Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"The enemy seems to have sighted our dust, sir. His shrapnel is
following up pretty closely. Would you advise me to put my men under
cover, or carry on?"

The captain hesitated. This was rather outside his sphere of
influence. But the boyishness of the other officer asked for help.

"My advice is to put your men into that ditch and keep them there
until the strafe is over." Some shrapnel bullets whipped the sun-baked
road as he spoke.

"Very good, sir."

The men sat in the ditch, with their packs against the bank, and wiped
the sweat off their faces. They looked tired and dispirited, but not
alarmed.

In the fields behind them--our way--the 4.2's (four--point-twos) were
busy plugging holes in the grass and flowers, rather deep holes, from
which white smoke-clouds rose after explosive noises.

"With a little careful strategy we might get through," said the
captain. "There's a general waiting for us, and I have noticed that
generals are impatient fellows. Let's try our luck."

We walked across the wild flowers, past the sheep, who only raised
their heads in meek surprise when shells came with a shrill,
intensifying snarl and burrowed up the earth about them. I noticed how
loudly and sweetly the larks were singing up in the blue. Several
horses lay dead, newly killed, with blood oozing about them, and their
entrails smoking. We made a half-loop around them and then struck
straight for the chateau which was the brigade headquarters. Neither
of us spoke now. We were thoughtful, calculating the chance of getting
to that red-brick house between the shells. It was just dependent on
the coincidence of time and place.

Three men jumped up from a ditch below a brown wall round the chateau
garden and ran hard for the gateway. A shell had pitched quite close
to them. One man laughed as though at a grotesque joke, and fell as he
reached the courtyard. Smoke was rising from the outhouses, and there
was a clatter of tiles and timbers, after an explosive crash.

"It rather looks," said my companion, "as though the Germans knew
there is a party on in that charming house."

It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never good to go
back before reaching one's objective. That was bad for the discipline
of the courage that is just beyond fear.

Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the chateau, and as we
went in through the gateway a sergeant made a quick jump for a barn as
a shell burst somewhere close. As visitors we hesitated between two
ways into the chateau, and chose the easier; and it was then that I
became dimly aware of hostility against me on the part of a number of
officers in the front hall. The brigade staff was there, grouped under
the banisters. I wondered why, and guessed (rightly, as I found) that
the center of the house might have a better chance of escape than the
rooms on either side, in case of direct hits from those things falling
outside.

It was the brigade major who asked our business. He was a tall,
handsome young man of something over thirty, with the arrogance of a
Christ Church blood.

"Oh, he has come out to see something in Vermelles? A pleasant place
for sightseeing! Meanwhile the Hun is ranging on this house, so he may
see more than he wants."

He turned on his heel and rejoined his group. They all stared in my
direction as though at a curious animal. A very young gentleman--the
general's A. D. C.--made a funny remark at my expense and the others
laughed. Then they ignored me, and I was glad, and made a little study
in the psychology of men awaiting a close call of death. I was
perfectly conscious myself that in a moment or two some of us, perhaps
all of us, might be in a pulp of mangled flesh beneath the ruins of a
red-brick villa--the shells were crashing among the outhouses and in
the courtyard, and the enemy was making good shooting--and the idea
did not please me at all. At the back of my brain was Fear, and there
was a cold sweat in the palms of my hands; but I was master of myself,
and I remember having a sense of satisfaction because I had answered
the brigade major in a level voice, with a touch of his own arrogance.
I saw that these officers were afraid; that they, too, had Fear at the
back of the brain, and that their conversation and laughter were the
camouflage of the soul. The face of the young A. D. C. was flushed and
he laughed too much at his own jokes, and his laughter was just a tone
too shrill. An officer came into the hall, carrying two Mills bombs--
new toys in those days--and the others fell back from him, and one
said:

"For Christ's sake don't bring them here--in the middle of a
bombardment!"

"Where's the general?" asked the newcomer.

"Down in the cellar with the other brigadier. They don't ask us down
to tea, I notice."

Those last words caused all the officers to laugh--almost excessively.
But their laughter ended sharply, and they listened intently as there
was a heavy crash outside.

Another officer came up the steps and made a rapid entry into the
hall.

"I understand there is to be a conference of battalion commanders," he
said, with a queer catch in his breath. "In view of this--er--
bombardment, I had better come in later, perhaps?"

"You had better wait," said the brigade major, rather grimly.

"Oh, certainly."

A sergeant-major was pacing up and down the passage by the back door.
He was calm and stolid. I liked the look of him and found something
comforting in his presence, so that I went to have a few words with
him.

"How long is this likely to last, Sergeant-major"

"There's no saying, sir. They may be searching for the chateau to pass
the time, so to speak, or they may go on till they get it. I'm sorry
they caught those gunners. Nice lads, both of them."

He did not seem to be worrying about his own chance.

Then suddenly there was silence. The German guns had switched off. I
heard the larks singing through the open doorway, and all the little
sounds of a summer day. The group of officers in the hall started
chatting more quietly. There was no more need of finding jokes and
laughter. They had been reprieved, and could be serious.

"We'd better get forward to Vermelles," said my companion.

As we walked away from the chateau, the brigade major passed us on his
horse. He leaned over his saddle toward me and said, "Good day to you,
and I hope you'll like Vermelles."

The words were civil, but there was an underlying meaning in them.

"I hope to do so, sir."

We walked down the long straight road toward the ruins of Vermelles
with a young soldier-guide who on the outskirts of the village
remarked in a casual way:

"No one is allowed along this road in daylight, as a rule. It's under
hobservation of the henemy."

"Then why the devil did you come this way?" asked my companion.

"I thought you might prefer the short cut, sir."

We explored the ruins of Vermelles, where many young Frenchmen had
fallen in fighting through the walls and gardens. One could see the
track of their strife, in trampled bushes and broken walls. Bits of
red rag--the red pantaloons of the first French soldiers--were still
fastened to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches,
water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs
littered the ditches which had been dug as trenches across streets of
burned-out houses.

V

A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in
front of the chateau of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer
walls still standing, and told us the story of its capture.

"It was a wild scrap. I was told all about it by a French sergeant who
was in it. They were under the cover of that wall over there, about a
hundred yards away, and fixing up a charge of high explosives to knock
a breach in the wall. The chateau was a machine-gun fortress, with the
Germans on the top floor, the ground floor, and in the basement,
protected by sand-bags, through which they fired. A German officer
made a bad mistake. He opened the front door and came out with some of
his machine-gunners from the ground floor to hold a trench across the
square in front of the house. Instantly a French lieutenant called to
his men. They climbed over the wall and made a dash for the chateau,
bayoneting the Germans who tried to stop them. Then they swarmed into
the chateau--a platoon of them with the lieutenant. They were in the
drawing-room, quite an elegant place, you know, with the usual gilt
furniture and long mirrors. In one corner was a pedestal, with a
statue of Venus standing on it. Rather charming, I expect. A few
Germans were killed in the room, easily. But upstairs there was a mob
who fired down through the ceiling when they found what had happened.
The French soldiers prodded the ceiling with their bayonets, and all
the plaster broke, falling on them. A German, fat and heavy, fell
half-way through the rafters, and a bayonet was poked into him as he
stuck there. The whole ceiling gave way, and the Germans upstairs came
downstairs, in a heap. They fought like wolves--wild beasts--with fear
and rage. French and Germans clawed at one another's throats, grabbed
hold of noses, rolled over each other. The French sergeant told me he
had his teeth into a German's neck. The man was all over him, pinning
his arms, trying to choke him. It was the French lieutenant who did
most damage. He fired his last shot and smashed a German's face with
his empty revolver. Then he caught hold of the marble Venus by the
legs and swung it above his head, in the old Berserker style, and laid
out Germans like ninepins. . . The fellows in the basement
surrendered."

VI

The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin,
and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or
the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon
piles of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner
officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had
their battery nearby. We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through
undergrowth to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and
wire frames with immortelles remained as relics of that garden where
the people of Vermelles had laid their dead to rest. New dead had
followed old dead. I stumbled over something soft, like a ball of
clay, and saw that it was the head of a faceless man, in a battered
kepi. From a ditch close by came a sickly stench of half-buried flesh.

"The whole place is a pest-house," said the gunner.

Another voice spoke from some hiding-place.

"Salvo!"

The earth shook and there was a flash of red flame, and a shock of
noise which hurt one's ear-drums.

"That's my battery," said the gunner officer. "It's the very devil
when one doesn't expect it."

I was introduced to the gentleman who had said "Salvo!" He was the
gunner-major, and a charming fellow, recently from civil life. All the
battery was made up of New Army men learning their job, and learning
it very well, I should say. There was no arrogance about them.

"It's sporting of you to come along to a spot like this," said one of
them. "I wouldn't unless I had to. Of course you'll take tea in our
mess?"

I was glad to take tea--in a little house at the end of the ruined
high-street of Vermelles which had by some miracle escaped
destruction, though a shell had pierced through the brick wall of the
parlor and had failed to burst. It was there still, firmly wedged,
like a huge nail. The tea was good, in tin mugs. Better still was the
company of the gunner officers. They told me how often they were
"scared stiff." They had been very frightened an hour before I came,
when the German gunners had ranged up and down the street, smashing up
ruined houses into greater ruin.

"They're so methodical!" said one of the officers.

"Wonderful shooting!" said another.

"I will say they're topping gunners," said the major. "But we're
learning; my men are very keen. Put in a good word for the new
artillery. It would buck them up no end."

We went back before sunset, down the long straight road, and past the
chateau which we had visited in the afternoon. It looked very peaceful
there among the trees.

It is curious that I remember the details of that day so vividly, as
though they happened yesterday. On hundreds of other days I had
adventures like that, which I remember more dimly.

"That brigade major was a trifle haughty, don't you think?" said my
companion. "And the others didn't seem very friendly. Not like those
gunner boys."

"We called at an awkward time. They were rather fussed."

"One expects good manners. Especially from Regulars who pride
themselves on being different in that way from the New Army."

"It's the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier.
The Regular crowd think the war belongs to them. . . But I liked their
pluck. They're arrogant to Death himself when he comes knocking at the
door."

VII

It was not long before we broke down the prejudice against us among
the fighting units. The new armies were our friends from the first,
and liked us to visit them in their trenches and their dugouts, their
camps and their billets. Every young officer was keen to show us his
particular "peep-show" or to tell us his latest "stunt." We made many
friends among them, and it was our grief that as the war went on so
many of them disappeared from their battalions, and old faces were
replaced by new faces, and those again by others when they had become
familiar. Again and again, after battle, twenty-two officers in a
battalion mess were reduced to two or three, and the gaps were filled
up from the reserve depots. I was afraid to ask, "Where is So-and-so?"
because I knew that the best answer would be, "A Blighty wound," and
the worst was more likely.

It was the duration of all the drama of death that seared one's soul
as an onlooker; the frightful sum of sacrifice that we were recording
day by day. There were times when it became intolerable and agonizing,
and when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace by
negotiation, by compromise, that the river of blood might cease to
flow. The men looked so splendid as they marched up to the lines,
singing, whistling, with an easy swing. They looked so different when
thousands came down again, to field dressing-stations--the walking
wounded and the stretcher cases, the blind and the gassed--as we saw
them on the mornings of battle, month after month, year after year.

Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether "soft,"
though we did not go "over the top" or live in the dirty ditches with
them. We had to travel prodigiously to cover the ground between one
division and another along a hundred miles of front, with long walks
often at the journey's end and a wet way back. Sometimes we were
soaked to the skin on the journey home. Often we were so cold and
numbed in those long wild drives up desolate roads that our limbs lost
consciousness and the wind cut into us like knives. We were working
against time, always against time, and another tire-burst would mean
that no despatch could be written of a great battle on the British
front, or only a short record written in the wildest haste when there
was so much to tell, so much to describe, such unforgetable pictures
in one's brain of another day's impressions in the fields and on the
roads.

There were five English correspondents and, two years later, two
Americans. On mornings of big battle we divided up the line of front
and drew lots for the particular section which each man would cover.
Then before the dawn, or in the murk of winter mornings, or the first
glimmer of a summer day, our cars would pull out and we would go off
separately to the part of the line allotted to us by the number drawn,
to see the preliminary bombardment, to walk over newly captured
ground, to get into the backwash of prisoners and walking wounded,
amid batteries firing a new barrage, guns moving forward on days of
good advance, artillery transport bringing up new stores of
ammunition, troops in support marching to repel a counter-attack or
follow through the new objectives, ambulances threading their way back
through the traffic, with loads of prostrate men, mules, gunhorses,
lorries churning up the mud in Flanders.

So we gained a personal view of all this activity of strife, and from
many men in its whirlpool details of their own adventure and of
general progress or disaster on one sector of the battle-front. Then
in divisional headquarters we saw the reports of the battle as they
came in by telephone, or aircraft, or pigeon-post, from half-hour to
half-hour, or ten minutes by ten minutes. Three divisions widely
separated provided all the work one war correspondent could do on one
day of action, and later news on a broader scale, could be obtained
from corps headquarters farther back. Tired, hungry, nerve-racked,
splashed to the eyes in mud, or covered in a mask of dust, we started
for the journey back to our own quarters, which we shifted from time
to time in order to get as near as we could to the latest battle-front
without getting beyond reach of the telegraph instruments--by relays
of despatch-riders--at "Signals," G. H. Q., which remained immovably
fixed in the rear.

There was a rendezvous in one of our rooms, and each man outlined the
historical narrative of the day upon the front he had covered,
reserving for himself his own adventures, impressions, and emotions.

Time slipped away, and time was short, while the despatch-riders
waited for our unwritten despatches, and censors who had been our
fellow-travelers washed themselves cleaner and kept an eye on the
clock.

Time was short while the world waited for our tales of tragedy or
victory . . . and tempers were frayed, and nerves on edge, among five
men who hated one another, sometimes, with a murderous hatred (though,
otherwise, good comrades) and desired one another's death by slow
torture or poison-gas when they fumbled over notes, written in a
jolting car, or on a battlefield walk, and went into past history in
order to explain present happenings, or became tangled in the numbers
of battalions and divisions.

Percival Phillips turned pink-and-white under the hideous strain of
nervous control, with an hour and a half for two columns in The
Morning Post. A little pulse throbbed in his forehead. His lips were
tightly pressed. His oaths and his anguish were in his soul, but
unuttered. Beach Thomas, the most amiable of men, the Peter Pan who
went a bird-nesting on battlefields, a lover of beauty and games and
old poems and Greek and Latin tags, and all joy in life--what had he
to do with war?--looked bored with an infinite boredom, irritable with
a scornful impatience of unnecessary detail, gazed through his gold-
rimmed spectacles with an air of extreme detachment (when Percy
Robinson rebuilt the map with dabs and dashes on a blank sheet of
paper), and said, "I've got more than I can write, and The Daily Mail
goes early to press."

"Thanks very much. . . It's very kind of you."

We gathered up our note-books and were punctiliously polite.
(Afterward we were the best of friends.) Thomas was first out of the
room, with short, quick little steps in spite of his long legs. His
door banged. Phillips was first at his typewriter, working it like a
machine-gun, in short, furious spasms of word-fire. I sat down to my
typewriter--a new instrument of torture to me--and coaxed its evil
genius with conciliatory prayers.

"For dear God's sake," I said, "don't go twisting that blasted ribbon
of yours to-day. I must write this despatch, and I've just an hour
when I want five."

Sometimes that Corona was a mechanism of singular sweetness, and I
blessed it with a benediction. But often there was a devil in it
which mocked at me. After the first sentence or two it twisted the
ribbon; at the end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry
snake, writhing and coiling hideously.

I shouted for Mackenzie, the American, a master of these things.

He came in and saw my blanched face, my sweat of anguish, my crise
de nerfs. I could see by his eyes that he understood my stress and
had pity on me.

"That's all right," he said. "A little patience--"

By a touch or two he exorcised the devil, laughed, and said: "Go easy.
You've just about reached breaking--point."

I wrote, as we all wrote, fast and furiously, to get down something
of enormous history, word-pictures of things seen, heroic anecdotes,
the underlying meaning of this new slaughter. There was never time
to think out a sentence or a phrase, to touch up a clumsy paragraph,
to go back on a false start, to annihilate a vulgar adjective, to
put a touch of style into one's narrative. One wrote instinctively,
blindly, feverishly. . . And downstairs were the censors, sending up
messages by orderlies to say "half-time," or "ten minutes more," and
cutting out sometimes the things one wanted most to say, modifying a
direct statement of fact into a vague surmise, taking away the honor
due to the heroic men who had fought and died to-day. . . Who would
be a war correspondent, or a censor?

So it happened day by day, for five months at a stretch, when big
battles were in progress. It was not an easy life. There were times
when I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I could hardly
rouse myself to a new day's effort. There were times when I was faint
and sick and weak; and my colleagues were like me. But we struggled on
to tell the daily history of the war and the public cursed us because
we did not tell more, or sneered at us because they thought we were
"spoon-fed" by G. H. Q.--who never gave us any news and who were far
from our way of life, except when they thwarted us, by petty
restrictions and foolish rules.

VIII

The Commander-in-Chief--Sir John French--received us when we were
first attached to the British armies in the field--a lifetime ago, as
it seems to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the chateau near
St.-Omer, which he used as his own headquarters, with his A. D. C.'s
in attendance, though the main general headquarters were in the town.
Our first colonel gathered us like a shepherd with his flock, counting
us twice over before we passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew
afterward to be Sir Philip Sassoon, received us and chatted pleasantly
in a French salon with folding-doors which shut off an inner room.
There were a few portraits of ladies and gentlemen of France in the
days before the Revolution, like those belonging to that old
aristocracy which still existed, in poverty and pride, in other
chateaus in this French Flanders. There was a bouquet of flowers on
the table, giving a sweet scent to the room, and sunlight streamed
through the shutters. . . I thought for a moment of the men living in
ditches in the salient, under harassing fire by day and night. Their
actions and their encounters with death were being arranged, without
their knowledge, in this sunny little chateau. . . .

The folding-doors opened and Sir John French came in. He wore top-
boots and spurs, and after saying, "Good day, gentlemen," stood with
his legs apart, a stocky, soldierly figure, with a square head and
heavy jaw. I wondered whether there were any light of genius in him--
any inspiration, any force which would break the awful strength of the
enemy against us, any cunning in modern warfare.

He coughed a little, and made us a speech. I forget his words, but
remember the gist of them. He was pleased to welcome us within his
army, and trusted to our honor and loyalty. He made an allusion to the
power of the press, and promised us facilities for seeing and writing,
within the bounds of censorship. I noticed that he pronounced St.-
Omer, St.-Omar, as though Omar Khayyam had been canonized. He said,
"Good day, gentlemen," again, and coughed huskily again to clear his
throat, and then went back through the folding-doors.

I saw him later, during the battle of Loos, after its ghastly failure.
He was riding a white horse in the villages of Heuchin and Houdain,
through which lightly wounded Scots of the 1st and 15th Divisions were
making their way back. He leaned over his saddle, questioning the men
and thanking them for their gallantry. I thought he looked grayer and
older than when he had addressed us.

"Who mun that old geezer be, Jock?" asked a Highlander when he had
passed.

"I dinna ken," said the other Scot. "An' I dinna care."

"It's the Commander-in-Chief," I said. "Sir John French."

"Eh?" said the younger man, of the 8th Gordons. He did not seem
thrilled by the knowledge I had given him, but turned his head and
stared after the figure on the white horse. Then he said: "Well, he's
made a mess o' the battle. We could've held Hill 70 against all the
di'els o' hell if there had bin supports behind us."

"Ay," said his comrade, "an' there's few o' the laddies'll come back
fra Cite St.-Auguste."

IX

It was another commander-in-chief who received us some months after
the battle of Loos, in a chateau near Montreuil, to which G. H. Q. had
then removed. Our only knowledge of Sir Douglas Haig before that day
was of a hostile influence against us in the First Army, which he
commanded. He had drawn a line through his area beyond which we might
not pass. He did not desire our presence among his troops nor in his
neighborhood. That line had been broken by the protests of our
commandant, and now as Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig had
realized dimly that he might be helped by our services.