Part 2

From all parts of the Empire the old Mother Country saw her homing birds. From Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa came bronzed and hardy men who were the uncles or the cousins or the brothers of the boys who were still storming the recruiting stations at home. After them came wave after wave of young manhood from the far Dominions, and for the first time in history the British Empire, so loosely linked, so scattered, so jealous of restraint or control from the British Government, was seen to be a federation of English-speaking peoples more strongly bound by links of sentiment and kinship in time of peril than any Imperialist of the old school could have forged by autocratic power. They were free peoples enlisting for service, as they believed also, in the cause of civilisation and in the chivalrous defence of peace-loving peoples wantonly attacked by a brutal enemy.

Looking back now with disgust of war and all its filthiness and death in our inmost souls, after years of disillusion with the results of that war, with a more complicated knowledge of its causes back in history; with a legacy of debt; unsettled problems; with new causes of hate, revenge, conflict; with justice no longer all on one side, nor injustice, one must still acknowledge the splendour of that spiritual comradeship which made all classes offer themselves for service and sacrifice to the uttermost, which was death. Not in England, nor in France, nor later in the United States, was there any love of this war for war’s sake. It did not appeal to the imagination of youth as a great adventure. Here and there its call might have come as a liberation from dull existence, or as an escape from private tragedy, or as a primitive blood lust. In very rare cases it appealed to old fighting instincts as a better thing than peace. To most it was hateful. Our young men loved life and loathed the thought of death. They did not want to kill or be killed. They disliked military discipline, dirt, lice, the thought of shell-fire, the foreboding of wounds, blindness, mutilation, and horror. They were the heirs of a civilisation in which there had been a high standard of decency, refinement, comfort, and individual liberty. Each young man when he went to the recruiting office knew in his heart that he was saying good-bye, perhaps for ever, to the things and folk he loved, to all familiar decent things, to the joy of life itself. Yet in millions they went, tide after tide ... and the women hid their tears and their agony as best they could, and found out work to do. In great houses and little homes there was the same spirit. Out of the foulest slums as well as out of fine houses came the heroic soul of a people proud of its history, impelled unconsciously by old loyalties which had been stunted but never killed by social injustice.

That was the passion of England and her sister peoples when war began. Difficult to imagine, impossible to feel again—now!... So much has happened since.

THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE

I remember the mobilisation in Paris on the day before war was declared, and that day. The French people had a different, sharper, more immediate fear. The frontier was in danger. France herself was menaced by the greatest army in the world. In one day, two days, all her life would be at stake. There was a sense of stupefaction among the common people. They too had been taken by surprise by the suddenness of the challenge. And they knew better than the English what war meant in horror and agony. In those crowds among whom I went there were many who remembered 1870—that nightmare of terror and shame and tears. There was no cheering, as when fifty years before the people in Paris had shouted _á Berlin_! in an ecstasy of war fever. In Paris there was the hush of souls who looked into the face of great death. In the streets men were parting from their women—for the last time. Some wept, not many, after the kiss of eternity. Emotion strangled one’s heart. In those days France seemed to me divine in courage, in sacrifice, in suffering. Anarchists, revolutionists, the scum of the underworld, the poor drabs, were cleansed of all evil, for a time, by love and passion—for France. They themselves did not matter. They held their lives as nothing so that France might live. The Pacifists said: “This is a war to end war.” The Socialists said: “This is a war against militarism.” The old women said: “Our sons will die, but France will be saved.” The young women said: “We give our lovers to France.” From the fields, the workshops and the factories, the manhood of France, quicker than in England, came down to the railways to join their depôts, and for hundreds of miles on the first night of war, in a train taking the first troops to the eastern frontier, I heard on the warm breeze the “Marseillaise,” the song of Liberty and France, and the tramp of marching men, and the rattle of gun waggons; and I felt the spirit of an heroic people like a physical vibration about me. After that come a thousand memories, strangely distant now, like an old dream, of roads black with fugitive people, retreating from the red flame of war; of French and Belgian towns under the first shell-fire, until they fell into flame and ruin; of wounded men, clotted with mud and blood, very quiet, on dirty stretchers, lying in rows under brown blankets, on railway platforms, in improvised hospitals, piled in farm carts, huddled under broken walls, in endless caravans of ambulances; the reek of blood, disinfectants, death; troops on the march, guns going forward, the French cavalry riding on saddle-galled horses, machine-guns in cornfields; troop trains; stations crowded with regiments; fields strewn with dead; women wheeling perambulators with babies and household goods, boys pushing old men along in wheelbarrows, farmcarts laden with children, furniture, grandmothers; the cry reiterated of “_Sales Boches!_”; the words “_C’est la guerre!_” repeated as an endless reason for infinite resignation to all this agony, and terror of civilian folk trapped in chaos; the phantasmagoria of war in modern civilisation; and always the courage of women, the valour of men, the immortal spirit of France rising above the torture of its soul and body, while the enemy thrust closer to its heart. In those days—ten years ago—an Englishman in France dedicated his heart to these people....

THE ENTENTE CORDIALE

And in those days the French people loved the English and their kinsfolk, so that when the first British troops appeared they went mad with joy, as I saw, kissing them, with streaming tears, dancing round them, flinging flowers to them, giving them fruit, as those boys, clean-shaven, bronzed, smart, laughing, singing, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,” went forward to be killed, wounded, maimed, blinded, broken, as most of them were before the end came, and some very soon. _Vivent les Anglais!_... Have the French people forgotten, or have we?

I was in Paris, after wild adventures, with two comrades on a day in September when it seemed that the city was doomed. It was already deserted. At mid-day, between the Place de la Concorde and the Etoile, we saw only one man, and that a policeman on a bicycle. It was no longer the seat of Government. Vast numbers had fled. We had seen them storming the trains. All others sat indoors, with their shutters closed, waiting for the tramp of German soldiers down the streets. The German guns were as close as Chantilly. Only a miracle could save Paris, as we knew, having seen the retreat of a French Army through Amiens, and the stragglers of the British Army after the Retreat from Mons, and the advance of the enemy as far as Beauvais, and a hundred signs of impending tragedy. The sun was glittering on the golden eagles above one of the bridges. The palaces, domes, spires of Paris were clear-cut under a cloudless sky. All the beauty of the city, all its meaning to the world in knowledge and art and history, invaded our hearts. If Paris were taken and France beaten, civilisation itself would be defeated and life would be worthless, and God mocked. It could not happen like that. A miracle must happen first. For God’s sake!

The miracle happened—the miracle of the Marne. The German tide was turned at last. By the blunder of the German Staff, by the audacity of Foch, by Galliéni with his army in taxi-cabs, by the desperate valour of French soldiers, fighting, dying, maddened by thirst, with untended wounds, with rage in their hearts, agonising, but without surrender in their souls because the life of France was in their guard that day. They won a victory which smashed back the German Army and destroyed their plan.

The British Army had a small share in that victory of the Marne. Its weight did not count for much, but its artillery harassed the German retreat with deadly execution, and in fighting down from Mons it had helped to spoil the German time-table and to bar the way to Paris for just that little time which enabled France to stand on its line of battle and repair the dreadful blunders of its first defence.

Have the French forgotten that? It happened ten years ago!

TRENCH WARFARE

The Germans were forced to dig in. It was the beginning of trench warfare. Then the line hardly altered for four years more, in spite of endless battles and unceasing death.

The British Regulars—that “contemptible little army” as the Kaiser called it before its rifle fire mowed down his men—were spent and done after the first and second Battles of Ypres, where they barred the way to Calais with a thin line standing among their dead. The Territorials—volunteers before the war—arrived, as steady as old soldiers. It was due to them that the Regulars had been able to get to France, leaving them for home defence. Then the new armies came into the field—“the Kitchener boys”—the First Hundred Thousand. They were those young men who had stormed the recruiting offices at the first call: from the Universities, public schools, city offices, village shops, and fields. They had been together in the ranks, learning each other’s language, bullied by sergeant-majors, broken in by discipline, taught to forget the decencies of civilisation as they had known it in their homes, the little comforts of their former state, individual liberty. Already they had left their old civilian life far behind. Yet they came out to France and Flanders like schoolboys in keenness and enthusiasm. They wanted to get into the “real thing” after all that gruelling training. They got into it quickly enough, up beyond Ypres at Hooge and St. Julien, or further south at “Plug Street” and Hill 60. They sat in water-logged trenches, with bits of dead bodies in the mud about them, under frightful shell-fire twenty times greater than the answer of their own guns because they were weak in artillery and short of shells. (The workers at home had not got into their stride in pouring out the engines of destruction.) They had no dug-outs worth the name. Only the Germans knew how to build them then, as they knew most else of war, as masters of technique, overwhelmingly superior in material, and in organisation. The British were in the low ground everywhere, with the Germans on the high ground, so that they could not march or move by daylight, or light a fire, or cross a road, without being signalled to watchful eyes and shelled without mercy. They were lousy in every seam of their shirts. There was no chance of cleanliness unless they were far behind the lines. Young gentlemen of England—and of Scotland, Ireland and Wales—found themselves like cave men: eating, sleeping, living in filth and the stench of corruption, under winged death searching for their bodies. They saw their comrades blown to bits beside them; counted their own chances, coldly, made it one in four, with luck. They were afraid of fear. To lose control—that would be worst of all. To show funk before the other men, to feel themselves ducking, shrinking, weakening, under those cursed shrieking shells, to surrender will power—that would be fatal. Some did, gibbering with shell-shock, or shot as cowards; but few. The marvel was that youth could stand so much, and still make jokes, laughing at the frightful irony between their old life and this new one, between the old lessons learnt by nice little gentlemen in nurseries, and this bloody business and primaeval stuff of killing and being killed!

It was truly a world war. Italy had come in. British troops were fighting in Africa and Asia. The Japanese Navy was in alliance with the British Fleet. Both France and England brought over coloured troops. Indian Princes poured out their wealth and offered their man power. Sikhs and Pathans rode through French fields. Gurkhas cut off the ears of German peasants after cutting their throats with curved knives. Indian cavalry, dismounted, were sent into the wet trenches of French Flanders and died of cold if they did not die of wounds. Seneghalese negroes drove French lorries, were massacred as infantry. Moroccans were billeted in French villages and Arab chiefs rode through Dunkirk. Chinese coolies unloaded British shells and cut down French forests for British trench props. And the coloured races of the world were shown the picture of the white races destroying each other for some reason which was never clear to them....

THE SLAUGHTER ON THE SOMME

The British Armies in France and Flanders reached their full strength before their great offensive on the Somme in the summer of 1915. In material and in manhood they were the best that England and the Empire could produce. The men were the fine flower of their race, in intelligence, physique, training, and spirit. In time of peace they would have lived to be leaders, administrators, artists, poets, sportsmen, craftsmen, the “quality” of their nation; the fathers of splendid children. They were in living splendour the priceless treasure of the British folk—and they were squandered, wasted, and destroyed.... Behind them now was an immense power in artillery and ammunition and the material of destruction. The factories in England had been working at full pressure, millions of women had been stuffing shells with high explosives; guns, guns, guns came pouring up the roads towards the front in an endless tide; the ground was piled with ammunition dumps, and British Generals had at their command a fighting machine incomparable at that time, not only in weight of metal, but above all in freshness of enthusiasm and heroic human fire.

The British Armies rose out of their ditches for the great attack with an ardour that had never been seen before in the history of war, and in my judgment will never be seen again. They believed that at last—after artillery duels deciding nothing, after muddled battles like that of Loos, mining and counter-mining, and trench raids, and the gain of little salients at murderous cost—they were going to “do the trick” and end the war by irresistible attack. I saw the glory of those young men and the massacres of their bodies and hopes.

At the first assault, after the greatest bombardment ever seen yet still leaving forests of barbed wire and a fortress system of trenches and tunnels twenty miles deep behind the German front lines, they were mown down in swathes by German machine-gun fire, and afterwards, in isolated positions to which they staggered, blown to bits by German gun fire. By desperate courage they smashed through the outer earthworks of that infernal trench-system; for five months they fought through that twenty miles, yard by yard; but it was sheer slaughter all the way, and they were the victims of atrocious staff work, incompetent generalship, ruthless disregard of human life, repeated and dreadful blundering. The British Generals cannot be blamed. They were amateurs doing their best in an unknown type of war. They had to learn by failures and by mistakes. Perhaps their mistakes were not worse than those of the enemy’s High Command; or not much worse. But for the men it was Hell. They were ordered to attack isolated positions, which often they captured although the whole arc of German gun fire for forty miles around was switched on to their bodies until they were annihilated. High Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Mametz Wood—a hundred more—are names that bleed with the memory of enormous sacrifice of British youth. In the end they won through to open ground and forced the enemy into a far retreat to the shelter of the Hindenburg line.

The German losses in these battles of the Somme were frightful too, and for a time certainly broke the spirit of the German Army, as thousands of letters left in their dug-outs proved beyond doubt. Their agony was as great as that of the British troops. They were pounded to death in their trenches and dug-outs, until all that land stank of their bodies, and one could not walk without treading on them. They were stunned by shell fire, tortured by fear beyond human control as they crawled out of their broken ditches to meet British bayonets. Their heroism was wonderful, as all our men confessed with an admiration which extinguished hate among those—nearly all—who had a sense of chivalry. But their losses, though enormous, were not as great as the British suffered, not half as great, I think, because defence was less costly than attack in those conditions. By the end of the battle of the Somme half a million of the finest manhood of Great Britain had been killed, wounded, blinded, shell-shocked, and broken.

The tide of wounded flowed back from the fields of the Somme in endless columns of ambulances, where the bad cases lay under brown blankets with only the soles of their boots visible. To the end of my life I shall remember those upturned soles and the huddled bodies above. The walking wounded formed up in queues outside the dressing stations: silent, patient, dog-weary, caked with a whitish clay. The casualty clearing stations were crammed, and the surgeons were overworked while, row upon row, the badly wounded were laid on the grass outside the tents or on blood-stained stretchers waiting for their turn. The “butcher’s shop” in Corbie had a great clientèle. Whiffs of chloroform reeked across the roadways. Fresh graves were dug in cemeteries behind the lines, in spreading areas. The lightly wounded, after a little rest, came back laughing, cheering and joking. A Blighty wound!... Home again!... Out of it for a few months of grace!

THE SPIRIT OF THE VICTIMS

By the end of the Battle of the Somme the first impulses of the war had died down, the first emotions had been forgotten. Disillusion, dreadful experience, bitterness, had turned the edge of idealism. One cannot understand the mind of men ten years after without going back to that period of disenchantment. The young men who had hurried to the recruiting stations were on fire with enthusiasm for France and Belgium, for the rescue of liberty and civilisation, and for love of England. They became rather damped in the training camps because of so much red-tape, eyewash, spit and polish, and humiliation. They were handled, not like men filled with heroic spirit, but often like swine. Sergeant-majors swore at them in filthy language; old officers, too feeble for the front or sent back in disgrace for their incompetence, set them to ridiculous, time-wasting work. Reviews, inspections, parades, took the heart out of them. They had not joined for this ... they were trained and staled by the time they went to France, though their spirits rose at the thought of getting into “the real thing” at last. They didn’t like it. They hated it when its routine became familiar and horrible and deadly. They were ready to stick it out to the death—they did so—but certain values altered as their illusions were shattered. It was all very well—though not at all pleasant—to die for civilisation or liberty, but it was another thing to die for some old General they had never seen because he ordered them to attack positions which were wrongly marked on his maps, or because he was competing in “raids” with the General commanding the line on his left, or because he believed in keeping up the “fighting spirit” of his troops by ordering the capture of German trenches which made another salient in his line and were bound to be blotted out in mud and blood as soon as the German guns received their signals. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._ Sweet to die for one’s country—in the first flash of enthusiasm—and afterwards necessary anyhow, though distinctly unpleasant to have both legs blown off, or both eyes blinded, or one’s entrails torn out. But not in any way comforting to be sent over the top with a battalion unsupported on the right or left, or with wrong orders, or without a barrage to smash the enemy’s wire, or by some incredible blunder which meant the massacre of a man’s best pals and a hole in his stomach. Inevitable, perhaps. Yes, but unforgivable by its victims when it became a habit.... Over and over again battalions were wiped out because some one had blundered. It was the same on the German front, the French front, every front. And its effect in the minds of the fighting men was the same in all nations and on both sides of the line. It made them rage against the Staff. It made them feel that the front line men were being sacrificed, wasted and murdered by pompous old gentlemen and elegant young men living very comfortably behind the lines in pleasant châteaux of France, far from shell fire, growing “flower borders” on their breasts. Men talked like that, with increasing irony. They were unfair, often. It’s not easy to be fair when one’s certain death is being ordered by influential folk who do not share the risks.

THE PEOPLE AT HOME

For England’s sake! Yes, those young officers and men who went through the battles of the Somme and many others, seeing no end to the war, and the only chance of life in a lucky wound, endured everything of fear and filth, because at the back of their minds and hidden in their hearts was the remembrance of some home or plot of earth, some old village with an old church, which meant to them—England, or Scotland, or Wales. They “stuck it” all because in their spirit, consciously or unconsciously, was the love of their country, and in their blood the old urge of its pride. But as the war went on even this, though it was never lost and flamed up again in the darkest hours, was overcast by doubts and angers and ironies. They were all so damned cheerful in little old England! They took the losses of men as a matter of course. Business as usual and keep the home fires burning! That was all very well, but those “charity bazaars for the poor dear wounded,” all that jazz and dancing and love-making, giving the boys a good time in their seven days’ leave, earning wonderful wages in the munition works, making enormous profits out of shipping and contracts, spending their money like water, filling the theatres, keeping up the spirit of the nation, wasn’t it too much of a good thing when viewed from the angle of a trench with one’s pals’ dead bodies in No Man’s Land, and a blasted world around one, and death screaming overhead?