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BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

WAR c()rri:spom)f>;nts xkar ypri-:s. (see chapter hi.) from a

SKKTCH MADK OX THE SPOT PV FREDERIC VILLIERS.

Reproduced hij eourtesij of
The illiistrdfed London Ncirs.

in.

4\ 1*

BEHIND THE SCENES m B
AT THE FRONT

0'i^4l#t».^H,

BY

GEORGE ADAM

PARIS CORRESPONDENT OF " THE TIMES

niMKct

WITH A FRONTISPIECE

0 ■«;.. DUFFIELD & COMPANY
r^^^- ' 1915

NEW YORK

Printed in Great Britain

7)

ff 5 6

PREFACE

This book describes the political conditions in
France on the eve of the outbreak of the war,
and endeavours to give a picture of the period
of siege warfare which began when the race
northwards from the Aisne brought the Allies
and the Germans face to face throughout the
whole length of Southern Belgium and of
France. The choice of the material of the
book has been dictated by personal experience.
Those are the two phases of the war with which
the author is most familiar. As correspondent
of The Times, he was invited to pay a series
of visits to the front in France and in Belgium
during the five winter months. This book is the
result of those visits to the lines. Its object is
not to attempt the hopeless task of furnishing a
history of this period. If it gives to the reader
some small idea of the splendour of the British
effort in Flanders, if it conveys but a hundredth
part of the author's admiration for the army and
the people of France, it will have attained its
object.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

Germany's Past Opportunity — The Awakening — First
Fruits of the Awakening — The Moment Page 1

CHAPTER II

A Nation in Arms — Success and Failures — Causes of
Victory Page 24

CHAPTER III
The French at Ypres Page 44

CHAPTER IV

At British Head-quarters — Keeping Fit — In Trench
and Wood — The Old Men and the New — The
Aeroplane — The Motor Page 69

CHAPTER V

The Eastern Gate

Page 134

CHAPTER VI

Generals all

Page 159

CHAPTER VII

^

The Poilus of France

Page 175

vii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII

The Black Butchers at Soissons

Page 184

CHAPTER IX

Destruction

Page 201

CHAPTER X

French and British

Page 229

Vlll

BEHIND THE SCENES AT
THE FRONT

CHAPTER I

I.— GERMANY'S PAST OPPORTUNITY

Never before in history has a war been so clearly
foreseen, so much discussed, and at the same
time so little anticipated, as that which now
scars the face of Europe with its trenches. To
the French, with memories of 1870, war with
Germany had become an idea just as familiar as
death, and they regarded it as a thing inevitable,
but nevertheless too remote to require any place
in the day's preoccupations. In England the
voices of warning were many, but they remained
almost without an echo. The public ceased to
take anything but an academic interest in the
matter. We had the Stamp-Licking Outrage,
Ulster, or the Suffragettes, to keep us busy. In
France conditions were different. The German
ascendancy imposed upon her in 1870 had kept
from her for nearly thirty years the full rights of

1 1

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

a first-class Power. The effects of this were
noticeable even in the smallest details of French
public life.

Gambetta told his countrymen after the sur-
render of Alsace-Lorraine that they would do
well always to think of the lost provinces, but
never to speak of them. Even in recent years,
since France had regained through Russian and
British friendship her proper weight in European
questions, no speaker would have dared to use
in the French Parliament, when dealing with
Franco- German relations, language approaching
in vigour that constantly employed by official
and non-official speakers in the Reichstag. The
same discretion was imposed upon the Press. In
the handling of important issues between the
two countries, the French Government — at any
rate until after the conclusion of the Entente
Cordiale — had to observe an attitude of still
greater caution towards Germany. German
bluster had upon the French a greater effect
than it could possibly have had in England, for
the French had sad memories of what lay behind
it. They had heard the first thunderous adver-
tisement given to Krupp guns in 1870, they had
seen the whole gaudy structure of the Second
Empire crack and collapse beneath the giant
German blows. Some who are to-day promi-
nent in the conduct of French affairs had made
the first pilgrimage of mourning to the statue of

GERMANY^S PAST OPPORTUNITY

the lost city of Strasbourg in the Place de la
Concorde, and to them the constant humiliation
placed upon France by Germany during the last
forty years had a very special significance, and
every change in the internal and external policy
of Germany a vital importance.

These men among the younger generation
sought to keep alive the memory of defeat and
the desire for a revenge, but in France, as in
England, the finger of history was unheeded.
The French have a paradoxical genius for clear
thinking and for self-deception. The logical
beauty of an idea dazzles them and obscures to
their eyes the brute nature of a fact. While the
new German Empire was making its sword ever
sharper, while it was exacting from its peoples as
the price of their prosperity an ever- increasing
discipline, an ever-increasing shareholding in the
great war industry of the country, France was
bathed in the artificial brilliance of new social
theories and fallacies. The spirit of defeat, with
its desire for victory, faded away, and its shame
and ardour were only kept alive for more or less
political reasons by the Monarchist Nationalists.

No country has shown greater rashness in the
making of political experiments than France,
and fortunately no people is more adaptable than
the French to the constantly changing Govern-
ments and forms of government imposed upon
it. They accept, or at any rate tolerate as a

s

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

people, methods of government which as indi-
viduals they nearly all deplore, llie spirit of
individuality seems to make them almost desirous
of placing upon the shoulders of others all the
collective duties of the State. There is, or at
any rate used to be, a prevalent idea in England
that the average Frenchman spent his time in
cafes in the heated discussion of politics. The
truth is that the average Frenchman pays a few
hundred deputies to take from his hands the
whole management of what he calls " those dirty
politics." The public is profoundly indifferent to
nearly all political matters, and it shows its
indifference by wholesale abstention from voting
during the General Elections. Almost up to the
outbreak of war, save in one or two critical
moments such as the period of Boulangism, there
has been no public interest and no public control.
The Panama scandal, the Dreyfus affair, and the
mistakes in the separation of Church and State,
were the logical result. Upheavals such as these
are practically the only form of an appeal to the
country provided for by the French constitution.
Dissolution is tantamount to a coup detat, and
the country, which regards with malicious and
contemptuous indifference the posturings and
peculations of its politicians, finds itself dragged
into the fray only when there is violent disagree-
ment in which personalities and politics are
inextricably mingled.

4

GERMANY'S PAST OPPORTUNITY

The appeal to the country is not that of the
poUing-booth. There is no General Election,
but rather an organized campaign of pande-
monium, the instigation of riots, the stirring up
of public and private scandals ; every journalist
becomes a cuttle-fish, and ejects inky clouds of
accusation and counter-attack, until the whole
country is plunged into the darkest and wildest
confusion, under cover of which one party either
strengthens its hold upon the Government
machine, or finds its control of it wrested from
its hands.

The effects of this system and of the constant
changes of Ministry which it involved can easily
be imagined. The public services became the
politician's privy purse, out of which he rewarded
faithful personal service or stopped the mouth of
a dangerous adversary.

This political anarchy was accompanied by
a corresponding mental chaos. The quality of
curiosity in all Frenchmen has made of them
the thinking pioneers of the world. The quality
of curiosity develops in different minds credulity
or scepticism. The anti-clerical legislation had,
as M. Viviani phrased it, " put out the lights of
heaven," and, at any rate for the lower classes of
society, some other form of illuminant was neces-
sary. Some accepted the torch of revolution,
others the somewhat artificial light of a vague
socialistic humanitarianism, which was to put an

5

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

end to wars, which led Jaures to address his
German friends in their own tongue at pubUc
meetings, which led the French Socialists to dis-
cuss Alsace-Lorraine with their German col-
leagues, which led to a widespread propagation
of the doctrines of internationalism which were
heard everywhere — in the professor's chair and in
the public-house.

II.— THE AWAKENING

On March 21, 1905, the French Parliament,
in sympathy with the prevalent pacific feelings
of France, reduced the term of compulsory
military service from three to two years. Ten
days later the German Emperor landed at
Tangier, and from that moment on the chain
of circumstances which led to the present war
may be clearly traced link by link. The Tangier
demonstration was followed by the withdrawal
of the Foreign Minister, M. Delcasse, from
office at the behest of Germany. It showed
France that, although it may take two to make
a quarrel, it only required one to make a war ;
that she might be as pacific as she pleased, but
that if she let her army run to waste, her stores
and ammunition become depleted, and her for-
tresses antiquated and out of repair, there was
one Power in Europe ready to pay the price of

6

THE AWAKENING

Empire and to wrest from France by blackmail
or by force her position as a great colonizing
Power.

The shock acted like a douche upon the
enervated body of the country. In the Chamber
of Deputies during one of the debates on the
Three Years Service Bill it was evident that the
House was becoming restive, and the Socialist-
Radical opposition was extremely uneasy. The
Minister at the Tribune had a temper, but no
tact. The grip of the Government over the
House was rapidly relaxing, and it seemed, when
the Minister had finished, that the result might
be fatal to the Government. The next speaker
was an old member whose whole speech had its
effect in the first sentence : " I have seen 1870."
The House was stilled as if by magic, for it
was one of the rare moments in which it heard
the voice of France.

The effect of the Emperor William's speech
upon France was exactly the same. In 1905
France found herself again. Even the Chamber
itself was made to feel what had long been
apparent to the whole of France, that it was not
worthy of the country. How far Germany
may have foreseen the moral result of 1905
upon the French cannot be estimated, but the
Germans realized with bitterness of spirit in
1911, after the "coup d'Agadir," that the
French — whom they had imagined to be mirrored

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

in the successive Ministries, whom they judged
by superficial political signs, by a misleading
stage and Press, to be corrupt and decadent —
had again found a bond of national unity. The
Germans had seen in the French attitude of
m' enficliisme to politics, and in the politicians'
apparent indifference to France, a cheap insur-
ance against the Franco-Russian alliance and
the Entente Cordiale. In the Agadir dis-
cussion they discovered that M. Caillaux by no
means represented his countrymen. They heard
French statesmen speaking with a new voice,
which had not been heard in France since 1870.
The nation whose decay had for long formed
the subject of smug German moralizing, whose
frivolity threw into shining relief the virtues of
Prussian piety, whose anarchy formed such a
pleasing contrast to German discipline — ''this
second-rate nation " suddenly refused to recog-
nize the supremacy of Germany in Europe, Asia,
and Africa, forgot all its dreams of universal
peace, and, while still remaining ardent in its
hatred of war, frankly and fearlessly faced the
possibility, even the probability, of a struggle
with Germany. The German Government
realized then that the internal rot in P^rance had
been stopped, that it could not count upon the
destruction of France from within, that another
huge military effort would be necessary before
German domination of Europe could be achieved.

FIRST FRUITS OF THE AWAKENING

III.— FIRST FRUITS OF THE AWAKENING

The French are in some respects the most
voluble individuals in the world, but politically
they are among the least articulate. It is only
in very rare moments that the opinion of the
country is clearly expressed or even indicated to
its rulers. The humiliations of Tangier and of
Agadir, with its sordid story of Caillaux dip-
lomacy, made Frenchmen acutely aware of the
fact that the affairs of the country were in very
bad hands. The great mass of Frenchmen is
Republican. Even the Monarchists realize that
any return to the older form of government must
be preceded by a miracle. The change which
men desired to bring about after the Agadir
crisis was one rather of men than of methods.
The Bill for proportional representation, which
aimed at destroying the power of the parish
pump politician, at rendering possible the entry
into politics of the disinterested patriotic French-
man, at freeing the Deputy from the tyranny
and place-greed of his elector, was defeated with
the aid of politicians who recognized in the
measure the death-sentence of their own personal
ambitions. But the chief supporter of the Bill,
the man who had presided over the inquiry into
Caillaux's Agadir intrigues, who throughout the
Balkan crisis had endeavoured to gain for

9

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

France what even some of his friends thought
was too important a diplomatic role, became
the centre of the vague desire for something
new.

To M. Poincare's election to the Presidency
of the Republic there attached a quite unusual
significance. The French are allowed by their
constitution no direct voice in the choice of their
chief magistrate, who is elected by the two
Chambers sitting in National Assembly, anything
like a plebescite giving too many opportunities
for the organizing of the personal ambitions of a
dictator. The two previous Presidents were
admirable representatives of the type of Presi-
dent dear to the politician. They were good,
safe men who could be counted upon to do
nothing startling or disturbing to the politician.
After the crisis of 1911 the French sought, as
they always have done in time of crisis, for a
man. They were indulging in no dreaming;
they wanted no coup d'etat ; they hoped for no
spectacular trotting down the Champs Elysees ;
they desired merely to relieve the undistinguished
mediocrity of the Presidents of the Third Re-
public by the return of a man rather than of a
puppet, of a statesman rather than of a politician.

The new spirit of France prompted them
to feel that they were destined again to play a
decisive part in the world's history, and they
wished to be worthily represented at the world's

10

FIRST FRUITS OF THE AWAKENING

council table. For the first time for many years
the public made the politician listen to its views.
Very clearly it was pointed out to Parliament in
the Press in which direction lay its duty at Ver-
sailles. Defying Republican ** discipline " — or,
in other words, refusing to make way for the
genial nonentity whom Radical policy and sus-
picion desired to place at the Elys^e — M. Poin-
care maintained his candidature, and, with the
support of the moderate Radicals and of some
sections of the clerical parties, returned from Ver-
sailles to Paris in triumph.

His election gave unbounded satisfaction to
the country, which saw in him a man of culture
(he was an Academician) and a man of tradition
(he was a son of Lorraine), who would be able
by his conduct of affairs to spare the country
a repetition of Tangier and Agadir, and who
would, if necessity arose, be strong enough to
force the attention of his Ministers to the urgent
questions of national defence. It would, how-
ever, be a mistake to imagine that he was a
candidate of La Revanche. Striking confirma-
tion of this view is to be found in the fact that,
since the first premature advance into Alsace in
the earliest days of the war, Alsace-Lorraine has
ceased to have any special significance to the
great body of Frenchmen.

It became apparent even before M. Fallieres
had made way for his successor that the opening

11

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

years of M. Poincar^'s Presidency were likely to
be eventful. His election in the teeth of fierce
Radical opposition had inflamed the bitterest
hatred among the extremist parties, who feared
that the long years of their prosperity and undis-
puted power in the Chamber might be drawing
to an end. It became evident that the Socialists
and Socialist Radicals had by no means accepted
their defeat, but intended to initiate a vigorous
political campaign, having as its object to render
M. Poincare's tenure of office intolerable.

These threats of commotion within were ac-
companied by warnings of even greater trouble
from abroad. A month after the Presidential
elections Grand- Admiral von Tirpitz, speaking
to the Budget Committee of the Reichstag, used
words the meaning of which was clear then, but
which subsequent events have made still more
emphatic. Briefly, he announced that Germany
intended to devote more attention to her military
expenditure and reorganization, and to stay for a
moment her growing naval preparations. She
had resolved, in fact, to grasp undisputed mili-
tary supremacy on the Continent before striving
to wrest the trident from Great Britain. France
knew what to expect. Each step she had taken
along the path of disarmament and peace had led
to more rattling of the German sabre, to the
military laws of 1911 and 1912, and she would
have played the traitor to herself and to the

12

FIRST FRUITS OF THE AWAKENING

world had she not taken immediate action to
meet the threatened German increase of miHtary
strength. Although the measures she adopted
were considered and discussed before M. FalUeres
had left the Elysee, the Three Years Service
Law which embodied them was largely due to
M. Poincare's qualities of patience and persever-
ance. The adoption of that law was without
doubt a bitter disappointment to Germany, who
has proved herself incapable in France, as in
England, either through her diplomacy or her
secret service, of judging anything but material
factors.

Blind to the dangers abroad, the Socialists and
Socialist Radicals saw in opposition to the Three
Years Service Bill a means of prosecuting their
campaign against the President. They fought
the Bill with the utmost ingenuity, but without
effect. The fight was renewed over the financial
measures which the new law necessitated. The
opponents of " Poincareism " had two weapons,
the income-tax, and the necessity for placing upon
the shoulders of the rich much of the burden of
the new taxation. They had in M. Caillaux a
leader of brilliant financial ability if of damaged
reputation. M. Caillaux saw the Government's
weakness on the question of finance. He over-
threw the Barthou Ministry on it, and obtained
the portfoho of Finance in the new Government,
of which he was leader in all but name, by defeat-
is

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

ing the loan proposal, the execution of which
would have prevented the terrible financial con-
fusion in France on the outbreak of war. His
chief preoccupation, once he had arrived in power,
was to remain there long enough to control the
General Elections. In spite of attacks vigorously
led, in spite of a ferocious campaign against the
income-tax in the Press, carried, notably in the
Figaro, into the personal field, he seemed certain
to win through until the elections, when his
wife's revolver shot tragically changed the whole
aspect of affairs both at home and abroad.

IV.— THE MOMENT

The murder of Gaston Calmette, the editor of
the Figaro, and the Rochette scandal which it
revealed, gave France a glimpse of the political
disorder in which she still struggled. Behind the
placid, ornamental front of public life, she saw a
coterie of men fighting their way to power by
means of blackmail, by the purloining of private
correspondence ; they saw ignoble bartering over
the honour or dishonour of women, and the
spectacle only served to encourage the country
in its distaste for all things political.

The day before the Calmette murder I returned
to Paris from a month's tour in provincial France
undertaken with the object of studying electoral

14

THE MOMENT

conditions. Everywhere on that tour I found a
growing spirit of indifference towards poKtics, and
the whole scandal only served to strengthen the
contempt of most Frenchmen for the proceedings
in the Palais Bourbon. Among some sections of
moderate opinion disgust was so pronounced that
it threatened to lose its negative character, and
to exert a positive influence in the approaching
elections. This feeling seemed to offer a lever to
any man strong enough to fashion it into some-
thing definite. M. Briand, who certainly at one
period of his career appeared to stand head and
shoulders above the Parliamentary ruck, made a
belated effort to utilize this current of opinion.
His campaign was attended with a certain amount
of success in the country ; the Radical income-
tax policy and the opposition to the Three Years
Service Law failed to obtain popular endorse-
ment, but the Socialist Radicals, by an alliance in
the Chamber with the Socialists, completely nul-
lified the political effects of their comparative
non-success at the polls.

The Ministry formed as the result of the
elections was composed mainly of opponents to
the Three Years Service Law, all of whom, how-
ever, on their arrival in office, proclaimed its
absolute necessity. M. Caillaux disappeared for
a moment from the political stage while awaiting
his more sensational appearance at the trial of his
wife at the Seine Assizes. At a moment when

15

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the international outlook was growing steadily
darker, the chief concern of the Government, or
at any rate of the parties which supported it in
the Chamber, was to bring the trial of Mme.
Caillaux to a satisfactory conclusion.

Germany's moment was indeed well chosen.
Her active preparations for war were hurried on
while the Caillaux case was proceeding, while in
France the whole attention of the public was
riveted on the astounding and unwholesome pro-
ceedings in the Palais de Justice, where apparently
the whole political world of France was on its
trial, while riotous scenes were being enacted
night after night on the boulevards, and a period
of complete internal chaos appeared to have been
reached. The President of the Republic, the
Prime Minister, M. Viviani, and the political
director of the French Foreign Office, M. de
Margerie, were absent on a State visit to Russia
with two of the most important units of the
French Fleet. There was, in addition to these
more or less accidental factors, another reason
which undoubtedly had a great effect in stiffen-
ing the determination, at any rate of Austria-
Hungary, to push matters to extremes. The work
of remedying the havoc wrought in the French
Army between 1900 and 1905, when Radicalism
reigned supreme, was by no means finished.

Large sums had been voted by successive
Parliaments, but in no case had France kept

16

THE MOMENT

pace with the German programme, and, at any
rate in some departments of war, she still lagged
dangerously behind. About a fortnight before
war broke out, a series of startling disclosures was
made in the Senate as to deficiencies of organiza-
tion and administration in the army. During the
crisis of 1905 it first became apparent that France,
with her weakened army, was for the moment
unable to protect herself against attack. The
plan of the French General Staff aimed at the
French Army taking the offensive upon the out-
break of any European war ; and when the neces-
sary military renovations were discussed, it was
naturally decided that the requirements of the
troops in the field — that is to say, of the offensive
forces—should be met before those of the defen-
sive organization (forts, stores, and engineering
material) could be considered. A great deal of
money was spent in strengthening the field
artillery, machine-gun sections, aeronautic and
railway services ; but, as was declared in the
Senate by M. Humbert just before the outbreak
of war, the eastern frontier forts were danger-
ously weak, some of the works upon the Upper
Meuse dating from as far back as 1878. Even
the more modern fortresses were not linked up
with each other by telegraph. The stock of
shells was inadequate, there was a shortage of
two million pairs of boots, the military wireless
installations were so inferior that when the

17 2

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

German station at Metz was working the French
station at Verdun had to retire from action.

All these shortcomings, important though they
were, faded into insignificance when compared
with the situation of the French artillery. In
their field-gun, the now famous " 75," the French
had a weapon which was greatly superior to the
German field - gun, but with heavy artillery
France was very badly provided. The German
guns numbered 3,370, while France only pos-
sessed 2,504. In engineering material the same
state of affliirs existed, and no money whatever
had been forthcoming for three years for bridging
requirements. Provision was being made to
remedy these defects ; thus, according to estimate,
by the end of 1915, 200 115-millimetre guns would
take the place of 84 guns of an obsolete pattern.
At the end of 1917, 200 howitzers were to have
strengthened the artillery. By the end of 1915
the stock of shells was to be brought to three
times the size of that which existed in 1906.
Old types of heavy field artillery were being
modernized, and a number of new types were
being tested.

These disclosures undoubtedly had an impor-
tant effect upon Austrian diplomacy, and Ger-
many saw with reason, in the preparations which
were being made to make up the ground lost, an
argument for striking at once while the work
of reorganization was still in progress.

18

THE MOMENT

The diplomatic effect of these disclosures in
the Senate was immediate. Two days before
they were made, on July II, 1914, the French
Consul-General at Budapest reported a distinct
improvement in the tone of the Hungarian Press.
The official newspapers in particular were adopt-
ing a more reasonable attitude, and, as the Consul
remarked, " Officially for a quarter of an hour
everything is for peace." The debate in the
Senate on French army defences took place on
July 13 and 14, and on the following day the
French Ambassador in Vienna informed his
Government that the Austro-Hungarian Press,
which is perhaps the most rigorously controlled
Press of the world in foreign affiiirs, represented
France and Russia as being unable to have their
say in European affairs owing to their military
disorganization. One important newspaper,
indeed, stated boldly : " The moment is still
favourable for us. If we do not decide upon
war now, the war we shall have to make in two
or three years at the latest will be begun in
much less propitious circumstances. Now the
initiative belongs to us." The coincidence of
all these arguments in favour of a German
attack only appeared after the blow had been
struck.

On July 25, when Germany was making her
first known preparations along the French
frontier, the whole attention of France was

19

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

given to the prospect of a duel between the pre-
siding Judge at the Caillaux trial and one of
his colleagues on the bench. The news of the
rupture of diplomatic relations between Austria
and Servia caused some little stir in circles where
foreign affairs were known to be possessed of
more than an academic interest, but the gravity
of the hour was completely lost to general view.
A remark made to me in the luncheon-room of
the Palais de Justice by a Socialist Deputy illus-
trated the general indiiFerence to the foreign
situation. He said : " The news from Vienna
looks bad. I am afraid that we Socialists may
not be able to hold our International Congress
there, and shall have to seek a home elsewhere."
In official circles there was, of course, none of
this blindness. They knew with whom and
what they had to deal. The visit of Baron von
Schoen, the German Ambassador, to the Foreign
Office on July 25, when he informed the French
Government, firstly, that Austria could not have
acted in any other way in her dealings with
Servia ; secondly, that the dispute must remain
localized between Vienna and Belgrade ; thirdly,
that any intervention would have the gravest
consequences, was recognized at once as being
a repetition of the Tangier and Agadir diplo-
macy ; and the despatches from the French
Ambassador in Berlin in 1913, since pubhshed
in the Yellow Book, had warned France that

20

THE MOMENT

from blackmail and bluiF Germany intended to
proceed to blackmail and action. In the Note re-
garding the strengthening of the German Army,
also published in the Yellow Book, they were in-
formed in what manner action would be taken,
and to what end. German diplomacy sought
throughout the last few days of peace which
remained to create between Russia and France
the feeling of aloofness which she at the same
time was endeavouring to manufacture between
France and Great Britain. The French Govern-
ment refused, however, to join the German
Government in making any representations to
St. Petersburg with a view to her abandonment
of Servia. Had they accepted the proposal,
they knew that it was doomed to failure unless
it was accompanied by German representations
to Vienna, and that its failure might have made
Russia appear responsible for any hostilities.

French diplomacy, once war had become in-
evitable, had to devote much of its energy to
proving to British public opinion the sincerity
of the French desire for peace. In order to do
this France made heavy sacrifices, and, indeed,
ran the risk of jeopardizing the success of her
whole plan of campaign. The French General
Staff had decided, in making its plans for a war
with Germany, that it would be better, in
accordance with French temperament, to take
the offensive from the start ; a plan which, in

21

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the event of success, would have had important
poKtical results in Germany, where initial victory
was considered to be absolutely necessary to
national unity. In spite of this plan to take
the offensive, when war had been forced upon
France the French Government, after prolonged
and anxious consideration, gave instructions that
the troops were to be kept eight miles from the
frontier, so as to avoid any possibility of the
guns going off by themselves.

They did this in order to convince British
opinion of their pacific intentions, and they
did it in spite of the knowledge that Ger-
many, thanks to the special measures of secret
mobilization provided by her legislation, had
stolen a four or five days' start ; in spite of the
knowledge that the troops of the Metz garrison,
strengthened by troops from the interior, had
moved up to battle positions within a stone's-
throw of the frontier posts ; that the fortresses
themselves had been placed in a state of de-
fence ; that trees which obstructed the field of
fire had been cut down, and entrenchment and
battery emplacements constructed and wire
entanglements strengthened. The 16th Army
Corps, a portion of the 8th from Treves and
Cologne, and the whole of the 15th from
Strasbourg, occupied strategic positions right
along the French frontier from Luxembourg
to Switzerland.

22

THE MOMENT

On July 30, when M. Abel Ferry, Under-
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was dis-
cussing this news with me at the Quai d'Orsay,
his telephone bell rang, and the Minister of War
informed him of the first overt acts of hostility,
of the seizure of French locomotives by the
German authorities, the cutting of the telegraph
wires, the tearing up of the permanent way at
several frontier stations, and the mounting of
quick-firing guns upon the frontier. I remarked
to him, " C'est la guerre," and even then he had
not abandoned hope, since he replied : " Je crois
que c'est la guerre." This news, taken in con-
junction with the diplomatic correspondence of
Belgium and of Russia, really left France no
other alternative but to proceed at once to mobi-
lization, which had, in fact, been delayed more for
diplomatic reasons than with any hope of saving
peace.

23

CHAPTER II

I.— A NATION IN ARMS

When the little slip of paper with the words,
" Ministry of War — Order of Mobilization —
Extremely Urgent — First Day of Mobilization,
Sunday, August 2," was posted throughout
France, it became immediately apparent how
superficial had been the evidence upon which
German diplomacy and the German Press had
proclaimed to the world the decadence of France.
Much has been said and written of the spirit in
which Frenchmen of all classes responded to their
country's call : too much cannot be said. All the
old shibboleths were swept away ; men who had
spent their lives in preaching peace and inter-
nationalism could not reach their depots fast
enough on their way to war and the defence of
their nation. In some ways one of the most
striking manifestations of this volteface was to be
seen in the paper of Gustav Herve, the old anti-
militarist. La Guerre Sociale, which after mobili-
zation appeared with an issue devoted entirely to
the letters of the members of the staff who were

24

A NATION IN ARMS

off to join their regiments. All those letters
burned with most ardent patriotism. Gustav
Herve himself volunteered for military service.
This general feeling was in no way due to excited
Jingoism. Without a doubt, the French felt that
they were entering the struggle in very favour-
able circumstances, with the support of Great
Britain and of Russia ; and, although they are
an essentially and intensely peace-loving people,
there was nevertheless a sentiment of relief.
They had been living for years under the German
menace, and now at last they were going to test
what lay behind it, and to test it with good
chance of success.

It is difficult to explain to a people unac-
quainted with the claims of universal military
service the tremendous message which was con-
veyed to the people of France by the small notice
of mobilization. Within less than three weeks
nearly every man fit to bear arms was taken from
his family and from his business. The railways
were given up almost exclusively to military
transport. The shortage of labour made itself
felt at once ; thousands of industrial establish-
ments came to a standstill ; newspapers which in
ordinary times appeared on six or eight pages
were reduced by lack of compositors and printers
to publishing news of the greatest event in
modern times on little sheets, in some cases
barely larger than a fly-sheet. Everywhere in

25

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the streets of the capital the shuttered shop-
windows bore a notice informing customers
that the estabhshment was closed, the pro-
prietor and all his staff having left to join the
colours.

The most noticeable outward sign of the change
in the streets of Paris was the disappearance on
the first day of mobilization of all the motor-
buses, which were taken off to act as meat-carriers
to the army. Practically the only vehicles to be
seen were taxicabs conveying reservists and their
friends up to the eastern and northern railway
stations. By the end of three weeks Paris
appeared to be drained of most of its male
population.

The mobilization worked smoothly and rapidly.
It was a period of excitement and of strain, which
aroused more commotion in the streets, more
tumult and shouting, in London and Berlin than
it did in Paris. The theatres and cafes were
closed at night ; there was none of the singing of
the Marseillaise by beautiful actresses, there was
none of the delirious enthusiasm with which Paris
in 1870 sped her troops on to disaster. Now and
again, it is true, little bands of youths paraded
almost deserted boulevards with the flags of the
Allies and those of the neutrals in whom the
politician of the pavement saw a future ally,
raising unheeded cries of " A Berlin !" The new
France had little doubt that it might reach Berlin,

26

A NATION IN ARMS

but it knew that the way would be long and the
cost of victory heavy.

If the men of the new France required no
stimulating excitement to send them on their
way, the women showed their spirit in the matter-
of-fact farewells they took of their menfolk.
There were troubled faces and wet eyes to be
seen everywhere, but the sorrow was controlled,
and the women did their utmost to make the
parting easy.

During the period of mobilization 1 motored
many hundreds of miles in the provinces, and met
with countless proofs that the provincial French-
man was in no way behind his Parisian brother.
Some of the forms which this zeal in the national
defence assumed were embarrassing. It had been
realized that on the outbreak of any war the
enemy from without, and even perhaps the
anarchist enemy from within, might endeavour
to impede the progress of mobilization, by blow-
ing up important railway bridges and damaging
other means of communication. The military,
of course, had taken their precautions against this
danger, and every important point along the rail-
way or the highroad was guarded by the elderly
troops of the Territorials, a class which does not
correspond to the Territorials at home, but con-
sists of middle-aged men who have arrived at the
end of their liability to military duty. In addition
to these official safeguards, there sprang up in

27

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

pretty nearly every village of the North and East
local committees composed of schoolmasters, the
mayor, and one of the village greybeards, who
unasked and unrewarded erected barricades with
embarrassing frequency along every road in the
country.

No village which respected itself had failed to
string two or three heavy farm carts across its
high street, where, lantern and antiquated fire-
alarm in hand, the schoolmaster or the mayor
kept a trembling watch, waiting for the all-pene-
trating German spy. One night the journey of
180 miles, which the car usually accomplishes in
some three and a half hours, took more than
double that time. Perfectly straight roads, devoid
of any side-roads running into them, had five or
six of these amateur barricades to stop progress.
The whole of France that night was looking for
motor-car No. 152 BB. It was conveying three
Germans and a supply of melinite varying from a
dozen pounds to as many tons ; they were dis-
guised as French officers ; they had tried to blow
up the Amiens viaduct ; they were masquerading
as nuns, and had stolen the French plans of
mobilization ; they were, in fact, doing everything
expected of the spy villain in the most sensational
novel.

All this amateur activity, although extremely
irksome to the innocent traveller, was an ad-
mirable sign of the temper of those left behind.

28

SUCCESS AND FAILURES

Every man determined that he would do what-
ever he could to keep order at home, while his
son was fighting on the frontier. They accepted
with marvellous stoicism the complete silence
which covered the early operations of the war.
France had indeed learnt the lesson which even
her best friends feared that she would never
learn — that of discipline. France had made up
her mind to trust her rulers, to put up with
silence, to support initial defeats along the
northern and the eastern frontier, to listen
unmoved to tales of Russian reverses, and to
wait with confidence, for she saw victory at
the end.

II.— SUCCESS AND FAILURES

The first victory of France over the traditions
of 1870 was seen in the quiet, resolute spirit
with which the outbreak of war was greeted.
That was a civil victory. Her first military
success, the smooth working of her mobilization,
showed what enormous progress had been made
since the days of appalling muddle which led to
the mislaying of army corps during the last
war with Prussia. The mobilization worked
well, but it was late. Therein lay German's
first victory. It was a victory of treacherous
secrecy ; it was the victory of autocracy over

29

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

democracy. With a submissive, firmly-ruled
people, Germany was able to gain a start, the
extent of which will not be known with any
accuracy for another thirty or forty years.
It certainly amounted to four, and perhaps it
amounted to five, days. Another triumph for
German treachery was gained by the onslaught
through Belgium. In spite of the repeated
warnings of her diplomats, France clung to the
plan of mobilization based on the campaign of
1870, which brought the main body of her
defences down upon the eastern frontier. The
German frontier was to be protected, not the
Belgian. Whether political reasons — namely,
the desire to influence German opinion by in-
flicting a decisive defeat upon the German troops
at the outset of the campaign — dictated this
decision, or whether too much reliance was
placed upon the staying powers of the de-
fences of Liege and Namur, cannot now be dis-
closed. It undoubtedly strengthened Germany's
hand.

The Germans had two enormous factors of
success upon their side. They had wanted war,
they had prepared for war ; they had chosen
the moment for it; and since they were the
aggressors they could reasonably hope to force
their own strategy upon their opponents. They
chose to attack through Belgium ; the defence
of Liege stayed them but a moment, and Namur

30

SUCCESS AND FAILURES

fell with a rapidity which may always remain
a mystery. The initial French deployment,
which had placed the First Army on the line
Belfort-Luneville, the Second from Luneville to
the Moselle, the Third between the Moselle and
the line Verdun Audun-le-Roman, the Fifth
northwards from there to the Belgian frontier,
and the Fourth in reserve in the country around
Commercy, had to be changed when Belgium
appealed for help.

The French Staff had taken into account the
possibility of two alternatives — that of a decisive
battle between the Vosges and the Moselle, or
that of a big engagement north of Verdun.
The invasion of Belgium and the rapid progress
of the Germans through that country forced
the French Staff, while attacking vigorously in
Upper Alsace with a view to retaining there as
many German troops as possible, to extend the
line held by the Second Army up to the Verdun
district, to thrust the Fourth Army (held in
reserve at Commercy) in between the Third and
the Fifth Army on the Meuse, and to push the
Fifth Army towards the north-west along the
Belgian frontier as far as Fourmies.

The operations in Alsace, conducted with great
vigour and success at the outset, led to the French
occupation of Mulhausen, which, however, owing
to faulty leadership and to the bad behaviour of
some of the southern French troops, had to be

31

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRON^

abandoned in defeat. These Alsace operations
were resumed under a new leader, but they did
not succeed for the moment (owing to the mag-
nificent method with which the Germans had
organized the defence of this section of the
fix)nt) in retaining any very important number
of German troops, and the enemy was enabled
to bring the fiill force of his blow to bear in the
first big battle of the war, the Battle of Mons-
CharleroL

On August 20 the modified concentration of
the French armies was effected, and the French
centre, consisting of two armies, and the left,
consisting of a third army strengthened by two
army corps, a corps of cavalry, reserve divisions,
and the British and Belgian armies, were ordered
to take the offensive, with a view to preventing
the seven or eight German army corps and four
cavalry divisions from extending to the wesL
The attack was made in circumstances which
warranted the French General-in-Chief in hoping
for \-ictory. He launched ten army corps upon
the centre, but, owing to factors which only the
test of war can reveal, what ought to have been
a \"ictory was turned into a defeat. The blame
for the failure of the AlHes is to be distributed
among all ranks. The men exposed themselves
in most foolhardy manner to fire ; the Reservist
officers showed by their company-leading that
they had forgotten many of the lessons of their

32

SUCCESS AND FAILURES

training ; battalions were launched across fire-
swept fields to attack impregnable positions ;
there were premature advances and premature
retreats. Many of the general officers showed
themselves incapable of holding their commands.
The attempt to crush the centre having failed,
there remained only the hope that on the left
matters would go better ; but as the French plan
had been to smash the German centre, and then
to fling every available man upon the German
left, with the first object unaccomplished there
was not much hope of achieving the second.
After sustaining heavy losses, the enemy suc-
ceeded in getting astride of the Sambre, and the
French left army two days later retreated under
the impression that the enemy was threatening
its right flank. The British Army was therefore
forced to follow suit or to risk being cut off and
annihilated.

The problem which faced General JofFre at
the close of his first general engagement in the
north was whether he should face the risk of
envelopment and annihilation of his defeated
troops along the northern frontier, or whether
by the prudent sacrifice of some of the richest
territory of France he should retire until he
could choose his own time and place for a
resumption of the offensive. He decided on the
latter course, and determined to carry it through
to the last margin of safety, to retreat almost to

33 3

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the walls of Paris, and during the retreat, under
cover of a series of counter-attacks delivered by
constantly turning upon the pursuing Germans
whenever opportunity arose, to effect the neces-
sary work of reorganization, so as to be able to
take the offensive with an army unbroken in
spirit, and with Generals more alive to the
requirements of modern strategy. During this
period there was a series of engagements which
terminated successfully for the French, one of
which was, indeed, so striking and complete as to
lead the General who had attained it to voice his
desire to stop the retreat and to turn his face
again towards the frontier. He was ordered, in
a telegram which, when published, will place on
record the voluntary nature of Joffre's retreat to
the Marne, to remain on the ground for six
hours so as to check the rapidity of the German
advance, and then to resume the retreat.

The extreme limit of the retreat was fixed by
General Joffre on September 1, on a line which
went through Bray and Nogent-sur-Seine, Arcis-
sur-Aube, Vitry le Francjois, and the region north
of Bar-le-Duc. On September 5 the factors of
success, of reorganization, and of position, desired
by the French General Staff for the resumption
of the general offensive, were found along the
Marne. The French left had occupied the line
Sezanne-Courchamps, and could no longer be
enveloped ; the French forces between the Seine

S4>

CAUSES OF VICTORY

and the Marne were linked up with the rest of
the French Army, and were protected on their
left by a new army composed of two army corps,
five reserve divisions, and a Moorish brigade.
" The hour has come," as General JofFre declared
in a message ordering the commanders of his
armies to take the offensive, " to advance at all
costs, and to die where you stand rather than
give way."

III.— CAUSES OF VICTORY

It is not within the province of this book to
give a detailed description of battles. That is a
task which can only be undertaken some years
hence by Staff historians. It is, however, pos-
sible to indicate some of the less obvious causes
for the success of the Allies on the Marne.
General Joffre, in the Battle of the Marne,
revealed himself as a superb strategist. The
manner in which the army commanders inter-
preted the wishes of the Generalissimo showed
that they understood that military discipline was
worthless unless it was accompanied by intel-
lectual discipline, that they had learnt the defini-
tion given by General Foch at the Ecole de
Guerre, when he said : " Discipline for a leader
does not mean the execution of orders received,
in so far as they seem suitable, just, reasonable,
or even possible. It means that you have entirely

35

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

grasped the ideas of the leader who has given the
order, and that you take every possible method
of satisfying him. DiscipUne does not mean
silence, abstention, only doing what appears to
you possible without compromising yourself. It
is not the practice of the art of avoiding responsi-
bilities. On the contrary, it is action in the
sense of orders received."

The armies, advancing step by step, moved in
complete unison, fitting in one to the other with
the machine-made precision of the teeth of a
pair of horse-clippers. There was none of the
bad handling of divisions and brigades which
brought about the reverses on the northern
frontier. The causes of that check had been
removed. A famous professor of the art of war
has told me that, in his opinion, the Germans
ought to have won through to Paris. He
attributes part of their failure to the surprises
which were constantly thrust upon them by the
ruthless justice with which General JofFre re-
moved any proved incompetent from his com-
mand. During the retreat from the north no
less than forty-three general officers were re-
moved from the posts which they had occupied
in the Battle of Charleroi. A further indica-
tion of the drastic manner in which General
JofFre changed his collaborators is to be found
in the fact that after the first six months of
the war the average age of Generals in com-

S6

CAUSES OF VICTORY

mand had been reduced by ten years. All who
were physically incapable of bearing the strain
of operations in the field, either through old age,
illness, or temperament, had to make way for
younger and better men. This delicate work
of " unsticking," as the French call the process
of getting rid of Generals, has been accomplished
with very little friction.

There have been one or two cases in which
the sufferers have not suffered gladly. There
has been the case of General Percin, to whom
the defence of Lille was for a moment entrusted.
General Percin has been shot for treason ; he
has been imprisoned for life in a fortress ; he has
a German wife who forged an order in his name ;
he forgot an urgent order he received, and left
it lying unheeded in his pocket for eight hours,
during which time Sir John French found no
support for his flank ; his wife purloined the
order while he was drunk or while he was asleep.
All these stories, as I can personally testify, have
no foundation, save in the fact that Lille was
not defended. History will determine if anyone
was at fault.

Any business man of ordinary strength and
will can get rid of an incompetent manager ; but
it takes a man of unusual quality to discover the
proper substitute. General JofFre is a judge of
character ; discernment is, indeed, one of his
most shining virtues. He does not proceed

37

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

blindly on the ** too-old -at-forty " principle. He
is himself a proof that many a good tune is
played on an old fiddle. Most of the men he
has appointed are very young. Some who are
at the head of divisions, or even army corps,
to-day, were Colonels when the war began.
Others have been brought from old-age retire-
ment to positions of infinite honour and re-
sponsibility. At the outset of the war nearly all
the Generals were well over sixty years of age ;
six months afterwards there were many army
corps commanders below fifty. There remain,
however, one or two shining exceptions to this
rule of youth.

It is a matter of the utmost importance that
an army should know by whom the army it
opposes is led. The Generals on the other side
have been closely studied in the time of peace.
Their training and their military record are
known down to the last detail. With these
data to go on, the Staffs are able, if they possess
the psychological sense, to estimate with some
degree of accuracy what nature of policy would
be adopted by the opposing General in given
circumstances. They are or should be able, if
there are two alternatives open to an army — the
one, perhaps, requiring a dashing policy of risk,
the liberal use of cavalry and the white arm;
the other requiring caution, scientific use of
artillery, the methodical preparation of attack —

38

CAUSES OF VICTORY

to judge by the character of the opponent which
of the two courses he is most likely to adopt.
Thus, the first alternative would probably be
taken by the Southerner who had come from
the cavalry, whose military writings showed
imagination and boldness of thought ; the second
would be preferred by the Northerner, the
gunner and the mathematician.

The Germans had two factors to reckon with
during the period of the Marne, which did not
enter, and could not have entered, into their
calculations. At one section of their line they
had before them an army demoralized by retreat,
whose officers had the greatest difficulty in pre-
serving that most necessary military virtue —
optimism. They had been pressed hard by the
enemy throughout their retreat. Forced marches
had availed them but little. After each terrific
effort on the road they hoped to regain for them-
selves time to breathe, to re-form, and to re-
cover; but always a very few hours after the
bivouac the Germans, rushed up by motor trans-
port, were again at them. One of the officers
of this army admitted to me that at one moment
most of them thought that the day of irretriev-
able disasters had come again, and that memories
of the defeats of 1870 crowded their days and
their nights.

At six o'clock one evening the General in
command was relieved of his post. The new

39

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

General, an alert, vigorous officer, whose service
had been done with the quick-stepping Chasseurs,
issued an army order resembling a four-line whip
in its business-like brevity. He spent the night
inspiring his staff with renewed courage, and he
fanned the dying embers of hope among his men
with such success that the next day they turned
upon their pursuers, and delivered a smashing
blow upon a General who was quite justified in
feeling that Fate had indeed played an unex-
pected and a scurvy trick upon him. They had
been faced with a surprise in the mentality of
the new General.

The fallacy that the French could never
recover from reverses fell to the ground. The
falsity of this idea was further demonstrated
during the Marne period by all the armies
engaged, but in particular by that of General
Foch, which occupied the portion of the centre
from Sezanne to Mailly. General Foch on the
Marne put into practice his own teaching at the
Ecole de Guerre — that " a battle won is a battle
in which one will not admit one is vanquished."

The French centre was formed by a new army,
the organization of which was completed on
August 29, and by that of General Foch, which
had fought throughout the retreat from Belgian
Luxembourg. The first held the line south of
Humbauville Chateau — Beauchamp — Bigincourt
— Maurupt le Montoy. The German right having

40

CAUSES OF VICTORY

been stopped, and the enemy's attempted en-
veloping movement stayed, the invader en-
deavoured during three days of ferocious fighting
to batter in the French centre west and east of
Fere Champenoise. The attempt began on Sep-
tember 7, and by the following day its partial
success was shown in the retirement of the right
wing of the new army on the centre. The next
day that success was emphasized, and the French
withdrew to the south of Gourgancon, a move-
ment followed by the other army corps, which
retired on AUemant and Connantre. General
Foch on three consecutive days was " defeated,"
but he refused to admit it by taking the offensive
after each " retreat." After retiring at six o'clock
in the morning of the 9th, he ordered a general
offensive on the same day, and his men, who had
known practically nothing but retreat since the
outbreak of the war, showed that their spirit was
unaffected by successfully resisting a terrific
attack of the Germans on the left, and then,
profiting by the enemy's mistake, by taking the
Guards Corps in flank and delivering a smashing
blow, which forced the Germans to a precipitate
and disorderly retreat. The German General
Staff may well be pardoned for having under-
estimated the recuperative power of the French
soldier. It was greater than they had foreseen,
and their whole plan of battle was brought to
naught by it.

41

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

There was another factor of still greater
surprise in the leadership of the new army — the
Sixth — which along the Ourcq played such a
decisive part at the critical moment of the battle.
For the command of this new army General
JofFre went, not to youth, but to age. General
Maunoury, who received this all-important ap-
pointment, was a man who might have expected
that his fighting days were over. After a steady
career, distinguished by no particularly brilliant
service, he had reached the post of Military
Governor of Paris, usually given to soldiers
before their retirement, years before war broke
out, and in due course retired. He was brought
from that retirement to play a leading part in
the battle which in all probability has changed
the face of Europe. The possibility of his ap-
pearance could not have entered into German
calculations ; and even had they known of it,
there was nothing to show them that General
Maunoury would be capable of putting up the
superb and dogged fighting of the Ourcq. His
action and that of General Foch gave the British
Army its chance, for by their vigour the Germans
were forced to bring heavy reinforcements from
the south to the north, and in doing so the
enemy exposed his left to the attacks of the
British Army, which immediately faced north-
wards, together with the French armies which
extended beyond the English lines to the right.

42

CAUSES OF VICTORY

It was this British attack which finally clinched
the victory and forced the retreat along the
whole line.

With the arrival of the retreating Germans on
their carefully prepared positions on the Aisne,
the first signs of the general siege war that was
to follow became apparent. After a period of
comparative inaction the Germans again resorted
to their favourite manoeuvre of outflanking the
AlUes' left. This development had been fore-
seen, and preparations had been made to meet it.
The two armies started off like runners from the
tape in a neck-to-neck race northwards. In
spite of the fact that the Germans, by their
concentric position, were favoured in the speed
of their transports, the French and the British
arrived in time. Fighting all the way up the
Oise, they slipped day by day farther northwards.
The operation brought nearly nineteen new
German army corps into the fighting. Three
fresh French army corps were formed on the
other side, and the British Army from the Aisne
and the Belgian Army from Antwerp were
transported into the northern zone. The Ger
man flanking movement stopped only when it
reached the sea, and then began the terrific
attempt of the enemy to break through in the
neighbourhood of Ypres and Armentieres.

43

CHAPTER III

I.— THE FRENCH AT YPRES

My first official visit to the Allies' line took place
at the end of November, when the German effort
to break through had been beaten down, when
the siege warfare had definitely begun. Save in
a few places on the eastern frontier, there was
hardly a break in the ditch dug by French and
Germans from the North Sea to Switzerland.

At the headquarters of General Foch, the
operations, which were just dying away in a final
blaze of heavy artillery fire, were explained to me
by officers of the Staff. The German attack in
Flanders was intended to retrieve the losses on
the Marne, to cut the British Army from its base,
to force it back upon Havre, or even a westerly
port, for its communication with England, and to
give the Germans a base on the Channel itself
for submarine and aerial operations. The signifi-
cance which they themselves gave to the fight-
ing emphasizes the importance of the defeat they
suffered. Everything had been done to encourage
the men to the expenditure of their last effort.

44

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

The Crown Prince of Bavaria appealed to his
troops "to make the decisive effort against the
French left," and *' to settle thus the fate of the
great battle, which has lasted for weeks." General
von Deimling issued an order declaring the
thrust upon Ypres to be of decisive importance.
The Emperor himself arrived behind the lines to
encourage his men by his presence, and to wait,
as he waited in vain at the gate of Nancy, to ride
in triumph into Ypres, the capital of what was
left of Belgium. They aimed, in fact, at nothing
less than a decision in the west before the hard-
ships of winter set in, which would enable them
to deal radically with the unsatisfactory position
of affairs in Poland.

The first effort was directed to the north of
Ypres, and particularly upon Dixmude. The
French forces at this point were spun out to
dangerous thinness. The Belgian Army, after
its withdrawal from Antwerp, was unable to
make any great effort for the moment. In order
to overwhelm the forces of the Allies, the enemy
had collected no less than four cavalry corps, with
fifteen army corps under the orders of Prince
Rupert of Bavaria, General von Fabeck, General
von Deimling, and the Duke of Wiirtemberg ;
while from the south the British Army, the armies
of General Maudhuy and General Castelnau,
were being moved as rapidly as rails and motor
transport could shift them. The duty of holding

46

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the Germans back was placed in the hands of
a couple of cavalry corps in the neighbourhood
of Ypres and Roulers. Farther to the north,
Nieuport was defended by General Grosetti,
Dixmude was protected by Admiral Ronarc'h
with 7,000 marines. These two divisions, fight-
ing in every circumstance of discomfort, suc-
ceeded by dogged persistency in keeping two
German army corps at bay for several weeks.
This defence frustrated the attack along the coast,
which had as its object the capture of Dunkirk ;
it gave the Allies time to move their armies north-
ward, so as to meet the second stage of the battle
for Calais, which began with the onslaught on
Ypres.

The Battle of the Yser and the Battle of
Ypres- Arm entieres really constituted one vast
battle of the north. This fighting has come to
be regarded as almost exclusively British. We
had more men engaged and suffered greater
casualties than we have done at any previous time
in our history. In the same fighting to the north
of Ypres the French lost three times as heavily
as we did. They fought with the spirit of the
old revolutionary soldiers, and no distinction
whatever can be drawn between the courage of
commanders and that of the men.

In the ruined village of Pervyse I was able
faintly to appreciate the calm, genial bravery
which has made of General Grosetti a popular

46

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

hero in the army. General Grosetti is a man of
almost phenomenal girth, and he has a strong
objection to walking or standing. There are
countless anecdotes about his behaviour under
fire. On one occasion he and his staff while
examining a piece of the country were seen by
the enemy, who at once started shelling them.
General Grosetti, who was sitting on the camp-
stool he had brought with him, seemed to be quite
oblivious of what was occurring, and when one of
his staff suggested that, as they had seen all they
need see, it was running a useless risk to remain
in the open, General Grosetti remarked that he
would rather be killed by shrapnel than start
walking again for another five minutes. At the
end of the five minutes his campstool was folded
up, and the General strolled back to cover.

At Pervyse during the rush towards Nieuport
he was also seen seated, this time in an armchair.
The village was being smashed by heavy explo-
sive shell, shrapnel was scattering all over its
streets, and the enemy had chosen the moment
for bombardment with great good - luck, for
through the village w^ere marching important
bodies of troops. To pass through shell-fire of
the intensity directed upon Pervyse required a
very high collective courage. The place was
pounded to pieces. It exists now practically only
in geography. The church is a ruined shell. The
graves in the churchyard have been torn open by

47

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

"marmites." The central square of the village
is a rubble heap of brick and plaster, blackened
here and there by the flames of the incendiary
bomb ; and in the middle of it, opposite the
churchyard, sat General Grosetti in his chair for
two hours, shouting jesting words of encourage-
ment to the troops as they passed on towards the
firing line.

The encouragement of heroic example during
this epic fighting in the north is, however, by no
means confined to officers. There is the case of
the French private, a reservist and a peaceful
bourgeois, w^ho for many years had had no other
care in life but to keep the zinc counter of his
bar near the Gare du Nord in Paris well polished
and well patronized. This man responded to a
•all for volunteers in the dangerous work of
trench scouting, went off in the darkness, and
returned mortally wounded, but with sufficient
strength left to ask for something to be given to
him so that he might live to make his report.
There is the case of the French prisoner who,
with other companions in captivity, was being
driven in front of a German attacking party
towards the trenches. The French, seeing their
own men advancing, held their fire, until one of
the prisoners shouted out : " Tirez, Nom de Dieu,
ce sont les Boches !" Collective heroism was
shown in this splendid chapter of the war by the
lowest scum of the French population, by the

48

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

apaches and other criminals who, as part of their
sentence, have to serve their time with the
dreaded disciphnary battahons in Northern
Africa. These battalions are formed by a very
thorough set of ruffians. " Les Joyeux," as they
are ironically called, were ordered to storm an
entrenched and entangled position in front of
them at Nacelle. They had to cross the appalling,
clogging mud of Flanders. They had to cut
their way through barbed wire woven into the
most intricate of patterns. Their advance was
continually being checked by the obstacles of
Nature and of the enemy's engineers, and all the
time the enemy's batteries were pouring shrapnel
over them and there was a withering fire from
the trenches. Men drawn from a better class,
animated by higher ideals, might well have been
pardoned for faltering in the face of the terrific
fire. In spite of their toughness and their dis-
cipline, " Les Joyeux " paused for a moment
irresolute ; then one of them, wiping out all his
past record with a song, began the Marseillaise.
The magic music fired all his companions ; they
laboured on, and captured an almost impregnable
position.

The arrival of reinforcements, after the heroic
resistance of General Grossetti and Admiral
Ronarc'h had broken the coastal attack upon
Calais, by no means deprived the Allies of
further opportunity of testing to the uttermost

49 4

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the resisting and enduring powers of their
troops.

The front then consisted of a straight line from
the North Sea at Nieuport down to Bixschoote,
and it then bulged for 12 kilometres to the east
of Ypres, until it continued the straight line
from St. Eloi to the south. This line was not
dictated by any reasons of strategy. The British
had been brought to a standstill by superior
numbers in their advance from Ypres towards
Roulers. They had been obliged to evacuate
Zandvorde,Gheluvelt, Messines, and Wytschaete,
and the line had been hammered into a shape
which was extremely difficult to defend. The
bulge to the east of Ypres gave the enemy an
opportunity of cutting in vigorously at the two
points of the semicircle at Bixschoote and St.
Eloi, and of nipping in to the rear of the forces
operating within the semicircle. Nevertheless,
in spite of the difficulties of that line, it was
defended with the most superb spirit and
success.

Ypres was the last big town left to Belgium.
Although fallen from its ancient burgher state,
although much of the still flourishing cloth trade
had been captured by Roubaix, Tourcoing, and
Lille, it was still the capital of Southern Flanders.
To-day it is still the capital of free Belgium. Its
retention by the Allies is the sign that the old
spirit of obstinacy which drove the Spanish down

50

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

from Flanders still walks the world, that the
Belgians, beaten and cruelly ransomed for the
neutrality imposed upon her by Europe, are still
as dogged as their forefathers. The safeguarding
of Ypres was considered necessary as an earnest
of the Allies' intention to win back Belgium.
The intention of the German Emperor to pro-
claim the annexation of Belgium at Ypres had
been heralded abroad. This was a moment of
pride which his troops were unable to win for
him, close though they came to victory. At one
time they had succeeded in piercing the iron hoop
at a small place almost directly south of Ypres,
at Zillebeke. It was during the days when the
line was critically thin, when reserves were a
luxury only remembered from manoeuvres. A
regiment had carried an important portion of the
breastworks and trenches, supports were hurry-
ing up behind it to bore through the gap, and it
looked as though the whole German flood, widen-
ing the hole already made, might succeed in
breaking in the dyke and flooding the country.

Brigadier-General Moussy arrived at Zillebeke
while the German attack was still being pushed
through. His urgent appeals that support
should be given him from neighbouring regi-
ments met with the reply that they were using
their last reserves in the firing line themselves,
and could not spare a single man. As a forlorn
hope, the General sent off the corporal of his

51

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

escort with instructions to bring every indi-
vidual he could find unoccupied in the rear.
The corporal returned with a force of some 250
men, some of whom were road-menders, some
of them cooks, some belonging to the cavalry,
some to the infantry, others were transport-
drivers. General Moussy added to this strange
ready-made regiment the sixty-five men of his
escort of cuirassiers, and led by him, with his
corporal as lieutenant, this regiment of camp-
followers and dismounted cuirassiers had the
impudence to charge straight into the flank of
the German regiment which had pierced the
line. The very appearance of their assailants
may have had something to do with the con-
fusion caused in the victorious German ranks.
The desperate nature of the attack, the know-
ledge of each man that, although in this anony-
mous war he might gain no glory in the event
of triumph, he would certainly in the event of
defeat gain death, gave to their onslaught a dash
and fury which the Germans, flushed though
they were with the excitement of victory, could
not withstand.

What the Germans attempted to do to the
south of Ypres, at St. Eloi and Zillebeke, they
tried to accomplish with even greater deter-
mination at Bixschoote, the northern salient of
the line. The village of Bixschoote is now
"neutral." It has been occupied by hundreds

52

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

of French and German soldiers for many
months. There they observe the neutrahty of
death. From the French hne you can see the
gaunt ribs of the roofs. Here and there a red
tile has survived the successive bombardments.
The village was taken and retaken time after
time. The trees around are scarred and shat-
tered by the fire, the remaining walls of the
houses are spattered and pitted with bullet and
shrapnel, and the streets are choked up with the
dead. Here the situation was even more critical
than to the south of Ypres, for through the
town lay the last communications of the Ypres
forces with the rest of the army, the Germans
commanding with their fire the bridges over
the Ypres Canal. The ferocity of the German
attack and the splendour of the French defence
are testified by the fact that in one day at this
one little spot upon the map three entire German
regiments were wiped out. The remaining regi-
ment of the attacking division was annihilated
on the next day.

The German effort at St. Eloi and Bixschoote
ended on November 15 or 16. The human dyke
opposed to their progress there had been as
effective an obstacle as the water defences which
eked out the strength of Grosetti's and Ronarc'h's
troops to the north of Ypres. The road along
the coast was barred, and the attempt to create
one by a diversion via Ypres had ended in

53

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

defeat. In the Battle of Ypres alone the German
losses must have amounted to over 150,000 men.
During three weeks of battle over 40,000 German
corpses were found upon the field. Even the
German military mind had to refrain from
further sacrifice. The argument of artillery and
concentrated shell-fire proved itself sound here
during the Battle of Ypres, as it did in a still
greater degree later on in the engagement at
Neuve Chapelle. Upon the restricted front of
the struggle the Allies had crowded nearly 300
guns, whose shells shattered and slaughtered
the German troops as they advanced in their
favourite massed formation to the attack. The
defeat they had sustained was decisive ; or, in
other words, the German General Staff had
been unable to realize its aims, even though
upon the attaining of them they spent lavishly
in human lives. The Allies had obtained all
that they could hope for — the strength to repel
the colossal battering their thin line received,
and the endurance to remain where they had
dropped in the mud of Flanders, at some points
where they had advanced a few kilometres, at
others where the line had yielded and sagged,
presenting a concave formation to the enemy.

There, where their tired troops had first
feverishly thrown up a little mud barrier with
their trenching tools, their victory gave them
the time, while their spirit gave them the

54

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

strength, to dig ever deeper into the Flanders
clay, to sink ever deeper into the mud, until the
regular period of trench or siege warfare began,
by which time they had become rooted in the
soil they had so well defended. What happened
in Flanders had occurred practically along the
whole immense front. No Staff previsions, no
military science, no genius, selected the line of
trench ; it was hammered out between the two
opposing armies. In the fields where they
dropped in retirement or in advance, to push
home the advantage or to stem the retreat, the
men remained, having accidentally discovered
their winter-quarters. There is no more curious
indication of the spirit in which this war is
waged than is to be found in the tacit refusal
of Generals in command, of Staff officers, regi-
mental officers, and the men themselves, to give
up even the most unwholesome line of country
for a position slightly to the rear, but from the
point of view of comfort or of strategy infinitely
preferable. The armies on both sides had come
to the bulldog grip, and neither would yield up
an inch of what he had.

Broadly speaking, the northern section of the
front by the end of November, when my visits
to the lines began, extended from Nieuport,
through Dixmude, along the Furnes Canal to
Boekinghe ; then in a semicircle round Ypres to
St. Eloi ; from St. Eloi to the west of Wyts-

55

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

chaete ; then almost due south, to the west of
Messines, along the fringe of Ploegsteert Wood ;
south to the east of Armentieres ; thence in a
south - westerly direction along the river des
Layes, to the west of Neuve Chapelle, turning
due south in the neighbourhood of Richebourg
TAvoue, and cutting across the railway from
Bethune to La Bassee, through Cuinchy ; thence
in a general southerly direction to the north-east
of Compiegne. This northern section of the line
is destined to replace the field of Waterloo as the
spot of pilgrimage for all Britons. There is much
mud there, but still more glory.

The lines which circumstances forced upon the
Allies in this portion of the front defended a
country as rich in associations as it was devoid
of amenities. The Royal Scots, as their Colonel
informed me, as the windows of the regimental
head-quarters resonantly shook with the con-
cussion of a neighbouring battery, is the oldest
regiment in the army. They have fought three
times in their history over the same fields of mud
and clay, which they have learnt to hate in this
campaign. They were fighting for France then
as a mercenary body, and under somewhat dif-
ferent political conditions. It was at a later
period, during the wars of the Great Duke, who
gave to France its most splendid marching song,
" Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre," that our army,
up till then presumably composed of mealy-

56

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

mouthed pietists, learnt to swear. It certainly
was an admirable school. It was there, on the
hill which is crowned by Cassel, that the Duke
of York, having marched his men up the hill,
could find nothing better to do with them, or
nothing worse, than to march them down again.
It may well have been at the moment when his
army again wallowed in the plain that our
soldiers acquired their historic fluency of lan-
guage.

The Duke of York's action has always been a
puzzle to schoolboys and to soldiers. Now that
our army has again become acquainted with
French Flanders the mystery is deeper than ever.
There are very few hills in Flanders. There is
the height of Cassel, there is the Mountain of the
Cats, there is the hill of Kemmel, each of which
rises like a miniature Mount Sinai above the
flood of mud which covers the flat plains below.
They command a view over the most cut-up
country in the world. The map of Flanders is a
tangled and intricate mass of road, canal, railway,
ditch, and dyke. It is dotted so closely with
houses that the highroads in many places form
one long, continuous village street. Here and
there a church-tower rises above the red-roofed
collection of farmhouses. Here and there is a
cluster of tall factory chimneys or the high, gaunt
structure of pithead machinery, the bold pyramid
outline of a black slag heap, the rounded contour

57

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

of a huge store of beet. The whole countryside,
with its occasional coal-mines, its jute factories,
its sugar factories, its canals, railways, and roads,
seems to have become the vast western suburb of
the city of Lille, with Armentieres and Ypres
playing the role occupied by Tourcoing and
Roubaix on the north-east of the great indus-
trial city of France.

When I first saw Ypres, it was at the end of a
dark November day. We had been labouring
along the slippery, muddy causeway, turning off
every now and again in order to avoid a portion
of the road rather too much in view of the
enemy. We had been stopped for about twenty
minutes by the usual mishap of the road. Our
little convoy of motor-cars, in attempting to pass
a battery of horse artillery moving round to
another position, had slipped off the tightrope
of causeway into the four- foot-deep canal of mud
which ran along on either side. While, with the
help of a couple of artillery horses, our car was
being dragged out, the enemy's shells started
bursting a couple of hundred yards away to our
right, and the bright, rose-coloured flame which
flashed from the heart of the green fumes of the
bursting shells burned more brightly against the
grey lowering sky than it had done half an hour
before, when, gazing through the loophole of a
trench, we had seen what war looks like six days
out of seven. The short November day was

58

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

drawing rapidly in, and it was under cover of
darkness that we entered Ypres in a jumble of
ammunition and supply carts which had awaited
the night before moving through the shell-
exposed entrance to the town.

In August last this black, grave-like city was
the happy home of 18,000 prosperous and indus-
trious men and women, who are now scattered
as ruined refugees throughout France and
England. In November already but few re-
mained. Passing along the pitch-dark streets,
with our footfalls arousing echoes where but a
few months before there had been the jostling
bustle of the Flemish burgher life, we heard an
occasional muffled voice — even the cry of a
fretful child coming from behind an iron-
shuttered window or from the vent of a cellar.
The railway-station had been reduced to an
irregular scaffolding of twisted iron. In the
square in front of it lay the water-filled crater
of a Jack Johnson. The streets leading from it
were marked only by the fa9ade of houses, the
interior of which had been smashed to pulp, or
by mounds of rubble, where even the walls had
been battered to the ground.

In some places it appeared as though a
gigantic battering-ram had been thrust right
through the town. Off the Rue du Buerre there
was one new avenue opened up by shell-fire,
with a completeness of destruction which would

59

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

have been envied by the housebreakers who
made the path of Kingsway. There all semblance
of building was absent. This section of the
town had been laid so low that it looked as
though scarcely one brick remained sticking to
another. This devil's work represented the ruin
of replaceable things. The vanished houses,
although they represented home to their scat-
tered occupants, possessed no gesthetic value save
that of association. Man's happiness cannot
reside in the banal red-brick and red-tile dwell-
ing of Flanders. But in Flanders more, perhaps,
than in any other part of Northern Europe they
have had a race of master-builders who have
known how to embody in the high-reared arch
and the massive open beam the traditions,
history, and ideals, of a race. All such edifices
— and at Ypres they were many — are ruined for
ever. At any rate until the last sustained
bombardment of Rheims in February, the cathe-
dral there might almost have been described
as " restored " in comparison with the havoc
wrought at Ypres.

The Cloth Hall in its architecture had much
of the roomy comfort of the fat Flemish
merchant, blended with much of the delicacy
and grace of the Spaniards whom these same
full-bellied traders threw out of Flanders. In
its wide hall, the walls of which glowed with
the colour of frescoes underneath its high -flung

60

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

vault, the modern Flemish cloth merchant in
July last strolled up and down discussing
markets, the price of wool, the drought in
Australia, and its effect in Flanders. Out in
the square in front, under the shade of their
wide canvas -topped stalls, the women of Rem-
brandt clacked gossip when they were not
selling ginger-nuts to children, butter to house-
wives, or ribbons to the beauties from the
villages around. — The Cloth Hall of Ypres is
blasted and scorched, the square in front is
black and empty, and in its centre yawns a pit
where a heavy German shell, breaking its way
through the cobbles in the earth, struck and
blew open the great sewer of the town.

I have been to Ypres twice since the war
began. My first visit, at night, showed me the
scarred ribs of the Cloth Hall, with the moon-
light occasionally glancing through the empty
arched windows, ^with the same effect of mystery
and horror produced by the white, sightless eyes
of a man. Even amidst this desolation there
were signs of life. There were several homeless,
hungry dogs snuffling along the streets in
search of food on the Grande Place, there were
the two lights of a motor-car belonging to the
Anglo-Belgian ambulance, who were removing
from the town those who, bedridden from old
age or infirmity, had been left behind when the
great exodus began. As I passed before the

61

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

shattered fabric of the cathedral I saw far into
the interior of the ruin, as the massive gates had
been charred to cinders, and high up above the
aisle there glowed a soft red light.

Bombardment is the most brutal of weapons,
but at times it has a most singular discernment.
In the Argonne, in the district where everything
had been laid waste, where the villages looked
as though some infuriated mammoth had
stamped upon them in a frenzied rage, I have
seen intact among the ruins the white statue of
Our Lady of Sorrows. Before the flame-
darkened front of Rheims Cathedral the gallant
figure of Joan of Arc remains astride its horse,
defying the enemies of France. The dull, soft
light within the aisle of the ruined Cathedral of
Ypres made me wonder whether here again the
shells had been tactful, whether the altar light,
lovingly kept aflame through centuries, had
been spared. Clambering over the debris which
littered the threshold of the church, climbing
over the first mound of fallen bell, broken glass
and splintered statue, I was confronted, not by
the veilleuse, but by another heap of masonry
and timber, the point of which was still alive
and glowing with the fire started by the incen-
diary shells which on that night were being
rained upon the town.

I was at Ypres again four months later, and
by daylight gained a more detailed appreciation

62

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

of the havoc that has been wrought there. The
fa9ade of the Cloth Hall, which when I had last
seen it remained more or less unharmed, had
two huge circular holes cut upon it, as though
with a gigantic compass. In every corner of the
town fresh devastation had been wrought, more
vistas of destruction opened up. A high wind
now at Ypres is able to complete the work that
the Germans had begun, and every now and
again the tottering walls of a wrecked building
crash down into the street at the push of the
breeze.

If Manchester and the men and women who
get their living there in the deft weaving of
cloth could picture their city possessed, in addi-
tion to its wealth, of the cloistered beauty of
Canterbury, they would gain some idea of what
Ypres was. If they could see Ypres as it is to-
day, they would realize the lesson which all
Continental nations have learnt in the bitter
school of experience — that no price is too heavy,
no effort or sacrifice too great, if by the glad
giving of them the entrance of the invader can
be barred. This country of Flanders is one the
fate of which should appeal more especially to
the textile workers and miners of England,
Scotland, and Wales.

Armentieres, the other town of importance in
this northern front, has its affinity in Dundee,
for here the Dundee factory hand will be able to

63

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

find many an empty bleaching-tub, many a
drying-room grown cold, and a weaving-room
stilled into non-activity by war. Some, it is
true, are bustling with life, but the tubs are
bleaching Tommies and not jute, the drying-
rooms are drying khaki, and in the weaving-
rooms there is the sound of the wringer and the
mangle, and not the click of the shuttle.

Jute, sugar, and coal, have been replaced by
the killed and the wounded as the chief products
of Flanders. It is no longer the smoke of the
factory, but the fumes of the shell, which hang
about the air. The chief characteristic of the
countryside has ceased to be its bustling activity.
The crack of the carter's whip has been replaced
by the buzz of motor transport. The digging of
trenches has taken the place of the tilling of the
soil. The jute sacks no longer serve to carry
the produce of the sugar factory to distant
markets. They are now filled with earth, and
build up the day's dilapidations in the trenches.
War has become the great industry of Flanders,
and a very flourishing industry it is. It has a
master way with it which in time of peace
would fill the breast of every Government with
envy. It builds new local railways in a week
for which rural councils and deputies have fought
in vain for years in Parliament. It has a wealth
of labour at its disposal for the making of new
roads, for the execution of vast works of excava-

64

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

tion, and the signs of its activity have scarred
almost indelible marks on the earth's surface.

In that book of rattling sea-adventure, " Tom
Cringle's Log," there is a passage in which the
hero describes the fortifications of Hamburg, in
which he says :

" It surprised me very much, after having
repeatedly heard of the great strength of Ham-
burg, to look out on the mound of green turf
that constituted its chief defence. It is all true
that there was a deep ditch and glacis beyond ;
but there was no covered way, and both the
scarp and counterscarp were simple earthen em-
bankments ; so that had the ditch been filled with
fascines, there was no wall to face the attacking
force after crossing it — nothing but a green
mound, precipitous enough certainly, and
crowned with a low parapet of masonry, and
bristling with batteries about halfway down, so
that the muzzles of the guns were flush with the
neighbouring country beyond the ditch. Still,
there was wanting, to my imagination, the
strength of the high perpendicular wall, with its
gaping embrasures and frowning cannon. All
this time it never occurred to me that to breach
such a defence as that we looked upon was im-
possible. You might have plumped your shot
into it until you had converted it into an iron-
mine, but no chasm could have been forced in it

65 5

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

by all the artillery in Europe ; so that battering
in breach was entirely out of the question, and
this, in truth, constituted the great strength of
the place."

What the eye of that simple sailor, Tom
Cringle, perceived at Hamburg in 1813 was
overlooked utterly by the great fortification
engineers, such as Brialmont and Vauban, until
Liege was falling, until the heavy German shell,
rending, tearing, and scattering, the concrete and
steel of the forts, and converting the fragments
into so many pieces of shrapnel, made defence
impossible save in the very type of earthwork
which Tom Cringle saw and admired at Ham-
burg a hundred years earlier. What had been
forgotten in the art of fortification was overlooked
or scorned in the science of field fighting. The
old lessons of the Crimea had faded from
memory, and, although entrenching and digging
have always formed part of a soldier's training,
the lesson of trench warfare taught in the long
period during which Japanese and Russian re-
mained at deadlock outside Port Arthur was
not sufficiently grasped by the moulders of mili-
tary thought in Europe.

To the man in the street the trench came
completely as a surprise. He pictured it, perhaps,
as a ditch or a parapet some 2 or 3 feet in height,
behind which kneeling men blazed away at their

66

THE FRENCH AT YPRES

opponents' heads. He may have thought of
rifle-pits or of breastworks, but the possibility of
a hne of highly organized and deeply delved field
defences stretching from frontier to frontier, from
the sea to the gorges of the Jura, defying all
attempt at manoeuvre, forbidding all hope of a
flanking movement, was a possibility which
perhaps many a military man, together with the
man in the street, had failed to realize. *' Peace,
Entrenchment, and Reform," will undoubtedly be
the rallying cry of patriots in every country at
the conclusion of this war. It is by the spade
and the sap that defence and offence are effected,
and there can be no more welcome addition to
the British Army than that which will be made
by the Navvies' Battalion. The number of pick-
axes, spades, and builders' tools of every sort,
which are issued day by day from the Royal
Engineers' park behind our lines would stagger
the chief storekeeper of Cubitt, Carmichael,
John Allen, or any other of our big building
contractors.

The mansions which these pickaxes and shovels
go to build cannot be described as the dwellings of
the blest. Even the most optimistic auctioneer's
clerk would find a difficulty in steeling himself
to describe them as eligible residences. They are
by no means free from damp, their drainage
system would scarcely meet the requirements of
the pubhc officer of health, they are draughty,

67

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

and in some cases by no means in a good state of
repair. But when it is remembered that the
barracks of our armies in Flanders are sunk some
6 or 7 feet below the mud-level, the success of
the enterprise and ingenuity of the builders are
seen to be wonderfully complete. No man can
feel quite happy when he spends his night propped
up between two walls of clay, the damp of which
runs in a broken rivulet through the wire netting
or twig hurdling with which the earth is kept
from collapse, and with his feet resting on the top
of an upturned bucket, so that he may be raised
above the 2 or 3 feet of mud which constitute
the basement of his dwelling. A bundle of straw
scattered on the rough boarding of a dug-out is
but a poor substitute for the nice freshness of
white sheets, the cosy warmth of woollen blankets.
The savoury stews of the field-kitchen, the crisp
fatness of army bacon, the succulent juices of
excellent meat, have but a faint echo in the
occasional cup of hot soup or coffee which the
trench brazier gives to the men. But these dis-
comforts and privations are as nothing com-
pared with those suffered by the troops at the
beginning of the great siege which constituted
the wonderful operations of the western theatre
of war.

68

CHAPTER IV

I.— AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

The trench line is the last manifestation of a
gigantic amount of thinking ; it is the finished
product of the huge factory of war. All the daily-
life of the army, whether it be on transport, in
reserve, in billets, or in the trenches themselves,
is determined and dictated by the General Head-
Quarters Staff, the thinking department where
every detail of the organization has been en-
trusted to specialists. The head-quarters of our
army in the field have, indeed, something of the
quiet of Harley Street about them, something of
the decorum which should surround the great
issues of life and death. The Generals and their
Staff officers have that air of restraint and control
which is the mark of the professional man. The
great pictorial moments of war have changed.
In that sleepy French town a hundred years ago
the streets were filled with gorgeous Generals
surrounded by glittering staff officers, all superbly
mounted, forming a splendid subject for the his-
torical painter. Of the gold and scarlet of war

69

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

all that remains is a band round the cap, and the
little tab of red with the golden rank-marks on
the collar. No longer does the General see from
his head-quarters the passing of convoys of
wounded ; no longer is he cheered by his men
riding into action.

The clatter of the war-worn steed of the
despatch rider has been replaced by the hum of
the motor-cycle ; the orderly, instead of reining
up with a gay commotion outside the General's
house, now stills his panting motor w^ith a lever
and delivers his message to a post-office. The
pageantry of war is gone, and the General, instead
of making his head-quarters in the tented field,
remains far behind the actual line of operations,
in an atmosphere as quiet, peaceful, and orderly,
as human ingenuity can make it. Now and again
a strong east wind may bring to our head-quarters
in Flanders the low rumble of the distant guns,
but the murmur of battle is too faint to disturb
the provincial peace in which the town is steeped.
Yet it is a beleaguered city ; it is besieged as defi-
nitely, if not as apparently, as are the trenches.
There is in the atmosphere the same sensation of
conflicting and invisible forces as there was in the
Beleaguered City of Mrs. Oliphant.

In the study of the Commander-in-Chief, a
large, low-ceilinged, rectangular room, the chief
piece of furniture is a big table covered with
maps. In this room and at this table — in some

70

AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

similar room and at some similar table miles
away behind the German trenches — the ideas of
strategy take their form, the nature of the enemy's
philosophy is weighed and discussed. There the
war of brains is waged. It is a war which demands
of our Generals and Staffs, in addition to know-
ledge almost encyclopaedic in its range, very
special qualities of character and knowledge of
themselves and of those whose energies they
control. The thinking administration of the
army in the field has transformed the town it
occupies in Northern France into a seat of
government. Every want of every man in the
field is considered and catered for at General
Head-Quarters. The General Staff has, indeed,
to order the lives of hundreds of thousands of
men in every single detail of their daily existence.
This task would require great talents of method
and organization if it were simply a question of
feeding and of clothing the numbers engaged ;
but for everything that is done, for everything
which is given to them, for everything they are
made to do themselves, for everything that is
denied them, there is an external reason, whose
validity has been threshed out and considered by
experts, with the one aim that the whole energy
of every man in the field may be brought to bear
at its greatest, and in the best conditions, upon
the chief purpose of all armies — fighting. Only
a visit to an army in the field reveals what an

71

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

extraordinarily complex being man is ; how varied
are his wants, even when they are cut down to
the point of efficiency. To take one instance of
the detail in which every question has to be
considered : the army rations have been drawn up
after consultation with a scientific board, and in
the food given to the men the quantities of
pugnacity-forming foods, resistance-forming and
brain-forming matters, carefully studied.

The result of this minute attention to detail is
to be seen in the varied callings to be found
among those at General Head-Quarters. There
are financiers, schoolmasters, engineers, map-
makers, photographers, traffic-managers, Oxford
dons, diplomats, scientists, linguists, chemists,
and chiropodists. Upon the work accomplished
in the various Government offices of the military
Whitehall in Flanders the whole well being of
the army depends. Mistakes breed mistrust,
and the Generals in command of armies, army
corps, divisions, and brigades, cannot possibly
furnish of their best unless experience has taught
them that the machine at work behind them at
General Head-Quarters works efficiently and in
the right direction. The company commander
may find himself led to disaster if the maps which
reach him from the cartographical department
of the Staff have a single error of distance or
location. The Colonel responsible for the defence
of a certain section of the trench line will do no

72

AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

good, will lose his confidence in the general
direction of the campaign, if through any failure
of the Staff work, through the misdirection of a
telegram, through the slightest break in the com-
plex channels of communication, the supply of
sandbags necessary for the repair of his trenches
does not reach him. For all this he is dependent
on Staff work, the chief duty of which is to con-
centrate, to boil everything down into essentials,
to direct the power of England to the most
profitable spot with the greatest effect. Each
bullet, each aeroplane dart, each shell, fired in
the war, is a concentrated expression of our
national efficiency, of what genius we may possess
for organization and for the utilization of the
social and economic factors of our national
life.

The process of concentration has already begun
before General Head-Quarters is reached. One
may illustrate this by a triangle, the broad base
formed by a number of factors such as our tradi-
tions, our social organization, our political and
economic system, from which the raw material
of war is directed in the shape of men and muni-
tions out into the field. By the time they have
reached it the lines of the triangle are narrowing
down, and its apex is reached at the trench-head.
The Staff not only has to receive, to accommo-
date, and to maintain, the troops which reach it
from home ; it has to direct the general scheme

73

B

.*''

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

of operations, for, with the gigantic numbers
which modern war brings into the field, it is
obviously impossible for one General-in-Chief
and one General Staff to do more than dictate
the very broadest outlines of the strategical
policy to be pursued. The General Staff, in
addition to controlhng thus the movements of
the armies in the field, has sometimes to act, in
accordance with diplomatic or political considera-
tions which are pressed upon it from home, as a
military embassy to our allies the French. Day
in and day out it has to keep in the very closest
contact with the French and Belgians operating
on the north of Ypres and those operating to the
south of La Bassee. The work of the General
Staff may be divided roughly into three sections :
there is the fighting part of the work ; the com-
fort department, or the work necessary if the
men are going to be able to give their utmost in
the field ; and the military-political part of the
work, which, arranging with our Allies after
consideration of the state of affairs, not only on
the western front, but also along the Dardanelles,
the Carpathians, Poland, and the Eastern Prus-
sian border, gives to the effort of our men its
best result.

The friendly eye with which the G.H.Q.
Staff officer of to-day is regarded by the staff
officers of the armies with whom he has to work,
and the cordial relations which exist between the

74

AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

army staff officers, the divisional staff officers, the
brigade staff officers, and finally between these and
the regimental officers themselves, are a proof that
the staff officer of to-day has learnt his business
in the field with as much keenness and ability as
have the recruits for the new armies. Among
civilians, at any rate, there used to be a very
definite feeling that, while the naval officer was
always a hard-working, cheery, nice fellow, who
knew his business inside out, the army officer —
and more particularly the staff officer — was a bit
of a snob, who took to soldiering as a pleasant
social pastime rather than an earnest business
of blood and war.

We have been reproached in the past by
the French, and we are reproached at present
by the Germans, on account of our mercenary
army of professional soldiers. At any rate, long
before this war began our staff officers merited
the title of professional soldiers. At one time
we were treated to a series of ragging scandals
in the army, in which it appeared that young
officers, who perhaps were rather objectionable,
had finally earned the condemnation of their
fellows in the regiment by an excess of military
zeal, much as a boy at school may create
hostility against himself for being a " swotter."
They are all " swotters " in the army to-day, and
any armchair critic who imagines that a billet on
the staff is just a nice soft job reserved for a

75

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

social celebrity who wishes to cut a figure in the
world is very wrong in his estimate of what is
required of a staff officer nowadays.

The staff mess, whether it be Sir John French's
or that of a Surgeon-General, is distinguished
mainly by its simplicity. When you have heard
the members of a General's mess talking with
envy of C mess, where they've got six pots of
marmalade, you realize that, while a staff*
appointment may be all jam, it is not all luxury.
I have met in the field staff officers of every
military grade, drawn from nearly every social
rank. They all have one subject in common,
and that subject is *' shop." They talk it from
morn till night, and they dream of it from night
till morn. It is a shop which appears to have
only human activity as its limit.

The Chief of Staff, whose functions are perhaps
only second in importance to those of the Com-
mander-in-Chief himself, presides over all the
questions which affect O.A., or the Operations
Section of the General Staff. When you think
that classified under these two letters there is
work to be done which requires linguists, secret
service agents, spies, aviators, and photographers,
to mention one or two things, you will realize
that each officer on the General Staff has a little
world of his own to manage and explore. Then
there is the Adjutant - General's department.
There " discipline " and " strengths " are the two

76

AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

words which summarize the manifold activities
that range from chaplains to gaolers, on the dis-
cipline side, to questions of horse care and fodder,
casualty returns, and reinforcements, under the
second heading. The Quartermaster- General is
the military universal provider. He deals out
permanganate of potash to stain grey horses dark,
shells, mouth-organs, and anything and every-
thing else which by any conceivable stretch of
imagination can be supposed to be necessary or
advisable for an army in the field.

The relations between the G.H.Q. Staff and
the army staff may be shown clearly in one
instance. It is the duty of the Quartermaster-
General at G.H.Q. to lay down the broad
scheme of transport for the armies in the field.
He chooses the railhead points to which the
various stores of an army are delivered. It is
the duty of the Deputy Quartermaster-General of
each army to arrange for the collection of those
stores at railhead, and their distribution by motor
vehicle or transport cart to the various units
of the army to which they are destined. In this
work the Quartermaster- General of an army is
represented by a special transport officer, who
maps out the country into traffic routes with as
as much system and care as are shown by the
General Omnibus Company in establishing the
lines of buses through the London streets. Even
with the most careful management, with the

77

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

establishment of definite circuits, along which
traffic may only go in one direction (and many
a policeman reservist is controlling traffic in
Flanders in exactly the same way as he did at
home on point duty), there are inevitable blocks
upon the road, so constant is the stream of
motor-buses, motor-lorries, which go up from
the railhead, where the stores arrive, to the re-
fiUing-point, where for safety's sake they are
transferred to horse waggons, or, in the case of
the Indian troops, to the handy little iron-ribbed
mule- carts. This transport officer will talk to
you for hours on the comparative merits of
causeway and macadam ; he has studied weight-
saving in harness till you would think there was
not another point left unexperimented in the
leather equipment of the whole army ; he knows
motors inside out ; he will point out that one
make has a chassis too long for the abrupt turn-
ing of the narrow Flemish roads, that in another
there is so much underhang that there is danger
of an accident if one of the wheels slips off the
causeway into the mud at the side of the road ;
everything there is to be known about road
transport apparently fills his mind to the ex-
clusion of almost every other topic.

The same process of specialization goes on
with every branch of the service. One doctor
has made a name for himself in the army by
discovering that the frost-bite which tilled our

78

AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

hospitals with hundreds of cases in the day was
not frost-bite at all, but a gross and ostentatious
form of the homely chilblain. He found out
that it was unnecessary to force upon the un-
willing Tommy the use of evil-smelling tallow
for his feet, and that all that was really necessary
to prevent " the crippling and the anguish "
of *' frost-bite " was that the men while in the
trenches should take their boots off at least once
in every twenty-four hours. Another doctor
spends his existence in running an elaborate lice-
killing machine. He is just as ready to talk of
lice, their manners and customs, as the head of
the Intelligence Department is to discuss the
psychology of prisoners, or to tell you of some
of the extraordinary channels through which in-
formation regarding the enemy's movements
and intentions drifts into his hands. He will
tell you that a prisoner caught hot from the
battle, dazed by the din of shells, depressed
by defeat, and perhaps demoralized by fear, is
quite likely, in the first half-hour of his cap-
tivity, if properly handled by the linguists of
the Staff, to blurt out useful information as
to what is going on in the enemy's territory.
After the first half-hour or so the man usually
recovers his soldierly pride, his spirits are revived,
he realizes that, although his share in the war
is at end, his own capture and his own little
misfortune are not likely to affect the issue;

79

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

and with that realization comes the dogged de-
termination to answer no questions, however
innocent they may appear to be.

The great charm of all this shop talk lies
not altogether in its intrinsic interest, but partly,
at any rate, in the keenness of the men who
use it. The Colonel in charge of a casualty
clearing hospital, when showing me over the
monastery in which he had provided 900 beds,
confided to me that his great ambition was
to be able to install another operating-table.
He deplored the fact that of his 900 beds only
about ninety were in occupation at the time
of my visit, and added cheerfully that he hoped
they would soon be full up again. It annoyed
him to know that he had in his hands a perfect
instrument and organization for dealing with
the products of the battlefield, and no oppor-
tunity of putting it to a triumphant test. His
keenness is the keenness of every man at the
front. Each man is rightly certain that the
job he has been given to do could not have
been done better by anybody else ; but at the
same time, when the machine, as has been the
case during the greater part of the period of
siege warfare, has been running slow, each man
has endeavoured to paint tlie lily. This is
no feeling of pride ; it is just the satisfied con-
sciousness of the good artisan that his work
has been well done, of the trader that the

80

AT BRITISH HEAD-QUARTERS

goods he sells are honest wares, of the servant
that the service he gives is worthy of his
master.

The speed of a squadron at sea is that of
the slowest ship in it. The same principle
applies, though perhaps not to quite the same
extent, to an army. Happy is the Commander-
in-Chief who knows that his troops do not con-
sist of some extremely well-trained, courageous,
and efficient soldiers and some badly disciplined
shirkers, for the average of the army which is
thus formed, while mathematically true, is of
little use for the purposes of command. It
is well to have tried and finely led troops avail-
able for the holding of positions of particular
peril or responsibility ; it is better that a Com-
mander-in-Chief, when he desires to make a
movement, should be able to do so without
too much examination of the moral of the
troops he is going to employ, but can depend
upon the average quality of his men along the
whole front. What applies to the men applies
to their regimental officers, to the various staff
officers, and to every single part of the machine
they are looking after. It is, obviously, no good
to have the best troops in the world gathered
at one point when their services are needed at
another, and, owing to faulty transport work,
there are no motor- buses available to hurry
them to the desired point. An army may be

81 6

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

a splendid fighting machine, and yet prove
utterly worthless if the commissariat depart-
ment fails, if its health suffers, or epidemic
disease breaks out ; the greatest strategist the
world has ever seen would be as powerless as
the prosiest armchair General if the signals
department were unable to transmit his orders
to the armies in the field. It is towards this
all-round efficiency that the work of the General
Head-Quarters Staff in Flanders is directed, and
directed with such success. The spirit which
fills the fighting branches of the service animates
the less directly bellicose departments of the
army. Every man in the field knows that the
activities of every other man, whether he be
Army Service, Royal Medical, or Chaplain,
whether he be translating German newspapers
or capturing German trenches, all help to swell
the great sum total of the army's value and
achievement.

II.— KEEPING FIT

There never has been such fighting, and there
never has been so much comfort, or at least so
much done to fight discomfort ; the British Army
is better fed, better equipped, and better off in
health and in pocket, since the war began, than it
has ever been before. The men fight like heroes,

82

KEEPING FIT

and it is as much like heroes that they are treated
as is possible in the extremely desolate country
in which they are fighting the trench war. Those
trenches in Flanders were the result of accident
rather than of foresight, inasmuch as they were
made there where the men dropped to cover in
the fighting. Many of the lines were established
in dry weather, in the ready-made trenches made
by the dykes in the valley of the Layes River.
Shortly after the construction of those trenches
the river overflowed, and the dykes filled up
rapidly. The discomforts of this and of the mud
which resulted have become historic.

The peasants of French Flanders are not
noted for the extreme cleanliness of their dwell-
ings. There is too much coal-mining and indus-
try mingled with the farming for the cleanliness
of agriculture to prevail. The whole country-
side is under intensive culture both in its indus-
tries and in its farming. It has therefore all the
dirt inseparable from intensive culture and the
consequent density of population. In the farm
billets all does not smell of milk and butter.
The custom of the country decrees that the farm
buildings encircle a large dung-pit. The standard
of domestic sanitation thus revealed applies also
to the larger drainage of the countryside. The
drainage engineers, confronted with so much to
drain, appear to have abandoned the task in a far
from finished condition. Ditches are filled with

83

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

evil-smelling mud covered with sinister green
scum. The cleaning of the country itself was
one of the first jobs the British Engineers had to
take in hand before any hope of sane comfort
could be entertained. Health is the chief factor
of happiness, and it has been the work of the
Royal Army Medical Corps which has success-
fully counteracted all the depressing influences of
the Flanders plain, and has made the army happy
and as contented with its lot as an army can be.
The Royal Army Medical Corps did not always
enjoy the esteem which is now gladly given
to it by the troops. Its work in Flanders has
obliterated almost the memory of the days when
it had a bad name. The system and the men
which permitted a small army, such as the
British Expeditionary Force during the Ypres
fighting, to handle nearly 18,000 wounded with
such expedition that most of them were placed
in their beds in hospital at home forty-eight
hours after they had been hit, is obviously en-
titled to admiration.

The wounded are, however, by no means the
greatest object of the doctors' activities. We
have learned the lessons of the Japanese War,
and in spite of our national care for the suscepti-
bilities of the crank we have decided that pre-
vention is better than cure ; that inoculation is
preferable to disease. The results of inoculation,
I was informed by a Surgeon- General, are in

84

KEEPING FIT

every way remarkable, and the health of the
army is better now, after nine months of war, than
it has ever been in the piping times of peace.
Inoculation against typhoid, cholera, smallpox,
and tetanus, are by no means the only form of
preventive medicine I saw in practice at the
front. The most rigid watch is kept over the
water-supply and the general sanitation of the
country. The cleanliness of billet towns is
looked after by regular sanitation squads, whose
word is law in all matters connected with the
cleansing of drains, the destruction of refuse, and
the general scavenging work of the army.
Mobile laboratories are stationed at various
points in the billeted area, from which they
scour the countryside in search of germs of every
sort in the drinking water, in the drains, every-
where that germs do congregate.

The greatest preventive work of the Royal
Army Medical Corps, and certainly that which
is most popular among the men themselves, lies
at first sight rather outside the range of doctor-
ing, and would appear to belong more rightly to
the nurserymaid than to the army doctors.
Shortly before joining the British forces in the
field I was looking at some contemporary sketches
of the Napoleonic campaigns. The veterans of
the great Napoleon were a shaggy, grimy-looking
band of villains, with scarce a complete or re-
paired uniform among a thousand men. Our

8d

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

army, except when it is in the trenches, is as
smart in appearance as it was when it left home.
The importance of spit and polish may at times
be exaggerated. It would be impossible to over-
estimate the value of the polish which is put upon
our men by the Royal Army Medical Corps. It is
due to the old spirit of pipeclay released from the
trammels of tradition, and working not merely to
provide the Colonel of a regiment with the aesthetic
joy of beholding on parade a set of well-groomed
men, but to give back to the men the pride in
their personal cleanliness which they may well
lose after a spell in the trenches, and to armour
their spirit against depression and their bodies
against disease. It would be interesting to hear
the comments of a General of the old school upon
the practice of giving an army hot baths once a
fortnight under fire, of providing the men with
convalescent homes, chiropodists, barbers, and
mouth-organs. He would probably declare that
an army which required all this mollycoddling
was going to the dogs. It would not, however,
take him long to realize that the conditions of
modern warfare, the active prosecution of the
campaign throughout the winter months, the
strain of trench life, and the nerve-shattering
effect of heavy shell-fire, would lead to tremen-
dous wastage if every moment the men are out
of the trenches were not given up to restoring
what the trench has deteriorated. It is in this

86

KEEPING FIT

work of restoration that the greatest preventive
activity of the army doctors has been exerted.

In this the doctors have, of course, had on
their side the fact that for many months the
array has been more or less stationary. They
have had the time to utiUze to the full all the re-
sources of the country, and, naturally, much more
can be done in this direction now than may be
possible later on.

The most complete example of what their
organization and method can accomplish is per-
haps to be found at No. 4 Stationary Hospital,
which has become a sort of Field Palace Hotel.
There an enthusiast has made a hospital of a
type entirely new in war. Towards the end of
November a large single-storied jute factory,
with a floor space measuring 150 yards by 75
yards, was handed over to him in which to carry
out his ideas as to the new type of hospital
required for the new type of warfare. It was an
ordinary red-brick factory, well lit by a glass
roof, heated by steam, and fitted with electric
light. The concrete of its floor space was
covered with heavy machinery. It was a most
unromantic and prosaic building. To-day it has
become a rest-home capable of accommodating
1,000 exhausted trench fighters at a time, and of
turning them out again ready for anything.
Since December, when it first opened its doors,
up till the beginning of March, 5,798 soldiers had

87

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

passed through it, suffering from minor disease,
pneumonia, bronchitis, bad feet, or just exhaus-
tion, of whom no less than 2,682 have been
returned to the firing line after less than a fort-
night's absence. Canvas sheets have curtained
the floor space into dormitories, reading-room,
dining-hall. In the outhouses of the factory
bathrooms have been established, and machinery
for thorough disinfection of all the men's clothing
has been installed. There is a tailor's shop,
where repairs are carried out. Among the
inmates, barbers have been found to clip the
heads and the beards resulting from a spell in
the trenches. A skilled chiropodist, who for
some reason had enlisted in the army before the
war broke out, and who was brought to the
hospital as a patient, now remains there, doing
much more useful work with his knives and his
scissors on the feet of his compatriots than he
would be able to accomplish with his bayonet in
the bodies of the enemy, while as he pares away
at a corn or puts an ingrowing toenail to rights
he gives Tommy a little course on foot-care
which will serve him in good stead when he gets
back to his regiment. There is a chapel, also
formed by these canvas screens, which is used
by all denominations in turn, and is open all day
to any of the men who wish to go to it. Here
in the bright wards of the field rest-home the
R.A.M.C. is doing preventive work of a kind

88

KEEPING FIT

that was never before attempted ; for they are
getting hold of men, some of whom perhaps, in
other wars, would have remained on with their
regiments until they had gone seriously sick,
giving them a fortnight's complete rest, splendid
attention, the most generous and varied diet,
building them up in so thorough a manner that
they can return to the trenches fairly confident
that, whatever else may happen to them, they
are not likely to suffer again in general health.
Others of the men treated there would under
the old system have been evacuated down to
the base, and probably sent over to England and
lost to the army for months.

An instance of preventive work at an earlier
stage is to be seen in the baths which have been
provided for the men as they come out of the
trenches, in areas some of which are actually
under shell-fire. For many of these also the
jute industry has provided homes. It is an
object-lesson in efficiency to watch the different
stages of the men's progress from mud-caked
figures until they become once more the smart
soldiers of the recruiting posters. They undress
in a room which is isolated from the rest of the
establishment, and, leaving their clothes behind
them, they dash into the factory, to a platform ;
then, with many manifestations of delight,
fourteen at a time they plunge into the huge
bleaching vats, which are filling up with hot

89

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

water. After a few minutes of energetic lather-
ing, "the squirmy change from hot to cold"
drives them out of the baths to the drying-mats,
where, with much rubbing and some Swedish
exercise, they regain the elasticity of limb lost in
the trenches. Then they file through the store-
room, receiving an equipment which has been
cleansed from top to bottom.

Their discarded clothes meanwhile have been
going through a process of a much more drastic
nature. They have been put through the great
Thresh disinfecting machine. In an adjoining
room in the factory some hundred Belgian
refugee women have been washing their under-
clothing with every type of improved laundry
apparatus. The clothes then are passed into the
drying-rooms, and finally, before going into store
for reissue, the seams of the coats, the pleats of
the kilts, have been searched in the detective
department, in case any abnormally resisting
vermin may have managed to survive the series
of shocks administered to it. This process of
cleansing the troops has almost kept alive the
industrial aspect of the zone of country behind
our lines exposed to German shell-fire. One of
the most curious sights to be seen in the field,
one of the most curious sounds to be heard, is
the sight of long lines of factory girls, used to
handling jute, waiting outside the factory door
for the beginning of their spell of duty in cleaning

90

KEEPING FIT

the British soldier — is the sound of the factory
whistle calling them to this work. This enter-
prise saves many a man from swelling the
numbers who go farther back to the field rest-
home, just as the field rest-home economizes
the numbers which have to be evacuated down
to the base. The two institutions form part of
a comprehensive, business-like, and successful
endeavour to rid war of one of its worst terrors ;
to free a General from one of the biggest hin-
drances upon his action, by reducing as much as
possible the minor ailments both of body and
spirit, which, if unchecked, work more havoc in
the efficiency and strength of an army in the
field than a small epidemic. It seems quite
superfluous to state that the better an army is
looked after, the more results you will get from
it ; but never before has the importance of caring
for every single detail of the men's bodily comfort
been so splendidly recognized in practice in the
field. Cure is good, but prevention is better,
and the doctor has for ever abandoned the idea
that he need only concern himself about the sick
and the wounded. In many ways his first atten-
tions go to the healthy.

In war there must always be waste or want.
It is beyond the power of the greatest organizing
genius to calculate with absolute safety the needs
of an army in the field either in food or in
ammunition. This war is being run on the

91

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

principle of generosity. The man who is em-
ployed in clerical work in the army, or whose
only exercise, perhaps, is driving a motor- lorry
about the countryside, is unable to get through
his army rations every day ; but it is infinitely
better that there should be waste with the rations
of the few than want with the rations of the
many. The food of the army is based upon the
conclusions of a committee, upon which sat
several eminent scientists. Its various qualities
have been attested in every possible way, and
the different ingredients, in the opinion of that
committee, form the most desirable combination
of heat-, energy-, and pugnacity- producing quali-
ties. So that he may fight at his best, a British
soldier is called upon to consume the following
rations every day :

Ij pounds of fresh meat, or 1 pound

preserved.
1^ pounds of bread.
4 ounces of bacon.
3 ounces of cheese.
^ pound of fresh vegetables or 2 ounces

of peas, beans, dried onions, or dried

potatoes.
I ounce of tea.
^ pound of jam.
3 ounces of sugar.
J ounce of salt.

92

KEEPING FIT

^jj ounce of mustard.

^^ ounce of pepper.

He also gets 2 ounces of tobacco or
cigarettes and 1 box of matches a
week, and 2 ounces of butter twice a
week.

In the trenches there are additions even to
this menu. They get 2 ounces of pea soup twice
a week, the tea ration is increased to f ounce,
the sugar ration to 3| ounces, and they get J gill
of rum if the Brigadier or Divisional Commander
thinks fit. Although Tommy is inclined to
grumble at the fact that he gets too much plum
and apple jam, even the most confirmed army
grouser is unable to declare that he does not get
enough to eat, nor is he able, save perhaps in
very rare instances, to criticize the quality of
the food. Officers and men have the same type
of food. There is no better. The meat for
the English Army is all frozen, and the only
slaughtering done within our lines is that of the
meat for the Indians, who have their special
slaughterers down at railhead, so as to be certain
that the animals have been killed in full accord-
ance with the caste ritual required. The Indians,
like our own men, are better fed than they are
at home. Their diet naturally presented special
difficulties. Their native flour for their chupat-
ties has to be brought from the East. Some

93

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

cannot eat beef for religious reasons, and have to
be provided with goats. They have taken very
kindly to jam, which is not in their rations at
home, and w^hich some of the regiments had not
tasted before their arrival in Europe. In some
cases the regimental officers had to reassure them
that there was nothing in the composition or
manufacture of the jam that would offend their
religious susceptibilities, and now the Indian,
with the Oriental love of sweet things, has
become an admirer even of plum and apple.

III.— IN TRENCH AND WOOD

Flatness and mud are the two great obstacles
to fighting in Flanders. The first has obvious
disadvantages, for except at one or two rare
points it is impossible to gain even a restricted
view over the country. Nowhere in Flanders
has a General an observation-station from which
he can command a view over the entire length
of the front, as is the case upon the Aisne.
Nowhere can the artillery commander see with
his own eyes the effect of his battery's fire. For
all this information they are forced to rely upon
the observation of others. For trench work, of
course, the drawback is not very great, for in
the trenches the advanced artillery observation
officer is able to report with the greatest

94

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

accuracy the ranging of the guns. He is in
constant telephonic communication with his
battery, and things go so quickly that, if
he reports the presence of a convoy of motor-
cars moving across Section AZ 12 23 of
the map, before the convoy has passed over
the intersecting lines thus indicated the guns
are already at work upon it. For results well
to the rear of the enemy's trench line the
artillery are dependent entirely upon their
airmen's observations. The aeroplane, indeed,
has to supply the elevation which Nature has
not furnished. Admirable as has been the work
done by the air service, it cannot entirely make
good the natural deficiencies of the country.
This unrelieved flatness makes a tour along the
trench lines an absolute necessity if any notion
is to be gained of the nature of the defence lines.
Such a visit to the actual front is also neces-
sary if an adequate idea of what mud can be
is to be formed. The roads within the transport
area have had placed upon them since the
beginning of the siege war a strain which no
roads in the world could stand. In spite of the
constant road-mending activity of the Engineers,
they have in many places been churned into
mud ; but the mud of the roads is as nothing
compared with the mud of the fields and the
trenches, which can never be adequately sung.
The volumes of soldierly expletive with regard

95

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

to it which have appeared in soldiers' letters
from the front fail to do it justice ; the educa-
tion in profanity which our army received in
Flanders in its previous campaign was not
sufficiently comprehensive. The mud here is
not just one of the incidents of the countryside,
it is the countryside itself; it is not just one
of many factors in the soldier's daily life, it is
almost the basis of his existence. It has become
in Flanders as decisive a strategic value as the
winter in Russia. Marshal Mud has proved
himself, indeed, to be an even doughtier fighter
than Generals Janvier and Fdvrier. To those
who are impatient of delay, to those who picture
a charge upon a trench as being formed by a
wavering line of figures springing alertly from
their own trenches and racing hunched up
across the intervening field, all that has been
said about mud has not said half there was to
say. In the fields the harrow strikes water,
and ground which has been shelled and fought
over for months becomes nothing better than a
mire. To walk a hundred yards over a Flemish
potato-field represents more physical effort than
a five-mile tramp along an English country road.
Progress has none of the swing of movement
about it. Your one foot sinks down into the
clinging clay, and you have to use it and the
firmness with which it is embedded as a leverage
point with which to extricate your other foot.

96

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

But this is only the mud you find upon the
fields. It conveys but a very faint impression
of the glutinous substance which has spread like
lava over the whole front trench lines and the
country immediately behind them. The trench,
according to the diagrams of military handbooks,
is a neat, mathematical affair, with its sides and
bottom apparently constructed with the aid of
the plumb line and the levelling board. In the
military handbooks it is always beautifully
drained. Its parapet is covered with nice vel-
vety grass. Outside the mihtary handbooks
the trench is not at all like this. Indeed, the
trench as it is in Flanders to-day seems likely
to become a more powerful agent in the prop-
aganda of peace than the millions of Carnegie
and the peace-making machinery of The Hague.
It is not the exhilaration of the fight, it is not
the long fatigue of the march, the possibility of
death or wounds, but the terrible total of dirt
and discomfort which the trench has produced,
that has given to this war its special character
of misery.

The approach to all trenches is impressive.
As you work your way up towards them from
head-quarters, you leave the comforts and
normality of ordinary life behind you, and pass
through villages whose streets are busy with
soldiers going about their ordinary affairs —
washing, shaving, moving stores, mounting

97 7

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

guard, playing with Flemish children ; you go
along roads heavy with the motor transport,
buzzing with despatch riders, ambulances. Staff
motor-cars ; and then, towards dusk, you enter
the zone where horse transport has taken the
place of the motor, where you meet companies
falling in, the men wearing their trench equip-
ment— their waders, their gumboots, with their
packs increased by the weight of pick and
shovel ; finally you come to the grey empty
road. The trenches I visited in the British lines
were neither good nor bad. The road which
led to them was like all the roads which lead to
trenches. In the dusk it looked as though it
led nowhere. It seemed as though in the billets
behind we had left the last of mankind, that out
there in front of us in the night there was
nothing but mud and emptiness, filled with
strange rumblings, sharp staccato knockings,
following so fast one upon the other as to merge
into a chaplet of sound. The order to split up
into small detachments as we went along the
road gave a significance to the growing noises,
which was impressively strengthened by the
passing of a stretcher-bearer party going back
with wounded, carried shoulder-high, to the
hospital. There was no moon, and as the night
settled down the road upon which we were
trudging, the fields through which it passed,
the horizon beyond, all became part of it,

98

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

through which high above sped the fiery mes-
sages of rockets, out of which glanced every
now and then the watery eye of a searchlight.
Suddenly from the dark came the challenge of
a sentry, and as he stepped aside the light of a
brazier showed the entrance to the trench.

We had struck straight into the trench, and
were spared the tedious tortuous approach down
a zigzag communication. My first step landed
me with one leg up to the knee in mud. I
put out my hand and leant against the face
of the trench, and extricated it, and, guided
by the flash of an electric torch, started along
the wooden tight-rope which zigzags in dif-
ferent forms for nearly 500 miles at the
bottom of the trenches on the western front.
Sometimes it is composed of huge armfuls of
brushwood or of twig pavement. In this par-
ticular trench it was the top plank of a large
rectangular box, the bottom plank of which
rested some 3 feet below the surface of the
mud on the top of a similar box, or it may be
of several similar boxes, which had been sucked
down by the voracious mud. It takes some
little time to get your trench legs. Your feet
become as erratic as the wheels of a motor-
bicycle upon a grease-covered causeway. Every
now and again a sideslip lands you — or launches
you — in the mud, where the planking is a little
out of repair, or at the corners, as it follows the

99

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

perpetual zigzag of the line. After about ten
minutes you get accustomed to the going, and
reconciled to the fact that mud really does not
matter. Then you are at leisure to take stock
of your surroundings — to gain some idea of the
labour and materials which have gone to their
making. The tribes of Israel, the great workers
of the Pharaohs, could not have accomplished
more, for, great though may be the labour of
digging a ditch some 6 feet deep for 500 miles,
the initial work of excavation is but a fleabite
compared with the daily task of repair and
improvement.

The mud has to be fed day by day on a
wonderfully assorted diet of rabbit wire-netting
and hurdles, which serve to keep the walls of the
trench from the effects of gradual disintegration.
Vast quantities of brushwood and timber are
used in keeping the men out of the mud, and in
the construction of dugouts and splinter-proof
shields overhead. Millions of sacks have been
thrown into the mud ditches. The damp earth
is continually crumbling away, breaking off into
miniature landslides, and the damage has to be
made good with sandbags. The trench every
now and again is subjected to bombardment, and
the gaps in the defences of the parapet have to
be repaired, the security of the narrow cut re-
stored, the protection of the traverses made good
again. Forests have been thinned down to

100

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

provide the stumpy supports for the wire en-
tanglements in front of the trench Kne. The
wire and the supports themselves require con-
stant renewal. Machine-gun or, indeed, sustained
rifle fire will destroy the efficacy of the wire
as an obstacle. The wire severed by bullets may
serve to trip a man or two here and there, but
unless it is very solidly entwined around its
wooden supports, and unless the damage done to
these by shell-fire, bombs, or trench mortars, is
constantly repaired, the wire will offer but a
slender barrier to a hostile rush. The trench has
to be drained ; it has to be pumped if the mud
and the water are to be kept down at all ; when
they win the upper hand, a new line has to be
constructed. There is the continual war of mine
and counter- mine. Much of this work of repair
is done during the day, with the materials brought
up under cover of the previous night, for in the
trenches there is not much room for the storage
of reserve supplies. Some of it has to be done
in the dark, and perilous work it is repairing wire
in the No Man's Land between trenches, when
the chance wanderings of the searchlight may
reveal the men to the enemy a couple of hundred
yards away, and lead to their being pinned down
to the mud while the machine-gun sweeps with
its leaden scythe the air above their heads.

This is the domestic side of trench life. By
these means the men keep their line strong and

101

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

habitable. It is the "comfort" department of
the trenches.

In the fighting there are strange new devices ;
old tricks have been revived. There in the trench
line the inventors' devices are put to the last
crucial test. Here the chemists' formulae are
converted into casualty lists. In many respects
this modern war has reverted to almost forgotten
weapons, the tradition of which only lingered in
the names of some of our regiments. Thus, the
Bombardiers, the Grenadiers, have come into
their own again. Artillery is at work in the
trenches beside which the first gun fired in France
would appear a finished scientific instrument ;
there are also guns whose working would appear
to the first artillerymen of history to be due to
nothing short of magic, for they are noiseless,
and with compressed air they fling into the air a
flying mine, a cylindrical aerial torpedo which,
owing to the low velocity at which it leaves
the gun, turns and twists in the most drunken
manner in the air before bursting with the force
of some 125 pounds of high explosiv^es on the
trench parapet, or, as is perhaps more frequently
the case, in front of it or beyond it. There are,
to compare with these terrifying engines of
German invention, the little home-made mortars
which any regiment is capable of manufacturing
for itself, apparently, out of any sort of iron
tubing that may be handy. The French have

102

IN TRENCH AND WOOC

been using catapults of the schoolboy variety for
bomb-throwing, and have done so with good
eiFect. Harpoons are employed for ripping up
the enemy's wire. You hurl your harpoon well
over the wire, and, by pulling and jerking with a
will at the rope or the wire to which it is attached,
you can tear away, or at any rate weaken, the
obstacle of the entanglement.

The strangest figures of the war are the
bombers. The bombs they throw are attached
to a stick about 1^ feet long, around which floats
a skirt of white streamers, the mission of which
is to restore the direction of the bomb when
thrown, and bring it down head foremost on the
percussion cap. The bombers carry their bombs
on a belt round their waists, and the falling
cascade of white ribbons gives them a grotesque
appearance, which does not seem to belong to
this world, but to be that of some strange fighter
of the future. The task of these men is one
requiring the greatest bravery. In an attack
upon a trench, when the bomber has reached the
enemy's wire, he has to raise himself sufficiently
to get the throwing purchase required to cast his
bombs over the enemy's trench parapet. To do
so he has to expose himself to the full view of
the trench occupants, and to as deadly a fire
as those occupants, shaken by attack, are able to
direct upon him. Once a portion of the trench
lines has been rushed, the bomb-throwers have

103

ll

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

to set to work to assist in dislodging the enemy
from the shelter of the traverses on either side of
the captured section, and in this part of the
business he frequently runs into the enemy's
bomb-thrower. Then from the clouds of green
smoke streaked with shrapnel, and the flying
clods of earth lined with the angry flash of rifles,
the side which has the best bombers will emerge
as the winners of the battle. If the attack has
been successful, the bombers then proceed to
cover by their activity the work of blocking up
the enemy's communication trench, and the
transference of the enemy's parapet from one
side of the trench to the other.

In this work with high explosives the Germans
started ahead of the Allies. For a time their
trench artillery, their bombs, their mines, were
alone in the field. Now we have caught up
with them, and are rapidly establishing our
ascendancy in this as in the other departments
of warfare. The trench I have described and the
activities I have detailed are typical of those
along nearly the whole of our line. In the
crude light of the day the trench is as unlovely
a spot as the prospect which it commands is
usually uninteresting. Through the steel -
screened loophole there is not much to be seen.
The country is completely empty. Away on
the horizon there is perhaps a battered belfry ; a
line of poplars marks a canal in the middle

104

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

distance, with the zigzag German parapet, whose
outhnes fade into a mist of wire entanglement.
The intervening ground more often than not
is a maze of old, abandoned, and shell-tumbled
trench burrowings. Here and there at some
points of the front the dull foreground of the
picture is lined with the dead, who mark where
they fell the skirmishing formation in which
they attacked many months before. The
ground is pitted with shell craters, laboured
deeply with every form of high explosive, and
terrible in its desolation and upheaval. Night,
however, shrouds all this horror.

In the trenches the unlovely drab of the clay
and mud glows with the warm reflection of the
trench brazier. From the dugouts there comes
the cheerful, homely glow of candlelight, a
pleasant smell of heating soup or infusing tea, in
the midst of which the bronzed or ruddy faces of
our Tommies shine with health. Those on duty
stand immobile at their firing stations peering
out towards the enemy's line for any indication
of movement, on the lookout for the revealing
flash of the rifle which will betray the where-
abouts of a sniper, very statuesque and black
against the sky. To our right and to our left
the machine-guns are chattering away, warming
up to a dispute which may bring in a peremptory
remark or two from a deeper-voiced gun. Every
now and again there are the crack and the whistle

105

x^>

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

of the rifle, in the desultory manner which
makes you wonder if you are not out on the
Stickledown watching the last stages of the
King's Prize. Right along the line the heavens
are blazing with fireworks, some conveying with
their different hues messages to the rear, most
of them bursting with the white brilliance
of magnesium over our lines. High they
burst, and slowly the light, after hanging
for a while in the sky, floats down to earth,
throwing everything upon it into dark relief.
It is well to stand still when you are caught full
in this glare, for if motionless you may pass as
a tree-stump to the watchful eyes away over
there, and if you do not you may add to the
hospital admissions of the day.

The trench is the slum, and Plug Street is the
country. Plug Street is the name given by the
army to the little wooded portion of our front
which on the map is called Ploogsteert Wood.
There Tommy enjoys himself after a spell in the
trenches with almost as much abandonment as
the slum child out on a Fresh Air Holiday.
There, instead of being cooped up in the mud
between two walls of clay and sandbags, a man can
move about, when necessary, at any rate screened
from view. It is true that the springy earth of the
self-respecting wood has been conquered by the
all-pervading mud, but there are trees and birds,
and freedom to enjoy the daylight and the very

106

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

occasional watery glances of the sun. It is the
one break in the monotony of the trench line, and
it is famous throughout the British lines in Flan-
ders. There the British soldier has installed him-
self so comfortably in spite of the mud, and has
given to his dugouts and bomb-proof dwellings
such an air of solidity, that it looks almost as
though he intended to remain there permanently.
He will, however, certainly know less comfortable
quarters before the campaign is ended. In the
meantime what his cheery sense of improvisation
can do to create an atmosphere of home from
home has been carried out in this little marshy
stretch of wood. Here, as along the rest of the
line, the first preoccupation of the men was to
cling on grimly to what they had got. A line of
trenches, now filled to the brim with water, cuts
a canal at some little distance from the eastern
edge of the wood, and marks the line where
Tommy held on desperately to what he had got
in the first early weeks of the winter. Since then
he has pushed forward to such purpose that the
wood is entirely in British hands ; he has erected
so strong a defence of breastworks that he has
been able to set about the second task of all
soldiers at the front, that of lifting himself above
the mud- level. Here in Plug Street it has been
a comparatively easy matter. Protected by the
veil of the trees, the men have been able to
work even in the daylight hours. Their supplies

107

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

and material have reached them without any
difficulty, and they have been able to see what
they were about. You will meet with many
kinds of roads in Flanders to-day, and Plug
Street contains an unusually varied collection of
improvised highways. There is the brick path,
built on the soggy meadowland leading to the
wood, where the ground is a little firmer than it
is under the trees ; there is the brushwood road,
formed simply by huge bundles of twigs and
brushwood ; there is the plank pavement ; and
there is the corduroy. Plug Street once had
roads of its own ; these are now nothing better
than mud canals of so absorbent a nature that
only the lightest sort of structure could be placed
upon them without danger of its disappearing
after a week or so. It is therefore the corduroy
road which is the most in favour in Plug Street.
Light though it is, even it is constantly being
trodden down into the mud, and is in constant
need of renewal. Its construction is primitive.

The men, who since their sojourn in this
spot have become expert woodmen, are adepts
at this. Twigs and branches are chopped to
lengths of about a yard, and nailed on to
parallel sapKngs about three-quarters of a yard
apart ; the resulting product is laid down over
the mud, and resembles in appearance the twig
bridges which are slung across the gorges of
Burmah and the North-East Frontier of India.

108

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

The network of roads thus formed has been con-
verted into a map of Central London by the use,
without too much attention to geography, of
famihar street names. Thus, although the Hay-
market runs into Piccadilly Circus, at Piccadilly
Circus branch off, not only Regent Street, but an
intrusive Fleet Street as well. There are one or
two names of purely local origin, for Plug Street
has traditions of its own. There are Spy Corner,
Essex Farm, Dead Horse Corner, and the Moated
Farm. The spirit shown by the christening of
these various avenues is further revealed in the
house pride with which all the men look after
their dugouts. At some spots, if the names
neatly inscribed on wooden labels were taken as
the only indication, the passer-by might imagine
himself to be in those portions of Suburbia where
the humblest dwelling becomes The Lodge, the
most cedarless domain Mount Lebanon.

The men's humour peeps out in numberless
ways. The orderly-room bears over its lintel
not only the words " Palais de Justice," but also
the Latin expression of the orderly officer's deter-
mination to do justice even if the bomb-proof
roof does fall in. The villas have a great many
of the appurtenances of villas. Before nearly all
of them there is a boot-scraper, made of the side
of a corned-beef can nailed to timber posts. The
men can be seen gardening after their day's work,
planting primroses over the roof of their bomb-

109

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

shelters, just as the city worker of villadom plants
out pansies in the front garden. There is a little
bridge in the evening, and, as befits an imitation
of Suburbia, music all day long. The men
whistle and sing as they chop away at the cordu-
roy, and one section at any rate possesses quite a
good saucepan and mouth-organ orchestra. Senti-
mental Tommy, if given a little time for study,
would, I think, manage to produce sentimental
melody out of a motor klaxon. In the saucepan
and the mouth-organ he has found an admirable
combination for the utterance of all the inmost
yearnings of his soul. A very jolly group they
looked, fooling away the time until the bacon
that was sizzling over the wood fire round which
they sat was done to a nice crisp brown.

At first sight Plug Street looks almost as
though some kindly General had invited a bat-
talion or so of his old regiment down to his
estate for a jolly good picnic. In Plug Street
there has been a little pheasant-shooting ! The
trim and beautifully kept regimental cemeteries
in clearings in the wood are reminders that there
has been shooting of a graver nature ; the occa-
sional whistle of an " over," the flying white of a
splinter as a bullet whacks into a tree, that the
German frontier is nearer the Piccadilly in Plug
Street than it is to the Piccadilly of London.
When you leave the Haymarket behind, and
have crossed over Hunter Avenue, the wood

no

IN TRENCH AND WOOD

becomes very still. Through the tree-trunks you
see a line of peculiar mounds, which, as you get
nearer, resolve themselves into walls of sandbags,
streets of dugouts and shelters. Farther back
you may, at your own risk, take certain liberties,
but here among the sandbags it is well to be
circumspect. You have left the suburbs behind,
and have got to business.

At the sandbag parapet there stand the
watchers, some gazing with their eyes on a level
with the top of the parapet, others peering into
the trench periscope, which lifts its mirror above
their heads and shows the reflection of a maze of
forest undergrowth ahead, heavy thickets of
bramble and of briar, and beyond them the
ruins of one or two red-roofed Flemish houses.
The fantastic lavishness of the barbed wire
which festoons the picture is the origin of the
name given to this portion of the enemy's front.
There in their " Birdcage " the enemy sings and
whistles as cheerfully as any canary ; for what-
ever may be true as to the depression of the
Germans at other points along the front, there
has been no very great sign of sorrow among
those who are opposed to our own troops.

Ill

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

IV.— THE OLD MEN AND THE NEW

Such, in the trench, upon the plain, and behind
the breastwork of the wood, are the hfe and con-
ditions of our men. One might be pardoned for
imagining that it is a Hfe which would take the
polish off the brightest metal. The topic was
discussed by the Colonel as we sat in the best
parlour of the Flemish farm which formed his
head-quarters, drinking coffee after lunch. '* It's
difficult to know. Must say my own men wear
well. Of course, we're a good lot anyhow " (all
regiments are good lots to their Colonels), " but
we don't know how their shooting is getting
along. There's no room in this country to try
them out, either, and they're getting no marching
to do at all worth speaking about. It would take
a harder man than I to turn my men out for a
long march after a spell of trench work.
Besides, you'd choke the roads up, and they
have plenty to carry with the transport as it is.
Of course, even the best troops in the world (no
need to mention the regiment) will get trench-
tired if they get too much of it, but 1 must say
our men wear well."

Then the talk glided off to the necessity of
forming a Lowland Association in Scotland
which would serve to correct the impression
that Highlanders (and particularly Highland
regiments) were the only real Scotsmen.

112

The old MiiN and The new

It is recognized by all that special effort is
required if the effects of the trench are to be
combated. The cavalry feel the matter most.
Our cavalry are paying the price of their own
excellence. In the early part of the war they
showed their superiority over the enemy in the
most decisive fashion. The German cavalry
may be very bold and skilfully used when it
is a question of scaring a countryside with its
ubiquity, but with British cavalry they never
once stopped to argue matters. When called
upon during the trench period of war, our cavalry
adapted itself in a wonderful way to trench con-
ditions. All cavalrymen have a natural distaste
for infantry work, and when that infantry work
leads them to the trenches in a waterlogged and
heavily enclosed country their fate is indeed hard.
I had the pleasure of visiting one of our crack
cavalry regiments in its billets, where it had
arrived the day before from a spell in the
trenches. The straggling street of the village
was busy with men at work on their horses, for
when a regiment of cavalry goes off to trench
duty it leaves behind it to look after the horses a
number of men well below the average, and the
first desire of the Colonel is always to get his
horses fit again ; for all cavalrymen are born
optimists, and awake every day with the prayer
in their hearts, if not on their lips, that this day
they may have a dart at the enemy. If hard

113 8

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

work and devotion to animals can do it, the day
when it does come will find the horses fit for
anything that may be asked of them. What
will be asked of them no man can tell. There
are some who incline to the belief that the
cavalry may have to see the war through to the
end in the mud of trenches in Flanders or else-
where ; that, of the many weapons with which
they are now equipped, the sword alone will
never be used. The cavalryman dreams of the
day when he will get a dash '* with clanking bit
and bridle-bar," and while he does his bit in the
trenches as well as the infantry, while he manu-
factures trench artillery and practises bombing,
he spends all his spare time at the agreeable task
of keeping fit for the special work that is his. I
was able to judge of the success with which this
task has been accomplished both by the British
and by the Indian cavalry.

Standing at a cross-road, I saw a division of
Indian cavalry go past on a route march. It
was a superb spectacle. The Indian has not
taken unkindly to the fighting in Flanders. It
is strange, no doubt, for them to have to face
the high-explosive shells, to have to delve down
into the earth, to lie crouching in the clay, but
it is a strangeness which they have begun to
understand. They see the reason for many
things that were lost to them before, and appre-
ciate that this, at any rate, is a fight worth taking

1145

THE OLD MEN AND THE NEW

part in ; and though they form but a small part
of the British Army in Flanders, the experiment
made in bringing them to Europe has been
justified. They suffer but little from home-
sickness, and get on in the most admirable
manner with the inhabitants. The men are
billeted in the barns and farm buildings, and
there in straw litters they have succeeded in
making themselves extremely comfortable. In
their billets you will find them hard at work,
learning the new, and polishing up the old,
lessons of war. They have fought extremely
well in very trying circumstances, and their
success at Neuve Chapelle is a proof of their
efficiency, and of their ability to stand the
strain even of the heaviest form of bombard-
ment. The cavalry of the Indian Army have
the same prayer as their comrades of the British
Army.

In that prayer there are now joining the
voices of many new accents, for the infantry
is as anxious to get a move on as the cavalry,
and the new troops which have gone out to
Flanders since the beginning of the year are
full of the ardour and impatience of the young.
Still, a little waiting and a little more learning
will do them no harm. Of the Territorials you
will hear nothing but praise from the general
officers under whose notice they have come.
Some battalions, of course, are better than

115

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

others. Some are as good as any regular regi-
ment, and the worst are good and capable of
improvement. They are drawn from classes
of men very different from those who join the
regular army, and are, on the whole, above the
intelligence level of the regular private. By
the mere fact that in time of peace they have^
taken the trouble to go into regular training,
and have devoted what holiday they got to
the learning of war, they have shown that they
had a higher conception than many of their
friends of a man's duty to the State. This
gives them a keenness and a desire to learn
which the old stager in the army, remembering
the days of his own training as a recruit, marvels
at and respects. The regular private welcomes
the Territorial as one would a friend who, in
a moment of crisis, came to one's side and
offered to help you through. The regular officer
has none of the amused tolerance for his brother
of the Territorials which used to be lavished
upon the Volunteer officer by Mr, Punch.

The officer's trade is naturally a difficult one
to learn as a hobby. The Territorial officer
has no long line of tradition behind him. He
does not as a rule belong to a family with a
long connection with the service, and, however
successful he may be as a business or profes-
sional man, the habits of the counting-house or
the Bar do not of necessity teach him that habit

116

THE OLD MEN AND THE NEW

of command which betrays his complete con-
fidence in himself and in those underneath him,
and which in turn breeds the confidence of the
men in their leaders, and will carry them through
anything at the order.

" The officers," said one General to me, '' have
in some cases the air of not knowing how good
they are. They're a bit afraid of themselves.
They've no need to be, and they'll soon get over
the habit of excessive modesty." The first
Territorials went out in a hurry. They were
the regiments which everybody knows and hears
about — the London Scottish, the Queen's West-
minsters, the Artists, the H.A.C. They were
sent into the fighting line at a time when many
matters were in doubt, and they emerged from
their first ordeals with colours flying. Since
then they have been joined in the field by many
Territorial regiments who possess no special
fame in the Press. The days of stress are over,
for the time being at any rate, and now Terri-
torials are taking their place in the army as
divisions. It is recognized that there is not at
present any necessity to throw these Territorial
divisions straight into the trenches, and the com-
parative quiet of the front is being utilized to
accustom both officers and men gradually to the
conditions of active service. The officers are
detailed off for a spell of duty in the trenches,
and shown the ropes by brothers in the regulars,

117

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

and so on. The work already done by the
Territorials is an earnest of what is to come.
The shooting of those regiments which have
been in the trenches has shown a remarkable level
of excellence. In some places where the regulars
had been unable to establish the ascendancy of
their fire (anglice: where a German might put
his head above the trench occasionally without
being killed, but where an Englishman was risk-
ing more in the same adventure), the Territorial
has put an end to enemy sniping, and has been
able to indulge in some ^very pretty practice on
his own. The quality of the men may be judged
from the fact that it has been decided to turn
the whole of the Artists into an officers' training
regiment, and the success of that scheme has
justified itself already by the fact that less than
10 per cent, of the men who have been granted
commissions from this school of officers have
failed to meet all the demands made of them.
The new arrivals in Flanders, whether they be
Territorials, men of the new army, or colonials,
will find only one standard of criticism applied
to them. The regular realizes, as perhaps no
one else can so fully, all that the men who have
come and are coming out have sacrificed, and
only the standard of efficiency will be applied
to them. There is no jealousy in our army,
whether it be among Generals, staff officers,
regimental officers, regiments, regulars, Terri-

118

THE AEROPLANE

torials, or colonials. They are all fighting for
the same cause, and with the same determina-
tion to succeed.

v.— THE AEROPLANE

" If anyone had told me that so many of my
friends would be alive after six months of it, I
shouldn't have believed him. With the ordinary
flying risk in time of peace, it seemed a certainty
that the Flying Corps would furnish the largest
casualty list. But it isn't so. We started off
badly by losing two men on the advance from
Amiens before the fighting had begun, but since
then the luck has been so consistently good that
the air is the safest bit of Flanders to-day."
Thus spoke a member of the Royal Flying
Corps, one of whose officers had but shortly
before applied to be sent back to his line
regiment " because it doesn't seem the game to
be enjoying one's self in complete safety up in
the air, having a jolly good time, with all the
other chaps having a devil of a go in the
trenches." On the way up to the flying-ground
I had been shown one or two things which
explained the miracle of this comparative freedom
from accident, and the things 1 had seen im-
pressed upon me this fact : that through war
flying has passed from the groping, experimental

119

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

stage, in which each flight was more or less of
an adventure, to the state when it will shortly
be as safe and as ordinary as the motor-car. It
has needed the imperative necessity of war to
give to the study of flight and the organization
of machines the money and talent demanded.

Each army aeroplane which you see skimming
with as little apparent effort as the swallow in
its flight has at its back tons of organization and
method. It is the eflbrt in the workshops and
storerooms at the flying head-quarters which
serves just as much as the air and the engine to
keep the machine afloat in the sky. It is the
store of spare parts of every imaginable nature
to keep the aeroplane fleet constantly renewed
which prevents the dangerous straining of a
weakened strut, the fraying of a wire. The Air
Corps provides, indeed, a very compact example
of the whole internal economy of the army. They
have their special stores of petrol, of canvas, of
specially seasoned timber for repairs, of ammuni-
tion, and of food ; they have their own signals
department, where messages are taken in. They
have their artillery work, the seeking out and
notification of the hostile batteries. They have
their own fighting to do, not only with machine-
gun and revolver against hostile aircraft, but also
with bomb and steel dart against gun emplace-
ments, strategic points such as railway-stations,
bridges, lock-gates, upon observation points used

ISO

THE AEROPLANE

by the enemy for artillery control, upon build-
ings used by head-quarters — in fact, upon any
point the destruction of which is likely to in-
convenience the enemy in any way whatever
— always excepting buildings used as hospitals.
In the bathing establishments there are men
who are earning a war medal, who are helping to
win the war, just as directly as the men in the
trenches, who spend their time in hunting for
lice, the great breeders of disease. In the aero-
plane workshops there are men winning the
medal with sewing-machines and the needle.
There is a tailor's squad stitching away at
aeroplane wings, strengthening here, repairing
there.

In another shop the plane and spokeshave
are the instruments of war. There on the car-
penter's bench are the delicate damaged bones
of the flying machine, the work of a German
bullet being repaired. In yet another room the
wings of the machine lean against the walls,
new^ly covered with strengthening solution, and
giving to the shed the appearance of a theatrical
scenery store, an appearance which is emphasized
by the fact that in time of peace the building
serves as some sort of parish hall, and is
decorated with the gaudy plaster statues of
village piety. Overhead, garlands of brightly
coloured paper strung on wires through the air
mingle with ingenious ventilating chimneys

121

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

designed to carry off the liverish fumes of the
strengthening solution on the aeroplane wings.
On the walls there are notices of village festivi-
ties side by side with stern prohibitions as to
smoking or eating in the workshop, a juxtaposi-
tion which reminds one that here, in spite of
the completeness of the Air Corps installation,
nearly everything is improvised. Here science
is occasionally put to rude tests and strange
shifts. " It's wonderful what you can do after
a bit with any old scrap of copper or iron you
happen to have handy," remarked the be-
spectacled khaki expert, adding, "Why, I can
even get distilled water out of an old petrol
can now !"

It is all this specialized work on the ground
w^hich keeps the airman up in the air with but
few mishaps of an accidental character, and
enables him to act as the eye of the army. In
this mission our Army Air Service has performed
wonders — much more, may it be said, than was
ever expected of it. We have all been told of
the performances and exploits of the naval
airmen, whose special qualities as seamen, we
had said to ourselves, fitted them in a peculiar
degree for the work of the air. The army air-
man, although he may not have been entrusted
with the execution of special raids along the
coast, the destruction of submarines, of airship
sheds in inland German towns, has done con-

122

THE AEROPLANE

sistently well. His work goes on day after day.
He is always aloft in one of the two zones
into which the air in Flanders may be divided.
He is either patrolling the strategic area some
thirty miles behind the enemy's trench line, in
search of signs which will indicate some large
movement of troops with their parks of trans-
port and supply, or he is hovering over the
tactical area ten miles to the rear of the Ger-
mans, on the lookout for the purely tactical
surprise, and in the endeavour to spot the
enemy's artillery. In this area and above the
enemy's trench line he works in the closest co-
operation with his own artillery.

Much has been said about the arrival of the
aeroplane having altered the conditions of war
completely. It has been declared in haste that
the General of genius defined by Welhngton as
being the man who could know what was going
on on the other side of the hill had no longer any
opportunity of displaying his instinctive talent ;
that, all things being known to both sides, war
simply became a matter of big battalions, of
sticking power and shells ; and that in the use of
those materials genius could not play as decisive
a role as organization. Much of this may be
true, but from other causes. Most of the British
Generals with whom I discussed this question
beheved that there was but little change in the
essentials of war, and that good generalship was

123

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

still as important a factor of success as before the
arrival of the air machine ; that surprise — at any
rate tactical surprise — was still a frequent possi-
bility.

VI.— THE MOTOR

Just as all new weapons of offence have pro-
duced a corresponding weapon or armour of
defence, so the discovering instruments of war
have spurred the mind to effective counter-
measures of concealment. The aeroplane, if it
desires to fly in comparative safety, has to keep
at a height from which it is by no means able to
discern everything upon the countryside beneath,
even when there has been no attempt at conceal-
ment. The discovery of a battery of artillery is
an extremely difficult matter. All armies have
become adept in hiding them away and in con-
cealing the flash of the big guns. You can leave
a long column of transport drawn up underneath
the trees along a roadside quite confident that
only an extremely bad bit of luck will reveal it
to the enemy. When a hostile aircraft is pass-
ing over a battery, any men who may be in the
neighbourhood of the guns stand as still as
statues till the eye has passed, and a man stand-
ing still is a very small thing to look down on
from a few thousand feet. The aeroplane can, of
course, report large collections of rolli ng stock, or

124

THE MOTOR

important movements of troops, when those are
visible by day. It is, however, quite powerless
as a scout by night, and it is by night that works
the great obstacle to the complete success of the
aeroplane, that great instrument of surprise, the
petrol-driven motor.

The British aeroplanes received the highest
praise for their reconnaissance work just prior to
the Battle of Mons ; the excellence of their per-
formances did not prevent the British Army
from being faced the next morning by Germans
in thoroughly surprising strength. During the
Battle of the Ourcq large numbers of General
Maunoury's army surprised the Germans by the
rapidity of their arrival on the scene. During
the Battle of Ypres the French managed to move
87,000 men in record time. The Germans were
completely taken by surprise at Neuve Chapelle.
Their airmen had not seen the gradual accumu-
lation of artillery along the line, the collection
of huge reserves of shell, the massing of large
numbers of men, on the one point. They were
taken by surprise just as surely as the olden
General was caught unawares by some stroke
prepared on the other side of the hill.

It was the petrol- driven motor which made all
those coups possible. At the front you meet
them in their thousands ; they are of every type,
of every size. They come from the big delivery
companies, the drapers' shops, the brewers, the

125

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

bus companies, the motor firms. They are
now all disciplined. The different types have
been drilled and drafted oif into columns, of
which each is as much a unit of speed and
efficiency as a squadron of the fleet. You meet
them toiling along the greasy road with heavy
loads of shells or food, their gay advertise-
ments of Bass's Beer or Crosse and Blackwell
scarred and dirtied by the war. On the road
at night you will pass huge convoys of motor
buses packed more closely to the square inch
than the London County Council might alto-
gether approve. The battalion has ** embussed,"
as the orders now phrase it, "at X, and will
debuss at Y." The battalion meanwhile is rest-
ing. Thrusting your eye past the khaki-clad
conductor, who sings out cheerily as he passes,
" B'nk, B'nk, Charing Cross, B'nk," you see in
the interior of the bus two lines of huddled
sleeping men, each man's head resting on his
neighbour's shoulder. The windows of the bus
are covered with paint or boards to prevent the
gleam of sunshine on their glass revealing the
presence of the column to the inquisitive airman,
and to dull the light from the interior.

The motor has defeated one of the chief reasons
for the aeroplane ; and if the conditions of war-
fare have been radically changed, it is the effect
of the motor and not of the air machine. The
motor is used for every imaginable purpose. It

126

THE MOTOR

hauls big guns ; it distributes meat ; it supplies
men and ammunition to the firing line, power to
the workshops ; it is used by the despatch rider
and the staff ; it becomes a weapon of offence in
the armoured motor-car ; it mounts mitrailleuses ;
it has almost completely ousted the horse from
the British ambulance system. The motor alone
makes possible the manipulation of the enormous
armies which these days of national service fling
into the field ; and at the same time it multiplies
the forces engaged, by the ease and rapidity with
which they can be hurried from one point of the
line to another, and by reducing the time wasted
in long marches along crowded roads ; for if the
roads immediately behind our army are busy
with motor transport, the space that traffic
occupies, the confusion into which it is occasion-
ally thrown, are as nothing to the muddles and
delays which would inevitably result from the
use of horsed transport sufficient to shift the
same amount of men and material. The motor
alone makes it possible to feed the men in the
field with any degree of regularity. When you
have a front of the density required by trench
fighting, it is obviously impossible for an army to
find in the resources of the country, be it ever so
rich, enough meat and flour to keep it going.
All the food of the army is run by motor, and
most of it comes from England.

The system of distribution varies a little in

127

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

accordance with local geographical conditions.
To the north of the British lines, the regi-
mental horsed carts collect their stores straight
from the railhead ; but in the British area,
although railways are plentiful, they mostly con-
verge upon Lille, and therefore run through our
lines, and not parallel with them. The system
adopted in the field is, broadly, the following:
Rail bases are formed at some little distance from
the shell area, and from them the stores are
sent up the line to some convenient point, prefer-
ably the centre of a knot of roads, beyond which
railway traffic is not as a rule continued. At
railhead a fleet of motor transports awaits the
arrival of the stores and conveys them along
regular traffic circuits to refilling points, w^here
they are once more transhipped, this time into
horse vehicles, for detailed distribution among
the units. The power of the motor transport
obviously ceases within a certain distance from
the firing line, for, quite apart from the danger of
running big motor convoys in too close proximity
to the enemy, where one shell would destroy
more stores in one motor than in several horsed
carts, the great wear and tear on the roads in
the immediate vicinity of the trenches, the
narrow lanes through which these are ap-
proached, and sometimes the complete absence
of any real communicating road, make horse
transport a necessity. The new system enables

128

THE MOTOR

the supplies of food to reach the men fresh every
day, and the motor, by its increased speed
capacity and greater carrying power, has cut
down both the length and the number of supply
columns.

Ammunition and shells go forward along prac-
tically the same routine, with this difference,
that the food requirements of an army are a
known factor, and its wants in ammunition vary
from day to day. Therefore the word which re-
leases the stream of food and general stores from
the base to the front is uttered from behind the
line, while for ammunition supplies the word
goes back from the trenches to the reserve points ;
and they fill up at once from the advanced base
in their rear with such rapidity, thanks to the
motor, that, blaze away as they will, the guns and
the men in the trenches may be assured of having
all the ammunition they want if it is to be had
at all.

The armoured motor-car is having a period ot
rest during the period of trench war, and the
motor Maxim detachments no longer know the
fierce joys of careering about debatable territory
in search of something to shoot. The motor-
cyclist, however, goes on for ever. For him
there has been no rest since the war began. The
picturesque line of army signallers, flag-wagging
from hill-peak to hill-peak, from field to field,
has utterly disappeared. Their place has been

129 9

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

taken by the telegraph, the telephone, and the
motor-cyclist. The old name of Army Signals
still exists, but flag-wagging is to Signals what
Euclid is to mathematics — purely an educational
affair, with but rare opportunity for practical
demonstration.

In the transmogrified counting-house of a
Flemish coal-merchant's office are Signals. The
calendars, the pictures of collieries, the glass case
with the specimen lumps of coal, have gone, and
the walls are covered with neat diagrams of
telegraph and telephone wire. At the desks
round the wall are the army telegraphists, atten-
tive to the instruments through which the army
chatters all day long about its business. Strange,
unearthly-looking individuals, clad in oilskins
and clotted up to their eyes in mud, buzz up to
the door on machines which appear themselves to
be composed of the all-pervading element. They
are the motor-cyclists. How they ever make
any progress at all along some of the roads is a
mystery. They dodge in and out of long trans-
port columns, sideslip into the mud ditches
which line the causeway of the highroad, get the
innards of their machines jolted out of them by
the holes or the repairs in the road ; and through
it all they keep up a steady eight or ten miles an
hour, and, at least with one Division, boast that,
in spite of tremendous difficulties — even during
the days of the retreat from Mons — they never

130

THE MOTOR

failed to deliver the messages entrusted to them.
Theirs is a record of which they may well be
proud ; it is a further triumph for the petrol-
driven motor, for even the best-organized system
of telephonic communication may at times break
down ; even the threefold telegraphic strands of
the wire get cut by some chance shell ; and with
coloured rockets it is not easy to convey very
much of a message, or to convey it with a
reasonable certainty that it has been noted and
understood.

In ambulance work of every kind the motor
has proved itself indispensable, and, gi^eat though
the supply of ambulance motors has been, it would
seem that at the front they can never have too
many of them. Without them it is difficult to see
how the enormous number of wounded, resulting
from the large numbers engaged, could possibly
be evacuated from the advanced dressing-stations
to the casualty clearing hospitals from which they
reach the railway. Our field hospitals and our
base hospitals in France would have been crowded
to overflowing for weeks during the heavy fight-
ing around Ypres had it not been for the
motor.

It seems a simple enough matter to fit up a
motor ambulance. As a matter of fact, the
ambulance transport officer finds within the
simple limits of car construction as much field
for shop talk as the keen cavalryman will find in

131

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

an attempt to cut down the weight of harness
without causing sore backs. There is too much
overhang or too much underhang. The first
brings the stretchers and the wounded man right
over the wheel, and leads to too much jolting ;
the second is fatal along the causeway roads,
because, if the car gets off the causeway with
one set of wheels in the two-foot-deep mud
on the side, the underhang will inevitably get
smashed up on the causeway camber of the
road. Internal fittings, sideways and endways
methods of loading cars, provide other points
for expatiation.

Verily, the man of knowledge is the man
who knows one thing ; and the charm of the
army on active service is the fact that each man,
whether he be an army corps commander, the man
in the trench, the engineer, the flying man, or the
doctor, has one cabbage-patch to keep in order,
one particular corner of the machine to keep
running and oiled, one thing to know, not super-
ficially, but down to the last letter. At the front
itself they worry but little about the war in its
general progress. They are glad to hear that the
'* Russians gave 'em a biff at Przemysl," but
their anxiety for news is not tremendous, and
extends much more to what the " other fellows
are doing" in the North Sea, along in the
Champagne country, down in the Dardanelles,
than to events within the area of the British lines

132

THE MOTOR

in Flanders. There they have their job to do,
and the doing of it gives them plenty to think
about and heaps of fun in the process. Of " the
other fellows," the French, they do not now see
very much, except where the trench lines and
their shoulders touch.

133

CHAPTER V

THE EASTERN GATE

Flanders lies nearest to our shores and to our
hearts. It was also well to deal with it first, for
in its flat plains there is to be seen the pure
type of trench warfare without relief of any sort.
The operations and the country around Verdun
may well come next, for there is considerable
contrast between the Hants de Meuse and the
flat Flanders plain.

At Verdun it is the real siege operations
of modern warfare which are in progress, and
Verdun, like Nancy, has disappointed the enemy's
calculations. The army defending Verdun was
pushed up to the Belgian frontier when it
became apparent that the French mobilization
and concentration had been effected too far down
to the south. It did its share of the fighting in
the neighbourhood of Longwy, and retired in
accordance with the scheme of general opera-
tions which was adopted after the reverse suffered
by the Allies in the great battle along the Belgian
frontier. W^hile the British and the French

134

THE EASTERN GATE

armies were hurrying back, turning every now
and again upon their pursuers, the Verdun army
was able to withdraw, in more leisurely style and
untroubled by the enemy, to cover the fortress
of the Meuse Heights. The movement came to
an end on September 10, when, with its line
running from Verdun to Bar-le-Duc, General
Sarrail's army threatened the flank of the Crown
Prince's army, covered Verdun, and acted in a
measure as the pivot of the Battle of the Marne.
It was the menace of this army which contributed
to the precipitate retreat of the German Crown
Prince's army, when his men seem to have been
seized with something of the blind spirit of
despair, so wholesale and purposeless was the
destruction they wrought as they moved through
the countryside of the Marne seeking a way to
the Argonne. The army and the line of fortifi-
cations stood a series of very heavy assaults.
Fort Troyon stood firm against the Crown
Prince, but at other points the enemy managed
to push through, and on the last day of the
Battle of the Marne he drove a wedge through
from the east right to the Meuse at St. Mihiel.

The achievement was important, for if it had
been pushed a little farther the Germans might
well have succeeded in cutting the Verdun army
in two and in enveloping the stronghold and a
large portion of the troops defending it in the
field. Reinforcements in the shape of two

135

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

cavalry corps stemmed the German onslaught on
the centre, and for all practical purposes the
Germans may be said to have failed in the object
they had in driving down the wedge to St. Mihiel.
Their presence there has been extremely awk-
ward, and all attempts to dislodge them have
been beaten, as have their efforts to cross the
Meuse. Once having corked the hole at
St. Mihiel, the French had leisure to look about
them and to survey the position around Verdun.
General Sarrail, although opposed by the 3rd,
10th, 16th, and 13th Wiirtemberg Corps, and
five or six reserve divisions, met the German
attack elsewhere with such determination that,
although he did not manage to defeat them in
any wholesale or decisive manner, he neverthe-
less, although in w^eaker strength, staggered the
3rd German Corps, and reduced it to a state of
extreme weakness, forcing it to retire and to
abandon many prisoners and large amounts of
stores.

General Sarrail had two duties to accomplish
with his army : he had first of all to maintain
his touch with the other armies and to contribute
to the general scheme of operations. The posses-
sion of Verdun was vital to the plan of campaign,
and it was also, therefore, his duty to protect the
fortress in the field to the utmost of his ability.

Liege, Antwerp, Namur, Maubeuge, Lille,
Longwy, Laon, Fere, and Rheims, had by this

136

THE EASTERN GATE

time taught their lesson. All those fortresses
had either been forced to surrender after brief
resistance, or had been deemed impossible to
defend, or not worth defending against the heavy-
siege train of the Germans. The truth of the
old saying, " Ville assiegee, ville prise," had been
very triumphantly demonstrated, and the great
truth vividly proclaimed, that the great, and
indeed the only, way of defending a fortress was
never to allow the enemy to come within shell-
fire distance of its forts.

The approach to all fortified towns, once they
have been prepared for defence, is impressive.
The sentries along the road multiply in numbers
and increase the severity with which your safe-
conducts are demanded ; the network of railways
grows more dense ; the roads broaden out and
increase in number ; there is a bareness on the
hillsides where woods have lately been felled to
clear the field of fire ; and all these indications
betoken the existence of some great purpose :
you do not build new roads and railways for
nothing. Verdun itself is a fortified town of
great antiquity. It is, and has been within the
memory, one of the bolts on the eastern portal
of France, and its walls and surroundings form a
compact course in the history of fortifications.
You reach it over many a bridge and canal, and
penetrate the castellated walls of the town
through a portcullis.

137

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

When I visited Verdun as the guest of the
French General Staff the town was already
besieged ; the outer forts guarding the eastern
road to Etain had already fallen ; the German
heavy batteries were already established some
few miles away from the battlements of the
place ; the inhabitants were reduced to their
last gasp ; they were already fighting for the
possession of sewer rats and other titbits of the
regular siege menu ; the Crown Prince, in fact,
was on the point of scoring another triumphant
victory. Such, at any rate, were the main lines
of the picture drawn for the credible neutral by
the masters of imaginative fiction who i*ule at
WollFbureau, the great official German news-
agency.

The streets seemed well populated with civil-
ians, and bore no visible traces of the work of
" Jack Johnsons " when I arrived there. The
hotel at which I was lodged was scarcely habitable
on account of the almost overpowering stench
of the cheeses which filled the whole of the
restaurant and the cellars. A stroll through the
town soon showed me that, whatever hardships
the citizens of Verdun had to bear, hunger was
not among them. Jewellers' shops and boot
stores vied with the regular charcuterie estab-
lishments in their displays of York hams, cheeses,
condensed milk, sausage of every kind save the
German. There was so much plenty, and the

138

THE EASTERN GATE

prices were so astonishingly low, that I sought
an explanation. When the war broke out, the
people of Verdun, confident though they were
in their army, reasoned with some justice : " A
place is not fortified unless an attack is expected,
and an attack on a place like Verdun means a
siege. It will be a long siege, for we shall not
give in this time to the Germans. We should
join Alsace and Lorraine if we did. So let us go
and buy provisions."

In a day or two the provision-dealers realized
the truth of the saying about ill winds. This ill
wind of war certainly brought them customers in
numbers they had never known before. The
whole civilian population of the place, and a good
many men of the garrison too, provided them-
selves with hams and other sustaining and long-
lived forms of nourishment. Prices naturally
went up with a will. Still the Germans did not
come, and still people clamoured for move hams
at the shops. Traders in other commodities,
such as bedroom suites, grand pianos, jewellery,
scents, and other neglected merchandise, watched
the growing prosperity of the provision- dealers
with some envy, and finally they determined,
since their own goods were not saleable or likely
to find purchasers for many a long day, that they
had better follow the immortal advice and " buy
hams and see life." They sent up to the markets
of Paris for supplies of food, and in the plush-

139

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

furnished fittings of the jewellers' shop-window
soon sprawled the product of the pig. When
the supplies of the town had thus been aug-
mented by amateur and by professional enter-
prise, the Governor decided that the time had
come to fix prices. He did so with some vigour,
and at the same time at last made up his mind
to the step which he had foreseen would be
necessary — the evacuation of all useless mouths
from the fortress. In other words, the town
having become filled with food of every nature,
he fixed prices, and then banished 7,000 of the
12,000 prospective customers of the provision-
dealers. It was a cruel blow to the speculators
in precious hams, and to their dying day they
w^ill never know just how far ahead the Governor
of Verdun had foreseen the turn of events, for to
the Governor of a fortress threatened with a
siege the pig question is as serious a matter as it
is to any Serbian Prime Minister.

Certainly Verdun did not seem to be seriously
threatened with hunger. I had an opportunity
of enjoying a siege menu at the Military Club,
which included lobster and chicken and Chateau-
briand, and that final proof seemed conclusive
to one who had spent the best part of a week
motoring in the fresh air. Even with my appe-
tite, I could not get through the whole menu.
As I wandered back to the cheese-laden atmo-
sphere of my hotel, I paused for a moment on the

140

THE EASTERN GATE

old bridge over the Meuse, and faintly louder
than the ripple of the water I heard the low
growling of the guns which I was to see in
action the next day.

Verdun lies in the Valley of the Meuse almost
due west of the great German fortress of Metz.
Between the two towns there is the great barrier
of the Meuse Heights. Upon these heights, in
the valley contained between them and the
wooded ridge of the Argonne to the west, and
down south to St. Mihiel, the siege of Verdun
has been in progress for months without the
inhabitants of that town being really aware of
any such operation. Occasionally the airship
has left its shed underneath the hill and floated
off upon some mission, occasionally the Taube
has come and dropped a few bombs in the streets
of the town ; occasionally the firing of the guns
has become so constant as to constitute a rumble.
But of a siege in the whole sense of the word
Verdun has seen nothing. A mile or so out of
the town, however, the siege operations become
immediately apparent. As my motor climbed
up through the tree-carpeted valleys towards
the advanced artillery positions, the noise of the
hatchet, the intense blue of wood smoke rising
from russet-coloured trees, told of great wood-
land toil. Along the roadside w^e passed fatigue
parties of French artillerymen and infantry in
blue and red uniforms, who stood at attention,

141

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

axe in hand, as the first motor of our convoy
came within sight, the broken lance-head it bore
with the colours of France denoting the presence
of the Commanding General. The forests were
filled with these gangs of woodcutters, and
resounded with the sharp blows of the axe and
the occasional hurtle of a falling tree. Along
the road jingled the transport sections, conveying
cartloads of twig baskets which, filled with sand,
strengthen the defences of a fort or of a breast-
work ; long lengths of timber for the roofs and
floors of trench and shelter ; masses of spruce
greenery for the concealment of batteries upon
the bald hillside. Then, leaving the wooded
slope beneath the road, we climbed to the bleak
skyhne, from beyond which came the prolonged
rumble of guns.

We left our motor-cars below, so as not to
attract the attention of the watchful enemy, and
toiled up the hillside to the top, where in a bower
of trees was installed one of the chief observation
stations along the French lines around Verdun.
To the right the country rolled away into the
distance in great billows of wooded hill and vale,
each hill a fort and bristling with concealed
guns. On the extreme right of the view were
the wooded twin heights, the Jumelles d'Ornes,
the nearest position of the enemy to Verdun,
13 kilometres away. The plain below stretched
out westward until it faded into the dark forest

142

THE EASTERN GATE

barrier of the Argonne. In the brilUant winter
sunshine the countless httle lakes formed a silver
setting to the green turf and fields. It is an
extraordinary plain, this plain to the north and
to the south of Verdun. Its fields are so fretted
with water that, seen from a height, it resembles
the skin of some miraculously beautiful lizard.
Here and there a red-roofed village glowed upon
the background. In the far distance uprose the
village of Montfaucon, over which hung a wisp
of smoke veiling the base of the pointed village
church spire.

In the immediate foreground the roads,
stretched like tapes upon a green running track,
were dotted with the black dots of moving
troops and transport. The artillery fire has
slackened, the storm centre has moved far away
to the south, from which the sound of the guns
floats slowly to us, muffled by much travelling
over sound-absorbing forests. In the distance
ahead of us the sun has touched to silver the
framework of a hovering aeroplane ; bobbing
grotesquely just over the neighbouring hill-top
on our right there arises the great sunlike orb
of a yellow captive balloon. It is a good after-
noon to be alive on, and there is pleasure in
seeing the cloud shadows cutting soft dark
arabesques upon the plain below. Then, without
apparent reason, there come from the ground
beneath our feet four quick, tremendously

143

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

emphatic coughs. " Now watch along that
white wavy line down there in the centre," said
an officer quickly. And as he finished his
remark the earth along the German trench line
spurted up into a fountain at four spots. The
75's were at it in the battery below us, and the
aeroplane ahead or the captive balloon beside us
saw the effect given to their information. Then
floated back to us the duller thud of the bursting
shell. Before it had stopped vibrating in our
ears four more shells were on their way. Then
a battery of deeper tone joined in with its more
weighty throat-clearing. Soon the whole country
seemed to tremble with the noise, and after half
an hour it had been noted down for the com-
position of that day's communique that there
had been an artillery duel in the Hants de Meuse,
in which the French guns had gained the
ascendancy. At the end of that time the smoke
overhanging Montfaucon was heavy, and it had
in it the glow of fire. The German guns were
silent, and the French aeroplane was again
circling over the German lines, this time to
report upon the damage done.

We went down to the battery. The men
tumbled out of the countryside and lined up
for inspection by the General. Clear of eye
and clean of skin, they were not suffering from
the hardships of winter in the mountains of the
Meuse. To the French soldier one of the most

144

THE EASTERN GATE

amusing features of this war has been the pity
lavished upon him by civiHans, and the terrible
pictures painted by poetic journalists of the
hardships and anguish the troops have to
undergo. What people at home fail to realize
is that all the troops are not in the trenches,
and that, at any rate during this period of
trench war, the infantry have their regular shifts
of trench service, very carefully arranged, so as
to expose them to as little strain as possible.
The artilleryman of course escapes, save when
he is an observation officer, nearly all the dis-
comforts of the damp trench life. In a country
of rolling hill the gunner's days are by no means
unpleasant. He has the leisure to busy himself
with the building of a comfortable home, and
in this kind of gay-hearted improvisation he has
shown himself certainly the equal of his British
allies. In the Meuse many villages have been
destroyed by the guns, but the gunners them-
selves have shown as much ability in building
up as they have in destroying. The villages
they have built for themselves outdo in their
rustic quality the finest examples of garden
city architecture. Unaided by their officers the
men have set to work, and from the trees in
the neighbouring woods, with a few odd bricks
taken from a ruined village near by, with spruce
branches for thatching, they have erected the
kind of house which Marie^^ Antoinette no

145 10

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

doubt had in her mind when she first formed
the wish to live the milkmaid's life at the
Trianon.

One entire village of this sort that I visited
would have formed the clou of any exhibition
at Earl's Court, it was so neat, and so cosy were
the interiors, so ingenious the whole structure.
To one you entered through a rustic veranda,
over the porch of which hung a fine old beaten
brass clockdial, the hands of which pointed per-
manently to eleven o'clock, the welcome hour
when the French soldier gets his soup. The
living-room had brick flooring, sprinkled with
a cleanly white sand ; in a large open brick
hearth leapt the many-coloured flames of a
wood fire ; upon the walls were pictures of
Pere Jofire and Sir John French ; around the
room were the rifle-racks and sleeping bunks
of the men, filled with warmth-retaining straw ;
the windows were veiled with white curtains,
gracefully looped back with tricolour ribbons.
It was the clock over the door, and that alone,
which justified this cottage in feeling prouder
than its neighbours.

There are villages of every sort in this part
of the country ; for wood and brick are not
always obtainable, nor is it always desirable that
the dwellings should be above-ground. At one
spot the men have scooped out for themselves
in sandstone a subterranean city to which, no

146

THE EASTERN GATE

doubt with some feeling of appropriateness, they
have given the name of Montmartre, the great
underworld of Paris. Here they have their
public gardens. A white expanse of sand has
been planted with twigs of evergreen, formed
into ornamental beds ; the paths are scrupu-
lously raked every day, and a rope hung
round the six trees which constitute the
garden's boundaries keeps the men "off the
grass."

At another spot the moving spirit seems to
have been some grown-up boy who, like youth
all the world over, has been brought up on the
tales of Fenimore Cooper. The village here
would delight the heart of every schoolboy in
its reproduction of the Indian wigwam. Clay
has taken the place of skins and canvas for the
wigwams, but three pointed sticks at the top
of each conelike dwelling give to the whole
place its air of dusky romance. In this village
they have no antique clock to boast of ; but the
last thing reserved for the delectation of visitors
is the kennel, where the battery pet, a poodle,
of all unlikely animals in the world, has a little
clay wigwam of his own, on the top of which,
as a protection against aircraft, a little spruce
sapling has been planted.

Just as the British soldier has christened
everything about war that there is to christen,
from big guns to dugouts, giving to the bap-

147

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

tized objects some name taken from family or
home surroundings, so the French soldier has
christened most of his belongings — with this
difference, however, that the names given by
the Frenchmen cover a wider field. " Villa de
la Victoire," " A la Bonne Alliance," are the type
of names the French soldier delights in. France
has already in the ranks the men that we are only
sending there — men of every class and calling;
and here and there in these artillery villages
the visitor will see a beautifully drawn sign-
board above a house, or a tablet bearing verses
of great merit, summing up the battery's opinion
of the Prussian. It was my good-luck to be
with a battery on the day of Ste. Barbe, the
patron saint of the French gunner. The guns
were in reserve, and the men had been given
full opportunity to celebrate the saint to their
hearts' content. The festivities were already in
progress w^hen I poked my head through the
door of a dugout, and found quite a number
of the gunners assisting the cook in the roast-
ing of a remarkably succulent-looking leg of
mutton.

He was just dishing the repast, and had
paused for a moment to seize the joint at the
knuckle, and was waving it vigorously round
his head with a shout of "Vivel a Ste. Barbe!"
when my strange civilian head coming round the
doorway so astonished him that for a moment

148

THE EASTERN GATE

the joint remained high above his head. He
was a bit of a wag, this cook, and as much a
cook as he was a wit. Discovering that I was
English, he immediately burst out into a series
of complicated sounds, from which I gathered
that he had been chef in the house of some great
English nobleman who lived in Upper Baker
Street. Thanks to his easy manners (due to his
native politeness, and not to the education he
had received at the hands of the Upper Baker
Street nobility), I was soon made to feel quite
at home. I quickly gathered that it was my
honour and good-fortune to have visited upon
the day of Ste. Barbe the very best battery in
the whole French Army ; for not only were they
better guns than anybody else, but they were
far ahead of the rest of the artillery in their
devotion to the patron saint, and in their de-
termination to make a jolly day in her honour.
I was shown, in proof of this, the advertisement
poster which announced on the " village " square
the programme of the day's events, not the least
important item of which was contributed by my
good friend the cook.

Upon the blackboard in the square had been
chalked the programme of the excellent even-
ing's entertainment the battery had organized
in honour of its saint. In its style and in its
contents it imitated in great detail, and with
much solemnity, the real poster of the boule-

149

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

vards. The " village " square became that night
the Casino du Bon Espoir. Private Gillet left
the army for a few hours to become music-hall
manager. M. Charles Martel exchanged his
seat on the limber for the chair of the chef
dorchestre. The programme, furnished entirely
by the talent of the battery, was certainly as
good as, and infinitely more varied than, that
to be found at any first-class music-hall ; for
many of the men who contributed to it remem-
bered for that evening the violin, the conjuring
tricks, and the songs, which gave them their
living in times of peace, and made their reputa-
tions as civilians. For the violin was played
by a man who, two years before, had won the
Premier Prix du Conservatoire in Paris ; the
conjurer had a name to conjure with in the
Parisian music-hall world ; and the songs that
were sung by the writer of them have long ago
made him known throughout the whole French
Army, when the men were in need of a lift
on the road and a lilt to keep their tired legs
swinging. In the open square of the " village "
the men from many miles around gathered to
listen to the music of peace, to which the guns
supplied an orchestral bass. Ste. Barbe was
honoured right royally, and the inhabitants of
the ruined villages in the countryside reaped
the benefit of the 50 centimes charged for ad-
mission.

150

THE EASTERN GATE

To return to the General's inspection. The
men were of the artillery type — stocky, well-
set fellows, with the broad backs and the long
arms of the weight-lifter, and with faces alive
with the alert intelligence required of men of
their arm. When the General had passed on
the men fell out of rank, and I stayed behind
to chat with them awhile, to distribute a few
cigarettes, and tell them the latest news. Of
cigarettes they would take none. *' We're lucky
here, just close to the main-road. Keep them
for the forward batteries and the trenches. There
they're scarce, and you will be greeted like a
god." " What do they say at Paris, eh ?
Give my love to the boulevards." ("Give my
regards to Leicester Square "). He was the only
Parisian in the battery, and he confessed to me
that " bons types " though all his comrades were,
and although the war was " tres rigolo," he did
occasionally long for the "pave de Paris," for
a saunter down from the Place de la Republique
to the Madeleine, for a gossip with another man
from the same "pays." The territorial mixture
among the men is very varied. Among our
party was a Deputy who wanted information
on this point in order to confirm a theory. He
questioned the General as to the provenance
of these men who are defending Verdun. The
General said they came from all over France.
No, he didn't think it made much difference

151

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

nowadays whether a Norman or a Lorrainer
was defending Lorraine. Frenchmen were first
for local patriotism, he admitted, but they all
had the larger patriotism of France.

We were up in the billets of an infantry
company which had been rather badly tried the
previous night. There were several missing from
the ranks, and men do not like to ponder upon
those things. The General, in order to show
the broad area from which the men were drawn,
went up to the line, and, affectionately patting
each man on the shoulder, asked where he came
from. It was a long time before he found a
man who came from a neighbouring village. It
was only about six miles away. " When did
you last hear from the village ?" asked the
General. '' Not since I left, the first day of
mobilization," was the reply. He didn't know
what had happened there. The man, saluting
'* mon General," stepped back ; but the General,
bidding the others be off, kept him. "Wait
a minute, and I'll find out what's happened over
there at your village, my friend." The Chief
of Staff stepped up. " What's happened there ?"
" X. ville, mon General, is still ours. Our
trenches are just east of the place." " There you
are, my man," said the General to the waiting
peasant ; " they're not there yet, and if you
go on fighting up here as you all did last night
they'll never get there." " Oui, mon General."

152

THE EASTERN GATE

And the man returned, to wait, to hope, and to
fight.

Such is the modern equivalent of the ear-
pulhng method of the Little Corporal. Fired
with the knowledge that, whether they be
Bretons or Normans, they are fighting for their
homes and for their existence as Frenchmen,
the French Army, handled sympathetically and
yet led with great discipline, has fought round
Verdun with the utmost gallantry. It is the
siege of Verdun in which they are participa-
ting, although Verdun is some 12 kilometres
away; but so fierce is the struggle for advan-
tage that to whole divisions the importance of
Verdun is lost completely in the immediate
siege operations of a village, or, indeed, of one
house in that village. Inch by inch since August
the army in the field before Verdun has edged
the Germans farther away from the inner forts ;
inch by inch, trench by trench, sap by sap,
the outer fortifications of the town have been
pushed farther and farther afield, and breathing-
room has been given to the city which they
defend. Inside the bigger siege there have been
furious minor siege battles against the village
strongholds of the Woevre and the plain to
the east of the Argonne. Villages ruined by
shell -fire have been converted into fortresses
capable of standing any amount of battering.
With sandbag and barbed wire, barricades of

153

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

carts and stones, they have defied capture for
weeks, in spite of the full fury of the French
assault ; for whatever else may be said of the
Germans, whatever change may have been
effected in the class of troops, there are few
to be found in the field who will not readily
admit that, at any rate during the first six
months of the war, the German soldier fought
with bravery worthy of admiration.

I have frequently heard the opinion expressed
by French officers, during a discussion as to
the merits and demerits of the German system,
that, while it was quite comprehensible that the
troops should be led in massed formation to
the attack of strong positions, what was astound-
ing was that the men should obey their orders.
Assaults such as these have been launched time
after time against the French pocket strongholds
in the Meuse, only to be beaten back with
terrible loss from machine-gun and artillery-
fire.

General JofFre, in reply to a question as what
he thought of the situation, is reported to have
replied, "Je les grignotte" (I am nibbling
them). This is certainly the course events
have taken in this area of the operations. The
general line has not changed much, it is true.
There has, however, been almost consistent pro-
gress along the whole semicircle of the position,
which runs from Vauquois through the Bois de

154

THE EASTERN GATE

Montfaucon to the north-east, from Flabas to
Azanne, south to Ornes, out away east to Etain,
south-west thence to Eparges, and finally through
Amorville to St. Mihiel. Along this front the
trench line is not unbroken. There are two or
three neutral zones where in the woods the rival
patrols still find work for cavalry to do, where
the opponents watch and wait for the other fellow
to try and advance. Here and there definite
progress, to be expressed in terms of geography
rather than of a number of metres, has been
achieved, in the capture of the village of Vauquois,
or the driving of the Germans out of the village
of Les Eparges, where they had established their
footing on the Meuse. These gains are more
than morally valuable, for they give to the
French armies around Verdun a new outlook.
They place the French at the top of the hills
from which their view stretches away into
Germany. Similar progress has been made in
wearing through the neck of German-occupied
territory which enables them still to occupy St.
Mihiel. The " nibbling " is continuous and sure.
At the end of six months of siege the Germans
have not succeeded in throwing a single shell
into Verdun. They brought a heavy gun into
position in the neighbourhood of the Ornes at
the end of March, and managed to put a few
heavy shells into the Fort of Donaumont, the
farthest advanced work of the old fortification

155

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

scheme, which was modern at any rate up till
the month of August last. What importance
the French may now attach to this ring of forts
I cannot say, but so long as the German semi-
circle around Verdun grows slowly but surely
wider the bombardment of an outer fort is not
likely to affect the persistent optimism of the
armies in the field before the town, and of the
civilian inhabitants of the town itself. The arrival
of the heavy siege artillery which has laid low
the pride of so many fortresses since the beginning
of the war, the report that the Crown Prince
himself has now assumed command of the
German armies operating against Verdun, may
indicate that here the enemy is going to seek
some other objective. Perhaps the Crown Prince
is to be given yet another opportunity of repair-
ing his damaged military prestige. Since he
could not enter Paris at the head of the trium-
phant armies, he may hope for a minor state
entry through the battlemented walls of Verdun.
The name of Verdun, if that be the intention,
will be added to the growing list of German
failures — Paris, Warsaw, Calais, Verdun.

The whole country has the greatest confidence
in the armies of the east. It has seen the famous
Iron division at work in the Grand Couronne de
Nancy. It perceived with some amazement, it
may as well be admitted, that the town of Nancy,
the fine capital of Lorraine, undefended though

156

THE EASTERN GATE

she was by any girdle of forts, close to the
frontier though she was, and apparently at the
mercy of the first bold German raider, had not
fallen like a ripe plum into the capacious Teuton
maw, although the menace came very near. The
town itself was bombarded pretty severely ; but
the courage and the skilled obstinacy which the
armies in the field displayed resulted in a com-
plete check to the enemy, and to-day the only
menace comes from the air. At Verdun the
feeling of confidence now felt at Nancy prevails.
There is good reason for it, for if ever an army
has taken kindly to war, if ever men were certain
of their leaders, or officers could rely upon their
men to struggle on with every nerve of their
minds and bodies, it is in the army which I saw
in the Hants de Meuse.

A pipeclay enthusiast accustomed to the well-
trimmed appearance of our peace army — an army
de luxe — might well find some points of criticism.
You cannot tailor the uniforms for an army of
millions ; the French soldier does not shave, he
is not brought up in an atmosphere of spit and
polish ; to German eyes his discipline would
appear queer, for to the Germans there is only
one way of treating everybody ; and he is quite
unable to understand — as, indeed, we are perhaps
ourselves — that in France discipline is not only
enforced by the shouted command, but may with
different people and different customs be better

157

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

brought into play by whispered persuasion. The
French soldier keeps his spit and polish for his
rifle and his bayonet. He may occasionally show
an inclination to smoke on duty, he may forget
to take his cigarette out of his mouth while
speaking to a superior officer, but he fights like a
polecat and will follow his officers anywhere.

158

CHAPTER VI

GENERALS ALL

In the debates upon the Three Years Service
Law, Jaures, the great Socialist leader, thunder-
ously appealed to the House to reject a military
system which would take the youth of the
country from its occupations and keep them for
three years in the unproductive barracks. He
fought hard for the introduction into France of
a system somewhat resembling that of Switzer-
land, whereby each man in the country would
have received a short training in the use of the
rifle, and would then be dismissed to his home
in readiness for the call. This Utopian idea
was christened " The Nation in Arms." Jaures
did not live long enough to see his idea realized
by the system he condemned, but even he, bitter
opponent though he was of the military system
of conscription, would have been forced to admit,
had he lived to see the mobilization of the army,
that here was in fact the nation in arms. The
French Army, strange though it may sound,
is perhaps the most democratic institution in

159

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

France. The obligation for service is universal
upon everyone physically fit to bear arms. It
applies to all in exactly the same degree. There
is nothing in the French Army which corre-
sponds with the German Ein-Jahrige system,
whereby the man who has reached a certain
educational standard has the period of his service
as a private soldier reduced by a year. There
are none of the wholesale exemptions to be
found in Germany ; everyone has to serve
alike.

The result could only be achieved with success
in a country in which democracy has become
more than a political platitude. The French
are profoundly democratic. Each Frenchman
is so individual that class and caste distinctions
fade before the distinction of individuality. This
is best to be seen in peace-time in the relation-
ship that exists between the servant of a middle-
class family and her employers. It resembles
rather the household arrangements which ob-
tained in England in the days of Pepys, and
even later, if one may judge by the Varden
family in " Barnaby Rudge," among other ex-
amples, than the present condition of domestic
employment in England. The servant is more
a member of the household in France than she
is with us ; and although a definite division of
class exists, it does so naturally, and by force of
its own weight, as it were. It is neither de-

160

GENERALS ALL

pendent on nor expressed by the artificial and
cramping conventions which turn out that
famous but almost uncanny product, the well-
trained English servant, whose face, hair, voice,
and very walk, are wholly different in the
presence of her employers. The French servant
is inclined to join in conversations, to take an
interest in the affairs of the household, to claim
an interest in her own — in fact, under French
democracy she is always herself.

It is this atmosphere which, on mobilization,
enables the Viscount to find himself under the
orders of the son of his concierge without any
feeling of ill-ease on either side. A friend of
mine, whose special work in Paris has given him
the use of a military motor-car, not having been
through the army himself owing to ill-health,
experienced a certain awkwardness when he dis-
covered that the chauffeur allotted to him was a
poet and an old friend. He felt a certain gene
at leaving his old friend seated in the motor-car
outside the restaurant where, in time of peace,
they had so frequently dined together. The
poet, having been through the great army
school of democracy, found nothing at all
awkward about the matter. What exists be-
tween the men is also to be found among the
officers. For many years it suited the politician
to describe the officers' corps of the army as a
hotbed of reaction. To listen to the politician,

161 11

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

one might have imagined that it was composed
almost exclusively of the scions of the old
nobility of France, that the political backward-
ness of their views was only equalled by the
extreme bigotry of their religion. The French
officer, since the Dreyfus affair, has been
scrupulous in abstaining from any manifesta-
tion of opinion either on political or religious
matters.

It is true that during the troubles aroused by
the anti-clerical legislation of the Government
one or two officers found their consciences did
not allow them to carry out the orders they
received in connection with the taking of the
Church inventories. A case of this sort hap-
pened in Brittany, and the Catholic General in
command of the district placed the officers
under arrest and had them tried by court-
martial. General Galliffist, on hearing the news,
telegraphed to his brother General, expressing
his sympathy, and also the general opinion of
the army, by adding, " Dura lex, sed lex." For
a time the officers found themselves condemned
to act as though they were not an integral part
of France.

Worse paid than the officer of any other
army, the object of the suspicions and the
manoeuvres of politicians, the French officer
continued, silently and steadily, to seek no
reward or recognition of his services other than

162

GENERALS ALL

that of the efficiency of the army. The change
in the attitude of the public, the growing
popularity of the army, in no way aiFected this
sage and sober attitude.

The regular French officer is usually drawn
from families possessed of more tradition than
means, which have behind them a long record of
service for the State. The work they have done
in time of peace has been but ill rewarded, and
with them social advantage has not come to
compensate them for inadequate pay. The mili-
tary caste enjoys none of the privileges given to
it in Germany, none of the social advantages it
enjoys in England. They are a set of hard-
working, unassuming men, whose only object
during the last forty years has been to place the
country in a position of dignified defence. In
the accomplishment of this work the whole
character of the French officer has changed.
He is no longer the waisted elegant, the beau
sabreur, the mustachioed military man. The
theatrical element, the desire for drama, latent
in every Latin heart, has been rigorously sup-
pressed. The General of old, who rode prancing
steeds, flashed his sword, and showered long-
winded eloquence upon his troops on the eve of
battle, has gone. The type of Brigadier Gerard
has given way to that of Pere JofFre. The elo-
quent platitudes of the former Order of the Day
have been replaced by " The hour has come to

163

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

advance at all costs, and to die where you stand
rather than give way."

The General commanding the group of armies
of the Republic in the north might be expected
to be rather a dazzling personage, to wear a fine
uniform, to ride a fine horse. We ourselves pay
tribute to our monarchical tradition by leaving to
our Generals, even in these days of khaki, just a
little more of the gold and the scarlet than is
worn by any other rank in the army. The
French pay tribute to their republican tradition
by making the General one of the least notice-
able persons in the army. His field uniform
has not a touch of gold upon it ; there are no
coils of silver braid upon the arm, no splendid
embroideries upon the collar. Three dull metal
stars upon his cuff alone reveal his rank. His
Staff officers are far more splendid than he.
They, with the common soldiers, are fighting
the war which is hardest for the Latin tempera-
ment— the war of silence and anonymity. In
France to-day I doubt whether the names of
more than perhaps three or four of the Generals
in whose hands lies the fate of France are
known to the great public. They have heard
of Gouraud, the Lion of the Argonne, who by
his youth, by the splendour of his bravery, his
brilliantly acquired reputation in Morocco, has
become a public character. They have heard of
General Maunoury, the victor of the Ourcq,

164

GENERALS ALL

the grey-headed, gentle man who played so
large a part in the saving of Paris. They may
have heard one or two stories of the tireless
energy of General Fronchet d'Esperey, who
served in the Chasseurs, and makes his whole
army work at the famous quick- step of his old
corps. They know of Foch, the brilliant leader
of the Iron division which saved Nancy from
generally awaited capture, who now commands
in the north; of Pau, the one-armed septua-
genarian, a hero of 1870 ; of Castelnau, the
tactician. But of the armies they command
there is ignorance ; of the deeds they have
done, merely the faintest outline is known ; as
to what manner of men they be there is no
knowledge. Of the rest, even the names have
not reached the public ear.

I have in my mind a very pleasant gallery of
Generals I have met along the front, installed in
country chateaux, in town-halls, leaving their
offices for an hour or so to conduct their visitors
along their portion of the front ; of luncheons
and the discussion and the toasting of victory ;
of the Generals' praise of their men, their admira-
tion for the splendid instrument of war entrusted
to them ; and of many a little incident showing
the affection and respect of the men for their
leaders. Some eighty- seven Generals have been
changed tince the war began. Those who remain
know that when their judgment begins to fail

165

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

them, when the strain to which they have been
subjected since the outbreak of hostihties begins
to affect their value in the field, they will have
to make way for fresh minds. They are the first
to recognize that this must be so, for never has
there been a vast army, such as that along the
western front, in which there has been a more
wholesale sinking of personalities among the many
commanding officers. Jealousy is a thing un-
known. When General Gallieni, in face of the
expected onslaught of the Germans upon Paris,
was appointed Military Governor of the city in
place of General Michel, who had held the post
since before the outbreak of war, this spirit was
excellently shown in the fact that General
Michel, far from feeling resentment, promptly
applied for a post under his successor.

The French Generals and the staff officers have
replaced the glitter and social distinction of their
class in former times by solid culture and brains.
I was much struck in December to see on
nearly every General's table an open copy of the
then recently issued Yellow Book. The causes
of the war interested them intensely. I had the
honour of lunching with General Maunoury and
his staff at Soissons. The table talk turned, not
upon the progress of the war, not upon stories
of the field, but upon the origins of the struggle.
Each man in the room had apparently studied
the causes deeply, and had gained from that

166

GENERALS ALL

study the sure comfort and the conviction of
the justice of the quarrel. Many of them had
travelled in Germany, and appreciated the
enormous strides in material matters made there
since the war of 1870. They discussed the
terrible moral deterioration which had accom-
panied the acceptance of the materialistic philo-
sophers. General Maunoury remembers 1870
well, and the contrast which he draws between
the German of those days and the methods he
is employing in the field to-day is an indictment
of the race.

In 1870 the theory of frightfulness was put
into practice for the first time as a philosophy of
war. There may be something in the idea that,
if war is made with the most terrible ruthlessness,
the resistance of the enemy will be shortened
and the suffering in the long-run curtailed. This
theory may hold in dealing with an uncivilized
people, upon whom only material arguments can
prevail. To adopt it in waging war against the
French is ghastly and criminal folly. Methods
of frightfulness have been tried before, in one
form or another, for periods of many years against
small and half- crushed nationalities, which to-
day carry on the fight against their oppressors
with as much fire as before. The Germans are
most certainly the only people who could dream
of crushing the spirit of the French by these
methods. The French know that they have at

167

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

stake in this war, not only their existence as a
first-class nation, but also their ideas of liberty ;
they know that they have in their keeping the
whole splendour of Latin civilization. They know
that, if this war is lost by them and by their Allies,
that civilization will gradually but slowly dis-
appear from the earth, and become the academic
food of peoples instead of their life's blood. The
French have always fought supremely well for
an ideal. The Germans have supplied all their
enemies with ideals to fight for. It was the fail-
ing of the French in 1870 that they had nothing
to fight for. The difference in 1914-1915 is
apparent. Only the Germans could believe that
frightfulness, the smoke of burning villages, the
cries of the slaughtered, the havoc of shell, would
weaken the defence, by the people which made
the French Revolution for a theory of govern-
ment, of the ideals at stake.

These and similar topics furnished the luncheon
table conversation. In the old days, when wars
were conducted with a few hundred thousand
men on each side, when the only concern of
nations was in the results of war, philosophy and
psychology could be left to the people at home.
To-day, when the sword is in the hands of
nations, these are become matters of vital
moment, for they form the thoughts of armies.
Carlyle expressed his preference for fighting on
the side of the convinced man. In the old days

I68

GENERALS ALL

it did not matter much what was the origin of the
quarrel. The enemy was in front, and it was the
duty and the pleasure of the army to give him as
sound a trouncing as was possible. To-day the
origin of the quarrel is all-important ; for although
an army of men who are soldiers for the love of
soldiering will fight for the fun of the fighting,
and because it is fighting that they have made
the purpose of their lives, no nation can be
expected to go to war unless it has a very clear
idea of the issues at stake, and no nation of the
spirit and traditions of the French is likely to have
its ardour quenched or its resistance shortened
by exhibitions of German culture, no matter
how full of frightfuhiess they may be.

To have conviction without leading, however,
is to have the fighting without the thinking
quality. The French have both, and in General
Foch, the General commanding the group of
armies in the north — those of General Maudhuy
and General Castelnau — they are most splendidly
combined. To the British, General Foch, after
General JofFre, has been the most important
figure during the period of siege warfare, for it
is in conjunction with the armies he controls
that our men have been fighting in Flanders.
General Foch has for long been well known to
our own staff officers. He has visited England,
and has followed our own manoeuvres. ^^^ ^^
has received many travelling parties of B^ti^":*^! "^

- -^ •

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

officers at his former command in the east at
Nancy. He has a still greater claim to the
acquaintance of our staff, as some of them are
the product of his own teaching at the Ecole de
Guerre, where for five years he lectured on
strategy and tactics. His stay at the Ecole de
Guerre was short, but in that time he acquired
such authority that his lectures were stimulating
the whole military thought of France, and left
indelible traces of their influence in the whole
teaching of tactics. He has the calm face of
the thinker, and the slim carriage of the well-
exercised man. His eyes are the most signifi-
cant feature of his face, and, were it not for the
firmness of his chin and the decisive cHp of his
thin lips, he might be taken for the pure type of
the thinker, the man with the brain to plan vast
strategic movements, to co-ordinate effort along
the western front in synchronization with events
in the east, to hurl armies about the map ; but
not for the fighter, the man with the obstinacy
and decision, the strength of character, neces-
sary for the actual translation of strategy into
action.

Before the outbreak of the war there were
many of his closest friends and greatest admirers
who wondered how he would acquit himself in
the command of the Marches of the East at
Nancy, where the troops are the pick of the
French Army, and each fresh batch of conscripts

170

GENERALS ALL

which goes there has to be disciplined and drilled
as no others on the soil of France. It was a post
requiring the exercise of qualities not usually
to be found in the thinker, in the student and
professor of tactics and strategy. The excellence
of General Foch's work at Nancy exceeded the
best hopes of his friends. The saving of the
Lorraine capital from the invader was one of
the finest feats of the opening period of the war ;
just as assuredly it was one of the greatest dis-
appointments suiFered by the Emperor William,
who in gorgeous array, at the head of glittering
cuirassiers, was in readiness to make triumphant
entry in the about-to-be German city. General
Foch's work at Nancy led to his selection for the
most important command in the field, that of
the armies in the north, upon whose shoulders
was to fall the heavy burden of the defence of
Ypres, the barring of the road to Calais — a post
for a fighter if ever fighter was required.

I met General Foch at his head-quarters in
the north. The square of the beautiful Flemish
town, in which the architecture of many a
building bore traces of the dominion of proud
Spain, was filled with motor-cars arriving or
departing with French staflp officers, British
naval flying men, British liaison officers, whose
daily duty brings them to General Foch for
consultation.

The old Burgomaster's house was blazing with
171

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

light — you can't worry about Zeppelins when
you are in the field — and there was an air of
activity and bustle which the town has probably
not known since Marlborough was there on other
business of the same kind. Away from the east
came the faint reverberation of big guns. They
were the dying echoes of the great thrust to
Calais. They marked the beginning of a pause
in the great battle of Flanders, in which General
Foch again triumphantly proved what he had
demonstrated on the Marne — that he could fight
as well as he could think, could act as well as he
could plan.

People are fond of declaring that, with the
entry of motor transport, aeroplanes, and wire-
less telegraphy, precise artillery war has become,
not only a science, but an exact science as well.
General Foch, although he possesses a scientific
— indeed, a mathematical — mind, reftises to admit
that war has this purely scientific character.

The requirements of the scientific instruments
with which war is waged demand a higher
degree of scientific attainment from each com-
batant, a greater degree of scientific intelligence.
They also place upon the fighters, whether they
be officers or men, Generals or private soldiers, a
greater burden of horror to bear, and call for a
display of greater moral qualities than did the
war of the past ages. Just as the material
factors of war have grown in complexity and in

172

GENERALS ALL

variety, so have the psychological and philo-
sophical equipment of the army been forced to
keep pace with the new developments in the
other field. General Foch is a believer in philo-
sophy. He has shown his faith in the psychology
of strategy in the best way possible, by action
in the field. He is one of the few professors
who has had the opportunity and the ability to
practise what he has preached.

At the Ecole de Guerre he was given to
quoting a saying of Joseph le Maitre which
summed up the psychological factor of defeat :
" A battle lost is a battle which one thinks lost,
for battles are not lost materially." To this
military summary of the doctrine of Christian
Science General Foch added this formula of
victory : *' Battles are therefore lost morally, and
it is therefore morally that battles are gained ;
and a battle won is a battle in which you refuse
to admit yourself beaten." During the most
critical moment of the Battle of the Marne,
when the Germans, foiled in their attempt to
stretch out round the Allies' left, hurled them-
selves upon the centre with the object of cutting
it and dealing subsequently with the two shattered
wings. General Foch was in command of the
army between Sezanne and Mailly. The first
day of this huge engagement ended unfavour-
ably for him : he had to retire. The next day
the same thing happened, and again on the third

173

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

day a further withdrawal became necessary.
After each retirement General Foch refused to
admit defeat. He and the men under him had
the moral strength, in which science plays no
part, to refuse to know when they were beaten.
On the third day the retirement began early in
the morning. In the course of the day General
Foch once more took the offensive, and by night-
fall he had delivered the decisive blow on the
flank of the Germans which led to the final pre-
cipitate retreat all along the line.

174

CHAPTER VII

THE POILUS OF FRANCE

The French have surprised their best friends by
the vigour of their attitude throughout the war,
by the stoic calm with which they endured the
long period of silence and reverse at the begin-
ning of the campaign in France, when fort after
fort was abandoned without a fight, when the
tide of battle rolled over the fairest and the
richest of her provinces, even to the gates of
the capital. History is very quickly forgotten,
and it is always the last impression which bears
weight.

In estimating the fighting value of the French,
it was always the standard of 1870 which was
popularly applied. It was forgotten that in
1870 the whole regime was corrupt, that the
people were left without an ideal and with the
worst leadership in history. Above all, it was
forgotten that the French have a military history
the glory of which is most certainly not exceeded
by any other people. The " New France " has
revived to the full all the glories of the old, and

175

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the shopkeepers, the bourgeois, the young men
who have been called to the colours before their
time, are fighting with the gaiety and grinmess
of Napoleon's veterans.

To the eye accustomed to the rigid line of the
Guards either in England or in Germany, the
march-past of French troops may appear slightly
short of mathematical perfection. The men are
small, and their stature varies. Their uniforms
are not tailored ; the baggy breeches give to
them a somewhat untidy appearance. Seen
strolling about the streets with cigarette in
mouth, laden with the paper parcels which all
French soldiers in time of peace seem for ever to
be carrying, with the tails of their blue over-
coats hooked up behind, they look the reverse of
smart.

The way in which private soldiers and officers
hobnob together in the streets and in the res-
taurants and cafes is strange to the eye of the
British officer. To him it argues a certain lack
of discipline. But if you have once seen the
French soldier on active service you realize at
once the superficiality of all these signs. There
is nothing finer as a spectacle than the French
regiment on the march on active service. I
have seen them in Morocco ; I have seen them
in France. They have retained about their
ceremonial much of the fine pageantry of old.
Their bugle marches are the most inspiriting

176

THE POILUS OF FRANCE

music in the world ; their marching songs, grown
up by regimental tradition, keep alive the
memory of past glories. The men are alert,
and their marching is a revelation. You realize
then that there is a difference, as the men go
swinging past, between these gay, alert-looking
fellows and the privates of any other army, and
the difference is that each man, while merged
completely in the regimental machine, remains
nevertheless more of an individual than does the
private in any other big army.

He has a quality expressed by the French
word " d^brouillard " which it is difficult to
convey in English. He can pull himself out of
an awkward corner by daring shifts and quickly-
thought-out strategem. When things have
gone wrong with the commissariat, he can find
something to eat where another man would
starve. This is a quality of enormous value in
a war of extended formations, in a war of siege
where each section of a trench may become the
centre of the fortress, in a war of heavy casualties
where a private may be called upon at any
moment to pull what is left of the company out
of a bad corner or lead them on to a worse one.
With it goes the great military virtue of cheer-
fulness. The Latin lives more upon his nerves
than does the Anglo-Saxon. He is more liable
to extremes of gaiety and depression. The
French soldier does get depressed. He hates

177 12

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the trenches. The whole nature of trench war-
fare is repugnant to his natural desire for quick
solutions, for rapid movement, for change, and
for the exhilaration of the fight in the open and
the sunshine. But even the damp inaction of
the trench, the long months of waiting, have
failed to quench the gay-heartedness of the
" little soldiers of France."

From the mud of the trenches it bubbles up
with all the sparkle of fresh spring water. It
is shown in the countless nicknames given to
all the implements of war. "Rosalie" is the
pet name of the French infantryman for the
bayonet, and "zigouiller un Boche" is to
bayonet a German. " Boulot," a log of wood,
has come to mean good work, and " les artiflots
ont fait du bon boulot " is Trench, if not French,
for " the artillerymen did fine work." In many
of the trenches newspapers — some of them of
great merit — have been produced. There is the
Echo des Mar mites ^ " mar mite " being the
French for the shell which our own men have
christened " Jack Johnson." There are the
Reveil des Tranchees, the Rigolboche, Le Poilu
Enchairi^, an imitation of the new title of
M. Clemenceau's paper, UHomme Enchaine,
There is the Entente Cordiale newspaper pro-
duced by a telegraphists' section under the title
of the Tele-Mel, sl phonographic rendering of
the French pronunciation of the Daily Mail.

178

THE POILUS OF FRANCE

They have a hundred and one ingenious ways
of amusing themselves, and of making their Ufe
in the field as much like a picnic as possible.
They also have a hundred and one ways of
fighting and of dying. The Journal OfficieU
which records only some of the instances of
heroism and splendour which go to make up
with the gaiety the life of the French soldier,
has stories in it which a thousand Homers could
not adequately sing. In their feats poets and
dreamers have become the men of action, and
the men of humble birth and no education have
died the death of poets ; have said ere they died,
to the comrade leaning over them, "Tell my
mother that it was for France — that I die
happy." This may be foreign to our tempera-
ment. We feel those things ; it is, perhaps,
a pity that we do not say them. They are not
the evidence of femininity or supersensitiveness.
It was a French General — General d'Amade,
the leader of the French Expeditionary Army to
the Dardanelles — who wrote the following letter
about the death of his eighteen-year-old son :

" He fell mortally wounded on the threshold
of the enemy's trenches, which, although he had
arrived in that region only three days before,
he had been ordered to reconnoitre. Two
German Generals who witnessed his brave and
courageous conduct have spontaneously mani-

179

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

fested to me their admiration, and have informed
me where our poor child Ues buried. Needless
to say, it is a great grief. We could not have
offered to God and to France anything more
beautiful, more pure, or more generous, than
that child ; but after the war we shall mourn
him until our death. I take with me on my
new mission that sorrow engraved upon my
heart as an example of courage and as a glorious
reason for hope."

It was a French General, General Joffre, who
remarked, when he was told of the inevitable
sufferings of the marines in the water-logged
trenches of Dixmude : " Well, they can't com-
plain ; they are at any rate in their element."
The French frame of mind, the Latin tempera-
ment which leads to a freer expression of the
emotions than is customary among us, has not
by any means led the French soldier to magnify
the tragedy of his fate.

At the beginning of the war it is true there
were some regiments of French Territorials,
men not to be confounded with the men who
form our own Territorials, but men getting on
towards their fiftieth year of age, who had to be
flung into the battle during the first critical
days of the German rush from the Belgian
frontier, who rather bewailed their lot. They
were subjected to a sudden strain such as it had

180

THE POILUS OF FRANCE

never been anticipated they would have to bear.
They stood the test triumphantly, but they were
conscious of the fact that they had been through
a terrible strain. I met some of them in the
march. They were going back into reserve after
weeks of strenuous fighting. " I have grown
sixty years older since the war broke out," one
of them complained to me. " We are * peres de
families,' and we can't stand it." They did,
however, and as time went on the old power of
the French reservist has exerted itself, as the
strength of Napoleon's older men did on other
fields. The " pere de famille " fights as well as the
youngster of twenty-one — perhaps not so gaily,
but with a fiercer determination to end war. I
have met them since the first days of the rush
marching along the straight roads of Flanders
on their way into the trenches, singing as lustily
about the " blonde " they have left behind as the
fresh young men of the actif,

Down in a dusty barrack square of the South
of France I saw a squad of the 1914 contingent
of conscripts called up a year before their time
to join the colours. They had been under drill
for but a few weeks. Already they turned and
wheeled, under the eyes of a few curious German
prisoners lazing at the windows of the barrack
buildings, with the precision of the Guards.
Their instructor, a wounded non-commissioned
officer, told me that there never had been such

181

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

material in the army before. They had arrived
at the regiment, not the usual contingent of
recruits inclined to get through their period of
training with as little trouble as possible to
themselves, but a band of youths as keen as they
could be to reach the stage of proficiency which
would lead to their being sent to the front.
Many of them were already the products of the
new France. Anticipating their term of military
service, these had joined the societies for military
preparation, and arrived with a fair knowledge of
shooting and of drill. Instead of having spent
the opening years of their manhood loafing round
cafes, smoking cigarettes, and indulging in pre-
cocious talk about women and the world in
general, they had trained their bodies in athletics
or in football.

Napoleon, after the first disastrous days of his
l^olish campaign, drained France of her youth.
The young soldiers who were hurried across
Europe to swell his armies who fell by
the roadside from disease, or filled the hospitals
on their arrival, were known to the army as
the Marie Louises, from their girlish, tender
appearance. There is nothing of the Marie
Louise about the young soldiers of France
to-day. They are supple, strong, and virile. I
met them afterwards marching along through
the inundated area in the north of French
Flanders, on their way to the trenches. Even

182

THE POILUS OF FRANCE

there in the mud and desolation their march had
something of a swing about it, and their backs
were straight under the heavy pack of the
regular, swollen though it was with trenching
tools. They, too, sang, but not of their
" blonde." Their rifles were gay with sprays of
spruce, the tricolour floated from the rifle of the
section markers, and the Marseillaise kept their
feet swinging as they moved forward with the
business-like air of veterans. France has every
reason to be proud of her infantry, the " poilus "
as they have been called in this war, as an indica-
tion of their sturdiness and exploits.

83

CHAPTER VIII

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

The infantryman is the great middle class of the
army. It is he alone who can snatch success
which others may prepare. Upon him has fallen
the burden of the trench discomfort, the strain of
terrible marches, the hand of Death. Compared
with his brother in the artillery his lot is not a
happy one.

But there is no one who has more opportuni-
ties or more cause to admire the French artillery
than the French infantryman. To the whole
of France the 75 mm. gun has become as much
a symbol of victory as Joan of Arc. It is,
however, regarded with more positive affection
than can ever be lavished on a distant saint.
The " 75 " is almost become a person, and great
is the war waged as to the paternity of this
remarkable weapon, the birth of which was, no
doubt, assisted by quite a number of ballistic
midwives. It is the instrument of victory, the
tool of revenge, the black butcher, the avenging
god : it is anything you like to call it. With

184

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

it the French artilleryman daily repeats the
exploit of William Tell. The performances of
the great steam-hammer are as nothing in their
precision to those of the French field-gun. The
affection in which the gun is held by the nation
is as nothing to the love with which the gunner
treats his weapon. To him it really is a person.
Nearly every gun in the army has been christened
by its servants. There is many a gun emplace-
ment which has stuck up upon a signboard some
lines of poetic eulogy addressed, by the battery
poet, " a mon beau canon." The men are worthy
of their gun. I have seen them in all sorts of
positions and at varying moments. I have seen
them after a long day's work attended by success.
I have seen them after reverse, when they have
been engaged in bombarding from a new position
the hill which they had occupied a week before.
Nothing can shake their conviction in victory or
their devotion to the service of their beloved
weapons.

The artillery have, of course, a much better
time of it than the infantry. Removed well
to the rear of the trench line, their lives are
not underground throughout the daylight
hours. They can move about freely and order
their daily life in a normal manner. Nor are
they constantly on the lookout and under
fire.

The most interesting artillery position I visited

185

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

was near Soissons. I went there just after the
fighting which turned a successful French offen-
sive into a reverse and a retreat. It led to the
abandonment on the eastern bank of the Aisne
of much of the ground won by our own troops
during the retreat from the Marne.

When I went to Verdun the Germans de-
clared that place to be besieged and starving. I
lunched there to the confusion of the fiction
writers of the German General Staff. When I
went to Soissons, if the German telegrams to
the Italian Press were to be believed, I went
to a German town.

The town was under bombardment by the
Germans ; so much was true, and so much only.
Over on the other side of the river there still
was a considerable French force strongly en-
trenched, occupying a semicircle of the country
at the end of the two bridges left by the floods,
and thus guaranteeing to the French the passage
of the river at any time they might deem fit to
resume their old positions on the other side.

The Battle of Soissons was of peculiar interest
to the gunner, for it was one of the few engage-
ments during which most of the guns were
working on direct and visible targets, instead of
blindly at a given spot upon a map. The battle
which began on January 8, by a French offen-
sive which carried Hill 132 on the farther side of
the river, was a very thorough illustration of the

186

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

danger of operations with water in the immediate
rear. Standing on an eminence the sides of
which bristled with the barbed wire of the third
or fourth organized Une of defence, in the barn
which housed the ControlUng Staff during the
battle, I was able to gain a wide view over the
country. The Valley of the Aisne at this point
is deeply cut. The hills rise up with some
abruptness from the water's edge on each side of
the river, and then roll away in broadly un-
dulating plateau land on either side, the edges of
which are lined with avenues of poplars. The
hills are mostly free of wood. Here and there
on the hillside there is a dark green square.
Below in the valley are strung a few villages, an
occasional factory, and the flood-broadened silver
of the stream. To the right of one of these
clusters of houses and chimney-stacks behind the
village of St. Paul rises the rounded Height 132,
and still farther to the right, in the distance,
Height 151. It was for the possession of
Height 132 that the battle raged, and the finest
artillery work on the French side was accom-
plished on Height 151 by the "75's." Imme-
diately the French had carried Hill 132, the
Germans counter-attacked in great force. In
spite of enormous losses — for here, although the
nature of the country exposed the men to
terrific artillery fire, massed formations were
adopted by the Germans — the Germans returned

J 87

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

again and again to the attack, and finally, on
January 12, the almost overwhelming force
brought up dislodged the French from the crown
of the hill and from the eastern hillside. With
a great tenacity they clung on to the western
face for a time.

Then the weather came to the assistance of
the enemy. Throughout the fight there was
a heavy downpour of rain. The concussion of
artillery ripped open the low-flying clouds and
unloosed a deluge upon the country. The con-
ditions thus created became alarming on the
day of the first definite German success, the
day when they managed to dislodge the French
from the eastern side of Hill 132. To the Staff
watching the fight from the barn on the other
side of the river the state of affairs began to
cause great anxiety. The strategic purpose of the
first French offensive was not one upon which
any very great importance rested. It was just
part of the general principle of " nibbHng them "
announced by General Joffre. The Germans,
however, were desirous, either for military or
for political reasons, to score a success. They
launched two army corps into the attack against
the three brigades of the French. The great
War Lord was in the neighbourhood, and the
people of Germany had to be reassured. The
game had reached a point at which General
Maunoury had to consider whether he would

188

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT S0I6S0NS

not be well advised to cut his losses, when the
rain settled the matter decisively for him. The
rising river overflowed its banks, and the floods
threatened to sweep before them the temporary
and permanent bridges over which the French
forces engaged on the other side received re-
inforcements and munitions. By the 13th —
that is to say, the second day of success for
the enemy — only two bridges were left. There
were three courses open to the French com-
mander. He could decide to gamble on the
falling of the waters ; he could leave his forces
on the other side, with the intention of holding
a smaller strip of the river-bank; or he could
retreat.

The first two of these alternatives might well,
and indeed would, have led to disaster. The
river remained in flood for many a day, and
any considerable forces left upon the other side
would have been in the greatest danger of shell
and ammunition famine. General Maunoury
decided to withdraw the bulk of his forces,
and to leave only, on the other side of the
river, sufficient men to organize and hold in
strength the two bridge-heads.

The retirement was effected in perfect order.
The Germans do not appear to have been aware
of what was going on underneath their noses
in the night. The urgency of withdrawal was
shown when the artillery began to cross over by

189

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the pontoon bridge still left, for the weakened
bridge was already giving under the pressure
of the flood, and it was with the water up to
the guns that the horse artillery came across
the river. The secrecy with which the move-
ment was effected was all the more remarkable
as it was delayed until the very last moment.
Indeed, one battery of field artillery did not
abandon its position until the French infantry
had actually fallen back upon its position, until
the enemy was only some 500 yards distant.

I have called the Battle of Soissons a gunners'
engagement. The skill with which the guns
were removed during the retreat would alone
give to the affair a special interest to the
artilleryman, for many of the guns had to be
man -handled down the steep hillside within
rifle range of the enemy's infantry. There were
guns lost; but that occurred during the fight-
ing, and not on the retreat. It was done with
such success that the Germans did not become
aware of what had happened until the following
afternoon, nearly twenty-four hours after the
event. They then attacked with great fury
the troops left in the village of St. Paul, and
after a stern struggle turned them out. That
was, perhaps, the most critical business of the
whole battle ; for unless the French had suc-
ceeded as they did in recapturing the village,
they might have lost the bridge-head and the

190

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

power to debouch upon the farther bank of
the Aisne. This result would indeed have
been a victory for the Germans, almost justify-
ing the lyric language of their communique
issued with regard to the battle, likening it to
St. Privat.

Throughout the fighting the artillery were
called upon to furnish a terrific effort. They
worked their guns almost without ceasing for
six days and six nights while the French assault
on Hill 132 and the German counter-attacks
were in progress.

I visited the battery which remained to the
last, and saved its guns when the German fingers
were practically upon them. This battery was
posted throughout most of the fighting on Hill
151, from which it poured a stream of explosive
and of shrapnel upon the dark masses of the
Germans as they advanced up the hillside
to the attack. They were moving forward in
massed formation, and more than one of the
gunners admitted to me that he had never seen
anything so stupidly and fantastically brave as
the way in which those men, many of them
(as was known afterwards) new soldiers, young
men just arrived at the front, streamed in serried
ranks to the attack, only to be broken time after
time by a withering downpour of shrapnel from
the black butchers. The French system of fire
by arrosage simply covers the entire field of

191

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

fire with a storm of projectiles. The slaughter
was terrible ; but still more men were hurled
on to the attack. To the artillery observers the
spectacle presented was of solid masses of men
pouring up the hill, disintegrating, scattering,
falling to cover under the terrible fire, whirling
about in rapidly moving clumps, then splinter-
ing up into dots, finally running in confusion,
leaving behind black mounds of dead. Still
more men were laimched into this inferno, until
finally a wave bigger than the others, more
resolute or more desperate, swept through the
fire and over the hill. The French were
defeated.

But it was not the men of defeat that I met
upon their new position on the western bank of
the Aisne. Even though they were engaged in
bombarding the position they themselves had
occupied the previous week, the gunners were as
confident of success as ever. The loss of com-
rades had not affected their gaiety or their
resolution. This battery position differed from
those I have described in the Hants de Meuse,
inasmuch as around Verdun nearly all the fire is
indirect, the gunner firing over intervening hills
at an invisible target. On the Aisne the fire is
direct, the target clearly visible.

A battery is the most compact fighting unit
of the army. It has a closer family life than the
regiment even in time of peace. In time of war

192

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

the artillery are thrown entirely on themselves.
Posted high upon a hill, their visitors are few.
They are cut off from the world. They get no
supplies of newspapers from passing trains ; they
hear no news save from an occasional staff
officer. The civilian passer-by would entirely
fail to notice that the hill contained any inhabi-
tants. This particular battery was stuck away
at the top of a hill slightly wooded upon its
eastern slope. Over the bare back of the height
the passing of men with stores and shells had
worn the ordinary path deep into the hill. One
of the precautions adopted by the wily battery
commander to prevent the location of his guns
from becoming known to the inquisitive aero-
plane is to avoid a multiplication of paths over
the bare countryside. A network of newly
worn footpaths is too clear an indication of
activity and occupation to pass unnoticed by the
trained observer in the air.

Higher up the hillside was pitted with shell
craters, and at the fringe of the wood was the
battery cemetery. The graveyards at the front
are a pleasant proof that in all the callousness of
war, in all the present profusion of death, the
dead are respected, and their resting-places
tended with touching care. The graveyards
vary from the trim beauty of the regimental
graveyard in Plug Street Wood, with its solid
marble tombstones, to the few mounds of earth

193 13

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

within the exposed fire area, where no stone or
wood is available to mark the resting-place or
the names of the fallen, and rows of bottles with
the names of the fallen men on pieces of paper
within them are all that can be found to preserve
the record of the dead. Here the battery grave-
yard is gay with flowers. The battery cai-penter
is a carver of no mean artistic merit, and in his
spare time he has fashioned from a birch in the
grove on the hill a beautiful cross, which bears the
simple words upon it, " Pour la France." This
large cross dominates the little cemetery, and
upon each grave there is a smaller cross bearing
the dead man's name and the date of his death.
Officers and men when they pass the graveyard
salute those who have fallen " Pour la France."
There is no sentimentality about the action.
The Frenchman's attitude to death is free of
such frippery. Death is too constant a visitor
along the front for him to be anything but an
old acquaintance. On this hillside space is
cramped, so the men of the battery exercise
themselves on the horizontal bar, and the tall
men as they make the circle on the bar have to
take care to avoid hitting the cross with their
feet. The living and the dead are close bed-
fellows on this hillside, for but very few feet of
earth separate the graves from the dugouts.

These are most cunningly concealed. Where
the trees were sparse new plantations have been

194

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

formed in which to conceal the guns and the
rabbit-warren in which the servants of the
battery hved. The concealment of guns has
been carried to the pitch of art by the gunners
of all armies, and it almost requires the deductive
methods of Sherlock Holmes to trace the presence
of a battery from a distance. Thus, smoke upon
a hillside, heavily marked tracks, or the line of
the telephone wire, would indicate to the traveller
along the road that the hill was an artillery
position. From the air, however, but very little
is to be seen, and on foot you can walk almost
on to a concealed battery before you notice the
glint of shell-cases or the dull grey of the gun
underneath the cover of spruce branches.

The scene inside the wood reminded me ot
illustrations to stories of the gnomes. As our
feet, crackling on the carpet of twigs, gave
notice of our approach, the silent wood became
alive. From holes just large enough to allow of
the entrance of a man, the population of the hill
clambered up from its dugouts to see the visitors
and to do the honours of their city. Nice, com-
fortable, roomy caverns they were, these dug-
outs, protected against bombardment by a roof
of some feet of solid sandstone, and a very
necessary protection, too, if one judged by the
numbers of shell-splintered trees in the wood.
Although the quarters were new, the battery
had already got everything comfortable and ship-

195

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

shape. The dugouts were well protected against
damp by walls composed of brushwood and of
sand, well furnished with rough battery-made
chairs, and rendered homelike by a few pictures.

The most interesting of them was the obser-
vation dugout on the side of the hill exposed to
the view of the enemy. It was just large
enough to take three men, who, seated on a
plank, obtained, through a long narrow window
cut at the level of their eyes, a splendid view of
the enemy's positions. Away on the right, on
the bend of the distant railway, three or four
explosive shells fell rapidly one after the other,
covering the line for a few brief moments with a
dark cloud of smoke and earth. Elsewhere
there was complete calm. " They're up to
something by that railway," the battery officer
remarked, " for we have seen lights there at
night, and we think they are organizing a pivot
of defence. Last night the men from those
trenches you see on the hill in front of us were
working in the village down below."

The village in question lay between the
opposing trench lines, and up till then had not
been occupied by the enemy. The only indica-
tion that they had decided to put its shell-
smashed ruins to some purpose, and had been
working there during the night, was the appear-
ance at dawn of a well-worn path down the hill-
side from the German trench line.

196

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

By day and by night, along the whole front,
there are in these observation stations men
trained to notice the slightest indications of
activity of this sort. That it requires, at any
rate, keen eyesight is shown by the fact that one
of our party was unable to distinguish the line of
German trenches on the hillside opposite even
with the aid of a powerful field-glass. The
battery commander, therefore, remarking that
his guns had not yet done their tir de rdglage,
called out, '* Four thousand explosive, twenty-
five, fourth piece !" From the entrance to the
dugout came the repetition of his words over
the telephone, and then, with a bang, three
shells were speeding on their way to outline
with the smoke of their explosion on the ground
the line of trench which the shortsighted member
of our party was unable to see.

With its mechanical fuse-setting arrangement,
its rapidity of fire, its system of recoil, absorp-
tion by means of pneumatic buffers, the " 75 "
is undoubtedly the best gun in the field. The
deficiencies of the French with regard to their
heavy artillery have been made good with great
rapidity since the outbreak of war ; for in France,
perhaps because of the fact that the labour
market was entirely depleted by the claims of
universal military service, the work of organizing
and controlling the productive activity of the
French factories was taken over by the State in

197

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

quite the early stages of the struggle. The guns
are good. With the best field-gun in the world,
and with heavy artillery which enables them to
compete with the long-prepared enemy, the
French are happy in possessing in their gunners
and their officers a set of men whose character
and qualities cannot be excelled by any other
army in Europe.

The French gunners are fine men, and are
doing fine work. The brunt of the battle, the
burden of the casualties, the most of the misery,
fall upon the infantryman walled up in the
trenches. It is with him that rests the final
thrust. But he loves to see the gunners' shells
bursting on the trench ahead, for they speak to
him of security ; they remind him, as he stands
in his water-logged hole, of the huge machine
which lies behind him, and he knows that with-
out his artillery his existence would be entirely
intolerable and victory impossible. Infantry
are the men of the problem, the gunners supply
the shells, and the whole solution of the war, as
has been said before, and cannot be said too
often, lies in men and munitions.

The shell, indeed, resumes the whole theory
of war, which General Foch, as professor at the
Ecole de Guerre, declared to be contained in
three fundamental ideas — preparation and forma-
tion of a mass, and the multiplication of that
mass in its use. The mass of shrapnel is formed

198

THE BLACK BUTCHERS AT SOISSONS

and put into the prepared easing, and multiplied
in its use by the charge which scatters it upon
the countryside. What explosives do for metal
motor transport has done for men ; but with a
long front, every section of which has to be
closely held, motor transport cannot do all that
might be required of it, and unless a General
has ready at his call large bodies of men which
can be flung into a threatened area, or pushed
forward to strengthen an attack without drawing
upon and weakening the trench line in other
parts, victory will be impossible. Anyone who
has wandered among the maze of trenches which
constitutes the first line of defence, who has
passed through several other lines more to the
rear which constitute the preparation for any
possible reverse, who has seen the density of
barbed -wire entanglement, who has heard
machine-guns chattering away their messages
of death along the front, would deem a forward
movement an impossibility had he not also been
able to see the guns at work.

An avalanche of men can do but very little
against a triple avalanche of bullets, and, broadly
speaking, it would avail neither side to collect
an army, of no matter what size, for the attack,
unless, together with this concentration of men,
they carried out a corresponding concentration
of munitions and of guns. This is the lesson of
Neuve Chapelle, of Vauquois, of the fighting

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BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

round Cambres and Les Eparges, of the advance
of the French in the Champagne. It is a lesson
which no doubt will be repeated time after time
before the signature of peace. It is one upon
which the world of labour might well ponder,
for it is only by the accurate and prodigal use of
shells that casualties can be kept down to any-
thing like reasonable limits during an attack.
If it be true that the Battle of Waterloo was
won in the playing-fields of Eton, it is equally
true that a speedy peace can only be forged in
the workshops of England, for without their
devoted co-operation the man in the field will be
disarmed. The man behind the gun is as im-
portant as the man in front of it, but without
the man far from the battlefield the struggle
will be lost.

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CHAPTER IX

DESTRUCTION

Looking through an American magazine pub-
hshed in February, 1915, I found under a
photograph of the Cloth Hall at Ypres the
remark : " Said to have been destroyed by bom-
bardment in October and November last." This
caution in describing a building which since
November has been nothing but a charred ruin
is, I suppose, due to the workings of neutrality.
It would have been well if it had been found
possible to conduct parties of eminent neutrals
round the battlefields of the Marne, the Argonne,
Flanders, and the East. It would have been
better if the military authorities had managed to
show our own people what horrors He behind the
phrases of the communiques, what is the punish-
ment of national weakness.

In the course of my journeyings along the
front I have seen enough with my own eyes, and
through the lens of the aerial photographer, to be
able to state with certainty that there runs right
across Western Europe, for some 500 miles, a

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BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

belt some ten miles wide of misery and ruin : of
villages pounded to pieces by high explosives,
burned to charred fragments by incendiary
shells ; of towns with battered squares and
crumbling churches ; of isolated, unroofed, deso-
late farmhouses. In attempting to convey an
impression of this ten-mile belt I shall be careful
only to describe what I myself have seen ; and
if my descriptions differ from those which have
already been published, they do not call into
question the accuracy of other records. To those
who witnessed the flames shooting up over the
roof of Rheims Cathedral there can have been no
doubt at the time that the cathedral was de-
stroyed. A very eminent French statesman
informed me, indeed, that it had been razed to
the ground. Seen a week or so after the fire
had consumed the outer timber roofing, both
descriptions seemed to be very far from the
reality. To use the word " destruction " in
giving an account of the state of the cathedral
is to leave one's vocabulary beggared in recording
the work of the Germans in many other towns
and villages. The mark of the incendiary, the
havoc of shell, is to be seen in much greater
completeness at Ypres and the villages we still
defend in Belgium ; at Gerbevillers, in Eastern
France ; and, above all, in the country through
which the inflamed and defeated army of the
Crown Prince retired after the staggering punish-

202

DESTRUCTION

ment it received during the Battle of the
Marne.

In the big towns the desolate streets will be
peopled again almost immediately after the free-
ing of France from the invader. The big
capitalists will get the big industries working
once again ; the municipal machinery will spring
once more into activity ; the gaps in the streets
will be filled up, public buildings repaired or
rebuilt ; and soon it will be as though war had
not been. It is in the small country towns, and
particularly in the villages, that the Germans
appear to have destroyed more than bricks and
mortar. The French peasant is attached to the
soil by ties of sentiment and tradition even
stronger than those of our own agricultural
population. France is the country of the small-
holder; the land, by the law of heritage, has
been parcelled out to all the sons for many
generations, and largely on account of this the
village life in France is much more of an intimate
family matter than it is in England, save to the
landlord. It is the rule and not the exception
to find two, and sometimes three, generations of
the same family occupying adjoining houses in
the village, tilling adjoining ground in the fields.
From this there arises an intimate communal
feeling which no amount of Government inspira-
tion or outside influence can bring into exist-
ence.

20S

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

There are many villages so battered and
smashed as to have, perhaps, no more than the
framework of two or three houses left standing,
where the peasants and farmers, on their return
to the village after the passage of the Germans,
have for a time been unable to locate with cer-
tainty the sites of their own homes. In these
spots something has been destroyed which it will
be difficult to replace. Sentiment, association,
and interest, which centred on those villages, have
been scattered as though they w^ere dust before
the wind. The tragedies there did not afford
the grandiose spectacle of the red flames shoot-
ing up over Rheims ; they did not wring a cry
of horror from the world ; they were intimate,
small, and infinitely sorrowful. The glories of
the rose-window of Rheims may have belonged
to all the world, but the clock which was
snatched by a marauding Bavarian from an old
woman's cottage at Vassincourt meant more to
her than the whole of Rheims Cathedral to the
lovers of beauty all the world over.

In Clermont-en-Argonne the Germans carried
their work of incendiarism to the highest pitch
of cruelty. The town, a stronghold of medieval
days, lies at the eastern entrance to the Argonne.
The opening of railway communication deprived
the road which it defended of its strategical
importance, and the town, after long years of
decay, had just begun to realize, when the war

204

DESTRUCTION

broke out, that its picturesque position in the
heart of one of the loveUest stretches of forest
country in France, its terraced streets, had a
value to the traveller in search of beauty. It
had its little devices for spreading the fame of
the loveliness of Argonne through France ; its
1,200 inhabitants hoped at a later date to go still
farther afield, and bring the foreigner to admire
its charms. Then the foreigner came, in the
shape of the 121st and 122nd Wlirtemberg
Regiments, under the command of General von
Durach and Prince Wittgenstein.

My own observation leads me to believe that
the Prussians have been completely outdone by
the Bavarians and the Wlirtemberg troops in the
genial German work of sacking and incendiarism.
It would be unfair to place upon the two Ger-
man noblemen who were in command at Cler-
mont the responsibility for beginning the scenes
which attended the sack of the town. It was
carried out without method, and apparently with-
out instructions. A brutish soldier, having made
himself a cup of coffee over a methylated spirit
stove, apparently thought that it would be rather
amusing to burn the house down. He started
by upsetting the stove, and then, presumably
anxious for more light, obtained the assistance of
one or two kindred souls in spreading it. The
idea seemed good, and soon all the fire-lighting
machinery of the German Army was in full

205

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

blast. The place was besprinkled with the little
black patches of gunpowder which have figured
in nearly all the big German bonfires, and with
petrol. The kind-hearted Wlirtemberger, so far
as can be ascertained, was good enough to allow
the inhabitants to leave their burning houses.
They were, at any rate, not shot down as they
ran for refuge. While the town below was
getting well alight, some earnest churchgoers
climbed up the hill to the beautiful old church.
One with a musical soul sat down to the organ
while his comrades danced crazily up and down
the aisles. This did not end their fun. A
church, of course, could not be allowed to escape.
Having set fire to their dancing-hall, they hurried
down the hill again to join in the pillaging that
was going on.

I found one of the inhabitants of Clermont.
She was an old woman, scavenging along the
ruined street for any little object which might
go to the rebuilding of her home. As my car
stopped, she raised herself slowly from the heap
of stones over which she was bending, and turned
the uncurious face of utter misery towards me.
The heap she had been turning over was her
house. She had been proud of it, with all the
pride of the old peasant woman whose savings in
life were represented by a son with the army, the
stone and mortar of her dwelling-place, her
handwoven linen, two clocks, a breviary with

206

DESTRUCTION

a silver clasp, and a few sticks of furniture. She
had at first thought that her decent old age had
won her favour in the Wiirtemberger's eye, for
before putting the torch to her home they had
removed the furniture, the clocks, the breviary,
and the linen. But once the fire was well alight
she saw her mistake, as the soldiers went through
the pile of her household belongings in the street,
tucked the clocks under their arms, tore the
silver clasp from the breviary, and then threw
the book back among the furniture, which
before they left was blazing away merrily. They
appear to have been on the move, and, fearful
lest they might not be able to return to com-
plete their work, as they passed the baskets
of linen they shoved their bayonets through
them.

The inhabitants of Triaucourt have also had
dealings with the Wlirtemberger — in fact, w^ith
no less a person than the Duke of Wlirtemberg
himself They were not so lucky as the people
of Clermont. At Triaucourt, of course, the
Wlirtemberger had just cause for grievance. A
young French girl had resented the beastly pro-
posals of an officer, and had carried presumption
and ignorance so far as to complain to the man's
superiors. There the village was burned, and as
the inhabitants fled from their dwellings they
provided shooting for the sport-loving soldiery.
Two old women, one over seventy, the other

207

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

over eighty years of age, finding that if they
tried to leave their burning house by going out
into the village street they would be massacred,
tried to escape with the girl who had brought all
this misfortune on the place, by climbing over
the hedge into the neighbouring garden. The
battue was well organized, however, and the two
old women were killed in the middle of their
climb ; but the young girl, flattening herself down
among the cabbages, managed to escape observa-
tion until the frenzy had passed, until the piano,
which they played among the corpses, had
soothed their savage breasts.

At Villers - aux - Vents, a charming village
clustering round a beautiful old church tower,
there is one house which has been left in a more
or less habitable condition. That is to say that,
although all the windows and some of the roof
have gone, there still are wall and covering.
Here, in spite of the complete destruction of
village life, although the mairie, the notary's,
the school-house, and the doctor's house, were in
ruins, and all official personages had long since
disappeared, there persisted the primitive form
of communal life, which arose out of the neces-
sity for self-protection and self- aid. In the one
remaining house four families of greybeards,
young women, and children, had taken up their
abode, and discussed and settled the affairs of
the village between them. Pooling their forces,

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DESTRUCTION

they were making an heroic effort to get their
fields in order for the sowing, trying to save the
heritage of their sons with the army. When
I visited them two months after battle had
scorched their countryside, they had already
passed from the stage of numb despair to that of
furious resentment.

It is to be doubted whether anyone ever
realizes war. These people tried to apply to it
the standards of reason and of humanity. They
wondered how they could be expected to go on
tilling the soil, raising crops, and feeding children,
if these Germans were allowed to come along,
burning and blasting everything. In some re-
spects their complaints were rather like those of
the burgled householder against the inadequacy
of his police protection. There were in all about
twenty people left in the village when the
Germans entered it, composed of the courageous,
who had determined to stick by their houses and
protect their goods to the end ; and of the timid,
who were unable to take the decisive step of de-
parture. Both had been assured by the gendarme
and other representatives of the Government
that, if they remained quietly in their homes and
obeyed the orders given them by the German
officers, their houses would probably be respected,
while the belongings of those who had fled
would in all likelihood be pillaged. They had
been particularly warned against indulging in

209 14

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

any fine but futile outburst of anger, and, above
all, against any shooting.

To make sure of matters in this last respect,
all the weapons in the village had been collected
at the mairie. They v^ere still there when I
passed that way, some hidden under fallen
masonry, the charred stocks of others showing
their iron bones above heaps of debris in the
ruins of the mairie, for the precautions were of
no avail. I talked with one of the peasants who
had stayed behind, trusting that the decency of
men would save his home from destruction. The
only indications left of his house were mounds of
brick and heaps of rubbish, littering the tiling of
the ground-floor. Here and there a bottle, the
leg of a chair, the metal springs of a mattress,
fragments of china, alone showed that the spot
was not a housebreaker's yard.

That tiled ground-floor had become the roof
of the man's house. At the top of the steps
leading down to the cellar was a bucket filled
with glowing coke, upon which the midday meal
of potatoes was being fried. In the cellar
bundles of straw marked the bedroom of the old
couple. The man came in from the fields as 1
was talking to his wife. Over his shoulders he
had a sack, at the bottom of which lay a few
potatoes, the result of a morning's gleaning over
the neighbouring fields. All the food they could
then get was army bread after a six or seven

210

DESTRUCTION

mile walk, and what little stuff the Germans
had left behind them in the fields.

The tiled floor, the fragments of china on the
site of the house, and the man's solid clothing,
proclaimed him to be a good type of the
prosperous peasant of France, hard-working, and
thrifty to the point of greed. His bitterness
against the system which had allowed his whole
world to be smashed about his head wrought
him into passion. It was the passion of the land-
owner for the soil. It was difficult to convince
the people whose homes had been shattered,
even during the German retreat, that there could
be any comfort in victory. All this man wanted
was to be given the means to do his sowing.
" Unless we get that," he said, " there are some
of us who will get a gun and take to the fields
and the highways, and use it."

It is the fate of all church towers within the
battle zone to be bombarded. In most cases
there is for this action the excuse that they may
serve as observation stations for the control of
artillery fire. At Villers-aux- Vents the church
received a shell or two, the bells had been hurled
from the belfry down into the aisle, and had
embedded themselves in the floor of the church.
In the graveyard tombstones had been splintered
and resting-places disturbed. But this damage
may be regarded as inevitable in war. The
church, however, bore proof of deliberate incen-

211

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

diarism. It was not enough that the tower had
been made unsafe for observation purposes ; a
heap of petrol-soaked straw had been placed
against the wooden door in an attempt to burn
the church down, and the charred semicircle in
the panels remains as evidence.

A little way behind the main street of the
village, at the foot of the garden of one of the
destroyed houses, there is a large pit, covered
above with stout beams, reinforced by a solid
mound of sods 4 or 5 feet deep. From the
security of this " front seat " his Imperial High-
ness the Crown Prince William watched the
merry sight of the burning of Villers-aux-Vents.

The townsfolk of Senlis, the beautiful
country place some sixty miles from Paris
where an organized massacre of civilian inhabi-
tants was carried out, where the main street
was burnt down as a punishment to the town,
and a hundred and six houses were thus de-
stroyed, regard their misfortunes as affording
the finest example of the inhuman methods of
German warfare. If they could see Gerbe-
villers, where there are only twenty houses out
of four hundred and seventy-five — if they could
see Sermaize-les- Bains, where only three houses
remain of a flourishing inland watering-station
— they would realize that they have matter for
congratulation. Mathematically it would be
incorrect to state that there is not one brick

212

DESTRUCTION

left sticking to another in Sermaize. The ex-
pression is, however, true as a record of the
impression made upon one by the spectacle of
so much ruin. Timgade and Pompeii were not
more effectively obliterated. The last thing in
a house to fall is the brick or stonework of the
chimneys. The main street of Sermaize is, as
it were, a clearing where everything has been
felled to the ground. Out of the ruins of the
rest of the town there rise occasional chimney-
stacks, like trees in a thinned plantation. It
was only possible with much difficulty to form
a picture of one or two of the houses thus
destroyed, and then the materials for mental
reconstruction had to be sought for among the
ddbris.

There were only two houses the occupation
of whose former inhabitants could be deter-
mined with accuracy. In the one case the clue
was provided by an enamel tablet with the
words "Night Bell," which indicated the site
of the doctor's house ; in the other the evidence
was more copious. It had been apparently a
flourishing ironmonger's store. The walls had
fallen outwards, and the house itself was levelled
to the ground. In the backyard there was a
mass of twisted iron, a heap of still smouldering
coal. In the front the shop was very easy to
reconstruct. Evidently around the walls the
smaller articles of the ironmonger's merchandise

21S

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

had been stored in drawers or boxes. All the
woodwork had been consumed, the walls them-
selves had dropped to pieces, but the packets of
nails, picture-hangers, curtain-hooks, and wire,
had fused under the red heat into strange
spongelike bricks of brass and iron, and formed
a low square rampart outlining the limits of the
former shop. No one knows what Sermaize
had done to merit this punishment, which was
meted out to almost every inhabitant of the
place. The big building at the springs escaped
destruction solely because it was occupied by
the German Headquarters Staff. The house of
a grave-eyed Frenchwoman, her face beautiful
with the strength of tested courage, was also
spared. The church was smashed utterly to
pieces, and they put a shell through the house
next to hers, which stood next the church.

Her dwelling was not actually in the town,
and so did not catch fire, and nobody came
along to set it alight. She does not know why,
but, from what I saw of her and gathered from
her account of what had passed, I imagine it
was that they respected her too much. As she
told me, she was an old woman, and nothing
mattered very much to her. She had the
courage to complain. She sent a message to
the staff, pointing out that the dead horses and
dead men who were lying in front of the church
near her house were becoming a danger to

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DESTRUCTION

health. As no notice was taken of this, she
went out and commandeered the services of a
batch of German soldiers, took them to the
place, and told them to clear the bodies away !
She retained her calm spirit, although she herself
was a witness of one of the most heartrending-
incidents of terror in the whole heartrending
history of German frightfulness in France. An
old man was being removed as a hostage for
the good behaviour of the town. He had been
torn from the agonized farewells of his wife and
daughter-in-law, who suspected with only too
much reason the euphemistic nature of the
term "hostage," and as he was marched away
between his captors the two frenzied women
rushed from the road and flung themselves into
the river. The old man wrenched himself free
and ran to their rescue. His escort caught him
before he got to the river-bank and dragged
him away, leaving the two wretched women
struggling in the water. Their bodies came to
land a little lower down, each with a bullet-
wound in its head.

In the ruined church of Sermaize, surrounded
by masses of fallen masonry and charred wood-
work and twisted iron, there stands untouched
the triumphant, joyous figure of Joan of Arc.
This case has become so frequent that the Maid
has become more than ever the symbol of victory
to France ; her constant survival in the midst of

^15

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

destruction resembles the country's quiet spirit
of confidence in success. In the grey, blackened
square of Rheims Cathedral, in the devastated
Place of Ypres, the graceful equestrian figure
points with her pennon the way to victory.

The German book of war, translated by Pro-
fessor Morgan, the writings of many military
apologists, explain and seem to justify these
methods of ruthlessness. We are asked to
believe that if you only make war with sufficient
savagery it will not last so long, and will become
less frequent. Even the Germans, masters
though they be of frightfulness, have not yet
found the means terrible enough to stamp out
the Frenchman's passionate patriotism, the
horrors great enough to leave him cowed and
sullen, with his heart and mind so emptied by
despair as to be free from the desire for retribu-
tion. They have not even found among their
own people a perfect tool for their designs. The
whole history of frightfulness in France is lack-
ing in any connecting principle. Some armies
have been worse than others ; some districts,
such as the region round Epernay, have escaped
unscathed. In some places the maddened act of
a civilian may have furnished the Germans with
an excuse sufficient in their eyes for the deeds
that have been perpetrated. Both discipline
and the lack of discipline have played their part
in the wrecking of the French countryside. In

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DESTRUCTION

some places, at Revigny for example, the work
of destruction was effected on orders from head-
quarters in the rear, and the inhabitants were
warned by the soldiers saying, to them as they
passed them in the streets : " Demain ! Malheur
a vous !" that orders had been received for the
destruction of a fresh block of buildings. The
motor "fire-engine" drew up in the doomed
street the next morning and squirted petrol into
the houses marked down for burning. Thus,
with much the same method as the guns in
bombarding the city will work over certain
squares in the map, half the town of Revigny
was burned down.

In another village a foreign officer entered a
cottage shortly after the French had retired.
The woman, whose little boy, frightened by the
appearance of the stranger, was hiding his face
in her skirts, mistook the man for a Belgian or
a British officer at first. While she was answer-
ing the questions he addressed to her in a kindly
manner, she saw beneath the open window the
spiked helmets of German troops. The officer
turned away for a minute to give some in-
structions, and the woman, seized with panic for
the safety of her boy, hid him in the cellars.
When the officer turned back, he noticed the
terrible agitation of the woman, and seeking to
put her at her ease, he said : " Was that your
little boy who was here just now ?" The woman

217

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

replied: "There was no boy." The officer
insisted; she obstinately denied that there was
anyone but herself in the house, until finally the
German, puzzled as to the reason for this lying,
fearing that the boy might have been despatched
to convey a message to French troops hidden in
the neighbourhood, had the house searched.
When the boy was discovered the officer realized
the cause of the woman's action. He appears to
have been a reservist officer and a kindly fellow.
He was horrified, and apparently sincerely so, to
think that the stories of the martyred children of
the invasion were believed. Taking the boy on
his knee he reassured the mother, telling her that
nothing would happen to him or to her ; that he
himself had a wife and a boy about the age of
hers at home in Germany. Two days afterwards
that woman's house — in fact, the whole village —
had been burned to the ground.

If the intimate tragedies of the riven villages
pluck at the heart, the desolation of the great
city of Rheims stirs the imagination to a dim
understanding of the gigantic forces which
ambitions and misunderstandings have unloosed.
The village scenes are humble in their tragedy,
and concern humble folk. In the villages it is
the shrine of family traditions which falls prey to
the flames ; in Rheims it is the cradle of a nation's
history which is imperilled. There is the diffisr-
ence of appeal which exists between the homely

218

DESTRUCTION

poems of Crabbe and the classical tragedies of
Shakespeare.

On my way to Rheims I stopped the night at
Epernay, where I was billeted on one who had
had the misfortune to be forced to entertain
Prince Friedrich Wilhelm during the German
occupation. The town of Epernay was the
busiest, most bustling spot I have seen in France
since the war began. It was filled from attic to
cellar with refugees from the city over the hills,
who clustered in knots round each fresh arrival
in hope of gaining information as to the safety of
their own friends and homes. Rheims was
spoken of in the bated breath with which the
advance of the plague or cholera is discussed in
eastern countries. From an active and beautiful
city it had become a sinister place of horror and
of death.

I reached it on a perfect winter day. From
the western height the bowl in which it lies was
clear as crystal. There was no haze to soften
the atmosphere, no smoke rose from the city, and
this absence of the mist which normally floats
above the living place of 120,000 people was the
only indication of the horror brooding over the
place. From a distance there were no signs of
damage in the streets ; the twin square towers
of the cathedral appeared to be untouched, the
guns away to the north and east were silent, and
there were no white clouds of bursting shrapnel

219

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

to fleck the blue sky. The city lay undisturbed
in the bright sunshine. Dropping down the hill
we passed a few isolated houses wrecked by
shell-fire, the numbers of which increased as we
passed through the solitary streets, until, as we
drew near the centre of the town, a house which
had not been hit became a rarity. As I got out
of my car at the hotel a crowd of beggars surged
round me clamouring for sous. They were
joined by the pedlars of shell-fragments, for
begging and shell -peddling have become the
chief industry of the poor who remain in Rheims.
The city had been left in peace for four days, but
while we were finishing our coffee after luncheon
the first shell of the renewed bombardment shook
the glass of the conservatory, and I went out
upon my sightseeing.

The thirty thousand odd people who remain in
Rheims, in spite of all the persuasions of the
authorities, have become quite accustomed to
their existence. Shell-fire has been added to the
things which constitute the background of their
lives, but they carry on with their usual affairs in
a very normal manner. One of the citizens of
Rheims, who remained there during the first
hundred days of the bombardment, allowed me
to look at his diary. He was a carpenter by
trade, and in the early entries his business and
his patriotism are curiously mixed. After nar-
rating the departure of the Germans from Rheims

220

DESTRUCTION

and the arrival of the victorious French troops,
he wrote in his diary : " I wish I were a poet to
describe to-day's events. Vive la France ! The

stairs of M. X have been badly damaged

by a shell. I have told him that it will take me
four days to repair them." The quiet spirit in
which this man kept about his business, in cir-
cumstances which were so thrilling and extra-
ordinary as to make him wish to be a poet,
evidently inspired most of his regular customers ;
for there is hardly a day in the diary which has
not an entry recording a visit to repair broken
shutters, to patch a roof or mend a door damaged
by the more or less continual bombardment.

The first shell of the fresh bombardment sent
some of those abroad hastening back to their
cellars. Others, not provided wdth cellars, or
fearing that even their cellars would not be
an adequate protection against the Black Maria,
were hastening along the road to the top of
the western hill, where they would be in safety.
The few shopkeepers whose establishments still
remained open were out in front of their shops
putting up their shutters, preparatory to a period
in the cellars. A shell is a rigorous early-closing
legislator. The tenacity of the people of Rheims
on their homes is so strong that even families
with children have refused to move out of the
zone of danger. The schools have been re-
opened for the children remaining in the town,

221

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

and the cellars of the champagne firms have
become the educational estabhshment of the
town. Here, too, Christmas Mass was cele-
brated, on an altar of packing-cases, with the
congregation kneeling in aisles of champagne-
bottles.

Our footfalls rang out with distinctness in
the still square of the cathedral. From a little
distance it seemed as though the fabric were
untouched. There was an untidy air about the
square, it is true. Part of the approach to the
cathedral was boarded off, and the roadway
in front was littered with crumbled stone and
broken glass. Inside, at first sight the nave
seemed most remarkable on account of its
emptiness. Then you realized that the greater
part of the famous choir-stalls had gone. The
tinkle of glass beneath the feet drew attention
to the shattered windows, and gradually the
sum of the damage done to the cathedral
soaked in.

My visit was made in the winter, and I have
not seen the building since the last heavy spring
bombardment, when some 1,500 shells were sent
into the town. This latter bombardment has
done more damage, the gravity of which is
indicated by the fact that for the first time
the stone -vaulted roof has been holed. The
first shells fell upon the building on Sep-
tember 4, the day the Germans first entered

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DESTRUCTION

the city. Little damage was done, and as the
bombardment was carried out by the Germans
when their own troops had already entered the
place, it may safely be assumed that it was
due to some blunder, or, as has been suggested
by the Germans themselves, to the jealousy
of a corps which had been deprived of the
honour of entering the fallen city at the head
of the troops. The town enjoyed immunity
for ten days while the guns roared down on the
Marne and along the Ourcq, and it was not
until the Germans had evacuated, on September
14 and 15, that the shells again began falling
in Rheims. On the 17th the cathedral was hit
again, one shell falling on the apse and another
on the north transept. On September 19 the
building suffered a sustained bombardment, and
towards evening the fire, which caused more
damage than the shells themselves, started on
the northern tower among the scaffolding which
had been erected for repairs before the outbreak
of the war. The flames burned themselves out
after about an hour, during which time the
timber roof was set ahght by another shell,
which the priest who conducted me round the
building is convinced was an incendiary bomb,
so quickly did the flames spread. The timber
roofing was totally destroyed, and the fire on
the scaffolding, spreading downwards, burned
through the north door, destroyed the beautiful

223

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

wooden screens, or drums, inside the door, and
set alight the straw which had been placed in
the interior of the cathedral for the accom-
modation of wounded. There were German
wounded lying in the straw when the bom-
bardment began, a fact which had been notified
to the enemy by the flying of the Red Cross
flag above the cathedral. When the bombard-
ment became intense, the French removed the
wounded to a place of greater safety. At least
one of the wounded, however, perhaps hoping
to make good his escape, covered himself up
in the straw, and was left behind to be burned
to death. In the blaze caused by the burning
straw half the choir-stalls were destroyed. The
remarkable reliefs decorating the interior of
the western wall, irreplaceable since they were
carved out of the stone and not applied to
it, were calcined by the flame, and crumble
to the touch. Outside, the same fate attended
all the romantic tracery of the facade, the
clerestory, the flying buttresses and the turret
crowning each of them, and the north tower.
The tapestries and the treasure were removed
from danger. There is blackness in the nave,
where the splendid glory of the glass has gone*
In the apse some glass still remains.

It is one of the curious facts about the modern
fortification and the modern shell that some of
the old church towers of Gothic construction

224.

DESTRUCTION

have stood the battering of heavy shell very
much better than the ferro - concrete of the
scientific fort - builder. If Rheims Cathedral
exists to-day it is not the fault of the Germans,
but the glory of those master-builders of the
Gothic day. Opinion in France is divided as
to the wisdom of restoration. It is, perhaps,
early to speak of its possibility when the
Germans are still encamped with their heavy
guns upon the circle of hills to the north and
east of the town. The damage done can be
repaired. There is a lover of the cathedral
who has devoted his life to the minute adora-
tion of every stone in the vast fabric. He has
a photographic record of such detail that even
the almost Grecian splendour of the sculptured
front has been planned out and reproduced by
his camera. Whether the age of blood and
destruction can produce the men with the art
and with the feeling necessary for restoration
is another matter. There are many Frenchmen
who feel that it would be better to leave the
cathedral as it is, as a monument to the glory
of the French, and the eternal shame of the
German, races.

The fate of Rheims has overshadowed the
importance of the other fine buildings in the
town which have suffered, some of them, such
as the Archbishop's Palace, to a greater degree
than the cathedral. It, with the Archaeological

225 15

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

Museum and the Apartment of Kings, has been
destroyed, together with the whole quarter of
the town in which it lies.

As we passed through this stricken area the
shells increased in frequency, as though the
gunners were anxious to throw as many as they
could into the city before the failing light went
altogether. While we retraced our steps towards
our waiting motor-cars, the sing-song alarm of
the fire-engine told us of an outbreak of fire, and
as we strayed for a moment at the top of the
western hillside, among the hundreds who were
watching the bursting of the shells over their
homes, heavy columns of smoke were rising from
four parts of the city. The last picture that I
bore away from Rheims was that of a sea of grey
masonry gathering into a triumphant towering
wave in the Cathedral. The red rays of the
sunset had caught the glass of the apse and
streaked the grey fabric, and the colour of blood
glowed against the black smoke of the fires in
the background.

The villages in the north have suffered in exactly
the same way as those in the east, and there is
yet no telling what will be the fate of the fair
towns and rich countryside the Germans have yet
to abandon. The French soldier hates war. French
civilization has worked on other lines than those of
blood and iron, and the taking of human life is
not pleasant to the French intellect. They were,

226

DESTRUCTION

before the war broke out, perhaps the most
pacific great nation in Europe. Now they have
become hardened to war, and have the soldier's
pleasure in the life of the field. Nothing, how-
ever, can harden them to the sights they have
seen and those they are still to see when they
march through the rest of invaded France. In
the Marne the soldiers of France have seen
what the German can do. They have marched
through the flaming villages, and in each man's
mind arose the thought : " What have they done
in my ' pays ' ?" Some of them do know what
has been done in their village, and the know-
ledge has made them iron in their determination
to exact retribution. The French soldier is, I
am firmly convinced, incapable of any frightfiil-
ness approaching that of the Germans. But he
has a keen wish for justice, and the only justice
which can meet the case is that of the old
Hebrew law. It is to be doubted whether
Dr. Lyttelton would have made his plea for soft
treatment for the enemy had he seen what is to
be seen in the Argonne. It is still more to be
doubted whether there would have been any
trouble with our labourers had they been given
an opportunity, either through the Press or
through the eyes of their own leaders, of realizing
what invasion means, how close the hour of
defeat came, how stern and unrelenting is the
struggle still, what manner of wild beast culture

227

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

would dominate Europe if the Germans won.
The French are fighting that the Germans may
be made to pay for all that they have done, that
they may never again be able to fling the torch
into the world's life. We have Scarborough
and Whitby and Hartlepool. The French have
a band of blasted country ten miles broad, and
so long that it only just fits into the map of
Great Britain.

-<J28

CHAPTER X

FRENCH AND BRITISH

During the days when British participation in
this war hung in the balance, British people in
France were filled with an almost shameful
anxiety, for they knew that to the French the
vague formula of the Entente Cordiale had con-
veyed more than was contained in the letters
exchanged between Sir Edward Grey and the
French Ambassador at London, which formed
the only solid documentary basis of Anglo-
French friendship and possible co-operation.
Technically, we were not bound to come to the
support of France, even were she attacked.
Sentimentally, at any rate, the French had seen
in the speeches of our public men, in the leading
articles of our Press, and, above all, in the
attitude of Great Britain at the time of the
Agadir crisis, an understanding which amounted
to an alliance. British neutrality would have
revived the tradition oi perjide Albion, and would
to French eyes have branded us for ever as
traitors to our word, though in reality no word

229

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

had passed. During those first few days an
Englishman in Paris was besieged at every hour
of the day by liis friends, and even by complete
strangers, for information as to what England
was going to do. The hesitancy of our attitude,
our refusal to give to France the pledge that we
would support her, and to notify Germany of
our intention of doing so, in the opinion of many
Frenchmen prevented the possibility of peace.
It was felt then that a clear, emphatic state-
ment by Great Britain, such as that made by
Mr. Lloyd George in his famous speech at
the Mansion House in 1911, would have made
Germany realize the hopelessness of the struggle
she was trying to provoke. Now it is recognized
that if events had taken this turn, the war
would only have been postponed, that Germany
would have continued with patience and perse-
verance to sap Franco-British friendship, and
still further to strengthen her army and her
fleet.

It was known in France that there were
powerful political and financial personages in
England who deemed it well that Great Britain
should stand aloof In spite of this knowledge,
France held, and rightly held, that Great
Britain could not thus be blinded to the
necessity for her intervention, that she could
not fly completely in the face of the whole of
her traditional foreign policy, which throughout

230

FRENCH AND BRITISH

ages has aimed at preventing any one State
upon the Continent of Europe from acquiring a
predominant position. The violation of Belgian
neutrality clinched the matter, and gave to the
waverers at home the urgent push that sent
them from neutrality to war. Even without
this push acute French statesmen are of opinion
that the British people would have realized that
the war upon France formed but the preliminary
to the greater and even more ardently desired
struggle against England. Frenchmen of all
classes have had more reason in the past than
British people to pay attentive heed to foreign
politics. They have all been quick, while
appreciating to the full the services we have
rendered to the cause of France, to the ideals
which have united our people in our champion-
ship of the Belgian cause, to realize that we
went to Flanders, consciously or unconsciously,
to fight for the protection of our own homes just
as much as we did for the protection of France
and the independence of Belgium. Their ap-
preciation of our services has not suffered from
this clearness of vision. The reception accorded
to our troops when the first few regiments
landed at the Channel ports was rapturously
joyful.

Over the Channel there floated the golden
tubbiness of one of the British dirigibles, and on
the horizon we saw the cloud of smoke of the

231

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

first transports. They had arrived at last.
Hurrjdng into Boulogne, I was in time to see
the Argyll and Sutherlands marching through
the streets of the town to the camps which had
been prepared for them upon the neighbouring
hills. The population of Boulogne rushed to
the unaccustomed sound of the bagpipes, and it
was through lines of the old Boulonnais fishwives,
who had that morning bade tearful farewell to
their fisher-sons off to the depot, that our men
stepped gaily along, with a cheery grin and a
smile for the words of welcome shouted out to
them. The fishwives searched through their
heads for odd scraps of English with which to
make their welcome more intelligible to the
braves Ecossais, While one sought to give a
note of welcome to the two words of English
she had heard in constant use upon the quayside
— " Portaire, Sire ?" — another exclaimed, in ac-
cents of the wildest enthusiasm, *' Daily Mail I
Daily Mail !" The opinion of the town was
summed up by the remark made by a brawny
veteran of the sea as he watched the sturdy
Scotsmen swinging past in their war-kilts of
khaki, ** Ca au moins, c'est du solide !"

It was the first of many similar scenes. The
town gradually became swamped with British,
who poured out of the docks from the ships
which had come across escorted by submarine
and airship. Then they vanished up-country,

232

FRENCH AND BRITISH

and for a time all that was seen of the British
was the machinery of the base.

I met them again, those cheery Argyll and
Sutherlanders, billeting themselves upon a
village in Flanders on the eve of the first
fighting of Mons. I had got caught in a great
stream of motor-cars filled with stores and with
officers moving northwards. They passed through
an almost continuous lane of cheering peasants.
Their motor-cars underwent a regular floral
bombardment, which grew in the country towns
to the intensity of a flower engagement at a
southern carnival. By the time the end of the
journey was reached, and the men had entered
the zone of operations, there was many a one of
them who smilingly and ruefully was rubbing a
bruise raised upon his cheek by a tightly bound
peasant bouquet, which had caught him with
the force of the thrower added to the speed of
the car. Men who got off their cars were
immediately the centre of a struggling mass of
villagers, old and young, male and female,
anxious to shake them by the hand or to coax
their regimental letters off their shoulder-straps.
They were given a right royal reception, and
right royally have they deserved it.

In spite of the inevitable friction caused by
the requisitioning officer, and the countless
restrictions which the army has naturally
placed upon the ordinary course of civilian life

233

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

in the country it occupies, the men get on in the
most splendid way with the French peasant.
They are firm friends, and there is many a
Flemish youngster to-day who, if he had not
been born a Frenchman, would most certainly
elect to be British at his second incarnation.

It is very jolly to see Tommy at his ease in a
French farmhouse — playing with the children,
helping the old people with the work about the
house, and occasionally giving a hand with the
plough. Contact such as that which brings the
French and British together in the field breeds
mutual respect, born of the knowledge of what
is being done and suffered by both. It is one of
the misfortunes of military requirements that
they prevent that knowledge becoming widely
diffused among the whole masses in Great
Britain and in France. The military censorship
rightly forbids any mention of the accurate
number of troops engaged, or of any detail
which might furnish information hkely to be
useful to the enemy. The drastic way in
which it has been enforced has had political
disadvantages.

The French know that we are making an
effort such as has never been made in the
world's history. They know it because they
have been assured of the fact in countless lead-
ing articles. We know that the French have
got large armies in the field because we have

234

FRENCH AND BRITISH

been told it in leading articles. Both peoples fail
to realize to the full what the other has accom-
plished. It is only by the constant stream of
descriptive articles that the great body of
French people can be really brought to grasp
all the difficulties with which we have had to
grapple.

There are many, many Frenchmen who do
not know that we have as yet no system of
conscription, who imagine in consequence that
we had at the outbreak of war an army as
large as the French to throw into the scales.
There are many, many English people who can-
not understand what France has done, who
cannot possibly be blamed for not knowing
what universal service means to a nation.
Naturally enough our eyes are turned most
eagerly upon the doings of our own troops ; it is
their fortunes that we follow with eager heart,
and the paucity of news regarding the doings of
the French in our own Press leads to an almost
undue emphasis being given to the doings of our
army. It is not the fault of the Press ; it may
not be the fault of the censorship, but one of the
things inevitable with the secrecy of war.

The Germans have seen in this secrecy a
political lever which their wonderfully organized
system of propaganda has been endeavouring to
use in France. The treatment meted out to
British prisoners is in contrast to that given to

235

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

the French, the hereditary enemies of Germany.
The French prisoner of war is better treated on
the whole than his ally in misfortune. The
German explains this to him by pointing out
that it is England alone whom she hates, by
quoting Herr Lissauer's Hymn, and by declaring
that the reason Germany so hates England is
because it is England which has forced this war
upon the world for her selfish ends. The propa-
ganda is carried out along the same lines in the
German and in the neutral Press. No method
is too minute to escape use.

I was shown recently a letter received by a
French lady living in Switzerland, in which she
was informed by a German officer of the death
of a relative upon the field of battle. The letter
was couched in the most correct and respectful
terms. The writer expressed his regret at having
to be the sender of the bad news, and tempered
it with a tribute to the heroic death of the
Frenchman in question. The sting and the
object of the letter were revealed in a post-
script, which declared that French people could
lay the blame for their dead upon the hated
English.

A band of strange Anarchists working for the
arch - Anarchist have been slipping circulars
underneath the doors of Paris houses, in which
the same order of ideas was developed. All this
and many other forms of German propaganda

236

FRENCH AND BRITISH

intended to destroy the confidence of France in
her Allies, to undermine the trust all Frenchmen
have in the purity of British motives, appears as
foolish and as futile as the similar work carried
out by Herr Dernberg's Press Bureau in the
United States ; but both activities deserve to be
watched. The mind of all Frenchmen is already
made up, and all the protestations of Germany
that she really rather admires the French now
that they have proved themselves such doughty
fighters will not succeed in convincing France
that this sudden desire for French friendship is
anything but the mask of further treachery ; nor
can it ever lead France to regard the Germans
as anything but the murderers of her sons, the
wreckers of her homes, and the ravishers of her
women.

I have heard English business men ask what
France is about. They have found that the
financial and commercial system of France has
been utterly upset by the war, and they have
pointed with some satisfaction to the better way
in which we have ordered these things at home,
at the motto of " Business as Usual " displayed
on our shop windows.

The Frenchman admires the spirit with which
the John Bull of tradition determined to allow
the war to affect the daily tenor of his life as little
as possible. Yet he was quick to perceive the
contradiction to be seen sometimes on two

237

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

posters plastered on the same premises, the one
declaring " Business as Usual," and the other
stating, " Your King and Country need you."

To the Frenchman who found the great
mineral district of the east, the huge textile dis-
trict of the north, the wine-growing and agri-
cultural country of the Champagne, in the hands
of the invader, the only business worth attending
to as usual was that of getting rid of the invader.
To French ears the new motto, " Victory as
Usual," has a worthier sound. It is less in
accordance with the Napoleonic view of British
nationality. The French have turned a some-
what wistful glance at the spectacle of England,
with her foreign trade practically unimpaired,
her shipping busy, her streets filled with traffic,
and her shops all open and full of customers,
when they have thought of the silence of many of
their factories, the closed shutters of their big
commercial establishments, unable to do business
because the requirements of military service
have removed not only their staffs and their
labour, but their customers as well.

They have guessed, if they have not known,
some of the difficulties with which we were
faced. They knew that armies cannot be im-
provised in a night. They saw with pride and
astonishment, it may be added, the wonderful
response made freely by all classes at home to
the call of the recruiter, and they said to them-

238

FRENCH AND BRITISH

selves : " The British effort is for later on. They
are not ready yet, and we must hold the line
with what admirable assistance they can afford
us at this early stage of the war until their
preparations are complete.

That time has come. Our army in Flanders
has been greatly reinforced, but the great effort
we have still to make. When, as our casualty
lists grow longer, as they undoubtedly will, when
the sorrow of the war has come home to ever-
widening circles of society, and the price of peace
to ourselves mounts up, it will be well that
people in England shall remember that our
allies in France have borne the burden we shall
then be bearing ever since the first day of war,
and are still bearing it ; that to them, although
no casualty lists are published, the cost of victory
has become their daily knowledge.

The French have abandoned the drinking of
absinthe many months before we started to con-
sider the advisability of giving up whisky. This
is a minor sacrifice ; but the date of it is an
indication of the fact that France has had to
bear the full force of the pressure of war at an
earlier date than we have in Great Britain.

We may be prepared for an attempt in
England to do what German propaganda has
failed to accomplish in France. It will not be
at all surprising if English people are told by
disguised German voices, when we are giving

2S9

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FRONT

our most in killed and wounded on the battle-
field, when our industry and finance are suffering
from the continued strain and drain of war, that
if the French had only fought well in the early
days of the war, all this might have been avoided.
We shall be often told in the anxious days of
the Peace Conference many things the accept-
ance of which might lead us to look askance at
the French attitude towards the final settlement.
We shall be told that if we allow severe or just
terms of peace to be forced upon beaten Ger-
many, we shall destroy the great buffer between
ourselves and the Slav flood. The whole mega-
phonic clangour of the propagandists' bureau will
be in full blast, and we shall do well to prepare
now to stop our ears to all this babel.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, ODILDFORD, ENGLAND

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