Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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"How can one reconcile all this with the war?"

"Why not? . . . I suppose we're fighting for justice and all that.
That's what The Daily Mail tells us."

"Seriously, old man. Where does Christ come in?"

"He wasn't against righteous force. He chased the money-changers out
of the Temple."

"Yes, but His whole teaching was love and forgiveness. 'Thou shalt not
kill.' 'Little children, love one another!' 'Turn the other cheek.' .
. . Is it all sheer tosh? If so, why go on pretending? . . . Take
chaplains in khaki--these lieutenant-colonels with black crosses. They
make me sick. It's either one thing or the other. Brute force or
Christianity. I am harking back to the brute--force theory. But I'm
not going to say 'God is love' one day and then prod a man in the
stomach the next. Let's be consistent."

"The other fellows asked for it. They attacked first."

"Yes, but we are all involved. Our diplomacy, our secret treaties, our
philosophical dope over the masses, our imperial egotism, our trade
rivalries--all that was a direct challenge of Might against Right. The
Germans are more efficient and more logical--that's all. They prepared
for the inevitable and struck first. We knew the inevitable was
coming, but didn't prepare, being too damned inefficient. . . I have a
leaning toward religion. Instinctively I'm for Christ. But it doesn't
work in with efficiency and machine-guns."

"It belongs to another department, that's all. We're spiritual and
animal at the same time. In one part of my brain I'm a gentleman. In
another, a beast. It's conflict. We can't eliminate the beast, but we
can control it now and then when it gets too obstreperous, and that's
where religion helps. It's the high ideal--otherworldliness."

"The Germans pray to the same God. Praise Christ and ask for victory."

"Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems to me God is above
all the squabbles of humanity--doesn't care a damn about them!--but
the human soul can get into touch with the infinite and the ideal,
even while he is doing butcher's work, and beastliness. That doesn't
matter very much. It's part of the routine of life."

"But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation in the world. It
creates cruelty and tyranny, and all bloody things. Surely if we
believe in God--anyhow in Christian ethics--this war is a monstrous
crime in which all humanity is involved."

"The Hun started it. . . Let's go and give the glad eye to
Marguerite."

At night, in moonlight, Amiens cathedral was touched with a new
spirituality, a white magic beyond all words of beauty. On many nights
of war I walked round the cathedral square, looking up at that grand
mass of masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming like
silver and its sculptured tracery like lacework, and a flood of milky
light glamorous on walls in which every stone was clear-cut beyond a
vast shadow-world. How old it was! How many human eyes through many
centuries had come in the white light of the moon to look at this
dream in stone enshrining the faith of men! The Revolution had surged
round these walls, and the screams of wild women, and their shrill
laughter, and their cries for the blood of aristocrats, had risen from
this square. Pageants of kingship and royal death had passed across
these pavements through the great doors there. Peasant women, in the
darkness, had wept against these walls, praying for God's pity for
their hearts. Now the English officers were lighting cigarettes in the
shelter of a wall, the outline of their features--knightly faces--
touched by the moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in the sky
beyond the river.

"A good night for a German air raid," said one of the officers.

"Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep," said the other
man.

The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their
shutters.

XIII

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the
rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice--a big,
grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways,
and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her
scales. There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of
French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that
woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of
steps, a tragic exhibition of war for passers-by to see. Many of them
revealed no faces, but were white masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round
their heads. Others showed only the upper parts of their faces, and
the places where their jaws had been were tied up with white rags.
There were men without noses, and men with half their scalps torn
away. French children used to stare through the railings at them,
gravely, with childish curiosity, without pity. English soldiers gave
them a passing glance, and went on to places where they might be made
like this, without faces, or jaws, or noses, or eyes. By their
uniforms I saw that there were Chasseurs Alpins, and Chasseurs
d'Afrique, and young infantrymen of the line, and gunners. They sat,
without restlessness, watching the passers-by if they had eyes to see,
or, if blind, feeling the breeze about them, and listening to the
sound of passing feet.

XIV

The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside
the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the
tow-path, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite
bank, and past the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-
idleness in days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture--these
Cottages where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come for week-
ends of boating and fishing--and their garden gates at the end of
wooden bridges over back-waters were of iron twisted into the shapes
of swans or flowers, and there were snails of terra-cotta on the
chimney-pots, and painted woodwork on the walls, in the worst taste,
yet amusing and pleasing to the eye in their green bowers. I remember
one called Mon Idee, and wondered that any man should be proud of such
a freakish conception of a country house. They were abandoned during
the war, except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French
officers and their light o' loves, and the tow-path was used only by
stray couples who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers
walking out with French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the
river in long, shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages,
cauliflowers, and asparagus, and farther up-stream there was a boat-
house where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to
get skiffs for an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the
picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and
the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or
lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In
the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a
ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of
drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and
the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des
tambours de la mort--the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding
waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war
by Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead bodies
floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges
and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was
a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving
barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These
barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter's
yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I
saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the
wooden sheds. They were the bad cases--French boys wounded in the
abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly
shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the
stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like
wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of
the lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of
birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took
the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the
great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched them from the
bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I
think some of them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me
one day.

"That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!"

"Yes. That is war, Madame."

She put a skinny hand on my arm.

"Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?"

"Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very
old and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the
lines."

"The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?"

"Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields."

"Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I
have lost mine."

"Where was that, Madame?"

"Over there."

She pointed up the Somme.

"He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my
breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades."

"It is sad, Madame."

"Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur."

"Au revoir, Madame."

XV

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station,
organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in
the autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the
city and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the
instruments abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The
French doctor who took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in
Amiens. At least he had refrained from atrocities. As I went through
the long wards I did not guess that one day I should be a patient
there. That was two years later, at the end of the Somme battles. I
was worn out and bloodless after five months of hard strain and
nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten me up in the fields where
lay the unburied dead.

"Trench fever," said the doctor.

"You look in need of a rest," said the matron. "My word, how white you
are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?"

I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed
between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of
the New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which
officers lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.

"That's all right. You're going to die!" said a rosy--cheeked young
orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his
way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in
the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in
reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of
silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy
with a fine, delicate face, a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with
a pile of books at his elbow--all by Anatole France. It was the first
time I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak and
helpless, but interested in my surroundings. The day nurse, a tall,
buxom New Zealand girl whom the general chaffed with sarcastic humor,
and who gave back more than she got, went off duty with a cheery,
"Good night, all!" and the night nurse took her place, and made a
first visit to each bed. She was a dainty little woman with the
complexion of a delicate rose and large, luminous eyes. She had a
nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a spiritual fire in those shining
eyes of hers for all these men, who were like children in her hands.
They seemed glad at her coming.

"Good evening, sister!" said one man after another, even one who had
laid with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on
his face.

She knelt down beside each one, saying, "How are you to-night?" and
chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I
heard a boy's voice say: "Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only
given me two minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in
love with you, you know, and I have been waiting all day for your
beauty!"

There was a gust of laughter in the ward.

"The child is at it again!" said one of the officers.

"When are you going to write me another sonnet?" asked the nurse. "The
last one was much admired."

"The last one was rotten," said the boy. "I have written a real corker
this time. Read it to yourself, and don't drop its pearls before these
swine."

"Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all."

An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the
bedclothes off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas.

"I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't want to be a hero! I
don't want to die! I want to be loved! . . . I'm a glutton for love!"

In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a schoolboy who
was mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother.
With his tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might
have been Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to
chide him. It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had
thrown off his clothes he snuggled under them again and said: "All
right, I'll be good. Only I want a kiss before I go to sleep."

I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet,
and a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating
the muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a
boyish wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he
loved life. But he was killed. . . I had a letter from his stricken
mother months afterward. The child was "Missing" then, and her heart
cried out for him.

Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire--I suppose he
had been in a cotton-mill or a factory--a hard-headed, simple-hearted
fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of "the wife." But his
nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the
dreams that came to him.

"Sister," he said, "don't let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me
dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can't
bear it."

"You will sleep better to-night," she said. "I am putting something in
your milk. Something to stop the dreaming."

But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man
opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give
a long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake
up in a dazed way, saying:

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" trembling with fear, so that the bed was
shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he
called out, hushing him down, whispering to him.

"I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep," he told
me. "It's what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face
blown off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn't it?
Nerves, you know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before this
war."

The little night nurse came to my bedside.

"Can't you sleep?"

"I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?"

She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.

"Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep."

In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red glasses,
and now and then all through the night matches were lighted,
illuminating the room for a second, followed by the glowing end of a
cigarette shining like a star in the darkness.

The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about violently, gave
strange jerks and starts. Sometimes they spoke aloud in their sleep.

"That isn't a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell."

"Now then, get on with it, can't you?"

"Look out! They're coming! Can't you see them moving by the wire?"

The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their
sleep; lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness.
Sights which they had tried to forget stared at them through their
closed eyelids. The daylight came and the night nurse slipped away,
and the day nurse shook one's shoulders and said: "Time to wash and
shave. No malingering!"

It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as rats had to sit
up in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave themselves.

"You're merciless!" I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse
dabbed my back with cold iodine at six o'clock on a winter morning,
with the windows wide open.

"Oh, there's no mercy in this place!" said the strong-minded girl.
"It's kill or cure here, and no time to worry."

"You're all devils," said the New Zealand general. "You don't care a
damn about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the
time the doctor comes around. I'm a general, I am, and you can't order
ME about, and if you think I'm going to shave at this time in the
morning you are jolly well mistaken. I am down with dysentery, and
don't you forget it. I didn't get through the Dardanelles to be
murdered at Amiens."

"That's where you may be mistaken, general," said the imperturbable
girl. "I have to carry out orders, and if they lead to your death it's
not my responsibility. I'm paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my
duty, rough or smooth, kill or cure."

"You're a vampire. That's what you are."

"I'm a nurse."

"If ever I hear you're going to marry a New Zealand boy I'll warn him
against you."

"He'll be too much of a fool to listen to you."

"I've a good mind to marry you myself and beat you every morning."

"Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm!"

* * *

Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as the German mark
was the railway station we were in the center of the danger-zone.
There was a frightful noise of splintering glass and smashing timber
between each crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the
anti--aircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of
those officers who had come down from the fighting--lines nerve-racked
and fever-stricken. They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about
from bed to bed, with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she
showed no other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at that
time, though they had done the hero's job all right.

It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that
an officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, "If there is another air
raid I shall go mad." He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of
Les Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over
sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until
he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients
had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.

XVI

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all
its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be
remembered forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of
greatest tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the
old battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March
21st, when our lines were stormed and broken by his men's odds against
our defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental
agonies like all who knew what had happened better than the troops
themselves. Every day after the first break-through we pushed out in
different directions--Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes
until we came up with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back
and back, day after day, with increasing speed, until it drew very
close to Amiens. It was a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It
was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying
to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed
by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and
sticks these soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our
front-lines, were trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks,
ambulances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers,
agricultural implements, transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A.
tents, gun-horse and mule columns, while rear-guard actions were being
fought within gunfire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back
along the roads in this uproar of traffic, and word came that a
further retreat was happening and that the enemy had broken through
again . . .

Amiens seemed threatened on the morning when, to the north, Albert was
held by a mixed crowd of Scottish and English troops, too thin, as I
could see when I passed through them, to fight any big action, with an
enemy advancing rapidly from Courcellette and outflanking our line by
Montauban and Fricourt. I saw our men marching hastily in retreat to
escape that tightening net, and while the southern side of Amiens was
held by a crowd of stragglers with cyclist battalions, clerks from
headquarters staffs, and dismounted cavalry, commanded by Brigadier-
General Carey, sent down hurriedly to link them together and stop a
widening gap until the French could get to our relief on the right and
until the Australians had come down from Flanders. There was nothing
on that day to prevent the Germans breaking through to Amiens except
the courage of exhausted boys thinly strung out, and the lagging
footsteps of the Germans themselves, who had suffered heavy losses all
the way and were spent for a while by their progress over the wild
ground of the old fighting-fields. Their heavy guns were far behind,
unable to keep pace with the storm troops, and the enemy was relying
entirely on machine-guns and a few field-guns, but most of our guns
were also out of action, captured or falling back to new lines, and
upon the speed with which the enemy could mass his men for a new
assault depended the safety of Amiens and the road to Abbeville and
the coast. If he could hurl fresh divisions of men against our line on
that last night of March, or bring up strong forces of cavalry, or
armored cars, our line would break and Amiens would be lost, and all
our work would be in jeopardy. That was certain. It was visible. It
could not be concealed by any camouflage of hope or courage.

It was after a day on the Somme battlefields, passing through our
retiring troops, that I sat down, with other war correspondents and
several officers, to a dinner in the old Hotel du Rhin in Amiens. It
was a dismal meal, in a room where there had been much laughter and,
throughout the battles of the Somme, in 1916, a coming and going of
generals and staffs and officers of all grades, cheery and high-
spirited at these little tables where there were good wine and not bad
food, and putting away from their minds for the time being the thought
of tragic losses or forlorn battles in which they might fall. In the
quietude of the hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered
by flower-beds, I had had strange conversations with boys who had
revealed their souls a little, after dinner in the darkness, their
faces bared now and then by the light of cigarettes or the flare of a
match.

"Death is nothing," said one young officer just down from the Somme
fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. "I don't care a damn
for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its
uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the
animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck. . . My nerves
are like fiddle-strings."

In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between
their stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and
ditches under frightful fire which had "wiped out" their platoons or
companies. A bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling
gull, used to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his
wing, and its head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on
the figures in khaki--until suddenly it would clap its long bill
rapidly in a wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire--"Curse the
bloody bird!" said officers startled by this evil and reminiscent
noise--and caper with ridiculous postures round the imperturbable
gull. . . Beyond the lines, from the dining-room, would come the
babble of many tongues and the laughter of officers telling stories
against one another over their bottles of wine, served by Gaston the
head-waiter, between our discussions on strategy--he was a strategist
by virtue of service in the trenches and several wounds--or by "Von
Tirpitz," an older, whiskered man, or by Joseph, who had a high,
cackling laugh and strong views against the fair sex, and the
inevitable cry, "C'est la guerre!" when officers complained of the
service. . . There had been merry parties in this room, crowded with
the ghosts of many heroic fellows, but it was a gloomy gathering on
that evening at the end of March when we sat there for the last time.
There were there officers who had lost their towns, and "Dadoses"
(Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies) whose stores had gone
up in smoke and flame, and a few cavalry officers back from special
leave and appalled by what had happened in their absence, and a group
of Y.M.C.A. officials who had escaped by the skin of their teeth from
huts now far behind the German lines, and censors who knew that no
blue pencil could hide the truth of the retreat, and war
correspondents who had to write the truth and hated it.