Part 6
The Somme country was an extension of the British line. As our army doubled, trebled, quadrupled, so it multiplied the extent of France which it defended. From the flats of Flanders and Northern France we gradually progressed to a more diversified country of long ridges and downs, pleasanter in peace but equally terrible in war. As you approach it now by train the cemeteries roll into view on every hand. The dead are as it were drawn up in solid columns to greet you as you pass, as it were one live man were monarch o'er all the dead. The Army that went to guard the line is still there, still on duty--in Plot A, Plot B, Plot C, Plot Z, of multitudinous war-cemeteries marked now by map-references. The dead challenge the living in choruses of silence from broad fields of burial. The hills remain like great mounds in the mist, the same bare ridges of Cæsar's wars two thousand years ago, the same o'er which perchance mankind will climb to death as many centuries hence, antediluvian hummocks of old earth, somnolent, green, indifferent. Earth suggests itself constantly as something mightier than man. It is not the prostrate earth of Ypres Salient, but one which war has much less power to sear. Man's habitations and cities topple down, forests are fired away, but the elemental lines and contours of the hills remain unbroken and as it were indifferent both to time and history. These rivers too, by which men name their battles, flow on, flow away without a conscious memory even of a yesterday. The innocence of the Somme, the virginity of the Ancre, these have overcome all hate and blood, and lightly forgotten them.
The Judas trees have leafed afresh upon the banks of Ancre, and every individual leaf is chattering and shivering--because, they say, two thousand years ago the betrayer hanged himself upon an aspen bough. The aspens give voice to the wind, and beside them the little willows are all silent. Tangled wild flowers cling to the river banks, and limpid water passes in bright armfuls over green sedgy tresses. On either hand the giant reeds lift their pompous heads. Shell-pits are pits of greenery. Deep brown of sagging rusty wire seems to be the complementary colour of an intense and shadowy green. In the road where the sentry stood guarding the crossing of the rail all is empty now. No dust-covered mud-splashed lorries come blundering and tearing along the high-road any more. There is a silence which is unearthly, as if the composed deep sleep of the dead had conquered the ways of the living. The little white towns and villages lie splashed in wreckage--without the power to lift themselves again. Your Ville sur Corbie, your Meault with its dirt-choked green strewn with pontoon boats, your Fricourt and Carnoy--all prostrate, inert--they lie on the ground as if sewn to it. On the left comes into view the triple blackness of the silhouette of Notre Dame at Albert. Trees with the horror of the martyrs on their receding withered hands seem fixed for years in the momentary awfulness of death, menacing, aghast, uprearing. Narrow crooked trenches in disorderly array seem to be hurrying forward, carrying their old wire with them--as if they too had to follow the men they once held. But they pause on the shores of dreadful pools and ponds, dead-horse and dead-men stagnancies that ponder and are still and reflect indifferently the grey sky above and the grey, blasted, shattered timber-bits on either hand.
Oh Albert, what a place of death thou art now, with thy returned children playing hide and seek around the heaps of thy homes. How is it possible to _return_ to this place. It is not a return: no one can ever return to the Albert of 1914. These that we see are revenants come to look at spectral homes. For Albert is dead. There you can realise that a human home is a living being like the woman who made it. It can prosper or decay. It can go shabby and suffer. It can be wounded or maimed--it can be killed. We mercifully hide our dead in Earth's great bosom--but we leave our dead homes long when they lie, in all their horror and terror. There stands a shrunken little house where the tiles have been swept away, the plaster also, and the bare laths of the ceiling are all exposed, but they look like a cap bashed down on the head of a dead man. Yonder lies a recumbent habitation with a welter of grey laths and beams on its burst-out side, like the sun-dried ribs of a dead dromedary. Beyond it stands a wall that is left, and then an outraged home with madness fixed in its visage in the moment of death-agony. Here is a house with gutted entrails half congealed and terrible to behold. There is a house that died simply of shock. But its neighbour _vis-à-vis_ was hit by some striding giant with iron fist. Rows of houses are seen cowering, as if they had had their hands up trying to ward off the dreadful fate which stalked above them. Houses lie killed as it were in the action of flight, veritably in the act of treading on one another's heels in a frenzy to get away. There are houses which are abased, houses which have fallen foremost on their faces, houses which have fallen backwards, bottom over top into confusion and debris behind, houses with their sides torn off as men's sides were torn off in the war, exposing for one instant beating hearts. There are houses where simply the life-breath has gone out--dead, blind, empty and desolate.
One can hardly think of the existence once of rooms, the marriage-bedrooms of sweet human honeymoons, the room where the baby slept a baby's untroubled sleep, the children's room where one thinks of a child's cry in the night or a child's lisped prayer before its mother or the crucifix, the room where the home met, the table round which went food and talk and laughter in a common innocence and ignorance of destiny--all gone now in shapeless ruin.
All the houses were the children of Notre Dame--the leaning Virgin who hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the Cathedral-church, and yearned o'er the city. The miracle of her suspense in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder, and the soldiers said the city would never be taken as long as she remained un-shot down from the eminence of the great church.
Alas, Albert had its day of fate and of complete sacrifice ere the war should end--when all should go, yea, Virgin and all, and only Golgotha remain, Golgotha and the Roman soldiers who smote the Master with their spears as He hung from the Cross.
Twilight settles down upon the dead, the twilight of time and misery. The dreadful reality of destruction becomes more intense and real. After all, sunlight and the noonday do not always show us truth. They are in themselves so full of life and happiness that they divert attention from ruins and death unto themselves. Only in the grey light of afternoon and evening, and looking with the empty eye-socket of night-darkness can one easily apprehend what is spread out here--the last landscape of tens of thousands who lie dead. Hamlet must go to the battlements at the time when the ghost walks. The light of day hides the unseen world, or cannot quite hide it. But there is one moment when the ghost of Albert grows into vision majestically before the eyes. You go out through the primeval jungle of dead weeds, the tripartite crowned heads of brown teasles looking like low-lying spectral regalia of the death-kingdom, past dug-outs and deeps and quagmire, past the prostrate ribaldry and obscenity of war's doings with the earth--to the dark-flowing water which nurses its forgotten secrets, flowing on, flowing on. You wait, and whilst mist chills the marrow the ghostly moment of Albert comes once more. Night has more than heralded itself; it is here in a vast-fronted army and comes onward. Demon-eyes look over the ridges, flash angrily, greedily; the roar of battle thunder bursts up; the gas-shells cat-calling across the sky fall in showers on the mud; field-guns are advanced to point-blank range--there comes the tide of the war-worn German soldiery of March 1918, war-worn and yet exultant; the English are driven out, the leaning Virgin falls, and the city is given over to the enemy. Albert is dead; even its soul has died. English soldiers will come back in August, recapture it, but not the city they defended so long, not the city of the little Notre Dame leaning passionately o'er its life and its defence.
* * * * *
From Albert to Bapaume, from Fricourt by Carnoy and Maricourt to Longueval and Ginchy and Le Transloy, a pleasant day's walk now. There is the incomparable Somme silence, a silence achieved by the tremendous thunderous contrast in history, a silence from the stilled hearts of the dead, a deafness and a muteness. Then when the mist disperses, and the sun lifts his awful radiance o'er the scene, there are audible the lowly orchestras of flies and bees. The rags of horses' skeletons lie on the roadway, and beside a ruined direction-post a clean-picked horse's skull has been placed on the stump of a tree. Lifting one's eyes to the view there rolls forth to the horizon vast moors empurpled here and there and with gashes of white on wan green wastes. An organised tour by car whirls past upon the road raising phantom hosts of white dust. It will do the whole Somme campaign in an hour and bring up safely at some French hotel where hot lunch and foaming beer persuade the living that life is still worth while. There was once a picture in _Simplicissimus_ of a Cook's guide showing a human skull to some tourists--
"This, sir," said he, "was a young man."
It was meant for irony. But surely it is good for everyone who talks of war to go and get that thought--_this was a young man_. It does not matter that tourists whirl past without pause in a car. Let each and everyone come and dip a corner of a handkerchief in the blood of the war--for remembrance. Come to the sacrament of the young man's blood which was shed instead of yours.
The road you traverse to the Somme altar is the road which hundreds of thousands of young men trod, marching to moments of destiny, moments of victory; the Manchesters to Montauban, South Africans to Delville, Royal Scots to Guillemont, the Guards to Les Boeufs, the Durham Light Infantry to the Butte of Warlencourt, the 47th Londons to Eaucourt l'Abbaye--and many others; they marched from the quiet places of the homeland and the empire, from Loos, from Laventie, from Flanders; defenders of Ypres and defenders of Arras, marching with their drums, marching with their bayonets, to Britain's quarrel and her mightiest enemy. Behind them were ranged the guns, and in front of them was Prussia. Now the desolation of Nature alone suggests what a desolation there was of men. The terrible woods are impressionist pictures of the ruined vitals of great regiments, and you can hold a forest in your mind as you would a skull in your hands and say--_This was a forest._ _This was an army._
The generality of men and women however will not do that. The new-born generations mask their grief, and you will see if you walk into Bernafay Wood that a young Bernafay Wood is rising midst the dead masts of the old--self-sown. It will grow higher every year till the old is hidden. The masts will fall, will rot, will recede from this bright sunlight, and relapse into the shade which the new trees will give them, and then soon all will be forgotten. Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything. The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich in their masses of brown-stained wood, will pass. They will first be re-set-up in stone. 1921 will see them rolling out in new stone crosses, at first startlingly pallid and virginal, but as the months go on, getting gradually greyened and darkened, rain-washed, wind-blown, then falling a little from the straight. Flowers will bloom as new summers shine o'er the dead. Visitors will come. There will be a greater time of visiting the cemeteries and the battlefields than there yet has been. Gardeners will be conscientious, and then some less conscientious as the years roll by and visitors become less. Most of the cemeteries in the more obscure places will be half-forgotten and gone desolate. There must come a time when no more visit the burial-places of the great war than visit now the cemeteries of the Crimea. In 1914 the great cemetery above Sevastopol, kept by a German gardener, had become from a national point of view utterly unvisited and forgotten. A roll used to be kept there of the visitors who came in their hundreds after the Crimean war was over, dwindling to a score a year and then to less than ten, and then to twos and threes and ones. The living who survived the Crimea do not need to go to Russia now, for they have joined the dead long since. So it will be with us; we shall join the authentic dead, and the young ones will have forgotten whilst chattering of some other war.
Meanwhile look reverently at the graves of the men of the 32nd A.I.F., with little rising suns adorning the centre-posts of their crosses! See where lies Capt. Claude with his high memorial, or Private Harry who carried out an equal sacrifice with him.
Rusty old cans on ten-foot poles mark the limits of the burial-ground, and a notice says "Cemetery closed" as one might read outside a theatre at night--"Pit full" "Gallery full" "Stalls full." On the hillside above, sounds the laughter of men and the clatter of spades where a new acre of God is being dug, the foundations of a new theatre being laid. Here French Negroes, Flemings, and French peasants are at work under the guidance of British soldiers. Occasionally a car rushes up through the dust and a couple of British officers come forward to see how things are going on.
Passing on to Longueval you see the masts of Longueval Wood, but before you come to it there stands now at the cross-roads a "café-restaurant," an unpainted wooden hut. Here with the sun streaming full on their faces sit two Falstaffian wights with bottles labelled Malaga between them and glasses full. On their dewy red chins and necks there are three or four folds of flesh; red veins run down their necks like gutters at the side of a house. They hold hands and sing and make everyone in the tavern laugh--then swallow--swallow--swallow, the wine rolls down their exuberant gullets.
Suddenly there is a note of warning in the restaurant, whisperings about _l'officier_, to make it appear as if the men were drinking beer, the woman comes and takes the wine-bottles and pours their contents into metal tankards, sweeps the table clean of wine driblets, and reprimands the topers.
They pull themselves together and take on a sobered gait. One of them opens a sand-bag in his possession and brings out two enormous doorsteps of bread and butter. Silence reigns. There is a suspense. Someone evidently is expected. Will it be a dapper, constrained, politely inquisitive British officer? Hardly! Ah, here he is! Enter fiery British sergeant-major with bristling moustache and bright crown on his sleeve, stout, smart, and red.
"Na then," says he, darting upon the Falstaffs, "play the game, play the bloomin' game. Come on, travai in the cemetery. Officeer come, no bon pour moy, bon pour vous, no bon pour moy. Com' on now or I'll jolly well have to shift yer. The Belgiques and the Algerians know all about yer. It's all over the place."
"Ca ne fait rien."
"Ca-ne-fait-rien pour vous but not pour moy. Officeer bocu faché avec moy. You no catch it, I catch it, compris?"
One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.
"Yers I know," says the sergeant-major indignantly. "Moy zig-zag las' night. But n-no zig-zag to-day."
They offer him their glasses--apparently of beer. He sips one and then drains it, and then drains the other one too.
"Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others," he continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.
"Na then," says he. "Quick March to the cemetery!" And they go.
How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the living!
* * * * *
The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn sunshine the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some shores when a neap-tide leaves them bare.
Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. The _sinistrés_ of the Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits, levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their little petrol-ploughs. The shell-splashed approaches to the line can with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real worship bending over _la France_ and he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred times what he has already done--and he will do it. A hundredth part of the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and rise on full fleshy stalks, and they are thick like a wall. They grow from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible yet, though not so terrible if still impassable. You see gleaming above the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross shining afar and make it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some ship to a white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a conventional scribble on the moor--the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out on to a limy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the returned peasants making _sauter les abris_ with dynamite, and then the eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from the centre of a large tableland. It is the Butte of Warlencourt, for the possession and retention of which what quantities of blood were shed, the famous Butte which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs. Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light Infantry--to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf. Regt. 159 who held the Butte against all comers in 1916 and recaptured it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their monument a concrete base. From the top of the Butte there is a complete circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods, wrecks of villages--a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the great Somme scene.
It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from Albert runs smooth and level below the Butte, a track for space-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness of the massed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorials of the German dead--Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short of it--like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of 1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front; rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to superintend a burying party--some three hundred sodden green bundles to be disposed of--three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find "the everlasting arms." He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the war-bred cynicism of those who believed in letting _others_ be heroic. He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in "putting his back into it," and doing even the meanest duty as if it were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men. He was so energetic in the football field playing officers versus sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his grave at C---- and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males, _entre eux_, a "man's man." Poor hero--from that night of burying green bundles to that morning when we buried him--he marched through the valley of the shadow of death, tormented as Pilgrim was by hobgoblins and satyrs. But when he died he shed his war body, he shed that lurid phraseology, and became once more, no doubt, the Kingsley-Carlylean hero that he was, with some sort of knowledge of human sorrow which those who lived in peace knew not. So it must have been also with those who once breathed within the sodden green bundles. They shook off something evil when they died, but in passing through it they must somehow have understood more. Sorrow dimmed the eyes even of the hardest swearer of the Army. And the dead now constrain us to a new human tenderness, they empower us to touch more delicately and to understand more deeply--to love more. Pity for us if we do not now live differently because of the dead!
Thus as one walks through Bapaume and sees the children of new Bapaume playing in their innocence in the streets and the ruins, one can look down on them more tenderly, more caressingly, for the sake of the dead, passing on, as it were, man's forgiveness to man. And in our relationships with the grown-ups, our neighbours, ourselves dressed differently, we can have more patience, more compassion, more readiness to help and to be kind. It comes from the dead, it comes from the living who were dead.