Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"You will have a moist time in some of the trenches," said the general
(whose boots were finely polished). "The rain has made them rather
damp. . . But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We're
expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our
trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It's an interesting
place."

The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I
uttered a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly
mine under me. It makes such a mess of a man.

A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: "The sound of
picks has been heard close to our sap-head. The enemy will probably
explode their mine in a few hours."

"That's the place I was telling you about," said the general. "It's
well worth a visit. . . But you must make up your mind to get your
feet wet."

As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed to my shoulders,
I was ready to brave the perils of wet feet with any man.

It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that
in London--which seemed a long way off--people were going about under
umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing
omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their
pretty ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of
peace.) But in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something
different, and hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our
soldiers, who cursed the rain--as in the old days, "they swore
terribly in Flanders"--did not tuck their clothes up above their
ankles. They took off their trousers.

There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those
hefty men coming back through the communication trenches with the
tails of their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were
plastered with a yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their
spades, they trudged on grimly through two feet of water, and the
boots which they wore without socks squelched at every step with a
loud, sucking noise--"like a German drinking soup," said an officer
who preceded me.

"Why grouse?" he said, presently. "It's better than Brighton!"

It was a queer experience, this paddling through the long
communication trenches, which wound in and out like the Hampton Court
maze toward the front line, and the mine craters which made a salient
to our right, by a place called the "Tambour." Shells came whining
overhead and somewhere behind us iron doors were slamming in the sky,
with metallic bangs, as though opening and shutting in a tempest. The
sharp crack of rifle-shots showed that the snipers were busy on both
sides, and once I stood in a deep pool, with the water up to my knees,
listening to what sounded like the tap-tap-tap of invisible
blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil.

It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head,
which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in
front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-
boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip in
the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow
growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman
whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs
about his elegant legs.

"Clever fellows!" said the officer, as two of us climbed on to the
fire-stand of the trench in order to avoid a specially deep water-
hole, and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were
only two hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry
earth for at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was loud at the
corner of the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a
slough of despond.

"And I hope they can swim!" said an ironical voice from a dugout, as
the officers passed. They were lying in wet mud in those square
burrows, the men who had been working all night under their platoon
commanders, and were now sleeping and resting in their trench
dwellings. As I paddled on I glanced at those men lying on straw which
gave out a moist smell, mixed with the pungent vapors of chloride of
lime. They were not interested in the German guns, which were giving
their daily dose of "hate" to the village of Becourt-Becordel. The
noise did not interrupt their heavy, slumbrous breathing. Some of
those who were awake were reading novelettes, forgetting war in the
eternal plot of cheap romance. Others sat at the entrance of their
burrows with their knees tucked up, staring gloomily to the opposite
wall of the trench in day-dreams of some places betwixt Aberdeen and
Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them, and said, "How are you getting
on?" He answered, "I'm not getting on. . . I don't see the fun of
this."

"Can you keep dry?"

"Dry? . . . I'm soaked to the skin."

"What's it like here?"

"It's hell. . . The devils blow up mines to make things worse."

Another boy spoke.

"Don't you mind what he says, sir. He's always a gloomy bastard.
Doesn't believe in his luck."

There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts--a
woman's face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a
portrait of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers.

A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French
troops who were once in this section of trenches. It was an altar
built into the side of the trench, where mass was said each morning by
a soldier--priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and
above the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of
which I read the words Notre Dame des Tranchees ("Our Lady of the
Trenches"). A tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the
desire of those who worshiped here:

"This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the
chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company
recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do
not touch the fragile statue in trench-clay."

"Our Lady of the Trenches!" It was the first time I had heard of this
new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches
of death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of
mankind whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do.

From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young
soldier was playing the mandolin to two comrades. "All the latest
ragtime," said one of them with a grin.

So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the
parapets at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a
village in which the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there.
The water through which we waded was alive with a multitude of
swimming frogs. Red slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and
queer beetles with dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges
and invaded the dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them.

"Rats are the worst plague," said a colonel, coming out of the
battalion headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and
table. "There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and
they're audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night
writhes with them. . . I don't mind the mice so much. One of them
comes to dinner on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar
who is very pally with me."

We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where
our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to
smoke or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in
their ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal
approaching upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long
ago by some of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower
growing in the churned-up soil. . . The new mine was not fired that
afternoon, up to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day,
and I wondered whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a
foreknowledge of death in his eyes.

One of the officers had spoken to me privately.

"I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that
thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it's the mining business that
wears one's nerve to shreds. One never knows."

I hated to leave him there to his agony. . . The colonel himself was
all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the
mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the
dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young
subaltern was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing
the glint of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver
ricocheted from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for
having fired.

The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the water-
logged trenches, the shell-fire which broke down the parapets and
buried men in wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers
waiting for English heads, and then the mines--oh, a cheery little
school of courage for the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war
for the devil and General Squeers!

VII

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from
the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it
stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as
a memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit
of those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the
fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts.

I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the
war that I think I could find my way about it blindfold, even now. I
saw it first in March of 1915, before the battle when the Germans
first used poison-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French and
British soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of masonry. On that
first visit I found it scarred by shell--fire, and its great Cloth
Hall was roofless and licked out by the flame of burning timbers, but
most of the buildings were still standing and the shops were busy with
customers in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small booths
served by the women and girls who sold picture post-cards and Flemish
lace and fancy cakes and soap to British soldiers sauntering about
without a thought of what might happen here in this city, so close to
the enemy's lines, so close to his guns. I had tea in a bun-shop,
crowded with young officers, who were served by two Flemish girls,
buxom, smiling, glad of all the English money they were making.

A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first sign of his work
was when a mass of French soldiers and colored troops, and English,
Irish, Scottish, and Canadian soldiers came staggering through the
Lille and Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell
upon them. They were gasping for breath, vomiting, falling into
unconsciousness, and, as they lay, their lungs were struggling
desperately against some stifling thing. A whitish cloud crept up to
the gates of Ypres, with a sweet smell of violets, and women and girls
smelled it and then gasped and lurched as they ran and fell. It was
after that when shells came in hurricane flights over Ypres, smashing
the houses and setting them on fire, until they toppled and fell
inside themselves. Hundreds of civilians hid in their cellars, and
many were buried there. Others crawled into a big drain-pipe--there
were wounded women and children among them, and a young French
interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them--and they
stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and
blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a
red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered
below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their
buttresses and towers.

When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the
years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of
its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were
raked into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never
a day for years in which Ypres was not shelled.

The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and
passed through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish
Chateau. . . For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life
in which men and women could move freely without hiding from the
pursuit of death; and even there, from time to time, there were shells
from long-range guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive
eggs. Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys
of motor-wagons, taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads,
raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-
horses with huge fringes of knotted string wended their way between
motor-lorries and gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-
gardens, with fleecy clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old
towers of Flemish churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont
Neir, whose sails have turned through centuries of peace and strife.
It all comes back to me as I write--that way to Ypres, and the sounds
and the smells of the roads and fields where the traffic of war went
up, month after month, year after year.

That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was strangely
quiet, I remember. There was "nothing doing," as our men used to say.
The German gunners seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a
charming day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of war
under every old hedge.

"What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?" asked one of my
companions. There were three of us.

It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the village which then--
they were early days!--looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of
sunshine above its gray thatch and red-tiled roofs.

Suddenly one of us said, "Good God!"

An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the sky and the hamlet
into which we were just going was blotted out by black smoke, which
came up from its center as though its market-place had opened up and
vomited out infernal vapors.

"A big shell that!" said one man, a tall, lean-limbed officer, who
later in the war was sniper-in-chief of the British army. Something
enraged him at the sight of that shelled village.

"Damn them!" he said. "Damn the war! Damn all dirty dogs who smash up
life!"

Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there had been a
minute or so between us and Dickebusch. (In Dickebusch my young
cobbler friend from Fleet Street was crouching low, expecting death.)
The peace of the day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the
way to Ypres. The German gunners had wakened up again. They always
did. They were getting busy, those house-wreckers. The long rush of
shells tore great holes through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet
in the ditch, we ate the luncheon we had carried in our pockets.

"A silly idea!" said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad look in his
eyes. He was Norman-Irish, and a man of letters, and a crack shot, and
all the boys he knew were being killed.

"What's silly?" I asked, wondering what particular foolishness he was
thinking of, in a world of folly.

"Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one's mouth, just
because some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away,
looses off a bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he
has no personal acquaintance."

"Damn silly," I said.

"That's all there is to it in modern warfare," said the lanky man."
It's not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength
against your enemy's, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics
and chemistry. What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth,
when guns kill at fifteen miles?"

Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised tricks to make him
show his head, and shot each head that showed.

The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again.
It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past
the red-brick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls,
past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring,
as our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres.
The enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in
the morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again. . . I
remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after
the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the
charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No
living figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones
above many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some
capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and
uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient splendor, with broken
traces of peoples who once had lived here in security. I looked up at
the blue sky above those white ruins, and had an idea that death
hovered there like a hawk ready to pounce. Even as one of us (not I)
spoke the thought, the signal came. It was a humming drone high up in
the sky.

"Look out!" said the lanky man. "Germans!"

It was certain that two birds hovering over the Grande Place were
hostile things, because suddenly white puffballs burst all round them,
as the shrapnel of our own guns scattered about them. But they flew
round steadily in a half-circle until they were poised above our
heads.

It was time to seek cover, which was not easy to find just there,
where masses of stonework were piled high. At any moment things might
drop. I ducked my head behind a curtain of bricks as I heard a shrill
"coo-ee!" from a shell. It burst close with a scatter, and a tin cup
was flung against a bit of wall close to where the lanky man sat in a
shell-hole. He picked it up and said, "Queer!" and then smelled it,
and said "Queer!" again. It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some
poisonous liquid from a German chemist's shop. Other bombs were
dropping round as the two hostile airmen circled overhead, untouched
still by the following shell-bursts. Then they passed toward their own
lines, and my friend in the shell-hole called to me and said, "Let's
be going."

It was time to go.

When we reached the edge of the town our guns away back started
shelling, and we knew the Germans would answer. So we sat in a field
nearby to watch the bombardment. The air moved with the rushing waves
which tracked the carry of each shell from our batteries, and over
Ypres came the high singsong of the enemies' answering voice.

As the dusk fell there was a movement out from Vlamertinghe, a
movement of transport wagons and marching men. They were going up in
the darkness through Ypres--rations and reliefs. They were the New
Army men of the West Riding.

"Carry on there," said a young officer at the head of his company.
Something in his eyes startled me. Was it fear, or an act of
sacrifice? I wondered if he would be killed that night. Men were
killed most nights on the way through Ypres, sometimes a few and
sometimes many. One shell killed thirty one night, and their bodies
lay strewn, headless and limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place.
Transport wagons galloped their way through, between bursts of shell-
fire, hoping to dodge them, and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the
litter of their wheels and shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and
the raw flesh of the dead horses that had not dodged them. Many men
were buried alive in Ypres, under masses of masonry when they had been
sleeping in cellars, and were wakened by the avalanche above them.
Comrades tried to dig them out, to pull away great stones, to get down
to those vaults below from which voices were calling; and while they
worked other shells came and laid dead bodies above the stones which
had entombed their living comrades. That happened, not once or twice,
but many times in Ypres.

There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death
to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had
had eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with
walls of sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very
long at a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic
according to the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' book as a hobby,
until it was buried under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful
soul, in spite of the menace of death always about him.

VIII

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days.
It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who
had the idea.

"It would be a great adventure," he said, as we stood listening to the
gun-fire over there.

"It would be damn silly," said a staff officer. "Only a stern sense of
duty would make me do it."

It was Gullett who was the brave man.

We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any
battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for
ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living
soul.

Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the
broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of
shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves.
There was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry
and twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had
been once a fair city.

For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not
speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers
of the sinking sun and the first stars that glimmered in a pale sky,
the frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us.

The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken
arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from
end to end by a thunderbolt. A recent shell had torn out a slice so
that the top of the tower was supported only upon broken buttresses,
and the great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. The Cloth
Hall was but a skeleton in stone, with immense gaunt ribs about the
dead carcass of its former majesty. Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's
was a stark ruin, which gleamed white through the darkening twilight.

We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster
Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and
into their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon
upon their riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of
isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my
friend and I stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried
life.

It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of
rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron lamp-
posts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken
way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and
plants still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed
by the daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been
all wrecked.

The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms,
and in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we
stumbled over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes. The silence
was broken now by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I
jumped sideways with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be the
signal for our batteries, and shell after shell went rushing through
the night, with that long, menacing hiss which ends in a dull blast.

The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells followed each
other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, echoed back by the ruins of
Ypres in hollow, reverberating thunder-strokes. The enemy was
answering back, not very fiercely yet, and from the center of the
town, in or about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses
or of huge blocks of stone splitting into fragments.

We groped along, scared with the sense of death around us. The first
flares of the night were being lighted by both sides above their
trenches on each side of the salient. The balls of light rose into the
velvety darkness and a moment later suffused the sky with a white
glare which faded away tremulously after half a minute.

Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the
roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields
between Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance.
The whole shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We
could see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We
stared across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge
crater, and those trenches which were battered to pieces but not
abandoned in the first battle of Ypres and the second battle.

That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British soldiers-
-there were years to follow when many more would lie there--and as
between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a
great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on
this ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our
loneliness here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and
made me see unnatural things.