beyond, where the light streamed through the broken panes of stained-
glass windows, one figure stood untouched in all this ruin. It was a
tall statue of Christ standing in an attitude of meekness and sorrow,
as though in the presence of those who crucified Him.

Yet something more wonderful than this scene of tragedy lived in the
midst of it. Yet there were still people living in Arras.

They lived an underground life, for the most part, coming up from the
underworld to blink in the sunlight, to mutter a prayer or a curse or
two, to gaze for a moment at any change made by a new day's
bombardment, and then to burrow down again at the shock of a gun.

Through low archways just above the pavement, I looked down into some
of the deep-vaulted cellars where the merchants used to stock their
wine, and saw old women, and sometimes young women there, cooking over
little stoves, pottering about iron bedsteads, busy with domestic
work. Some of them looked up as I passed, and my eyes and theirs
stared into each other. The women's faces were lined and their eyes
sunken. They had the look of people who have lived through many
agonies and have more to suffer.

Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. There was a
greengrocer's shop still carrying on a little trade. I went into
another shop and bought some picture post-cards of the ruins within a
few yards of it. The woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and
laughed because she had no change. Only two days before a seventeen-
inch shell had burst fifty yards or so away from her shop, which was
close enough for death. I marveled at the risk she took with cheerful
smiles. Was it courage or stupidity?

One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in a friendly way
and called me cher petit ami, and described how she had been nearly
killed a hundred times. When I asked her why she stayed she gave an
old woman's cackling laugh and said, "Que voulez-vous, jeune homme?"
which did not seem a satisfactory answer. As dusk crept into the
streets of Arras I saw small groups of boys and girls. They seemed to
come out of holes in the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki.
"Are you afraid of the shells?" I asked. They grimaced up at the sky
and giggled. They had got used to the hell of it all, and dodged death
as they would a man with a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the
length of his lash. In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when
English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls who gave
them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or two, and the Circe cup
of pleasure, if they had time to stay. Overhead shells were howling.
Their city was stricken with death. These women lived like witches in
a cave--a strange and dreadful life.

I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a
sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great
factory of some kind--probably for beet sugar--and then a street of
small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own
suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and
houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sand-
bags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned
boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced
outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of
which is the enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we
had to walk very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house
of all, which was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence
was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten yards away,
with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across
the walls. Through a chink no wider than my finger I could see the
red-brick ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to
Douai . . . The road to Douai as seen through this chink was a tangle
of broken bricks.

The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there
were many places where one had to step quietly and duck one's head, or
get behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper's bullet or
the rattle of bullets from a machine-gun.

As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its
ruined streets and shells were crashing over the city from French
guns, answered now and then by enemy batteries. But in a moment of
rare silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the
sweet voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its
agony, and I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in
a ghostly way.

XV

While we hung on the news from Verdun--it seemed as though the fate of
the world were in Fort Douaumont--our own lists of death grew longer.

In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on
their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with
one hand clutching at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, with
head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas.

"O Christ!" said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-
bed in the ambulance-train.

"Now you will be comfortable and happy," said the R.A.M.C. orderly.

The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and,
grasping a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking
out on his forehead.

Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told
me that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the
tears away and said:

"I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed."

So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.

It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under
the shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we
flung over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held
the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of
our little hells.

"Things happened," said one of them, "which in other times would have
been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death." For
days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of
sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then
trench-mortars and bombs.

"It seemed like years!" said one of the Irish crowd. "None of us
expected to come out alive."

Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a
midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully
beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black
coffee.

Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge--you remember Hooge?--the
14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-
holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst
like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in
one battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were killed on
their way out to "rest"--camps to the left of the road between
Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe.

* * *

On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers--
the old Fighting Fifth--captured six hundred yards of German trenches
near St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them
who followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built
of earth and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the
fork of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this
place and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil
in a black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs
through barbed wire and over sand-bags which had escaped the radius of
the mine-burst--in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get
on, to kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got to work on
them. It was knocked out by a bomb flung by an officer who saved his
company. The machine--gunners were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was
chaos out of which living men came, shaking and moaning.

I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers come back from
this exploit, exhausted, caked from head to foot in wet clay. Their
steel helmets were covered with sand-bagging, their trench-waders,
their rifles, and smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white
earth, and they looked a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered from
the fields of France. Some of them had shawls tied about their
helmets, and some of them wore the shiny black helmets of the Jaeger
Regiment and the gray coats of German soldiers. They had had luck.
They had not left many comrades behind, and they had come out with
life to the good world. Tired as they were, they came along as though
to carnival. They had proved their courage through an ugly job. They
had done "damn well," as one of them remarked; and they were out of
the shell-fire which ravaged the ground they had taken, where other
men lay.

XVI

At the beginning of March there was a little affair--costing a lot of
lives--in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It
was a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had been
held for a long time by the 3d Division under General Haldane, whose
men were at last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the
17th Division commanded by General Pilcher. The Germans took advantage
of the change in defense by a sudden attack after the explosion of a
mine, and the men of the 17th Division, new to this ground, abandoned
a position of some local importance.

General Haldane was annoyed. It was ground of which he knew every
inch. It was ground which men of his had died to hold. It was very
annoying--using a feeble word--to battalion officers and men of the 3d
Division--Suffolks and King's Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal Scots-
-who had first come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow and
slush and shell-fire, to a pretty village far behind the lines, on the
road to Calais, where they were getting back to a sense of normal life
again. Sleeping in snug billets, warming their feet at wood fires,
listening with enchantment to the silence about them, free from the
noise of artillery. They were hugging themselves with the thought of a
month of this. . . Then because they had been in the salient so long
and had held this line so stubbornly, they were ordered back again to
recapture the position lost by new men.

After a day of field sports they were having a boxing--match in an old
barn, very merry and bright, before that news came to them. General
Haldane had given me a quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing,
and the faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity for
the frightful disappointment that was about to fall on them, like a
sledge-hammer. I knew some of their officers--Colonel Dyson of the
Royal Scots, and Captain Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways
with a deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and of their
own officers. Colonel Dyson was the seventeenth commanding officer of
his battalion, which had been commanded by every officer down to
second lieutenant, and had only thirty men left of the original crowd.
They had been slain in large numbers in that "holding attack" by Hooge
on September 25th, during the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they
were "going in" again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid
their feelings from their men. The men were tough and stalwart lads,
tanned by the wind and rain of a foul winter, thinned down by the
ordeal of those months in the line under daily bouts of fire. In a
wooden gallery of the barn a mass of them lay in deep straw,
exchanging caps, whistling, shouting, in high spirits. Not yet did
they know the call-back to the salient. Then word was passed to them
after the boxing finals. That night they had to march seven miles to
entrain for the railroad nearest to Ypres. I saw them march away,
silently, grimly, bravely, without many curses.

They were to recapture the Bluff, and early on the morning of March
2d, before dawn had risen, I went out to the salient and watched the
bombardment which preceded the attack. There was an incessant tumult
of guns, and the noise rolled in waves across the flat country of the
salient and echoed back from Kemmel Hill and the Wytschaete Ridge.
There was a white frost over the fields, and all the battle-front was
veiled by a mist which clung round the villages and farmsteads behind
the lines and made a dense bank of gray fog below the rising ground.