THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM
A Vagabond in the Caucasus
Undiscovered Russia
A Tramp's Sketches
Changing Russia
With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem
With Poor Emigrants to America
Russia and the World
The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary
Through Russian Central Asia
Priest of the Ideal
Russia in 1916
The Quest of the Face
A Private in the Guards
Children of the Slaves
The Challenge of the Dead
The Challenge of the Dead
A vision of the war and the life
of the common soldier in France,
seen two years afterwards between
August and November, 1920
By
Stephen Graham
Cassell and Company, Ltd
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1921
The Challenge of the Dead
The suns shines and a strong wind lifts the waves toward the land; the blue sea, in happy commotion, throws armfuls of white spray across the long stone breakwater which is called Zeebruges Mole. The white stone way goes two miles out to sea, and is swept by a marine healthiness. Upon it at intervals stand the German guns with the ends of their barrels burst out like thistle-heads. They point o'er the sea; they have their armoured shelter on the inner side of which on the level with the gunner's eye stand inscribed in neat German schrift the distances to all places of importance within gunshot—greenish-yellow camouflaged German guns with something of the tiger in their expression. On the lee side of the Mole cling the giant sheds of hydroplanes—as it were, hooked to the side of the great stone wall. In the quieter water on this side of the Mole one sees jutting out of the fairway the tops of vessels sunk there in 1918, and near by is a tablet marking the spot where the landing-party of the Vindictive made its daring raid upon the foe.
Zeebruges! A party of school-children in "croc" are being escorted along the way by nuns; the Smiths of Surbiton have scrawled their names on the guns. There is a half-way house on the Mole now where one drinks beer and buys a picture postcard, or at the base of the Mole and looking outward toward England, one may dine alfresco at a Grand Palace Hotel. But what of that! The whole is sun-drowned and wind-swept and bare and open with a spaciousness and grandeur which are ample for the soul. The breeze which blows from England slackens nothing ere it reaches those fields where the wild flowers and the rushes bloom.
The mind goes back to 1914 and that great October when Antwerp fell but Ypres was held—when the last transports rolled alongside this glorious Mole bearing the Seventh Division, soon to be called, in faith, immortal, because half its number was destroyed before the war was very old.
October fifth they sailed away
Upon the salt sea's raging spray
And landed safe in Bruges bay
Upon their way to Ypres.
They stepped up from the boats, new, ruddy, well equipped, intact—they rolled forward, with drums beating, o'er the Belgian land. Now all who ever will arrive in Zeebruges from o'er the sea will arrive after the Seventh Division. The war-pilgrim, paying his due of honour to those who came that day, cannot follow very far on their road unless he die also. If he chooses to follow any one soldier, will he not very likely come soon to the road's end and a grey wooden cross where his soldier's destiny dipped into eternity?
Follow, then, the many who ran in the great torch race of the war, where the spent runner handed the torch from his hand to another, who in turn ran with it blazing till he fell, thus from Zeebruges to Ypres; from Ypres, flaming, to Neuve Chapelle; from Neuve Chapelle, flaming, to Loos; then aflame to the defence of the Salient; then a long blaze to the sevenfold altar of the Somme ... man to man, unit to unit, period to period, till the November when the race was won.
Was it not characteristic of the old war that the "Contemptibles" of the Seventh, landing at Zeebruges, should at once be marched thirty miles in the wrong direction and then brought back by train. Antwerp was the beacon; Antwerp was not yet taken; the Naval Brigade was trying to save it. It was to fall, Zeebruges was to fall, Ostende itself was to fall—all very rapidly. When the boys got to Bruges it was rumoured that the Germans had had a set-back; when they got to Ostende they heard that Antwerp had been taken. When they got back to Bruges terror had seized the city. When they got to Ghent they took the Antwerp road—and then they came back, to Ypres.
The cobbled way to Bruges is not marked by destruction. The trees give shade, the houses stand, the fields are ploughed. Alice in an estaminet says she learned French from the French prisoners kept there—her bar used to be crowded with them. The Belfry of Bruges stands against the sky ahead—as if lifted out of the plain up to heaven itself.
You cross a canal which looks like a moat, and are in Bruges itself, a perfectly whole, undamaged, serene and peaceful city. Trams, shops, carts pulled by dogs, rows of estaminets, old gateways, old churches, and then the Grande Place. The broad market-place is empty, but one sits facing the great tower and listens to the ever-repeating chimes of the bells—silver in the evening hour. It is—no, it is impossible—yes, it is "The Rosary" which is being played by the bells. "I ... strive ... to kiss the Cross," yells the steeple, and then goes plaintive and trickles tunefully away.
"Well, here I am and here I remain," says an old man sitting behind me with a coffee-glass which he has long since drained. "Till England becomes sane, I stay here."
"The cost of living is just as high in Peebles as in London," says a woman sitting opposite him.
"Mad everywhere," says the man. "What I'd like is a flat somewhere near Lancaster Gate, so as I could go out into Kensington Gardens and sit under the trees and smoke."
There was a pause.
Then the woman from Peebles ventured in a thin, small voice:
"I think that Peter Pan statue in Kensington is so sweet. It was put up in the night, wasn't it?"
"Yes, it was; and isn't Kensington a delightful place?" says the old man.
They gloated in silence over Kensington. The bells of the Belfry began selections from Faust. Is there a war on? men used to ask facetiously. "There never was any war," says Bruges. The sound of the boots has long since died away, the boots, boots, boots, boots, marching up and down again, away, away—this city was not delivered unto the Angel of Death.
It's a shady highway that goes eastward to Ostende. At the village of St. Andrews there is a first war memorial to Belgian soldiers who gave their lives in the war; and then you come to the open ground at Varssenaere where the 20th Brigade did outpost duty, the first resting-ground for many a man, if rest he could, on his first night on the terrain of war—Varssenaere, a mean red-brick village with estaminets and small shops. Next day 'twas Steine and then Ostende.
October 9, 1914, they marched into Ostende station, crowded with wounded men who had been rushed
Ghent also is an undamaged city. Our airmen spared her; our cannon could not reach her. She was not taken by assault, but fell into the enemy's hands. It is prosperous, all its factory chimneys are a-smoke. Cheap plenitude fills its shop windows. Its people are at work—or, rather, they are at work when there is not a groodefeest.
It is calm on the Lokeren road. You cannot hear the battle-thunder of that October now, the ominous and insistent and encroaching roaring of the monster who was just spitting and flashing fire at Ghent in those days. You can see with the mind's eye the new army with its new boots and its sore feet and its loads of equipment. It did not carry bombs and it did not carry gas-masks, but it carried everything else. One can see the perplexed and anxious Staff looking at the intelligence brought in—the Germans held nowhere, the Germans in vast numbers, truly ready and capable of sweeping the contemptibly little army into the sea, the Germans advancing everywhere. The order comes to retire. Retire—retreat—might not the retreat from Antwerp resemble the retreat from Mons? It is retreat in any case. Back into Ghent; back, perhaps, to Bruges and to Ostende. No one talks of Ypres. The army does not yet know where Ypres is. However, they filed through Ghent, and it was once more boots, boots, boots, boots over the cobbled roads. It was midnight, and they traversed the whole broad metropolis—singing a song which has not been forgotten in all the intervening years.
But now it is midnight again, the night of the 1920 National Fête, and the whole population has got singing drunk and then screaming drunk on beer. Tens of thousands of men and women flock the streets. There are fireworks, there is music, there is dancing. The fronts of the estaminets have been taken out, and seats go from the bar to the middle of the street; long tables on trestles, and plank seats, have been put out; piles of shrimps litter the tables from end to end, and the yellow beer gleams as it streams. Tired children are massed on the cathedral steps waiting for the fireworks to begin, and past those who sit surges a tireless crowd.
In the Groensel Maarkt a truly Dostoieffskian scene. A soldier with one arm, a diminutive woman with dislocated hips, and two children are singing Flemish songs to a ring of people of varying ages. The old soldier has a sheaf of leaflets with the words of the songs and sells them a penny a time, a small boy plays the concertina, "mother" sings all the while a murmuring sing-song which never rises or falls, and keeps time with her wasp-like waist, which seems to hang from the black hump of her hips and sways uncannily back and forth. Father with the one arm also sings all the while he sells, the little girl sings, and the boy playing the concertina sings also. To the tune of "Way Down in Tennessee" they sing:
Ik noem haar mijn everzwijn
Mijn voddenmagazijn
They sing too, over and over again, a Flemish song about the war:
Nog niet genoeg dat hij
Binst d'oorlog was in 't lij
Tot overmaat huns laffe daad
Der duitschers vol van haat ...
and a haunting chorus which begins:
Hoe ... kan het bestaan
Dat men een man, die gansch zijn plicht
toch heeft gekweten
and glasses of beer pass over the heads of the audience to the singing family. All in a dark, empty market-place, with somebody's statue looking down on the scene and many a tear softening human eyes.
The rockets shoot up to the height of the cathedral spire and break in coloured lights, the large catherine-wheels are lit, the children clap and chase one another for firework cases.
At two in the morning strings of men and women holding on to one another parade the streets and kick out with their legs, attempting to dance whilst they sing "Tipperary," "Marguerite," "Mademoiselle from Armentières," "Hoe kan het bestaan," the new girls in knee-skirts with spindly legs, the old wives in longer heavier ones, exposing when they dance white baggy drawers like Canterbury bells. At four in the morning there are still ten thousand in the streets; men and women have made circles round trees and lamp-posts, and kick out as they try to roll round; knots of men and girls go staggering past with howls and yells; young Flemish fellows are squeezing girls of twenty and pressing down their cheeks with large-mouthed kisses. At six, in the heavenly radiance of a pure morning, pandemonium still rolls on.
Yes, it is good beer. The first glass of it on a hot day is refreshing—a flagon at lunch does not come amiss. But these men and women sat for hours pouring it in with floating shrimps—glasses, quarts, sitting on low seats with their legs apart, and visibly filling. And this plenitude did not make them weary. Au contraire, beer got into their toes and their knees and their thighs and their fat arms and necks, and expressed itself at all points of the body. I suppose one good reason for running in queues was that all holding on to one another none could fall down. One of the reasons why the bacchanalia continued long after morning-life had supervened was that many had forgotten they had any homes and mostly did not know where they were.
What a night! Six years ago on that other night it was different. Anxiety and foreboding throbbed in these streets. Belgian manhood in arms marched away. The British marched away, and by midnight the last soldier had gone. Suspense ... and then at two in the morning the first German, a motor-cyclist, armed, goggled, covered with dust, vigilant.... And from the dawn German order reigned in Ghent—no bacchanalias.
The army went out by night by many roads, making, however, for Bruges. It fell back for the defence, perhaps, of Bruges and of Ostende. Brussels had fallen, and Ghent—there was not much of Belgium left. The first morning out of Ghent saw the army at Somerghem, and the second at Thielt. So tired were the troops that at each halt in the night both officers and men, lying down by the roadside, fell asleep. At the halts the men bumped into one another mechanically, like the trucks of a freight train coming to a sudden stop, and then they just tumbled down and snored.
Newly tarred barges loll slowly along the Bruges-Ghent canal, and there is a vista along the straight water to the belfry of Ghent and the cathedral. The sides of the canal are lush with verdure; health and happiness spread out from its banks. One would say also the war never was here. But in Somerghem the old church on the hill crowning the town has been blown up. Its tower gave a view for leagues around, and the Devil made good use of it when he had a chance and when he had done his task blew it up lest others should follow his example. The Germans evacuated the town just before the end of the war; the Belgian army bombarded it and placed a gas concentration there. It was retaken, but at the price of a most beautiful church. The inhabitants are all back. They remember the Tommies and, of course, the Scots. The Gordons in their kilts made a lasting impression. Somerghem saw much war life before the enemy
One sees in these parts not a few war-babies, and worse than these, for they are innocent enough, one sees war-children in adolescence. The numbers of depraved young girls is appalling. Perhaps there were many before the war, but they look rather like war products. How many of them there are in the beer-houses and backyards of the small towns! It is difficult to avoid adventures with them. Bertha and Martha, depraved little rascals, come running along the canal bank, one in clogs, one in stocking soles. They talk scraps of German and scraps of French, and make disgusting gestures and throw themselves about in hard, coarse laughter. Martha is a strong and brazen little hussy with red face and fat little arms. Bertha is a soft-witted, pallid slip of a girl with full throat and weak lips. Both have long black finger-nails, both are in cotton rags; but Bertha has a large yellow festering wound on her ankle which she says was caused by a bit of shrapnel. Bertha is the younger. Martha may be sixteen; Bertha would be two years younger. And Martha would get Bertha into trouble. "Take Bertha!" she says continually, suggestively making signs. Poor war-children! When the war began Martha was ten and Bertha was eight. Martha was corrupted in it; pale, sickly, weak-lipped Bertha, with the shrapnel wound, perhaps not actually corrupted. When the wound had been examined and their nails cut they concluded they had met a doctor.
They scamper away at last. The dark water of the canal flows peacefully between banks of untarnished green. Nature is unqualified loveliness. At Somerghem, however, behind this veil there has been war, there has been something of the curse. One begins to notice in old walls patches of new brick where shell-holes in human habitations have been cobbled. Re-pointing is going on. The splash where the splinters of iron rived a whole house has been sought to be gently erased. The most virtuous work in the world! But it splashed on to the children too, and who can re-point the Berthas and the Marthas?
Enfin, the fair-sized town of Thielt, would-be picturesque but surprisingly shabby, not clean, not cleaned up, not quite like Belgium. The dirtiest of all possible hotels, more like a billet than a hotel, unswept floors, smashed china, supper in a kitchen which does not gleam like housewife's honour. It is a town unlike Ghent, unlike Bruges. It has not, however, been much shelled. British and Belgian gunners seem to have had orders to spare friendly cities. But there is no doubt that Thielt was in the war. Half its present inhabitants are revenants, as the French call those pitiful spirits who return to the places where they used to live. Mine host fled to Paris in 1914, and did not make a fortune there; he talks bitterly of Bosches and compensation. He is forty-six and set. Six years ago he felt a young man, he says, but to-day he is not ready to start anything new.
On then towards Roulers! 'Tis in gloomier country and with poor people. All high roads are under repair. If shells spared Thielt, they did not spare the roads. Where British army leather beat the cobbles in that long march back from Ghent, whistling shells touched later and blew up the ground that had been beneath their feet. The patient Flemish farmers hung on to their farms on each side of the shell-pitted road, and their cattle grazed in the fields with an equanimity that was sublime. For four years the cannon-thunder never ceased, and every night war flamed around the heavens, but the men on the soil remained true to the soil and drove straightly their ploughs.
Not a few farmers were killed; they also were heroes, for they died at their posts. But no patriotic cockade marks their humble graves. Plentiful now are the crosses ornamented with flowers and the red, white and blue, for those morts pour la patrie. Above Ardoye the first-noticed wayside cemetery of German soldiers appears, and there lies Franz Delmann, of Chemnitz, and many others who died in November, 1917. It is high up on a ridge beside the position of an old German battery. How the shells used to howl from this eminence over Roulers, over Passchendaele and leagues of destruction right into Ypres itself! Here in old days the grubby war-worn Germans plied the guns, and here the British guns found their prey also, and our enemies were put to sleep in this acre of death. Now most of the crosses are down, the cross-pieces of others have been taken away, part of the field has been dug up with a spade. For after all the ground is appropriated Belgian property. It was never paid for and it reverts to its owner, dead and all. What a pathetic tragedy is that of the dead the Germans left behind! Each cross, each dead one, refers back to some living family, some home, some set of human circumstances. What thoughts, what questions do not go out on the air from obscure homes to the dead who have been left behind! The reins which go from the living to the dead!
But enemies take little stock of one another's dead. Roulers, which is vis-à-vis to Ypres, lay partially destroyed and now it is being builded up again. If the dead could be made to pay for it the dead would. The living for the living! Roulers was a fine city once. The creative eye sees that it can be so again. The British gunners could have laid it flat as Ypres but they did not. Ypres can never be raised. But Roulers will be Roulers once again. As one approaches it, behold, what activity. New houses have sprung up overnight. There are thousands of piles of bricks. Every Belgian has learned bricklaying. Clerks, shopkeepers, salesmen, porters, in shirt sleeves and plaster-sprinkled hats, are at work—without trade union rules. Hundreds of thousands of whitish vermilion flesh-coloured old bricks are being made fit to use again, new bricks in tiers are apparent in improvised kilns, and all day and every day sounds the chipping and slapping of real reconstruction. Iron girders are being fitted into the gutted depths of old shop-fronts, and with foundations and framework it is marvellous how speedily old houses are built up. The city is poor. Its many factory chimneys are innocent of smoke. Roulers for flax! It was famous for its linen industry. Two Scotch engineers, met at a hotel, are fitting in new machinery in the factories. Typical uncommunicative Britons, they volunteer no information, but sit face to face over their meals, lean over their food and chuckle to one another in private monosyllables. When asked how they are getting on, one of them replies:
"Och slowly, man, slowly. They Chairmans didna leave muckle when they went awa!"
And six years ago the Army continued to fall back. Zeebruges whence it had started, Bruges and Ostende, and Ghent which it had marched through, became enemy country without much shedding of blood. No one stood long for their defence. After Roulers the name of a much less famous place than Bruges or Ghent came on to men's lips. Did they know that they were going to stand for the defence of it? No, it is all unlikely. And as they marched to Ypres they providentially did not know the four years' hell of which they trod the stage. War all over by Christmas was their thought if they thought at all as they marched o'er the ridge of Passchendaele in October, 1914.
The soldier, it is said, has an elementary mind which does not imagine, does not think—a regimental mind. Others therefore must think about him and do the thinking for him. See, the
Few shall part where many meet...
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.
Thus they marched into Ypres—"as pretty a town as you'd care to see after a day's march." Oh, it's highly romantic to look back to it now.
Banners yellow, glorious golden,
On its roof did float and flow.
This, all this, was in the olden time
Long ago.
The business centre of Ypres was invested with a dignity which was not merely commercial in those old days when the silver chimes rolled regularly the quarter-hours from the Cloth Hall tower. And the Army arrived, the army for the defence of Ypres. They will dig trenches and throw out wire south of Ypres, looking at Kemmel without knowing its name, walking on Hill 60 before it was numbered and named.
A quiet and little marked country south of Roulers now gives way first to trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks, and then to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farm-houses and cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire—but now as it were in tumultuous conflict with Nature. Chiefly remarkable are the magnificent rushes with their black tops rising from almost every shell-hole. The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest of wild flowers—pink willow-herb, burly St. John's wort in a yellow glare, starry blue of outbreaking chicory, hundred-headed blossoming sweet thistles growing from the hollows where fell, I doubt not, Caledonia's sons, foxgloves flowering upward attempting to take crimson to heaven. Ypres by the compass lies south-west. No, there is nothing on the horizon, not a wall, not a wood, only the bare eminence of Kemmel Hill. Before you is a vast fen. Some Flemings are at work on it in shirt sleeves, but not a soul is traversing it. You constantly change your direction: there is no going directly. It is impassable. You make for what once was a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now—thrice thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs, rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there still in plenty. Weather-beaten ammunition baskets with shells intact lie where they fell off the ammunition waggons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles, there are graves. There is all but the blood. But from the blood has risen flowers.
On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned Flemish—what a return!—and they have made shacks of shreds and patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture forth—there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. It has needed courage to come back to your old ten acres. Few of these Flemish are owners; they are only tenants. Their landlords allow them now three years rent free. From the hut made of salvage starts the regeneracy of the land. In an irregular patch round its gates lies the first reclaimed ground, a mere kail yard, a bean plot. There are wonderful crops of beans, higher than beans are wont to grow, bean-stalks to climb up. Tobacco also has been growing, for the leaves hang wilting from green to yellow on the outside of the unpainted wooden walls. But beyond the oasis the tall black-topped reeds, like Guardsmen of the vegetable world, go rank beyond rank to the eyes' end. One comes to a road, and there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:—"In den Niewen wereld." Half of them seem to be estaminets.
It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in one another's estaminets.
"I wouldn't never have come back had I known it was like this," says a Belgian woman. "I had good job at Rouen all the war, make plenty money, not like this."
"How was that?"
"Me cook in sergeants' mess, huh, plenty food, plenty money."
"That's where you learned English?"
"Yes."
There were two British Tommies drinking beer at the estaminet, one an R.E. the other an R.F. both talking knowingly about the old war. They had a motor-lorry which was waiting outside.
"Take a lift?" said they.
"Where to?"
"Polygon Wood."
To be on one of those old blundering kindly quixotic lorries again, pounding along a war-stricken highway! One might have thought the old lorry had now ceased its devils' dance. But no, it still has a duty to perform. Presently we pass a red-cross ambulance.
"Got any to-day?" cries the R.E. to the driver of the ambulance.
He puts up two fingers.
"Two ..." says the soldier with an air of satisfaction. "We found a brigadier-general yesterday," he adds.
"How do you mean?"
"Ex-umed 'im. He'd bin missin' since 1916. All this no-man's land bein' dug up now," said he with a wide sweep of his hand.
"That your job? It's pretty interesting."
"It's jolly hard work. But it 'as its better side. Some fellers the other day came on a dug-out with three officers in it, and they picked up five thousand francs between 'em."
The motor-lorry blundered forward toward a stone obelisk planted on a man-made hillock. On one side was a swamp of green stagnant water; on the other was a planting out of many hundred crosses of unvarnished wood. The lorry is full of crosses each named and numbered, roped up in scores, and these must be dumped inside the enclosure.
The view from the Polygon monument is desolation on all sides. One living man standing there is as it were monarch of all the dead. It is a remarkable eminence, a pillar at Thermopylæ, one thing standing where all else is lying flat. As it stands to-day it has no inscription. Polygon—myriad-sided—it is one of the strangest standing places and shrines of the war. Pause thou who livest: salute the dead!
Back thunders the empty lorry—on to the Menin road—and faces Ypres. You see the grey contour of the tower afar, but doubt whether you are approaching a city, so flat has all become. Yet certainly it is Ypres. You enter by a series of new-painted wooden taverns and hotels. You walk up a wide main street and there is Ypres——
A great dust storm is raging here whilst the sun shines out of a perfect sky. Here are no rushes, no wild flowers, no moisture, but only infinite debris and the shatterings of old masonry. There is a suggestion of the desert. A notice says "This is Holy Ground" and a barbed wire fence runs round the whole centre of old Ypres. Within that enclosure lies a ruined city. Thousands of years ago such a thing happened; all the people were slain or taken into bondage. No one came back, the victors
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Yet six years ago the Cloth Hall tower chimed the quarter-hours! The road out from the Menin gate was shady. Polygon Wood was a wood, not a monument. There was seemingly a château near a wood called Hooge. Zandwoorde Church had a spire. Behold the army however digging itself in. There are rudimentary lines of defence making a spider's web across the Menin road. The Twentieth Brigade flounders from Zandwoorde to Gheluvelt in newly upturned earth. The Germans who followed so rapidly to Ghent and Thielt and Roulers are hot on the trail, expecting Ypres also to be left to them without a blow. But they have not arrived. Our men are sitting on the parapets of their trenches, singing. There have been no casualties to mention, a few men lost sight of; three sentries in fact left unrelieved at Ghent. There is a battalion of Guards in the line at Klein Zillebeke, and not one has yet been killed or wounded. A battle is coming, however, for the retirement has ceased.
You turn out of Ypres by the left hand on a road which faces Kemmel Hill—the Wytschaete road, and you come to a flattened-out village at cross-roads, called Kruistraat. Where were once ploughed fields is now a land-ocean of humps and hollows with a foam of wild flowers. Plunging toward Voormezeele one is intoxicated by a perfume and looking to the right you see the cause in a field of thistles as thick and close as wheat. At what was Voormezeele there is now nothing more remarkable than the crosses of the P.P.C.L.I. the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, who evidently went down in the most terrible way in 1915. Were not these the Canadians who first tasted the devilry of gas?
Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently examining the aluminium ribbons on which the names are fixed to the wooden crosses—looking perhaps for her husband's grave but with an expression in her face and form of "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."
Virbranden Molen, where many encamped, is but a name now, and eastward the wire-covered duck-boards climb across the rushes and thistles to what was once a front line, past derelict limbers with rusty broken wheels, past unexploded five-nines—the wildest way. Reeds have filled the trenches, grass long and withered swarms o'er the parapets. There are heaps of rusty Mills bombs which no one has ever come to take away and no one will; there are ration-tins; there is all manner of army rubbish everywhere. Pilgrims and tourists evidently collect few souvenirs on the old Ypres front, and few Americans as yet arrive at Ypres, which has for them a lesser fame than Château Thierry and Verdun.
In October, 1914, the line was far in advance of what became such a carnage-strewn battlefield. Here is the railway cutting, then in supreme peace, and beyond it is a pale British monument inscribed with many names, though already defaced—to the memory of a lost mining and tunnelling company that took a sudden way to heaven before the war was won. Beyond it is a first German grave, where lie Fleully, Beck, Dechert, Mehlhorn, and an unknown, and helmets and old bombs strew the place where they lie. Klein Zillebeke is now marked by a huge concrete fort. Zandwoorde and Kruisseecke, which were scenes of hand-to-hand fighting in 1914, soon fell into German hands and remained within the enemy's lines throughout the war. The old church at Zandwoorde cannot now be identified by any ruins—one has to ask where it was. Even the bricks and the stones seem to have been swept away, but there are three graves there, Captain Rose and Lieutenant Turnor, of the Tenth Hussars, and a private soldier nameless and unknown, a sort of batman in death. An estaminet has jumped up like a weed beside the ruins but it has little trade. Zandwoorde was once a substantial little place but now perhaps it will not grow again so readily—it is off the main road and not served by rail. Kruisseecke will be bigger. On October 21st the Gordons drove the Germans back from Zandwoorde at the point of the bayonet. On that day the church tower was twice struck by shells. That was about the beginning of the history.
The old trenches 'twixt Zandwoorde and Gheluvelt are worn down and perhaps were never very deep. The shell-holes are much deeper. The land is desolate and all o'ergrown but it affords a scene of lesser desolation. The exhumers are patiently seeking for the dead who were left behind—the old dead of that first battle. It is ghoulish work, but they have become as matter of fact as can be.
"No, we don't find many Gordons. But we're picking up a lot o' Borders just now. Yes, and some Grenadiers. Brought in about thirty Borders yesterday. It isn't a bad job if they'd pay us more. We gets used to it. They say as how the Americans won't have the British touch their dead and have given the job over to the French. Fifteen thousand of them to be boxed and stuffed—there's a lot of work in that."
"You must dig up a fair number of Germans. What do you do with them?"
"Leave them where they are. We notifies the authorities, that's all. Of course Jerry buried most of his own, and I'll give him credit for that, he gave every man his eight feet. You don't so easy come across a man the Germans buried, but some of ours——"
The weather-beaten Tommy, in old flannel shirt and sagging breeches, waved his hand and grinned with mirth at our British ways.
"'S a funny thing though—the British dead keep much longer than the Germans. If I put a spade through something and it's soft, I know it's a Jerry."
"They say the body of a drunkard keeps fresh longest of all because of the spirit in it."
"Yes, that's true. And if buried in an oilskin it makes a heap of difference. But it's queer what you find. We came on a fellow the other day with a bayonet through his jaw. He'd been buried that way. No one could get the bayonet out——"
"Aren't the Germans doing anything to keep their dead? The Belgians would look after them if they got a hint from Berlin that it would be worth while."
"Oh, we'd bury them like Christians if they'd give us another half-crown on our wages. We ain't got nothing agin 'em—specially the dead."
"Do you sleep out here on this battlefield?"
"We bin 'ere six months now."
"No ghosts?"
The man smiled. He saw none. He felt the presence of none. Imagination did not pull his heart-strings. If it did, he would go mad.
Lying in an old trench behold a skull! It is clean and polished—a soldier's head, low and broad at the brows, high at the back. There is a frayed hole in an otherwise perfect cranium. The simplest way to pick it up would be to put a finger in an eye-hole and lift it. You must put both hands together and raise it fearfully if it be the first skull you have ever found.... Friend or foe? Hm—there are no identification marks on this. Thinking anything about it all? No, nothing—long since ceased to think. Friends living? Probably, somewhere. The more you look at the skull the more angry does it seem—it has an intense
Such is the Golgotha of Zandwoorde. Gheluvelt, the other end of the line, has now a diminutive yellow tower of new wood from an improvised church. Kruisseecke is a rusty-roofed, ramshackle, salvage-built settlement on the site of complete ruin. You see the yellow tower of Gheluvelt from all around, and like a livid finger the monument at Polygon Wood is seen far o'er the battlefields pointing to heaven.
In the whole complex story of the battle of Ypres, where so many regiments were engaged in such diverse parts of the field, with all their varying calamities and triumphs, it is only possible to realise the story in glimpses and aperçus. A thousand dramas were being enacted simultaneously in a clamour so great that no neighbour understood what was happening to his neighbour. Tragedy was accomplished, swiftly and as it were privately. A dreadful way of speaking was begotten afterwards, and men said "He got his at Polygon Wood," or "he got his at the Château," or "his at Kruisseecke."
Our gallant marchers, with the confetti as it were still sticking to them, have seen a great deal of Belgium, have been greatly excited, have reached Ypres with numbers intact, have taken their stand four feet deep in the clay of the fields of Zandwoorde and have taken a look round. They have been shelled. The shells have been falling irrelevantly—far from them. The first man to perish is a colour-sergeant, who, taking a stroll, gets shot by accident by an over-hasty sentry. The colour-sergeant did not quite realise the war till then. Others also did not realise the silent symbol of the fact that in fighting others you start by killing yourselves. Next to die is a drummer-boy, killed by a shell on the way to a hamlet called America, a kilometre beyond Kruisseecke. With what pathos was that dead boy considered! For he was a child of the Army. Drummer-boys are nearly always orphans, or boys without homes, brought up in barracks, taught in the Army school, with the Army for father and mother, the Army for God, the Army for nurse. Little drummer-boy dead on the way to America—the first to go West! It is a matter for pause, for a sad thought. If, however, the dead meet one another in the other world, as so many now believe, the boy will soon be comforted, for within the week scores of friends, hundreds of acquaintances, will join him. See a reconnaissance at Polygon Wood and Eskernest! Out of a whole company, only twenty-five come back. Its commander killed. Another company half destroyed—its commander killed also. Two captains buried side by side near a much-shelled house—rudimentary wooden crosses put o'er their resting-place. They were eager impetuous captains who had chafed to wait in England all August and September. Their minds were full of what the war really meant. But so soon are they sped! For four years the agony of Ypres beginning in these days will roll impotently on whilst they lie there, and the war with its gossip, its articles and speeches, its new inventions and new bitternesses will go on. God loved them and removed them betimes from the scene.
Yet if they see, if they can hear and know from other realms, what a spectacle, what an intense interest is theirs. To see the remains of their own poor companies of soldiers march back to Zandwoorde—the "not the six hundred," to see the ever-encroaching German and the more and more intimate and terrible strife proceed. The grand emotions of pity and fear thrill the air as the tumultuous battle goes on....
The shell-fire ceases to be irrelevant and finds its mark, turns whole brigades out of their trenches; reinforcements move with the acceleration of a moving ant-heap which has been kicked over. False news comes and confounds true news. The Borders are said to have given way. Guards and Gordons go to their support. Weak points change to strong points, strong to weak. Columns of assault are launched by the enemy, first on one point, then on another. A column breaks through at Kruisseecke at nightfall. The madness of the murder-excitement enters the trenches, and it is bayonet to bayonet; the rain streams down to mingle with blood, it is intensely dark, many have lost their clearness of mind and balance of nerve. But there is a counter-attack. Gallant Major F——, leading, is shot down; there is a dreadful mêlée and then silence. The enemy is winning his way. Nevertheless patrols in Kruisseecke round up a large number and take them prisoner. There is a dispute as to who is to have the merit of having taken the prisoners. But what does that matter? Round about this village is confusion worse confounded. Germans appear dressed up as Gordon Highlanders, then Gordons are thought to be Germans in disguise. Strange masses roll up through the rain looking not at all like Germans and crying "We are French."—"We are Allies"—"Don't shoot"—"Where is Captain P——?" "We surrender," and things of that kind. The survivors of a Staffordshire regiment devoid of officers, officers all down and out, come pelting through the lines having thrown their rifles away. German yells of victory break out.... It is a terrible night, one night, one little corner of the ground outside the city. Dawn comes, and Kruisseecke is with the enemy. It remains with the enemy. And there for many the march from Zeebruges ends and a personal war history is concluded. The torch of war has been carried thus far, to the battle of Ypres. The spent runner gives it to another who carries it in turn—
Back then to Ypres! It is an exposed moorland way. No woods, no houses stop the even progress of the wind. The trees are stumps no higher than Venetian masts. Instead of crops in the fields—crosses, an enormous harvest. Along the Menin road a steam tram rolls. At the entrance to Ypres is the communal cemetery of the city. Here, around the pre-war Belgian dead, lie Hussars, Lancers, Dragoon Guards, Scots Guards, all officers, all of the 1914 fighting. There they were lowered into graves with the flag about them—there they remain. In this acre of death the high wooden crucifix still stands, with its riven agonised Lord looking down. Of the hundreds of thousands of shells which fell in Ypres all spared Him—all but one which came direct and actually hit the Cross. That one did not explode but instead, half-buried itself in the wood and remains stuck in the upright to this day—an accidental symbol of the power of the Cross.
Ypres is terribly empty. Hundreds of thousands of eyes would look on it but there are few people who come to look at it—just ones and twos who stand diminutively in front of the great ruins and peer at them like the conventional figures in an old print. This absence of the living intensifies the strange atmosphere. It is said that the city will build itself up again, but it is possible to feel some doubt on that point. Perhaps Ypres will never be built again. At present it has some hundred and fifty places where they sell beer to two where they sell anything else. Its string of wooden hotels with cubicle bedrooms do not pay. The curious come for an hour or so from Ostende but do not spend the night. There is a sense of emptiness and tragedy which cannot be dispelled. Some sort of unit of British troops does duty instead of police and is posted to various guards, the sentries being however without rifles. The soldiers in their "sixth year" impart a certain liveliness. A party of them at night coming down the middle of the street singing
One
Tell the world you are mine,
And the world will be dearer to me,
in a full-throated chorus wakens echoes from dark corners of the ruins. There is music and dancing in favoured taverns. The returned Belgians do not perhaps belong naturally to the atmosphere of the sublime. They love beer and sociality. They will make their money by some means—they are not too particular how. Civilised ethics do not rule in these places where war has worked its will.
Strolling along at dusk past the Cloth Hall tower a bright-eyed Belgian wolf asks you who you are. "C'est triste, n'est ce pas?" says he, pointing to the ruins. Triste is what they are not. The Belgian is from Poperinghe. It is very dull there now. Tous les soldats sont partis. Also the mamzelles. Pas de jig-a-jig.
"Like a glass of beer?" asks the Belgian.
A spare woman of thirty serves two glasses of ale at a table outside a hotel. She seems to speak English for preference.
"You want someone to sleep with?" asks the man from Poperinghe.
"No, I sleep with no man."
"Not married?"
"No, and plenty time yet, and I shan't marry an English when I do. The English are all false."
The man from Poperinghe seems taken aback. At a further table a curious scene is being enacted. Here are sitting a pioneer corporal and a sergeant, both wearing the 1914 ribbon. They have their beer, and between them is an effervescent loose-mouthed Alsatian. The latter, like the man from Poperinghe, stands treat.
"I vill take you, one minit, I vill take you," says the Alsatian, kissing the tips of his fingers, "just vait, not ten minits from 'ere."
"Oh you go on, you bloomin' well shut up. I b'lieve you're agent for the girl or something," says the sergeant.
"No, listen, I'll tell you vot it is.... C'est de gateau, got that, gateau; naw need to drink any coffee, just ten minits, you see for yourself."
The sergeant makes a mocking show of biffing him in the eye, and grins all over his weak sun-burnt face. The shoeing corporal sips at his beer and smirks. The Alsatian on the tips of his toes, leaning forward on his chair which is tilted toward the table, gesticulates and slobbers—
"You wait till you see her, you'll felicitation yourself...."
And the sergeant is persuaded against his will and goes with him. Meanwhile dusk has grown to dark, and the ruined Cloth Hall tower on the other side of the way seems more gloomy, more moody and threatening, as if the war were not yet over.
This Ypres is a terrible place still. There is no life when night comes on but tavern life. Those who live and work here have lost their sense of proportion. They are out of focus somehow. "You lookin' for dead soldiers," says a Flemish woman to you with a glaring stare, wondering if you are one of the exhumers. Death and the ruins completely outweigh the living. One is tilted out of time by the huge weight on the other end of the plank, and it would be easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death. There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit. One is ashamed to be alive. You try to sleep in a little bed in a cubicle with tiny doll's house window. You listen to a drunken company down below singing, "Mademoiselle, have you got any rum?" A French couple enter the room next door, smacking one another's hips and confounding one another with coarse violent laughter—that is the light end of the plank. Then night ensues, the real night, breathless and sepulchral, the night which belongs to all lost hopes and ended lives and wearinesses.
You lie listless, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy masonry. You go to the little window, behold, the whole sky is crimson once more, and living streamers of flame ascend to the stars. An old dump has gone up at Langhemarcq. Everyone in Ypres looks out and then returns to sleep—without excitement. The lurid glare dies down; stertorous night resumes her sway o'er the living and the dead. For a moment it was as if the old war had started again.
Day dawns in a mist. A veil hides the inner reality of Ypres, and as a visitor says—"It looks more picturesque in the mist." Ypres however is an altar to which the nation must return.
After the great battle most of the survivors marched away. New men took their places. Glorious captains received their D.S.O.'s, battalions their first honours. A mere thirty thousand of the old army had stemmed the onrush of a quarter of a million of the enemy. Ypres remained in British hands—though badly battered, and the Germans were kept back from the vital ground of Calais.
At Chateau Wood near Hooge where a placard now says "This Place Was Hooge" were the remains of many battalions—Grenadiers, Duke of Wellingtons, Scots Fusiliers; along the Menin road lay Scots Guards, Borders, Gordons; but all were withdrawn. The Scots marched then to Dickebusch and Locre and Bailleul, and then to Sailly sur la Lys, and were out of the battle line ten murky days at least.
Now as you walk out from Ypres along the blighted Dickebusch road midst the iron thorn bushes of rusty barbed wire and sheaves of old spiral stakes you still see large notices that Waste Lengthens the War—what stronger appeal could one make! Does it not still prolong it and ever will!
A south wind blows volumes of rain out of the clouds on Kemmel Hill, the old mud is restored on the road, and long plashy pools of water guide the steps. Dickebusch is getting itself dug out of the mud, and making fair progress. Of its church amid broken monuments only two needles of up-jutting wall remain—at altar and entrance. New La Clytte is soldering itself to the foundations of old La Clytte. Kemmel grows nearer to the view and all the detail of its hillside can be picked out by the eye—the wheat field, the pasture, the farm-house. It is one's eye-neighbour on the left as you march into Locre. Now the Locre church, unscathed in 1914, unthreatened, is but a heap of red rubble surmounted by eight beams pointing skyward. Men are digging among the bricks, uncovering soiled images, figures of the Virgin, altar cloths, banners, stools. Near by stands a rusty cast-iron church built of salvage, a straight Protestant meeting house but for some brand-new coloured effigies of saints set among the seats. One aspect of Locre is of a diminutive forest of stinging nettles and low stumps of dead trees, and beyond lie some hundreds of British dead, flanked by a disused medical shed where the bodies used to be brought out and a burying padre with clayey hands went through the painfully mechanical service of throwing "dust to dust." The graves are nicely kept, and the young Belgium of Locre grows up with this heritage of sacrifice. As you sit on the ruins of the church looking down to the wet highway muddy velocipedists come pelting past in a race round their native land. Their bare thighs are caked with brown mud, and their cotton chemises are stuck to their bare round-shouldered backs, their intent faces are dirt-covered—on they dash, a complete and happy irrelevance beside the old war.
Here is the frontier 'twixt Belgium and France. A rope is drawn across the road; there was none in the days of the war. The customs gendarmes will examine you if you are coming into Belgium, though they will pay little attention if you are going out.
The landscape is one of black dead trees hanging dead arms. Old blown-up trees lie, root and all, along the roadside. There are great numbers of sockets of old gas-shells relating to the taking of Locre by the Germans in April 1918, heaps also of rusty rifle grenades which seem to have been collected and put by the side of the road. Remarkable ever are the promiscuously piled mountains of domestic old iron which one passes. It would be an interesting exercise for a young detective to decide what each piece of wreckage had been before the war. Certain things you can be sure about however—oil-drums, coal-scuttles, wash-bowls, chamber conveniences, armchair and sofa springs, metal guts of mattresses, perforated bowls for straining greens, coffee-pots, mangling and washing machines, scales, canisters, salvers—a clean sweep for every farm-house and every village. And in the new houses there is scarcely one saved utensil carried forward. Among the new articles introduced one may remark china casts of Charlie Chaplin in gala attire.
The frontier land is hilly. One skirts the upland of which Mount Kemmel on the left is the most prominent feature. It is three or four kilometres from the rope of the frontier to the French line of douane and its customs-gendarmes. One looks down to the first town in France, Bailleul, and it looks like a picture which someone has drawn and then crossed out with black lines and smudged. As one approaches, this is found to be the residential suburb or park called L'asile, with grandiose buildings, now an appalling wreck with not one redeeming new patch upon it. Heaps of debris stand higher than houses, and houses which have not fallen have as it were been pushed forward upon one another. The frontier gendarmes examine your passport and you are free in France. You see the first diminutive huts of the French returned refugees, and then in the mud of the street, urchins playing bat and ball with a slowly-expiring frog which they hold by one dangling leg, and toss to the boy with the bat. A few steps further and it is Bailleul.
Bailleul too is a great wreck as remarkable as Ypres, and its progress of recuperation is much slower. It does not cater for war pilgrims or take the money of tourists, and so there are no prominent hotels and few estaminets. Most of its houses are down, its ways are choked with ruin, and in the evening nondescript squads of workmen shuffle through the streets to their homes in barracks and cellar.
Still the old Army of 1914 marches on. When it entered Bailleul all was calm. Its great red-brick houses stood fairly and uncracked. The people had had a fright, but they held on. They held on through years of the war, and though the guns kept pounding away at them they did not wholly abandon it till 1918 when the Germans seized the town as part fruit of their second great Spring attempt to end the war. Then it was "fort abimée." The owners all fled, and what they left an enemy army ransacked.
Thousands of officers and men were snugly billeted in November 1914 at Locre and Bailleul and Meteren. Sir John French came and chatted with men in the billets—about the battle of Ypres. New drafts came out from England. There had been a clearance of reservists and first volunteers. Each stricken battalion received its half a thousand to make up. Practically new units were organised for the winter defence of the new lines, and when the time was come they marched three leagues nearer to their enemy—to Sailly sur la Lys and Laventie and Neuf Berquin, Estaires—such names of destiny! When the King came to Sailly sur la Lys at the end of November he could not see his guardsmen because they were already in the fighting line and it was thought it would be unsoldierly to call them back for the King to see, to which the King agreed.
The flowers are withered, the thistles which gave their fragrance to the air at Ypres are white with down. Peasants everywhere are scything weeds and burning them in smoking heaps. But the trenches beyond Sailly are still shaggy-topped with teazle crowns and woolly nettle heads. One wonders how many different units at what different times occupied those 1914 trenches. Here still, one picks up old blue water-bottles and faded green straps and pouches of British uniforms. They are poor trenches—the mere staves that lined them to keep up the mud are all warped and good dug-outs are few.
The Germans of course swept o'er all this in 1918. Witness the "busted" concrete telegraph posts growing dozens of rusty iron wires from their stumps, witness the lumpy solid cement-bags by the side of the road. But between 1914 and 1918 what a history! A little way beyond the British line is a cemetery called "V.C. corner." There are two hundred and thirty crosses and on every cross is exactly the same legend—"G.R.U. Unknown Australian soldier." There is no name in the whole of the cemetery. Some time some band of Australians charged here and did not come back and were not taken prisoner. Old rifles with broken rusty bayonets have been placed against the white-washed cross-surmounted entrance. Not many paces on one comes to the German line wrought in impregnable concrete, a line of snug beds in which it seems one might comfortably await the Last Day. But one concrete structure has been mined and looks as if it had been thrown bodily into the air without flying into bits. Now it stands poised upside down on a heap of dirt beside a profound pit. The Germans who were there when that happened are nearer now to the unknown Australian soldiers than we are.
In 1914 there was none of this concrete. Both sides were equal in the mud, and the same no-man's land lay between. Even the wire had not been thrown out—or was of a most rudimentary kind. Friend and foe heard one another talking from across the wet fields—even called to one another and were without especial bitterness. On the right and towards Laventie a nervous Indian division kept up a heavy rifle fire all night long, but otherwise the war was mild. Frost-bite harmed more than iron. The first night raids were planned—sporting expeditions in which the thrills were sufficiently novel. Pleasantries were often exchanged with the enemy who was found to be possessed of plenty of English slang, and occasionally an English soldier who knew some German risked being thought a spy by his comrades and replied.
Someone however planned a sharp attack on Lille. It was really the predecessor of the battle of Neuve Chapelle and should be called perhaps the battle of Fromelles. But it was completely abortive and the details were removed from public news—the first and last night attack of its kind. The date was exactly one week before Christmas, and looking at that narrow strip of no-man's land in which the attack spent itself one realises afresh how ineffectual were all these little battles of the war. Men died: that was all their effect.
The attack was timed to start at six in the evening. Men were hoisted to the parapets and lay flat awaiting a signal, the blowing of a whistle. At the sound of the whistle they stood up and walked slowly and cautiously forward not to disturb the Germans. The moment the enemy discerned them and fired they were to rush forward as one man and enter the German trenches. Some men walked hand in hand; some unfortunately lost their heads and ran forward at once. The night was black as pitch and full of the unknown. It was not long before the enemy began to fire, and men dropped rapidly, leaving the inevitable gaps and disconnections in the line. It is incredible to realise it: the affair lasted all night long, and scarcely anyone knew where anyone else was. But back and forth they ranged in that fatal width of eighty yards of
A curious day in the war—that first twenty-fifth of December. It was surely a moment of hope after great suffering and in the midst of the great anxiety. Probably all the nations engaged felt horrified by what they had done, and a sort of penitence ranged in men's minds, a belated regret that a better way than war had not been found to solve Europe's problems. By most of the private soldiers and young officers it was fervently believed that all would be over soon. And away at home there was such idealistic hope as that the soldiers on both sides might unanimously refuse to fight and that thus war might die of old age and prove that it had truly been an anachronism. Immense new armies were drilling in England, France, Germany, Russia, but they would never be needed. Germany would speedily be forced back to the Rhine and would capitulate, indemnifying France and Belgium handsomely and owning herself in the wrong. Our armies held the Germans on the West and the enemy was short of shells. The Russian "steamroller" was at work on the other side of Europe, and men were betting one another that Przemysl would fall before the New Year. Germany also was short of food, and our sea power would cause her to starve. In Germany on the other hand, a sense of great military superiority prompted the thought that soon all the enemies of the Fatherland would be crushed.
Despite the details of atrocities on both sides there was not the extent of international bitterness that existed later. There was much talk of an armistice, and there would have been official sanction for a general temporary peace if Germany had not been so deeply distrusted. As it was, there was a cessation of hostilities in many parts of the line and meetings of enemies which amounted to fraternisation. This first Christmas was the only one on which there was innocent and bloodless armistice. Next year men were killed; and in 1916 despite the hopes of rank and file there were few handshakes, few interchanges of civility and greeting.
But the first Christmas Day was a holiday. A party of Germans came over from Fromelles and a party of ours went over to the German trenches. Here in this narrow no-man's land where but a week ago had been that "clash by night," foes met as friends. The Germans agreed to bring over those of the dead which had not been buried. This was a matter of great solemnity. The grey German soldiers put the bodies on stretchers and brought them to the midst of no-man's land. Graves were dug there and then. Detachments of British and German troops formed up in line, and a German and an English chaplain read prayers alternately in the two languages. It must have been heart-rending for our fellows to look on the faces of the dead they knew so well, some of whom had set out for the attack in such high spirits. And they lay with their terrible wounds, the silent and ghastly fruits of the war, and it seemed they had nothing in common with Christmas and the festival of peace and goodwill.
The arrangements for the armistice had been made in this way. On the night of Christmas Eve the German trenches were lit up with lanterns and there was much singing of carols and popular German music. Now and then there would be shouting across at the British lines, Christmas wishes and attempts to enter into conversation. Early on Christmas morning one of our scouts went out accordingly and met a German patrol. The latter gave him a glass of whisky and some cigars with a message that if we didn't fire at them they wouldn't fire at us. There had been no firing since nightfall and an armistice was agreed to. At about dawn a party of Germans came over to our wire fence and a party of our men went out to meet them. The meeting was most friendly, and there was a general exchange of small souvenirs and much mirth. Out of their abundance our men gave the Germans of their Christmas puddings which were received with great appreciation. Cigarettes were smoked, and there was much conversation in which Tommy made himself understood and the German mustered all his English. They all said they were tired of the war but were convinced Germany would soon win. One or two had lived in England, one even had an English wife, another had had an English sweetheart in Suffolk, and these were very eager to get back, so they said. The German opinion about the war was that France was on her last legs; Russia had had a tremendous defeat in Poland and would soon be ready to make peace. England remained to be broken, but with France and Russia out of the way it would not be difficult to come to terms. They thought the war might come to an end in January, 1915, in the following month. They professed to hate their officers but were evidently afraid of them. It was clear that discipline was carried further in the German army than in ours and that it was very much harsher.
The German officers, without tokens of rank, seemed much less at ease than their men and were inclined to observe a sort of official silence. One pointed to the dead and said in French "Les braves!" indicating a reverence for fallen foes. Another volunteered the information that the officers who had died a week ago had been buried in the graveyard at Fromelles. There were dignified exchanges of tokens of remembrance among officers—not very convincing perhaps as evidence of brotherly love, but there was no mistaking the good-humour and camaraderie of rank and file which continued all the while.
What a sad moment when officers saluted and the men marched back to continue the bitterness and folly of Europe's suicide. And feu de joie at midnight and massed choruses of carol singing! Christmas 1914 how far away wert thou from happiness and peace!
And Fromelles church on the hill has been rased to the ground. The English dead have been taken away—only French remain, and amidst the great smash-up of tombstones are seven or eight wooden crosses for Chasseurs Alpins and French dragoons.