Books: Now It Can Be Told

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Gaston whispered gloomily behind my chair: "Mon petit caporal"--he
called me that because of a fancied likeness to the young Napoleon--
"dites donc. Vous croyex quils vont passer par Amiens? Non, ce n'est
pas possible, ca! Pour la deuxieme fois? Non. Je refuse a le croire.
Mais c'est mauvais, c'est affreux, apres tant de sacrifice!"

Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for company's sake,
fixing up accounts as though the last day of reckoning had come. . .as
it had. Her hair, with its little curls, was still in perfect order.
She had two dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a
waxen pallor. She was working out accounts with a young officer, who
smoked innumerable cigarettes to steady his nerves. "Von Tirpitz" was
going round in an absent-minded way, pulling at his long whiskers.

The war correspondents talked together. We spoke gloomily, in low
voices, so that the waiters should not hear.

"If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the coast."

"Will that be a win for the Germans, even then?"

"It will make it hell in the Channel."

"We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire."

"France won't give in now, whatever happens. And England never gives
in."

"We're exhausted, all the same. It's a question of man-power."

"They're bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow."

"I don't see that at all. There's still a line. . ."

"A line! A handful of tired men."

"It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux to-night. It
commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map."

"They won't."

"We keep on saying, 'They won't.' We said, 'They won't get the Somme
crossings!' but they did. Let's face it squarely, without any damned
false optimism. That has been our curse all through."

"Better than your damned pessimism."

"It's quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is
to keep them back? There's nothing up the road."

"It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. How they would
laugh!"

"We shouldn't laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on
things."

"How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication.
Anything may happen in the night."

Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There
were two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin.
All the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a
noise of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling
glass. Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw
themselves on the floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass
splinters blown sideways. Then some one laughed.

"Not this time!"

The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table,
and lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the
loud hum of airplanes, the well known "zooz-zooz" of the Gothas'
double fuselage. More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with
the same sound of explosives and falling masonry. The anti--aircraft
guns got to work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells
winging over the roofs.

"Bang! . . . Crash!"

That was nearer again.

Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.

"They're making a mess outside. Perhaps we'd better get away before it
gets too hot."

Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the
increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she
controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer
who was settling up for a group of others.

The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly
bright and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets
were flooded with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver
above intense black shadows under the gables, where the rays were
barred by projecting walls.

"Curse the moon!" said one officer. "How I hate its damned light"

But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and
into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were
running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one
doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of
the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and
paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions.
Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding
monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.

An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white
under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.

"A fellow was killed just by my side." he said. "We were standing in a
doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a
log, without a sound, as dead as a door-nail."

There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note
which vibrated like 'cello strings, very loudly, and with that
sinister noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they
passed across the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a
glitter of shrapnel below them. From time to time they went away until
they were specks of silver and black; but always they came back again,
or others came, with new stores of bombs which they unloaded over
Amiens. So it went on all through the night.

I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was
impossible. My will-power was not strong enough to disregard those
crashes in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful
falling noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the
ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which
I lay engulfed in the chaos of this wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many
times I said, "To hell with it all . . . I'm going to sleep," and then
sat up in the darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on
the electric light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in the corridor
there was a stampede of heavy boots. Officers were running to get into
the cellars before the next crash, which might fling them into the
dismal gulfs. The thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law
of gravity. I walked along the corridor, now deserted, and saw a
stairway littered with broken glass, which my feet scrunched. There
were no lights in the basement of the hotel, but I had a flash-lamp,
going dim, and by its pale eye fumbled my way to a stone passage
leading to the cellar. That flight of stone steps was littered also
with broken glass. In the cellar itself was a mixed company of men who
had been dining earlier in the evening, joined by others who had come
in from the streets for shelter. Some of them had dragged down
mattresses from the bedrooms and were lying there in their trench-
coats, with their steel hats beside them. Others were sitting on
wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while there were others on
their knees, and their faces in their hands, trying to sleep. There
were some of the town majors who had lost their towns, and some
Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three private soldiers, and some
motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel lying
together on dirty straw. By one of the stone pillars of the vaulted
room two American war correspondents--Sims and Mackenzie--were sitting
on a packing-case playing cards on a board between them. They had
stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering light played
on their faces and cast deep shadows under their eyes. I stood
watching these men in that cellar and thought what a good subject it
would be for the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a
comfortable place. There was only one place on the bare stones, and
when I lay down there my bones ached abominably, and it was very cold.
Through an aperture in the window came a keen draft and I could see in
a square of moonlit sky a glinting star. It was not much of a cellar.
A direct hit on the Hotel du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this
vaulted room and end a game of cards. After fifteen minutes I became
restless, and decided that the room upstairs, after all, was
infinitely preferable to this damp cellar and these hard stones. I
returned to it and lay down on the bed again and switched off the
light. But the noises outside, the loneliness of the room, the sense
of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up again and listen
intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again. Many houses round
about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage was being made of
the dear old city! I paced up and down the room, smoking cigarettes,
one after another, until a mighty explosion, very close, made all my
nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the best place. If one
had to die it was better to be in the company of friends. Down I went
again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He, too, was a wanderer
between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.

"I am getting bored with this," he said. "It's absurd to think that
this filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense
calls one down. Anyhow, I can't sleep."

We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well
as sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the
mattresses, vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for
pillows, or gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry
officer of the old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and
Ol' Bill, with a fierce frown above his black mustache. Sims and
Mackenzie still played their game of cards, silently, between the
guttering candles.

I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to
the cellar, six times that night. There was never ten minutes' relief
from the drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens. It
was at four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me
wandering before.

"Let us go for a walk," he said. "The birds will be away by dawn."

It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the
Hotel du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There
was still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a
paler sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of
horses and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The
roadway was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many
houses had collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still
standing, had been stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls
were scarred by bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we
explored it later, had been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were
utterly destroyed. The air raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first
light of dawn came into the sky. . . .

That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military
authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving
everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops--where
there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many people
must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own
houses--I never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of
the tragedy in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over
the first high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them
about the city, destroying many other houses. A fire started by these
shells formed a great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des
Trois Cailloux, where there had been an arcade and many good shops and
houses. I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted
ironwork when I went through the city after the day of exodus.

XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its
desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its
loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect--I often think of
Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the
enemy--but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its
narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in
flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in
another.

One of our sentries came out of a little house near the Place and
said:

"Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, sir. They've
been falling pretty thick on the east side. Made no end of a mess!"

On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Australian
headquarters, on the left bank of the Somme, we ate sandwiches in the
public gardens outside the Hotel du Rhin. There were big shell-holes
in the flower-beds, and trees had been torn down and flung across the
pathway, and there was a broken statue lying on the grass. Some French
and English soldiers tramped past. Then there was no living soul about
in the place which had been so crowded with life, with pretty women
and children, and young officers doing their shopping, and the
business of a city at work.

"It makes one understand what Rome was like after the barbarians had
sacked and left it," said a friend of mine.

"There is something ghastly about it," said another.

We stood round the Hotel du Rhin, shut up and abandoned. The house
next door had been wrecked, and it was scarred and wounded, but still
stood after that night of terror.

One day during its desolation I went to a banquet in Amiens, in the
cellars of the Hotel de Ville. It was to celebrate the Fourth of July,
and an invitation had been sent to me by the French commandant de
place and the English A. P. M.

It was a beau geste, gallant and romantic in those days of trouble,
when Amiens was still closely beleaguered, but safer now that
Australians and British troops were holding the lines strongly
outside, with French on their right southward from Boves and Hangest
Wood. The French commandant had procured a collection of flags and his
men had decorated the battered city with the Tricolor. It even
fluttered above some of the ruins, as though for the passing of a
pageant. But only a few cars entered the city and drew up to the Town
Hall, and then took cover behind the walls.

Down below, in the cellars, the damp walls were garlanded with flowers
from the market-gardens of the Somme, now deserted by their gardeners,
and roses were heaped on the banqueting-table. General Monash,
commanding the Australian corps, was there, with the general of the
French division on his right. A young American officer sat very grave
and silent, not, perhaps, understanding much of the conversation about
him, because most of the guests were French officers, with Senators
and Deputies of Amiens and its Department. There was good wine to
drink from the cold vaults of the Hotel de Ville, and with the scent
of rose and hope for victory in spite of all disasters--the German
offensive had been checked and the Americans were now coming over in a
tide--it was a cheerful luncheon-party. The old general, black-
visaged, bullet-headed, with a bristly mustache like a French bull--
terrier, sat utterly silent, eating steadily and fiercely. But the
French commandant de place, as handsome as Athos, as gay as
D'Artagnan, raised his glass to England and France, to the gallant
Allies, and to all fair women. He became reminiscent of his days as a
sous-lieutenant. He remembered a girl called Marguerite--she was
exquisite; and another called Yvonne--he had adored her. O life! O
youth! . . . He had been a careless young devil, with laughter in his
heart. . . .

XVIII

I suppose it was three months later when I saw the first crowds coming
back to their homes in Amiens. The tide had turned and the enemy was
in hard retreat. Amiens was safe again! They had never had any doubt
of this homecoming after that day nearly three months before, when, in
spite of the enemy's being so close, Foch said, in his calm way, "I
guarantee Amiens." They believed what Marshal Foch said. He always
knew. So now they were coming back again with their little bundles and
their babies and small children holding their hands or skirts,
according as they had received permits from the French authorities.
They were the lucky ones whose houses still existed. They were
conscious of their own good fortune and came chattering very
cheerfully from the station up the Street of the Three Pebbles, on
their way to their streets. But every now and then they gave a cry of
surprise and dismay at the damage done to other people's houses.

"O la la! Regardez ca! c'est affreux!"

There was the butcher's shop, destroyed; and the house of poor little
Madeleine; and old Christopher's workshop; and the milliner's place,
where they used to buy their Sunday hats; and that frightful gap where
the Arcade had been. Truly, poor Amiens had suffered martyrdom;
though, thank God, the cathedral still stood in glory, hardly touched,
with only one little shellhole through the roof.

Terrible was the damage up the rue de Beauvais and the streets that
went out of it. To one rubbish heap which had been a corner house two
girls came back. Perhaps the French authorities had not had that one
on their list. The girls came tripping home, with light in their eyes,
staring about them, ejaculating pity for neighbors whose houses had
been destroyed. Then suddenly they stood outside their own house and
saw that the direct hit of a shell had knocked it to bits. The light
went out of their eyes. They stood there staring, with their mouths
open. . . Some Australian soldiers stood about and watched the girls,
understanding the drama.

"Bit of a mess, missy!" said one of them. "Not much left of the old
home, eh?"

The girls were amazingly brave. They did not weep. They climbed up a
hillock of bricks and pulled out bits of old, familiar things. They
recovered the whole of a child's perambulator, with its wheels
crushed. With an air of triumph and shrill laughter they turned round
to the Australians.

"Pour les bebes!" they cried.

"While there's life there's hope," said one of the Australians, with
sardonic humor.

So the martyrdom of Amiens was at an end, and life came back to the
city that had been dead, and the soul of the city had survived. I have
not seen it since then, but one day I hope I shall go back and shake
hands with Gaston the waiter and say, "Comment ca va, mon vieux?"
("How goes it, my old one?") and stroll into the bookshop and say,
"Bon jour, mademoiselle!" and walk round the cathedral and see its
beauty in moonlight again when no one will look up and say, "Curse the
moon!"

There will be many ghosts in the city at night--the ghosts of British
officers and men who thronged those streets in the great war and have
now passed on.

PART SIX

Psychology on the Somme

I

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to
come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready
for the big battles which were being planned for them by something
greater than generalship--by the fate which decides the doom of men.

The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by
Ypres, were defensive actions of rear--guards holding the enemy back
by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our
race were being raised.

The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks
which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the
science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no
meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn;
ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children.
They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of
trench warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their
School of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn
their lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the
daily visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two
years it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her
sons against the enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to
breach them. At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of
'16, it was France which sustained the full weight of the German
offensive on the western front and broke its human waves, until they
were spent in a sea of blood, above which the French poilus, the
"hairy ones," stood panting and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks.
The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the heart of France.
France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant
still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses--six
hundred thousand casualties--already conscious, icily, of a dwindling
man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged
their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight
eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out
by sledge-hammer blows, left and right, west and east, from that ring
of nations which girdled them. On the west they would stand now on the
defensive, fairly sure of their strength, but well aware that it would
be tried to the utmost by that enemy which, at the back of their
brains (at the back of the narrow brains of those bald-headed vultures
on the German General Staff), they most feared as their future peril--
England. They had been fools to let the British armies grow up and wax
so strong. It was the folly of the madness by which they had flung the
gauntlet down to the souls of proud peoples arrayed against them.

Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six
hundred thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England,
immense reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks
before the summer foliage turned to russet tints.

Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the
year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean
harness and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get
their targets. We were strong in "heavies," twelve-inchers, 9.2's,
eight-inchers, 4.2's, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled sixty-
pounders terrible in their long range and destructiveness. Our
aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon squadron, and our aviators had
been trained in the school of General Trenchard, who sent them out
over the German lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and how
to die like little gentlemen.

For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned "buses"--
primitive machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying Fokkers
who waited for them behind a screen of cloud and then "stooped" on
them like hawks sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer
came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery,
replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for
fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German
champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless
they flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men gained an
absolute supremacy by greater daring--there was nothing they did not
dare--and by equal skill. As a caution, not wasting their strength in
unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back
again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful
concentrations. But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy
cost of life, kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes.

The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long
trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of
aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that
in this direction a merry hell was being prepared.

There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast
to the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts
and tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty
clearing stations near the front the wounded--the human wreckage of
routine warfare--were being evacuated "in a hurry" to the base, and
from the base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so
that all the wards might be empty for a new population of broken men,
in enormous numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying
up. There was a sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being
made for a multitude that was coming.

"We shall be very busy," said the doctors.

"We must get all the rest we can now," said the nurses.

"In a little while every bed will be filled," said the matrons.

Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four wounded
Germans, Wurtemburgers and Bavarians, too ill to move just then. Each
of them had lost a leg under the surgeon's knife. They were eating
strawberries, and seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them.

"Wie befinden sie sich?"

"Ganz wohl; wir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung."

I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard where the "shell-
shocks" sat about, dumb, or making queer, foolish noises, or staring
with a look of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room came a
sound of singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of
laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so mad!