Part 8

On Easter Monday, in the Battle of Arras, I saw two sights such as I shall never forget. One revealed the kind and forgiving spirit of our men, the other their unflinching courage. After burying three non-commissioned officers who had been killed the day before, I reached the Advanced Dressing Station near which our regiment was "standing to" in a support trench. Other regiments of our Division were carrying out the attack and, with small loss, had taken the enemy lines. The German trenches had been blotted out by our shells but their deep dug-outs, with machine-guns at their mouths, remained untouched, and it was almost impossible for our soldiers to discover them until they got within a few yards of the entrances.

The German commander's idea was to keep his men in the shelter of the dug-outs until our barrage lifted. They were then to rush out with machine-guns and rifles to destroy our men who were following it up. If the idea had been carried out, the German line would have been impregnable for our men would have been mown down like corn before the reaper. It failed because German human nature could not rise to the occasion. The German soldiers had been demoralized by the safety of the dug-outs and by the thunder of our shells above them. They cowered in the dug-outs when they should have rushed out. The critical moment passed, and with its passing our soldiers leapt to the entrances and threw down hand grenades. There was a wild cry of pain and fear from below. Arms went up and the cry of "Kamerad." The surrender was accepted and the beaten soldiers crawled out. From some dug-outs as many as two hundred prisoners were taken. In other parts of the line there was a stiff fight, but, on the whole, our casualties were very light. From my own observation I should say that we took more prisoners than we suffered casualties. Some companies could boast a prisoner for each man engaged in the attack.

The Advanced Dressing Station was at the corner of Cross Roads and the sight around it was wonderful to behold. A crowd of prisoners was assembling ready to be marched to the cages, and wounded officers and men, British and German, were being bandaged. The prisoners were hungry. For some days our artillery had cut off their rations. A platoon of our soldiers came marching by, and, to save time, eating their breakfasts as they passed along. The prisoners looked at them with hungry eyes. Our men saw the look and stopped. Breaking rank for a moment they passed in and out among the prisoners and shared out their rations. "Here, Fritzy, old boy, take this," I heard all around me, and Fritz did not need asking twice. He took the biscuits and cheese gratefully and eagerly. The look of trouble passed out of his eyes and he felt that he had found friends where he had only expected to find enemies. He began to hope for kindness in his captivity. The scene was one of pure goodwill.

Scarcely ever have I seen a crowd so happy. Our Tommies laughed and cracked jokes which no German could understand, but I heard not a single taunt or bitter word. In fact, Fritz was treated more like a pet than a prisoner. One who had worked in London, and who spoke English, asked me for a cup of tea for a comrade who was slightly wounded, and I got one in the dressing station. The platoon of Tommies re-formed and marched away to the battle and the prisoners were led off to the cages. There were still large numbers of prisoners on the road, and they were moving about without guards. Many of them were being used as stretcher-bearers and they seemed to do their work out of goodwill and not of constraint.

Their assistance was of great help to the wounded. The battle was going well with us. Everyone felt in good heart and kindly disposed. An officer who lay seriously wounded and waiting for a car told me of the splendid work which his regiment had done. His eyes shone with suppressed excitement and pride as he told the story. While he was speaking two soldiers came limping down the road and their appearance was greeted with a burst of laughter. One was English, the other German. Tommy had his arm round the German's neck and was leaning on him while Fritz, with his arm round the lad's waist, helped him along. They came along very slowly for both were wounded, but they laughed and talked together like long-lost brothers. Yet neither could understand a word the other said.

I passed down the road towards the line. Gunners of the Territorials were hurriedly hitching their guns to the horses ready to advance to new positions. In the ruined village a party of engineers was already unloading a wagon of rails with which to build a light railway. I continued along the road towards the next village. It had just fallen into our hands and not one stone was left on another. There were scores of wounded men hobbling back from it and I gave my arm to such as needed it most. A badly wounded Tommy was being brought along on a wheeler by two orderlies and as I helped them through the traffic we heard the heavy rumble of the advancing field-guns.

The road was cleared with the quickness of lightning. Out of the village the batteries burst at a mad gallop and down the road they came at break-neck speed. With the swiftness of a fire engine in a city street the rocking guns swept past. The gunners clung to the ammunition limbers with both hands and the drivers whipped and spurred the excited foam-flecked horses as though they were fiery beings leaping through the air and incapable of fatigue or weakness. Suddenly the drivers raised their whips as a sign to those behind, and the trembling horses and bounding guns came to a dead halt. The leading gun had overturned at a nasty place where the road dipped down into the hollow. The rest of the batteries stood exposed on the crest of the ridge. Before retiring the Germans had felled all the trees that grew by the roadside so that nothing might obstruct their line of vision. Such a catastrophe as this was what the enemy had been hoping for. The sun shone brilliantly, and our batteries were a direct target for the German gunners such as seldom occurs. Our boys were caught like rats in a trap. By the side of the road ran a shallow trench and near us two broad steps into it. We laid the wounded lad in the bottom of the trench and sat down by his side. Shells were falling all around and fountains of dirt and debris rose into the air and, on five or six occasions, covered us with their spray.

I covered the lad's face. He was barely conscious and uttered no word. It seemed as if nothing could live in such a bombardment. A shell burst near, and the cry of dying horses rent the air. The traces were cut and the horses and gun-carriage drawn off the road. Every second I expected to see the horses and drivers in front of me blown into the air and I watched them with fascinated eyes. Not a man stirred. They sat on their horses and gun-carriages as though they were figures in bronze. Not a man sought the trench and not a man relieved the tension by going forward to see what was wrong or to lend a hand. Each knew his place, and if death sought him it would know where to find him. The horses felt that they had brave men on their backs and, in that mysterious way peculiar to horses, caught the spirit of their riders. Every shell covered men and horses with chalk and soil, but they remained an immobile as statuary. It was magnificent and it was war. A driver in the battery beside us got wounded in the leg and hand. He jumped off his horse and came to us to be bandaged. Then he leapt back into the saddle. It seemed an age, but I suppose it was only a few minutes, before the obstruction was removed. The whips flashed in the air and the horses sprang forward. The guns rocked and swayed as they swept past us and within a few minutes they were in their new positions under the hill upon which lay the ruins of Neuville Vitasse.

The shelling ceased as suddenly as it had started and we lifted out our wounded soldier and went in the direction of the dressing station. Some distance up the road my attention was called to one of the drivers whom the artillery had left in the care of some privates. He was living, but his skull was broken, and he would never wake again to consciousness. He was fast "going West." His day was over and his work was done. I got him lifted on to a stretcher and taken to the dressing station so that he might die in peace and be buried in the little soldiers' cemetery behind it.

When I returned in the evening to our billet I told the transport officer of the magnificent bravery of the artillery drivers.

"Any other drivers would behave just as well, if caught in the same trap," he replied.

He spoke the simple truth. They would. Such supreme courage and devotion to duty are common to the army. Their presence among all ranks and in all sections of the army makes the fact the more wonderful. Both officers and men love life, but they love duty more, and commanders in drawing up their plans know that they can rely on their soldiers to carry them out. Our Tommies never fail us whether in France, Mesopotamia, or Palestine. Devotion to duty is inwoven with the fibers of their hearts. They are men who, either in kindness to captives or courage amid disaster and destruction, never fail us.

*XIV*

*THE CROSS AT NEUVE CHAPELLE*

The war on the Western Front has been fought in a Roman Catholic country where crucifixes are erected at all the chief cross-roads to remind us that, in every moment of doubt as to the way of life, and on whichever road we finally decide to walk, whether rough or smooth, we shall need the Saviour and His redeeming love. We have seen a cross so often when on the march, or when passing down some trench, that it has become inextricably mixed up with the war. When we think of the great struggle the vision of the cross rises before us, and when we see the cross, we think of processions of wounded men who have been broken to save the world. Whenever we have laid a martyred soldier to rest, we have placed over him, as the comment on his death, a simple white cross bearing his name. We never paint any tribute on it. None is needed, for nothing else could speak so eloquently as a cross--a white cross. White is the sacred color in the army of to-day, and the cross is the sacred form. In after years there will never be any doubt as to where the line of liberty ran that held back the flood and force of German tyranny. From the English Channel to Switzerland it is marked for all time with the crosses on the graves of the British and French soldiers. Whatever may be our views about the erection of crucifixes by the wayside and at the cross-roads, no one can deny that they have had an immense influence for good on our men during the war in France.

The experience of many a gallant soldier is expressed in the following Belgian poem:

"I came to a halt at the bend of the road; I reached for my ration, and loosened my load; I came to a halt at the bend of the road.

"O weary the way, Lord; forsaken of Thee, My spirit is faint--lone, comfortless me; O weary the way, Lord; forsaken of Thee.

"And the Lord answered, Son, be thy heart lifted up, I drank, as thou drinkest, of agony's cup; And the Lord answered, Son, be thy heart lifted up.

"For thee that I loved, I went down to the grave, Pay thou the like forfeit thy Country to save; For thee that I loved, I went down to the grave.

"Then I cried, 'I am Thine, Lord; yea, unto this last.' And I strapped on my knapsack, and onward I passed. Then I cried, 'I am Thine, Lord; yea, unto this last.'

"Fulfilled is the sacrifice. Lord, is it well? Be it said--for the dear sake of country he fell. Fulfilled is the sacrifice. Lord, is it well?"

The Cross has interpreted life to the soldier and has provided him with the only acceptable philosophy of the war. It has taught boys just entering upon life's experience that, out-topping all history and standing out against the background of all human life, is a Cross on which died the Son of God. It has made the hill of Calvary stand out above all other hills in history. Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon--these may stand at the foot of the hill, as did the Roman soldiers, but they are made to look mean and insignificant as the Cross rises above them, showing forth the figure of the Son of Man. Against the sky-line of human history the Cross stands clearly, and all else is in shadow. The wayside crosses at the Front and the flashes of roaring guns may not have taught our soldiers much history, but they have taught them the central fact of history; and all else will have to accommodate itself to that, or be disbelieved. The Cross of Christ is the center of the picture for evermore, and the grouping of all other figures must be round it.

To the soldiers it can never again be made a detail in some other picture. Seen also in the light of their personal experience it has taught them that as a cross lies at the basis of the world's life and shows bare at every crisis of national and international life so, at the root of all individual life, is a cross. They have been taught to look for it at every parting of the ways. Suffering to redeem others and make others happy will now be seen as the true aim of life and not the grasping of personal pleasure or profit. They have stood where high explosive shells thresh out the corn from the chaff--the true from the false. They have seen facts in a light that lays things stark and bare; and the cant talked by skeptical armchair-philosophers will move them as little as the chittering of sparrows on the housetops. For three long years our front-line trenches have run through what was once a village called Neuve Chapelle. There is nothing left of it now. But there is something there which is tremendously impressive. It is a crucifix. It stands out above everything, for the land is quite flat around it. The cross is immediately behind our firing trench, and within two or three hundred yards of the German front trench. The figure of Christ is looking across the waste of No Man's Land. Under His right arm and under His left, are British soldiers holding the line. Two dud shells lie at the the foot. One is even touching the wood, but though hundreds of shells must have swept by it, and millions of machine-gun bullets, it remains undamaged. Trenches form a labyrinth all round it. When our men awake and "stand-to" at dawn the first sight they see is the cross; and when at night they lie down in the side of the trench, or turn into their dug-outs, their last sight is the cross. It stands clear in the noon-day sun; and in the moonlight it takes on a solemn grandeur.

I first saw it on a November afternoon when the sun was sinking under heavy banks of cloud, and it bent my mind back to the scene as it must have been on the first Good Friday, when the sun died with its dying Lord, and darkness crept up the hill of Calvary and covered Him with its funeral pall to hide His dying agonies from the curious eyes of unbelieving men. I had had tea in a dug-out, and it was dark when I left. Machine-guns were sweeping No Man's Land to brush back enemies that might be creeping towards us through the long grass; and the air was filled with a million clear, cracking sounds. Star-shells rose and fell and their brilliant lights lit up the silent form on the cross.

For three years, night and day, Christ has been standing there in the midst of our soldiers, with arms outstretched in blessing. They have looked up at Him through the clear starlight of a frosty night; and they have seen His pale face by the silver rays of the moon as she has sailed her course through the heavens. In the gloom of a stormy night they have seen the dark outline, and caught a passing glimpse of Christ's effigy by the flare of the star-shells. What must have been the thoughts of the sentries in the listening posts as all night long they have gazed at the cross; or of the officers as they have passed down the trench to see that all was well; or of some private sleeping in the trench and, being awakened by the cold, taking a few steps to restore blood-circulation? Deep thoughts, I imagine, much too deep for words of theirs or mine.

And when the Battle of Neuve Chapelle was raging and the wounded, whose blood was turning red the grass, looked up at Him, what thoughts must have been theirs then? Did they not feel that He was their big Brother and remember that blood had flowed from Him as from them; that pain had racked Him as it racked them; and that He thought of His mother and of Nazareth as they thought of their mother and the little cottage they were never to see again? When their throats became parched and their lips swollen with thirst did they not remember how He, too, had cried for a drink; and, most of all, did they not call to mind the fact that He might have saved Himself, as they might, if He had cared more for His own happiness than for the world's? As their spirits passed out through the wounds in their bodies would they not ask Him to remember them as their now homeless souls knocked at the gate of His Kingdom? He had stood by them all through the long and bloody battle while hurricanes of shells swept over and around Him. I do not wonder that the men at the Front flock to the Lord's Supper to commemorate His death. They will not go without it. If the Sacrament be not provided, they ask for it. At home there was never such a demand for it as exists at the Front. There is a mystic sympathy between the trench and the Cross, between the soldier and his Saviour.

And yet, to those who willed the war and drank to the day of its coming, even the Cross has no sacredness. It is to them but a tool of war. An officer told me that during the German retreat from the Somme they noticed a peculiar accuracy in the enemy's firing. The shells followed an easily distinguishable course. So many casualties occurred from this accurate shelling that the officers set themselves to discover the cause. They found that the circle of shells had for its center the cross-roads, and that at the cross-roads was a crucifix that stood up clearly as a land-mark. Evidently the crosses were being used to guide the gunners, and was causing the death of our men. But a more remarkable thing came to light. The cross stood close to the road, and when the Germans retired they had sprung a mine at the cross-roads to delay our advance. Everything near had been blown to bits by the explosion except the crucifix which had not a mark upon it. And yet it could not have escaped, except by a miracle. They therefore set themselves to examine the seeming miracle and came across one of the most astounding cases of fiendish cunning. They found that the Germans had made a concrete socket for the crucifix so that they could take it out or put it in at pleasure. Before blowing up the cross-roads they had taken the cross out of its socket and removed it to a safe distance, then, when the mine had exploded, they put the cross back so that it might be a landmark to direct their shooting. And now they were using Christ's instrument of redemption as an instrument for men's destruction.

But our young officers resolved to restore the cross to its work of saving men. They waited till night fell, and then removed the cross to a point a hundred or two yards to the left. When in the morning the German gunners fired their shells their observers found that the shells fell too far wide of the cross and they could make nothing of the mystery. It looked as if someone had been tampering with their guns in the night. To put matters right they altered the position of their guns so that once more the shells made a circle round the cross. And henceforth our soldiers were safe, for the shells fell harmlessly into the outlying fields. Nor was this the only time during their retreat that the Germans put the cross to this base use and were foiled in their knavery.

When a nation scraps the Cross of Christ and turns it into a tool to gain an advantage over its opponents, it becomes superfluous to ask who began the war, and folly to close our eyes to the horrors and depravities which are being reached in the waging of it.

There is a new judgment of the nations now proceeding and who shall predict what shall be? The Cross of Christ is the arbiter, and our attitude towards it decides our fate. I have seen the attitude of our soldiers towards the cross at Neuve Chapelle and towards that for which it stands; and I find more comfort in their reverence for Christ and Christianity than in all their guns and impediments of war.

The Cross of Christ towers above the wrecks of time, and the nations will survive that stand beneath its protecting arms in the trenches of righteousness, liberty and truth.

*XV*

*THE CHILDREN OF OUR DEAD*

There are times when we get away from the Front for a rest. We hear no more the sound of the guns, but give ourselves up to the silence and charm of the country. Before going into the Somme fighting we were billeted for ten days in the neighboring village to Cressy; and as the anniversary of the battle came that week the colonel chose the day for a march to the battlefield. The owner of the field, when the old windmill stood, from which King Edward III directed his army, came to meet us and describe the battle. When the war is over he is going to erect a monument on the spot to the memory of the French and British troops who in comradeship have died fighting against the common foe.

They were happy days that we spent around Cressy. The last that some were destined to know this side of the Great Divide. The bedroom next to mine was occupied by two fine young officers of utterly different type. One was a Greek whose father had taken out naturalization papers and loved the country of his adoption with a worshiping passion that would shame many native born. The other was a charming, argumentative, systematic, theological student of Scots parentage. The night before we left, the Greek accidentally broke his mirror and was much upset. It was, he said, a token that Death was about to claim him. The Scot laughed heartily, for he had not a trace of the superstitious in him; or, if he had--which was more than likely--it was kept under by his strong reasoning faculties.

"If you are to be killed," he replied, "I am to be killed too, for I also have broken my mirror."

He spoke the words in jest, or with hardly a discernible undercurrent of seriousness; but they were true words nevertheless. The two bed-mates were killed in the same battle a week or two later. I had tea with them in their dug-out on the eve of the fight. They were to take up their positions in an hour, but the student could not resist having just one more argument. He directed the conversation to the New Theology, and to German philosophers and Biblical scholars. He simply talked me off my feet, for he possessed the most brilliant intellect in the regiment, combined with self-reliance and perfect modesty. Then the conversation turned to the question of taking a tot of rum before going over the parapet. He was a rigid teetotaler, "for," said he, "drink is the ruin of my country." He was opposed to the idea of taking rum to help one's courage or allay his fears. He would not, he said, go under with his eyes bandaged. He would take a good look at Death and dare him to do his worst. He was superb, and Death never felled a manlier man. Browning would have loved him as his own soul for he had Browning's attitude to life exactly, and could have sung with him,