Chapter 9

Meanwhile, the artillery fire was quickening. We reached a ruined village from which all normal inhabitants had been long since cleared away. The shattered church was there, and I noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hanging on its chancel wall. A little farther and the boyish artillery-officer, our leader, who had been by this time joined by a comrade, turned and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping through seas of mud down into the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed that no aeroplane overhead could guess it.

There it was--how many of its fellows I had seen in the Midland and northern workshops!--its muzzle just showing in the dark, and nine or ten high-explosive shells lying on the bench in front of the breech. One is put in. We stand back a little, and a sergeant tells me to put my fingers in my ears and look straight at the gun. Then comes the shock--not so violent as I had expected--and the cartridge-case drops out. The shell has sped on its way to the German trenches--with what result to human flesh and blood? But I remember thinking very little of that--till afterwards. At the time, the excitement of the shot and of watching that little group of men in the darkness held all one's nerves gripped.

In a few more minutes we were scrambling out again through the deep, muddy trench leading to the dugout, promising to come back to tea with the officers, in their billet, when our walk was done.

Now indeed we were "in the battle"! Our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by shell holes. "Look at that group of trees to your left--beyond it is Neuve Chapelle," said our guide. "And you see those ruined cottages, straight ahead, and the wood behind." He named a wood thrice famous in the history of the war. "Our lines are just beyond the cottages, and the German lines just in front of the wood. How far are we from them? Three-quarters of a mile." It was discussed whether we should be taken zigzag through the fields to the entrance of the communication-trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and Captain ---- was evidently relieved when we elected to turn back. Shall I always regret that lost opportunity? You did ask me to write something about "the life of the soldiers in the trenches"--and that was the nearest that any woman could personally have come to it! But I doubt whether anything more--anything, at least, that was possible--could have deepened the whole effect. We had been already nearer than any woman--even a nurse--has been, in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of impressions was full.

As we turned back, I noticed a little ruined cottage, with a Red Cross flag floating. Our guide explained that it was a field dressing-station. It was not for us--who could not help--to ask to go in. But the thought of it--there were some badly wounded in it--pursued me as we walked on through the beautiful evening.

A little farther we came across what I think moved me more than anything else in that crowded hour--those same companies of men we had seen sitting waiting in the fields, now marching quietly, spaced one behind the other, up to the trenches, to take their turn there. Every day I am accustomed to see bodies, small and large, of khaki-clad men, marching through these Hertfordshire lanes. But this was different. The bearing was erect and manly, the faces perfectly cheerful; but there was the seriousness in them of men who knew well the work to which they were going. I caught a little quiet whistling, sometimes, but no singing. We greeted them as they passed, with a shy "Good luck!" and they smiled shyly back, surprised, of course, to see a couple of women on that road. But there was no shyness towards the General. It was very evident that the relations between him and them were as good as affection and confidence on both sides could make them.

I still see the bright tea-table in that corner of a ruined farm, where our young officers presently greeted us--the General marking our maps to make clear where he had actually been--the Captain of the battery springing up to show off his gramophone--while the guns crashed at intervals close beside us, range-finding, probably, searching out a portion of the German line, under the direction of some hidden observer with his telephone. It was over all too quickly. Time was up, and soon the motor was speeding back towards the Divisional Headquarters. The General and I talked of war, and what could be done to stop it. A more practical religion "lifting mankind again"?--a new St. Francis, preaching the old things in new ways? "But in this war we had and we have no choice. We are fighting for civilisation and freedom, and we must go on till we win."

III

It was long before I closed my eyes in the pretty room of the old château, after an evening spent in talk with some officers of the Headquarters Staff. When I woke in the dawn I little guessed what the day (March 2nd) was to bring forth, or what was already happening thirty miles away on the firing line. Zélie, the _femme de ménage_, brought us our breakfast to our room, coffee and bread and eggs, and by half-past nine we were down-stairs, booted and spurred, to find the motor at the door, a simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready! "We have had a very successful action this morning," said Captain ----, evidently in the best of spirits. "We have taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost a little while ago, and captured about 200 prisoners. If we go off at once, we shall be in time to see the German counter-attack."

It was again fine, though not bright, and the distances far less clear. This time we struck northeast, passing first the sacred region of G.H.Q. itself, where we showed our passes. Then after making our way through roads lined interminably, as on the previous day, with the splendid motor-lorries laden with food and ammunition, which have made such a new thing of the transport of this war, interspersed with rows of ambulances and limbered wagons, with flying-stations and horse lines, we climbed a hill to one of the finest positions in this northern land; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, Frank and Fleming, English and French have clashed, which looks out northward towards the Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards Ypres. Now, if the mists will only clear, we shall see Ypres! But, alas, they lie heavy over the plain, and we descend the hill again without that vision. Now we are bound for Poperinghe, and must go warily, because there is a lively artillery action going on beyond Poperinghe, and it is necessary to find out what roads are being shelled.

On the way we stop at an air-station, to watch the aeroplanes rising and coming down, and at a point near Poperinghe we go over a casualty-clearing station--a collection of hospital huts, with storehouses and staff quarters--with the medical officer in charge. Here were women nurses who are not allowed in the field dressing-stations nearer the line. There were not many wounded, though they were coming in, and the Doctor was not for the moment very busy.

We stood on the threshold of a large ward, where we could not, I think, be seen. At the farther end a serious case was being attended by nurses and surgeons. Everything was passing in silence; and to me it was as if there came from the distant group a tragic message of suffering, possibly death. Then, as we passed lingeringly away, we saw three young officers, all wounded, _running_ up from the ambulance at the gate, which had just brought them, and disappearing into one of the wards. The first--a splendid kilted figure--had his head bound up; the others were apparently wounded in the arm. But they seemed to walk on air, and to be quite unconscious that anything was wrong with them. It had been a success, a great success, and they had been in it!

The ambulances were now arriving fast from the field dressing-stations close to the line, and we hurried away, and were soon driving through Poperinghe. Here and there there was a house wrecked with shell-fire. The little town indeed with its picturesque _place_ is constantly shelled. But, all the same, life seems to go on as usual. The Poperinghe boy, like his London brother, hangs on the back of carts; his father and mother come to their door to watch what is going on, or to ask eagerly for news of the counter-attack; and his little brothers and sisters go tripping to school, in short cloaks with the hoods drawn over their heads, as though no war existed. Here and in the country round, poor robbed Belgium is still at home on her own soil, and on the best of terms with the English Army, by which, indeed, this remnant of her prospers greatly. As I have already insisted, the relations everywhere between the British soldier and the French and Belgian populations are among the British--or shall I say the Allied?--triumphs of the war.

Farther on the road a company from a famous regiment, picked men all of them, comes swinging along, fresh from their baths!--life and force in every movement--young Harrys with their beavers on. Then, a house where men have their gas-helmets tested--a very strict and necessary business; and another, where an ex-Balliol tutor and Army Chaplain keeps open doors for the soldier in his hours of rest or amusement. But we go in search of a safe road to a neighbouring village, where some fresh passes have to be got. Each foot now of the way is crowded with the incidents and appurtenances of war, and war close at hand. An Australian transport base is pointed out, with a wholly Australian staff. "Some of the men," says our guide, "are millionaires." Close by is an aeroplane descending unexpectedly in a field, and a crowd of men rushing to help; and we turn away relieved to see the two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile, I notice a regular game of football going on at a distance, and some carefully written names of bypaths--"Hyde Park Corner," "Piccadilly," "Queen Mary's Road," and the like. The animation, the life of the scene are indescribable.

At the next village the road was crowded both with natives and soldiers to see the German prisoners brought in. Alack! we did not see them. Ambulances were passing and re-passing, the slightly wounded men in cars open at the back, the more serious cases in closed cars, and everywhere the same _va et vient_ of lorries and wagons, of staff-cars and motor-cyclists. It was not right for us to add to the congestion in the road. Moreover, the hours were drawing on, and the great sight was still to come. But to have watched those prisoners come in would have somehow rounded off the day!

IV

Our new passes took us to the top of a hill well known to the few onlookers of which this war admits. The motor stopped at a point on the road where a picket was stationed, who examined our papers. Then came a stiff and muddy climb, past a dugout for protection in case of shelling, Captain ---- carrying the three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green space--three or four soldiers playing football on it!--and an old windmill, and farm-buildings.

We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain bordered eastward by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood, and consecrate to British dead. As we reached the windmill, as though in sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part, and there rose from them a dark, jagged tower, one side of it torn away. It was the tower of Ypres--mute victim!--mute witness to a crime, that, beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years to come.

A flash!--another!--from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; and as we watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as the shells burst. There they are, the German lines--along the Messines ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain ----'s guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, and a couple of their shells are bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine-guns--as it seems from somewhere close below us, and again the boom of the artillery.

The counter-action is in progress, and we watch what can be seen or guessed of it, in fascination. We are too far off to see what is actually happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites of the earlier war can be dimly made out between us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 60 is in that band of shadow; a little farther east the point where the Prussian Guard was mown down at the close of the first Battle of Ypres; farther south the fields and woods made for ever famous by the charge of the Household Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour of that "thin red line," French and English, cavalry and infantry, which in the first Battle of Ypres withstood an enemy four times as strong, saved France, and thereby England, and thereby Europe. In that tract of ground over which we are looking lie more than 100,000 graves, English and French; and to it the hearts of two great nations will turn for all time. Then if you try to pierce the northern haze, beyond that ruined tower, you may follow in imagination the course of the Yser westward to that Belgian coast where Admiral Hood's guns broke down and scattered the German march upon Dunkirk and Calais; or if you turn south you are looking over the Belfry of Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festubert, and all the fierce fighting-ground round Souchez and the Labyrinth. Once English and French stood linked here in a common heroic defence. Now the English hold all this line firmly from the sea to the Somme; while the French, with the eyes of the world upon them, are making history, hour by hour, at Verdun.

So to this point we have followed one branch--the greatest--of England's effort; and the mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh from its beginnings when we first stood to arms in August, 1914, through what Mr. Buchan has finely called the "rally of the Empire," through the early rush and the rapid growth of the new armies, through the strengthening of Egypt, the disaster of Gallipoli, the seizure of the German Colonies; through all that vast upheaval at home which we have seen in the munition areas; through that steady, and ever-growing organisation on the friendly French soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet here, for us, it culminates; and here and in the North Sea, we can hardly doubt--whatever may be the diversions in other fields--will be fought, for Great Britain, the decisive battles of the war. As I turn to those dim lines on the Messines ridge, I have come at last to sight of whither it all moves. There, in those trenches is _The Aggressor_--the enemy who has wantonly broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled civilisation with deeds of lust and blood, between whom and the Allies there can be no peace till the Allies' right arm dictates it. Every week, every day, the British Armies grow, the British troops pour steadily across the Channel, and to the effort of England and her Allies there will be no truce till the righteous end is won.

But the shadows are coming down on the great scene, and with the sound of the guns still in our ears we speed back through the crowded roads to G.H.Q., and these wonderful days are over. Now, all that remains for me is to take you, far away from the armies, into the English homes whence the men fighting here are drawn, and to show you, if I can, very shortly, by a few instances, what rich and poor are doing as individuals to feed the effort of England in this war. What of the _young_, of all classes and opportunities, who have laid down their lives in this war? What of the mothers who reared them, the schools and universities which sent them forth?--the comrades who are making ready to carry on their work? You ask me as to the _spirit_ of the nation--the foundation of all else. Let us look into a few lives, a few typical lives and families, and see.

VI

_April 22nd_.

Dear H.

As I begin upon this final letter to you comes the news that the threatened split in the British Cabinet owing to the proposed introduction of general military service has been averted, and that at a Secret Session to be held next Tuesday, April 25th, Ministers will, for the first time, lay before both Houses of Parliament full and complete information--much more full and complete at any rate, than has yet been given--of the "effort" of Great Britain in this world war, what this country is doing in sea-power, in the provision of Armies, in the lending of money to our Allies, in our own shipping service to them, and in our supply to them of munitions, coal, and other war material--including boots and clothing. If, then, our own British Parliament will be for the first time fully apprised next Tuesday of what the nation has been doing, it is, perhaps, small wonder that you on your side of the Atlantic have not rightly understood the performance of a nation which has, collectively, the same love of "grousing" as the individual British soldier shows in the trenches.

Let me, however, go back and recapitulate a little.

In the first of these letters, I tried, by a rapid "vision" of the Fleet, as I personally saw an important section of it amid the snows of February, to point to the indispensable condition of this "effort," without which it could never have been made, without which it could not be maintained for a day, at the present moment. Since that visit of mine, the power of the Fleet and the effect of the Fleet have strengthened week by week. The blockade of Germany is far more effective than it was three months ago; the evidence of its growing stringency accumulates steadily, and at the same time the British Foreign Office has been anxiously trying, and evidently with much success, to minimise for neutrals its inevitable difficulties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. Asquith will explain next Tuesday, the expenditure on the war, not only on our own needs but on those of our Allies is colossal--terrifying. The most astonishing Budget of English History, demanding a fourth of his income from every well-to-do citizen, has been brought in since I began to write these letters, and quietly accepted. Five hundred millions sterling ($2,500,000,000) have been already lent to our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate of 600,000,000 sterling ($3,000,000,000) on the Army; 200,000,000 on the Navy as compared with 40,000,000 in 1913; while the Munitions Department is costing about two-thirds as much (400,000,000 sterling) as the rest of the Army, and is employing close upon 2,000,000 workers, one-tenth of them women. The export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at the moment greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913.

As to what we have got for our money, Parliament has authorised an Army of 4,000,000 men, and it is on the question of the last half million that England's Effort now turns. Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has been done, and everything that still remains to do, _in camera_ to Parliament next Tuesday. But do not, my dear friend, make any mistake _England will get the men she wants_; and Labour will be in the end just as determined to get them as any other section of the Community. Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for the moment, in France to be inactive, we are in reality giving the French at Verdun just that support which they and General Joffre desire, and--it can scarcely be doubted--preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious position of General Townshend's force, Egypt is no longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been; our sea-power has brought a Russian force safely to Marseilles; and the possibilities of British and Russian Collaboration in the East are rapidly opening out. As to the great and complex war-machine we have been steadily building up on French soil, as I tried to show in my fourth letter, whether in the supply bases, or in the war organisation along the ninety miles of front now held by the British Armies, it would indeed astonish those dead heroes of the Retreat from Mons--could they comes back to see it! We are not satisfied with it yet--hence the unrest in Parliament and the Press--we shall never be satisfied--till Germany has accepted the terms of the Allies. But those who know England best have no doubt whatever as to the temper of the nation which has so far "improvised the impossible," in the setting up of this machine, and means, in the end, _to get out of it what it wants_.