Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"We are clearing them out," said the medical officer. "There will be
many more soon."

How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. It was the only
secret, and even that was known in London, where little ladies in
society were naming the date, "in confidence," to men who were
directly concerned with it--having, as they knew, only a few more
weeks, or days, of certain life. But I believe there were not many
officers who would have surrendered deliberately all share in "The
Great Push." In spite of all the horror which these young officers
knew it would involve, they had to be "in it" and could not endure the
thought that all their friends and all their men should be there while
they were "out of it." A decent excuse for the safer side of it--yes.
A staff job, the Intelligence branch, any post behind the actual
shambles--and thank God for the luck. But not an absolute shirk.

Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, rows and rows of
bell tents and pavilions stained to a reddish brown. Small cities of
them were growing up on the right of the road between Amiens and
Albert--at Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous-Corbie. I thought they
might be for troops in reserve until I saw large flags hoisted to tall
staffs and men of the R.A.M.C. busy painting signs on large sheets
stretched out on the grass. It was always the same sign--the Sign of
the Cross that was Red.

There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains were
traveling on light railways day and night to railroads just beyond
shell-range. What was all the weight they carried? No need to ask. The
"dumps" were being filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells,
covered by tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. Enormous
shells, some of them, like gigantic pigs without legs. Those were for
the fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2's. There was enough high-explosive
force littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off
the map.

"It does one good to see," said a cheery fellow. "The people at home
have been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been
packing those things. Well done, Munitions!"

I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of satisfaction
that at least when our men attacked they would have a power of
artillery behind them. It might help them to smash through to a
finish, if that were the only way to end this long-drawn suicide of
nations.

My friend was shocked when I said:

"Curse all munitions!"

II

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the approach of that
new phase of war which they called "The Great Push," as though it were
to be a glorified football-match. It is difficult, perhaps impossible,
to know the thoughts of vast masses of men moved by some sensational
adventure. But a man would be a liar if he pretended that British
troops went forward to the great attack with hangdog looks or any
visible sign of fear in their souls. I think most of them were
uplifted by the belief that the old days of trench warfare were over
forever and that they would break the enemy's lines by means of that
enormous gun-power behind them, and get him "on the run." There would
be movement, excitement, triumphant victories--and then the end of the
war. In spite of all risks it would be enormously better than the
routine of the trenches. They would be getting on with the job instead
of standing still and being shot at by invisible earth-men.

"If we once get the Germans in the open we shall go straight through
them."

That was the opinion of many young officers at that time, and for once
they agreed with their generals.

It seemed to be a question of getting them in the open, and I confess
that when I studied the trench maps and saw the enemy's defensive
earthworks thirty miles deep in one vast maze of trenches and redoubts
and barbed wire and tunnels I was appalled at the task which lay
before our men. They did not know what they were being asked to do.

They had not seen, then, those awful maps.

We were at the height and glory of our strength. Out of England had
come the flower of our youth, and out of Scotland and Wales and Canada
and Australia and New Zealand. Even out of Ireland, with the 16th
Division of the south and west, and the 36th of Ulster. The New Armies
were made up of all the volunteers who had answered the call to the
colors, not waiting for the conscription by class, which followed
later. They were the ardent ones, the young men from office, factory,
shop, and field, university and public school. The best of our
intelligence were there, the noblest of our manhood, the strength of
our heart, the beauty of our soul, in those battalions which soon were
to be flung into explosive fires.

III

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads
behind the front.

I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there
was a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-
day and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and
old ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their
black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people
scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line
of transport wagons came through the square.

"By Jove! . . . Australians!"

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told one at a glance,
but without them I should have known. They had a distinctive type of
their own, which marked them out from all other soldiers of ours along
those roads of war.

They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding through the little old
market town; British unmistakably, yet not English, not Irish, nor
Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the hardness of a
boyhood and a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the
softer training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially
for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and
they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though
born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the
little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle
and an old woman's table of colored ribbons.

Those clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered men, who had come out of
the hell of the Dardanelles and the burning drought of Egyptian sands,
looked wonderfully fresh in France. Youth, keen as steel, with a flash
in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came
riding down the street.

They were glad to be there. Everything was new and good to them
(though so old and stale to many of us), and after their adventures in
the East they found it splendid to be in a civilized country, with
water in the sky and in the fields, with green trees about them, and
flowers in the grass, and white people who were friendly.

When they came up in the train from Marseilles they were all at the
windows, drinking in the look of the French landscape, and one of
their officers told me that again and again he heard the same words
spoken by those lads of his.

"It's a good country to fight for . . . It's like being home again."

At first they felt chilly in France, for the weather had been bad for
them during the first weeks in April, when the wind had blown cold and
rain-clouds had broken into sharp squalls.

Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard their teeth
chatter, but they said they liked a moist climate with a bite in the
wind, after all the blaze and glare of the Egyptian sun.

One of their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying
sweets! "They can't have too much of them," said one of the officers,
and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities
had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an
amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they
were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a
wonderful simplicity of youth and the gift of laughter.

I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried on the gas-
masks which none of us ever left behind when we went near the
fighting-line. That horror of war on the western front was new to
them.

Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the Turks, and the gas-
masks seemed a joke to the groups of Australians trying on the
headgear in the fields, and changing themselves into obscene specters
. . . But one man watching them gave a shudder and said, "It's a pity
such splendid boys should have to risk this foul way of death." They
did not hear his words, and we heard their laughter again.

On that first day of their arrival I stood in a courtyard with a young
officer whose gray eyes had a fine, clear light, which showed the
spirit of the man, and as we talked he pointed out some of the boys
who passed in and out of an old barn. One of them had done fine work
on the Peninsula, contemptuous of all risks. Another had gone out
under heavy fire to bring in a wounded friend . . . "Oh, they are
great lads!" said the captain of the company. "But now they want to
get at the Germans and finish the job quickly. Give them a fair chance
and they'll go far."

They went far, from that time to the end, and fought with a simple,
terrible courage.

They had none of the discipline imposed upon our men by Regular
traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with none but the gipsy law in
their hearts, intolerant of restraint, with no respect for rank or
caste unless it carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind
the lines, quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, primitive men, but lovable,
human, generous souls when their bayonets were not red with blood.
Their discipline in battle was the best. They wanted to get to a place
ahead. They would fight the devils of hell to get there.

The New-Zealanders followed them, with rosy cheeks like English boys
of Kent, and more gentle manners than the other "Anzacs," and the same
courage. They went far, too, and set the pace awhile in the last lap.
But that, in the summer of '16, was far away.

In those last days of June, before the big battles began, the
countryside of the Somme valley was filled with splendor. The mustard
seed had spread a yellow carpet in many meadows so that they were
Fields of the Cloth of Gold, and clumps of red clover grew like
flowers of blood. The hedges about the villages of Picardy were white
with elderflower and drenched with scent. It was haymaking time and
French women and children were tossing the hay on wooden pitchforks
during hot days which came between heavy rains. Our men were marching
through that beauty, and were conscious of it, I think, and glad of
life.

IV

Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed between England
and the long, straight road which led to No Man's Land. The seven-day-
leave men were coming back by every tide, and all other leave was
canceled.

New "drafts" were pouring through the port by tens of thousands--all
manner of men of all our breed marching in long columns from the
quayside, where they had orders yelled at them through megaphones by
A.P.M.'s, R.T.O.'s, A.M.L.O.'s, and other blue tabbed officers who
dealt with them as cattle for the slaughterhouses. I watched them
landing from the transports which came in so densely crowded with the
human freight that the men were wedged together on the decks like
herrings in barrels. They crossed from one boat to another to reach
the gangways, and one by one, interminably as it seemed, with rifle
gripped and pack hunched, and steel hat clattering like a tinker's
kettle, came down the inclined plank and lurched ashore. They were
English lads from every country; Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every
regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, West
Indian negroes of the Garrison Artillery; Sikhs, Pathans, and Dogras
of the Indian Cavalry. Some of them had been sick and there was a
greenish pallor on their faces. Most of them were deeply tanned. Many
of them stepped on the quayside of France for the first time after
months of training, and I could tell those, sometimes, by the furtive
look they gave at the crowded scene about them, and by a sudden glint
in their eyes, a faint reflection of the emotion that was in them,
because this was another stage on their adventure of war, and the
drawbridge was down at last between them and the enemy. That was
all,just that look, and lips tightened now grimly, and the pack
hunched higher. Then they fell in by number and marched away, with
Redcaps to guard them, across the bridge, into the town of Boulogne
and beyond to the great camp near Etaples (and near the hospital, so
that German aircraft had a good argument for smashing Red Cross huts),
where some of them would wait until somebody said, "You're wanted."
They were wanted in droves as soon as the fighting began on the first
day of July.

The bun shops in Boulogne were filled with nurses, V.A.D.'s, all kinds
of girls in uniforms which glinted with shoulder-straps and buttons.
They ate large quantities of buns at odd hours of mornings and
afternoons. Flying-men and officers of all kinds waiting for trains
crowded the Folkestone Hotel and restaurants, where they spent two
hours over luncheon and three hours over dinner, drinking red wine,
talking "shop"--the shop of trench-mortar units, machine-gun sections,
cavalry squadrons, air-fighting, gas schools, and anti-gas schools.
Regular inhabitants of Boulogne, officers at the base, passed to inner
rooms with French ladies of dangerous appearance, and the transients
envied them and said: "Those fellows have all the luck! What's their
secret? How do they arrange these cushie jobs?" From open windows came
the music of gramophones. Through half-drawn curtains there were
glimpses of khaki tunics and Sam Brown belts in juxtaposition with
silk blouses and coiled hair and white arms. Opposite the Folkestone
there was a park of ambulances driven by "Scottish women," who were
always on the move from one part of the town to the other. Motor-cars
came hooting with staff-officers, all aglow in red tabs and armbands,
thirsty for little cocktails after a dusty drive. Everywhere in the
streets and on the esplanade there was incessant saluting. The arms of
men were never still. It was like the St. Vitus disease. Tommies and
Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive
energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn
saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing
became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet
pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It
seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of
man. Only the Australians stood out against it, and went by all
officers except their own with a careless slouch and a look of "To
hell with all that handwagging."

Seated on high stools in the Folkestone, our young officers clinked
their cocktails, and then whispered together.

"When's it coming?"

"In a few days . . . I'm for the Gommecourt sector."

"Do you think we shall get through?"

"Not a doubt of it. The cavalry are massing for a great drive. As soon
as we make the gap they'll ride into the blue."

"By God! . . . There'll be some slaughter"

"I think the old Boche will crack this time."

"Well, cheerio!"

There was a sense of enormous drama at hand, and the excitement of it
in boys' hearts drugged all doubt and fears. It was only the older
men, and the introspective, who suffered from the torture of
apprehension. Even timid fellows in the ranks were, I imagine,
strengthened and exalted by the communal courage of their company or
battalion, for courage as well as fear is infectious, and the
psychology of the crowd uplifts the individual to immense heights of
daring when alone he would be terror--stricken. The public-school
spirit of pride in name and tradition was in each battalion of the New
Army, extended later to the division, which became the unit of esprit
de corps. They must not "let the battalion down." They would do their
damnedest to get farther than any other crowd, to bag more prisoners,
to gain more "kudos." There was rivalry even among the platoons and
the companies. "A" Company would show "B" Company the way to go! Their
sergeant-major was a great fellow! Their platoon commanders were fine
kids! With anything like a chance--

In that spirit, as far as I, an outsider could see and hear, did our
battalions of boys march forward to "The Great Push," whistling,
singing, jesting, until their lips were dry and their throats parched
in the dust, and even the merriest jesters of all were silent under
the weight of their packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day,
through the beauty of that June in France, thousands of men, hundreds
of thousands to the edge of the battlefields of the Somme, where the
enemy was intrenched in fortress positions and where already, before
the last days of June, gunfire was flaming over a vast sweep of
country.

V

On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only
lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our
British armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all
previous reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that
furnace month after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift
haste; when those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown
to bits by shell-fire, gassed in thousands, until all that country
became a graveyard; when they went forward to new assaults or fell
back in rearguard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in
their first attack no more than one chance in five of escape, next
time one chance in four, then one chance in three, one chance in two,
and after that no chance at all, on the line of averages, as worked
out by their experience of luck. More boys came out to take their
places, and more, and more, conscripts following volunteers, younger
brothers following elder brothers. Never did they revolt from the
orders that came to them. Never a battalion broke into mutiny against
inevitable martyrdom. They were obedient to the command above them.
Their discipline did not break. However profound was the despair of
the individual, and it was, I know, deep as the wells of human tragedy
in many hearts, the mass moved as it was directed, backward or
forward, this way and that, from one shambles to another, in mud and
in blood, with the same massed valor as that which uplifted them
before that first day of July with an intensified pride in the fame of
their divisions, with a more eager desire for public knowledge of
their deeds, with a loathing of war's misery, with a sense of its
supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to acknowledge defeat
or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there were officers
and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of ecstasy did
acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of these feats
the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass followed
their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were many, as
in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as the
center of the fury before their knees gave way or they dropped dead.

Each wave of boyhood that came out from England brought a new mass of
physical and spiritual valor as great as that which was spent, and in
the end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers
and swept through in a rush to victory, which we gained at the cost of
nearly a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and all our
wealth, and a spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that
now England is for a time sick to death and drained of her old pride
and power.

VI

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred
years ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the
Somme. With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above
Albert, looking over to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, on
the left side of the German salient, and then, by crossing the road,
to Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban on the southern side. From Albert
westward past Thiepval Wood ran the little river of the Ancre, and on
the German side the ground rose steeply to Usna Hill by La Boisselle,
and to Thiepval Chateau above the wood. It was a formidable defensive
position, one fortress girdled by line after line of trenches, and
earthwork redoubts, and deep tunnels, and dugouts in which the German
troops could live below ground until the moment of attack. The length
of our front of assault was about twenty miles round the side of the
salient to the village of Bray, on the Somme, where the French joined
us and continued the battle.

From where we stood we could see a wide panorama of the German
positions, and beyond, now and then, when the smoke of shellfire
drifted, I caught glimpses of green fields and flower patches beyond
the trench lines, and church spires beyond the range of guns rising
above clumps of trees in summer foliage. Immediately below, in the
foreground, was the village of Albert, not much ruined then, with its
red-brick church and tower from which there hung, head downward, the
Golden Virgin with her Babe outstretched as though as a peace-offering
over all this strife. That leaning statue, which I had often passed on
the way to the trenches, was now revealed brightly with a golden
glamour, as sheets of flame burst through a heavy veil of smoke over
the valley. In a field close by some troops were being ticketed with
yellow labels fastened to their backs. It was to distinguish them so
that artillery observers might know them from the enemy when their
turn came to go into the battleground. Something in the sight of those
yellow tickets made me feel sick. Away behind, a French farmer was
cutting his grass with a long scythe, in steady, sweeping strokes.
Only now and then did he stand to look over at the most frightful
picture of battle ever seen until then by human eyes. I wondered, and
wonder still, what thoughts were passing through that old brain to
keep him at his work, quietly, steadily, on the edge of hell. For
there, quite close and clear, was hell, of man's making, produced by
chemists and scientists, after centuries in search of knowledge. There
were the fires of hate, produced out of the passion of humanity after
a thousand years of Christendom and of progress in the arts of beauty.
There was the devil-worship of our poor, damned human race, where the
most civilized nations of the world were on each side of the bonfires.
It was worth watching by a human ant.

I remember the noise of our guns as all our batteries took their parts
in a vast orchestra of drumfire. The tumult of the fieldguns merged
into thunderous waves. Behind me a fifteen-inch "Grandmother" fired
single strokes, and each one was an enormous shock. Shells were
rushing through the air like droves of giant birds with beating wings
and with strange wailings. The German lines were in eruption. Their
earthworks were being tossed up, and fountains of earth sprang up
between columns of smoke, black columns and white, which stood rigid
for a few seconds and then sank into the banks of fog. Flames gushed
up red and angry, rending those banks of mist with strokes of
lightning. In their light I saw trees falling, branches tossed like
twigs, black things hurtling through space. In the night before the
battle, when that bombardment had lasted several days and nights, the
fury was intensified. Red flames darted hither and thither like little
red devils as our trench mortars got to work. Above the slogging of
the guns there were louder, earth-shaking noises, and volcanoes of
earth and fire spouted as high as the clouds. One convulsion of this
kind happened above Usna Hill, with a long, terrifying roar and a
monstrous gush of flame.

"What is that?" asked some one.

"It must be the mine we charged at La Boisselle. The biggest that has
ever been."

It was a good guess. When, later in the battle, I stood by the crater
of that mine and looked into its gulf I wondered how many Germans had
been hurled into eternity when the earth had opened. The grave was big
enough for a battalion of men with horses and wagons, below the chalk
of the crater's lips. Often on the way to Bapaume I stepped off the
road to look into that white gulf, remembering the moment when I saw
the gust of flame that rent the earth about it.

VII

There was the illusion of victory on that first day of the Somme
battles, on the right of the line by Fricourt, and it was not until a
day or two later that certain awful rumors I had heard from wounded
men and officers who had attacked on the left up by Gommecourt,
Thiepval, and Serre were confirmed by certain knowledge of tragic
disaster on that side of the battle-line.

The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me
when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villages of Mametz and
Montauban and our barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first
lines of German trenches, and our support troops moving forward in
masses to captured ground. We had broken through! By the heroic
assault of our English and Scottish troops. West Yorks, Yorks and
Lancs, Lincolns, Durhams, Northumberland Fusiliers, Norfolks and
Berkshires, Liverpools, Manchesters, Gordons, and Royal Scots, all
those splendid men I had seen marching to their lines. We had smashed
through the ramparts of the German fortress, through that maze of
earthworks and tunnels which had appalled me when I saw them on the
maps, and over which I had gazed from time to time from our front-line
trenches when those places seemed impregnable. I saw crowds of
prisoners coming back under escort,fifteen hundred had been counted in
the first day,and they had the look of a defeated army. Our lightly
wounded men, thousands of them, were shouting and laughing as they
came down behind the lines, wearing German caps and helmets. From
Amiens civilians straggled out along the roads as far as they were
allowed by military police, and waved hands and cheered those boys of
ours. "Vive l'Angleterre!" cried old men, raising their hats. Old
women wept at the sight of those gay wounded, the lightly touched,
glad of escape, rejoicing in their luck and in the glory of life which
was theirs still and cried out to them with shrill words of praise and
exultation.