Now It Can Be Told - free ebook by Philip Gibbs

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Now It Can Be Told

Philip Gibbs

135 chapters

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135 chapters

PREFACE

PREFACE

In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen again—surely—if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on all the fronts where conditions were the same. What I have written here does not ca

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I

I

When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and a glorious adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out from London to report the proceedings, and I was one of them. We went in civilian clothes without military passports—the War Office was not giving any—with bags of

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II

II

In 1915 the War Office at last moved in the matter of war correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against them, was being broken down a little by the pressure of public opinion (mentioned from time to time by members of the government), which demanded more news of their men in the field than was given by bald communiqués from General Headquarters and by an “eye-witness” who, as one paper had the audacity to say, wrote nothing but “eye-wash.” Even the enormous, impregnable stupidity of our Hig

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III

III

In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by courtesy a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General Headquarters at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time to time, according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was very peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women worked while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied us by the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick ride over Cassel Hill to

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IV

IV

Just at first—though not for long—there was a touch of hostility against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their quarters, wondered why we should come “spying around,” trying to “see things.” I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy nor pleasant

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V

V

A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front of the chateau of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still standing, and told us the story of its capture. “It was a wild scrap. I was told all about it by a French sergeant who was in it. They were under the cover of that wall over there, about a hundred yards away, and fixing up a charge of high explosives to knock a breach in the wall. The chateau was a machine-gun fortress, with the Germans on the top floor,

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VI

VI

The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin, and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had their battery nearby. We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through undergrowth to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and wire frames with imm

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VII

VII

It was not long before we broke down the prejudice against us among the fighting units. The new armies were our friends from the first, and liked us to visit them in their trenches and their dugouts, their camps and their billets. Every young officer was keen to show us his particular “peep-show” or to tell us his latest “stunt.” We made many friends among them, and it was our grief that as the war went on so many of them disappeared from their battalions, and old faces were replaced by new face

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VIII

VIII

The Commander-in-Chief—Sir John French—received us when we were first attached to the British armies in the field—a lifetime ago, as it seems to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the chateau near St.-Omer, which he used as his own headquarters, with his A. D. C.'s in attendance, though the main general headquarters were in the town. Our first colonel gathered us like a shepherd with his flock, counting us twice over before we passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew afterward to be Sir P

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IX

IX

It was another commander-in-chief who received us some months after the battle of Loos, in a chateau near Montreuil, to which G. H. Q. had then removed. Our only knowledge of Sir Douglas Haig before that day was of a hostile influence against us in the First Army, which he commanded. He had drawn a line through his area beyond which we might not pass. He did not desire our presence among his troops nor in his neighborhood. That line had been broken by the protests of our commandant, and now as C

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X

X

I came to know General Headquarters more closely when it removed, for fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once within sight of the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below its hill, but now looking across a wide vista of richly cultivated fields where many hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came to G. H. Q. from journeys over the wild desert of the battlefields, where men lived in ditches and “pill-boxes,” muddy, miserable in all things but spirit, as to a pl

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XI

XI

There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our quarters—women's voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came into the mess—we were at breakfast—and explained the meaning of the clamor, which by some intuition and a quick ear for French he had gathered from all this confusion of tongues. “There's a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has been attacking a girl. The villagers want an officer to arrest him.” The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. “Tell three

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XII

XII

Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion headquarters for the officer I had gone to see. He was attending a court martial. Presently he came into the wooden hut, with a flushed face. “Sorry I had to keep you,” he said. “Tomorrow there will be one swine less in the world.” “A death sentence?” He nodded. “A damned coward. Said he didn't mind rifle-fire, but couldn't stand shells. Admitted he left his post. He doesn't mind rifle-fire!... Well, tomorrow morning.” The officer laughed gri

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XIII

XIII

There were other men who could not stand shell-fire. It filled them with an animal terror and took all will-power out of them. One young officer was like that man who “did not mind rifle-fire.” He, by some strange freak of psychology, was brave under machine-gun fire. He had done several gallant things, and was bright and cheerful in the trenches until the enemy barraged them with high explosive. Then he was seen wandering back to the support trenches in a dazed way. It happened three times, and

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XIV

XIV

Shell-shock was the worst thing to see. There were generals who said: “There is no such thing as shell-shock. It is cowardice. I would court-martial in every case.” Doctors said: “It is difficult to draw the line between shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well as mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues by concussion, or actual physical damage to the brain; sometimes it is a shock of horror unbalancing the mind, but that is more rare. It is not generally the slight,

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XV

XV

As war correspondents we were supposed to have honorary rank as captains, by custom and tradition—but it amounted to nothing, here or there. We were civilians in khaki, with green bands round our right arms, and uncertain status. It was better so, because we were in the peculiar and privileged position of being able to speak to Tommies and sergeants as human beings, to be on terms of comradeship with junior subalterns and battalion commanders, and to sit at the right hand of generals without emb

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XVI

XVI

General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents—he had been something of the kind himself in earlier days—and we were welcomed at his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3d Division and afterward when he became commander of the 6th Corps. I thought during the war, and I think now, that he had more intellect and “quality” than many of our other generals. A tall, strongly built man, with a distinction of movement and gesture, not “stocky” or rigid, but nervous and restless, he gave one

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XVII

XVII

Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general in the days of Sir John French, and I dined at his mess once or twice, and he came to ours on return visits. The son of Macready, the actor, he had a subtlety of mind not common among British generals, to whom “subtlety” in any form is repulsive. His sense of humor was developed upon lines of irony and he had a sly twinkle in his eyes before telling one of his innumerable anecdotes. They were good stories, and I remember one of them, which had to do

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XVIII

XVIII

Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme, I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there and elsewhere. One of my first meetings with him was extraordinarily embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While he was organizing his army, which was to be called, with unconscious irony, “The Army of Pursuit”—the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a pursuit—he desired to take over th

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XIX

XIX

Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very little except by hearsay. He went by the name of “The Bull,” because of his burly size and deep voice. The costly fighting that followed the battle of Arras on April 9th along the glacis of the Scarpe did not reveal high generalship. There were many young officers—and some divisional generals who complained bitterly of attacks ordered without sufficient

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XX

XX

I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely limited in their range of ideas and qualities of character. “One has to leave many gaps in one's conversation with generals,” said a friend of mine, after lunching with an army commander. That was true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, thei

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XXI

XXI

As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a l

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I

I

By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The “Old Contemptibles” were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still “carried on” as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into those sa

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II

II

The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers, who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish imagination of the masses, so that every wall in London and great cities, every fence in rural places, was placarded with picture-posters. ... “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”... “What will your best girl say if you're not in khaki?” Those were vulgar appeals which, no doubt, stirred many simple souls, and so were good enough. It would have been better to l

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III

III

It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from the secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gone from them, but who could not get a word of their doings in France. I saw the first of the “Kitchener men,” as we called them then. The tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road of France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings, and I poked my head out

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IV

IV

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to “The Empire” left them stone—cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall, when th

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V

V

When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could not “answer back.” In M

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VI

VI

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer, after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places. The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage. I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in '15.

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VII

VII

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts. I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the war that I think I could find my way about

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VIII

VIII

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had the idea. “It would be a great adventure,” he said, as we stood listening to the gun-fire over there. “It would be damn silly,” said a staff officer. “Only a stern sense of duty would make me do it.” It was Gullett who was the brave man. We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were

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IX

IX

The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for young Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a time there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with excellent stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one of our gener

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X

X

Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets. A friend of mine—an ironical fellow—nudged me, and said, “Sunday-school for young C

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XI

XI

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as f

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XII

XII

One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enem

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XIII

XIII

At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentieres—a most “unhealthy” place in later years of war—a bathing establishment was organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though they had brought a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they had done that. To any interested visitor, understanding the nobility of their work, they exhibited a curious relic. It was the Holy Shirt of Nieppe, which should be treasured as a memorial in our War Museum—an object-lesson of wh

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XIV

XIV

It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death was not the only reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far ridge, and left the world in darkness. On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it. The red ball just showed above the far line of single trees which were black as charcoal on the edge of a long, straight roa

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XV

XV

For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls. By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of entertainment among men dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and encouraged “variety” shows, organized by young officers who had been amateur actors before the war, who searched around for likely talent. There was plenty of it in the New Army, including professional “funny men,” trick cyclists, conjure

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XVI

XVI

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who h

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XVII

XVII

On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer (visited from time to time by monstrous nightbirds who dropped high-explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns there, but generally some hundreds of young officers and men from many different battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the direction of General Baker-Carr, who was the master machine-gunner of the British army (at a time when we were very weak in those weapons compared with the enemy's strengt

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XVIII

XVIII

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the will-power, the moral code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was bad enou

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XIX

XIX

At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came out to France with the cheerful shout of “Now we sha'n't be long!” before they fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons to the Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. The New Army boys who followed them were desperate to get out to “the great adventure.” They cursed the length of their training in English camps. “We sha'n't get out til

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I

I

In September of 1915 the Commander-in-Chief and his staff were busy with preparations for a battle, in conjunction with the French, which had ambitious objects. These have never been stated because they were not gained (and it was the habit of our High Command to conceal its objectives and minimize their importance if their hopes were unfulfilled), but beyond doubt the purpose of the battle was to gain possession of Lens and its coal-fields, and by striking through Hulluch and Haisnes to menace

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II

II

The movements of troops and the preparations for big events revealed to every British soldier in France the “secret” of the coming battle. Casualty clearing-stations were ordered to make ready for big numbers of wounded. That was always one of the first signs of approaching massacre. Vast quantities of shells were being brought up to the rail-heads and stacked in the “dumps.” They were the first-fruit of the speeding up of munition-factories at home after the public outcry against shell shortage

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III

III

The town of Bethune was the capital of our army in the Black Country of the French coal-fields. It was not much shelled in those days, though afterward—years afterward—it was badly damaged by long-range guns, so that its people fled, at last, after living so long on the edge of war. Its people were friendly to our men, and did not raise their prices exorbitantly. There were good shops in the town—“as good as Paris,” said soldiers who had never been to Paris, but found these plate-glass windows d

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IV

IV

In those villages—Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others—on the edge of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and villages, getting a fine edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing, and having their morale heightened by addresses from brigadiers and divisional commanders on the glorious privilege which was about to be theirs of leading the assault, and on the joys as well as the duty of killing Germans. In

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V

V

I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from many points of view. It was a hideous territory, this Black Country between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges of Notre Da

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VI

VI

In order to distract the enemy's attention and hold his troops away from the main battle-front, “subsidiary attacks” were made upon the German lines as far north as Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypres, and southward to La Bassee Canal at Givenchy, by the troops of the Second and Third Armies. This object, wrote Sir John French, in his despatch, “was most effectively achieved.” It was achieved by the bloody sacrifice of many brave battalions in the 3d and 14th Divisions (Yorkshire, Royal Scots,

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VII

VII

Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the field—no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood—and from the officers who survived. It is a story full of the psychology of battle, with many strange incidents which happened to men when their spirit was uplifted by that mingling of exultation and fear which is heroism, and with queer episodes almost verging on comedy in the midst of death and ago

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VIII

VIII

Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) Division climbed over their parapets at six-thirty, and saw the open ground before them, and the dusky, paling sky above them, and broken wire in front of the enemy's churned-up trenches; and through the smoke, faintly, and far away, three and a half miles away, the ghostly outline of the “Tower Bridge” of Loos, which was their goal. For an hour there were steady tides of men all streaming slowly up those narrow communication ways, cut through

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IX

IX

While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of men, wounded, dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, women, doctors, Highlanders and Lowlanders “fey” with the intoxication of blood, London soldiers with tattered uniforms and muddy rifles and stained bayonets, mixed brigades were moving forward to new objectives. The orders of the Scottish troops, which I saw, were to go “all out,” and to press on as far as they could, with the absolute assurance that all the ground they gained would be

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X

X

To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of September 25th—of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly “Jocks,” and they were in exalted spirits because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and out of it—alive. They came straggling back through the villages behind the lines to the casualty clearing—stations and ambulance-trains. Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown, brawny arms ti

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XI

XI

To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning, when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours. There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment, a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of misery, while a few of our fresh-fac

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XII

XII

During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from slag heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and flurry of gun-fire and the smoke of shells mixing with wet mist, and the backwash of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and wagons, and supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge of a volcano I sat among the slag heaps with gunner observers, who were listening at telephones dumped down i

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XIII

XIII

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 1915, and issued by the War Office on November 1st of that year, the Commander-in-Chief stated that: “In view of the great length of line along which the British troops were operating it was necessary to keep a strong reserve in my own hand. The 11th Corps, consisting of the Guards, the 21st and the 24th Divisions, were detailed for this purpose. This reserve was the more necessary owing to the fact that the Tenth French Army had to postpone it

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XIV

XIV

Meanwhile, at 6 P.M. on the evening of the first day of battle, the Guards arrived at Noeux-les-Mines. As I saw them march up, splendid in their height and strength and glory of youth, I looked out for the officers I knew, yet hoped I should not see them—that man who had given a farewell touch to the flowers in the garden of our billet, that other one who knew he would be wounded, those two young brothers who had played cricket on a sunny afternoon. I did not see them, but saw only columns of me

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I

I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men—ours and the enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17 the

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II

II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled down—knee-deep where the trenches were worst—for the winter campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the slimy parapets. When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept

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III

III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go “dead,” and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores of men could

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IV

IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under concentrated gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks) nicknamed “Big Willie,” near another trench called “Little Willie.” Our enemies forced their way back into some of their old trenches in this outpost beyond the

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V

V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, “Listen!” Through the open door came the music of a mouth—organ, and it was playing an old tune: God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day. Outside the wind was howling across F

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VI

VI

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year, and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and there was no peace on earth. Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of war. I heard the New-Year's chorus when I went to see the last of the year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence. It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tra

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VII

VII

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for a long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never knew what they might do next. When they were most quiet they were most dangerous. They used cunning as well as courage, and went out on red-Indian adventures over No Man's Land for fierce and scientific slaughter. I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when a big party of them—all volunteers—went out one night with intent to get through the barbed

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VIII

VIII

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. It became part of the routine of war, that quick killing in the night, for English and Scottish and Irish and Welsh troops, and some had luck with it, and some men liked it, and to others it was a horror which they had to do, and always it was a fluky, nervy job, when any accident might lead to tragedy. I remember one such raid by the 12th West Yorks in January of '15, which was typical of many others, before raids developed into minor battl

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IX

IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition which belong to the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about the world. The skirl of the Scotti

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X

X

Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of Flanders were white. There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visi

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XI

XI

For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the Chateau of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the line, were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motor-cars could move through that snow which drifted across the roads. We sat indoors talking—high treason sometimes—pondering over the problem of a war from which there seemed no way out, becoming irritable with one another's company, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics of war, the purpose

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XII

XII

The world—our side of it—held its breath and felt its own heart-beat when, in February of that year '15, the armies of the German Crown Prince launched their offensive against the French at Verdun. It was the biggest offensive since their first drive down to the Marne; and as the days passed and they hurled fresh masses of men against the French and brought up new guns to replace their losses, there was no doubt that in this battle the Germans were trying by all their weight to smash their way t

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XIII

XIII

The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, but rendered great service to France at that time. By February of 1915 we had taken over a new line of front, extending from our positions round Loos southward to the country round Lens and Arras. It was to this movement in February that Marshal Joffre made allusion when, in a message to our Commander-in-Chief on March 2d, he said that “the French army remembered that its recent call on the comradeship of the British army met with an immedi

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XIV

XIV

It was then, in that February of '15, that the city of Arras passed for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets where their la

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XV

XV

While we hung on the news from Verdun—it seemed as though the fate of the world were in Fort Douaumont—our own lists of death grew longer. In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one hand clutching at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, with head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas. “O Christ!” said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-bed in the ambulance-t

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XVI

XVI

At the beginning of March there was a little affair—costing a lot of lives—in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It was a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had been held for a long time by the 3d Division under General Haldane, whose men were at last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the 17th Division commanded by General Pilcher. The Germans took advantage of the change in defense by a sudden attack after the explosion of a mine, and the men

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XVII

XVII

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side of the lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides. Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells, saving them up anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S rocket shot up a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was concentrating “ha

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XVIII

XVIII

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were “bunkered” forever, and that all their training and tradition were made futile by the digging in of armies. Now and again, when the infantry was hard pressed, as in the second battle of Ypres and the battle of Loos, they were called on to leave their horses behind and take a turn in the trenc

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XIX

XIX

The winter of 1915-16 passed with its misery, and spring came again to France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth was not made barren by the fire of war and all trees killed. For men there was no promise of life, but only new preparations for death, and continued killing. The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France had saved herself from a mortal blow at the heart by a desperate, heroic resistance which co

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XX

XX

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes. Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that believed once

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I

I

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of that year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines; near enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front and ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or blinded in the

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II

II

The Street of the Three Pebbles—la rue des Trois Cailloux—which goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were the best shops—the hairdresser, at the left-hand side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth and stench of life in the

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III

III

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and studying their types. All the types of young English manhood came down this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or more o

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IV

IV

I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like a scene from “Gaspard.” The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down by the river. In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the war to happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and a

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V

V

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of their big, coarse hands. They ordered two “little glasses” and drank them at one gulp. Then two more. “See what I have got, my little cabbage,” said one of them, stooping to the heavy pack which he had shifted from his s

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VI

VI

Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles with a grim look under their wide-brimmed hats, having come down from Pozieres, where it was always hell in the days of the Somme fighting. I liked the look of them, dusty up to the eyes in summer, muddy up to their eyes in winter—these gipsy fellows, scornful of discipline for discipline's sake, but desperate fighters, as simple as children in their ways of thought and speech (except for frightful oaths), and looking at life, this life of

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VII

VII

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of

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VIII

VIII

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading articles of English papers. (There was never any news of French fighting beyond the official communique and imaginary articles of a romantic kind written by French journalists in Paris about episodes of war.) In one corner of the estaminet was a group of bourgeois gentlemen talking business for a

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IX

IX

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private houses, became very friendly with the families who received them. Young girls of good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and schoolmasters, and merchants in a good way of business, found it delightful to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French, to take walks with them, and to arrange musical evenings with other girl friends who brought their young officers and sang little old French songs with them or Engli

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X

X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could see to walk along the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was quivering with flashes of white light, like summer lightning, and now and then there was a long, vivid glare of red touching the high clouds with rosy feathers; one of our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been blown up by that gun-

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XI

XI

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain fell heavily out of a moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp flashed out except where a solitary woman scurried down the wet streets to lonely rooms. There were no British officers strolling about. They had turned in early, to hot baths and unaccustomed beds, except for one or two, with their burberries buttoned tight at the throat, and sopping field-caps pulled down about the ears, and top—boots which went splash, splash through deep puddles as the

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XII

XII

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie's bar was on the left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o'clock by officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and made them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young staff-officers were th

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XIII

XIII

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice—a big, grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways, and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her scales. There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition o

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XIV

XIV

The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the tow-path, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite bank, and past the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness in days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture—these Cottages where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come for week-ends of boating and fishing—and their garden gates at the end of wooden bridges over back-wate

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XV

XV

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station, organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the city and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he had refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did not gues

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XVI

XVI

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st, when our lines were stormed and broken by his men's odds against our defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like all who knew wh

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XVII

XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect—I often think of Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the enemy—but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in another. One of our sentries ca

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XVIII

XVIII

I suppose it was three months later when I saw the first crowds coming back to their homes in Amiens. The tide had turned and the enemy was in hard retreat. Amiens was safe again! They had never had any doubt of this homecoming after that day nearly three months before, when, in spite of the enemy's being so close, Foch said, in his calm way, “I guarantee Amiens.” They believed what Marshal Foch said. He always knew. So now they were coming back again with their little bundles and their babies a

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I

I

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than generalship—by the fate which decides the doom of men. The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by Ypres, were defensive actions of rear—guards holding the enemy back by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race were being raised.

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II

II

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the approach of that new phase of war which they called “The Great Push,” as though it were to be a glorified football-match. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know the thoughts of vast masses of men moved by some sensational adventure. But a man would be a liar if he pretended that British troops went forward to the great attack with hangdog looks or any visible sign of fear in their souls. I think most of them were uplifted by the belief t

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III

III

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads behind the front. I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there was a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-day and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and old ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line o

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IV

IV

Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed between England and the long, straight road which led to No Man's Land. The seven-day-leave men were coming back by every tide, and all other leave was canceled. New “drafts” were pouring through the port by tens of thousands—all manner of men of all our breed marching in long columns from the quayside, where they had orders yelled at them through megaphones by A.P.M.'s, R.T.O.'s, A.M.L.O.'s, and other blue tabbed officers who dealt with the

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V

V

On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits by shell-fire, gassed in thousands, until all that country became a graveyard; when they

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VI

VI

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme. With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert, looking over to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, on the left side of the German salient, and then, by crossing the road, to Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban on the southern side. From Albert westward past Thiepval Wood ran the little river of the Ancre, and on the German side the gr

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VII

VII

There was the illusion of victory on that first day of the Somme battles, on the right of the line by Fricourt, and it was not until a day or two later that certain awful rumors I had heard from wounded men and officers who had attacked on the left up by Gommecourt, Thiepval, and Serre were confirmed by certain knowledge of tragic disaster on that side of the battle-line. The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villag

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VIII

VIII

On the left, where the 8th and 10th Corps were directing operations, the assault had been delivered by the 4th, 29th, 36th, 49th, 32nd, 8th, and 56th Divisions. The positions in front of them were Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel on the left side of the River Ancre, and Thiepval Wood on the right side of the Ancre leading up to Thiepval Chateau on the crest of the cliff. These were the hardest positions to attack, because of the rising ground and the immense strength of the enemy's earthworks and t

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IX

IX

I have told how, before “The Big Push,” as we called the beginning of these battles, little towns of tents were built under the sign of the Red Cross. For a time they were inhabited only by medical officers, nurses, and orderlies, busily getting ready for a sudden invasion, and spending their surplus energy, which seemed inexhaustible, on the decoration of their camps by chalk-lined paths, red crosses painted on canvas or built up in red and white chalk on leveled earth, and flowers planted outs

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X

X

The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial success on the right caused a sudden pause in the operations, camouflaged by small attacks on minor positions around and above Fricourt and Mametz. The Lincolns and others went over to Fricourt Wood and routed out German machine-gunners. The West Yorks attacked the sunken road at Fricourt. The Dorsets, Manchesters, Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire Fusiliers, and Borderers of the 32d Division were in possession of La Boisselle and clearing

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XI

XI

People who read my war despatches will remember my first descriptions of the tanks and those of other correspondents. They caused a sensation, a sense of excitement, laughter which shook the nation because of the comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of quicker victory, which caught hold of the imagination of people who heard for the first time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in appearance and performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due to the censorship, whic

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XII

XII

One branch of our military machine developed with astonishing rapidity and skill during those Somme battles. The young gentlemen of the Air Force went “all out” for victory, and were reckless in audacity. How far they acted under orders and against their own judgment of what was sensible and sound in fighting-risks I do not know. General Trenchard, their supreme chief, believed in an aggressive policy at all costs, and was a Napoleon in this war of the skies, intolerant of timidity, not squeamis

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XIII

XIII

I am not strong enough in the science of psychology to understand the origin of laughter and to get into touch with the mainsprings of gaiety. The sharp contrast between normal ethics and an abnormality of action provides a grotesque point of view arousing ironical mirth. It is probable also that surroundings of enormous tragedy stimulate the sense of humor of the individual, so that any small, ridiculous thing assumes the proportion of monstrous absurdity. It is also likely—certain, I think—tha

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XIV

XIV

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a territory forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five months of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of slaughter, wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war. As an eye-witness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw day by day the tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred and fifty thousand men had passed through our casualty clearing stations, and then wer

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XV

XV

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was “immune” from shell-fire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech

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XVI

XVI

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded toget

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XVII

XVII

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked degraded, bestial men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest atrocities. But in the mass they seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our own lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not quite so brigh

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XVIII

XVIII

The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of September—six weeks of fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that time. The Australians dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet Farm, where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and up to the Windmill on the high ground of Pozieres, for which there was unceasing slaughter on both sides because the Germans counter-attacked again and again, and

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XIX

XIX

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage, not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year's fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The German dead lay in heaps. The

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XX

XX

I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the “Butchers' Shops,” the agony in men's souls, the shell-shock cases, the welter and bewilderment of battle, the shelling of our own troops, the lack of communication between fighting units and the command, the filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields. But to complete the picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happen

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XXI

XXI

The name (that “blood-bath”) and the news of battle could not be hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve regiments quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St. Quentin, Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting to go to the front, nor from the civil population of those towns, held for two years by their enemy—these blond young men who lived in their houses, marched dow

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XXII

XXII

All through July and August the enemy's troops fought with wonderful and stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every heap of bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches smashed by heavy shell-fire, with obstinacy. It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute, and inspired sometimes with the courage of despair, which was hardly less dangerous than the courage of hope. The

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XXIII

XXIII

By September 25th, when the British troops made another attack, the morale of the German troops was reaching its lowest ebb. Except on their right, at Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyond the great system of protective dugouts which had given them a sense of safety before July 1st. Their second and third lines of defense had been carried, and they were existing in shell-craters and trenches hastily scraped up under ceaseless artillery fire. The horrors of the battlefield were piled

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I

I

During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded in my daily despatches, republished in book form (“The Struggle in Flanders” and “The Way to Victory”), the narrative of that continuous conflict in which the British forces on the western front were at death-grips with the German monster where now one side and then the other heaved themselves upon their adversary and struggled for the knock-out blow, until at last, after staggering losses on both sides, the enemy was broken

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II

II

During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but by carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that it was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is only that our laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity above that of primitive savages. “The decision to retreat,” he says, “was not reached withou

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III

III

Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and prepared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round Arras. This new battle by British troops was dictated by French strategy rather than by ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was organizing a great offensive in the Champagne and desired the British army to strike

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IV

IV

The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at th

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V

V

The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to enfilade our lines of attack. The natural strength of his position along the ridges, which were like a great bony hand outstretched through Flanders, w

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VI

VI

During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of the town,

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VII

VII

At the end of those battles happened that surprising, audacious adventure in the Cambrai salient organized by the Third Army under General Byng, when on November 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke through the Hindenburg line, and infantry streamed through the breach, captured hundreds of guns, ten thousand prisoners, many villages and ridges, and gave a monstrous shock to the German High Command. The audacity of the adventure lay in the poverty of manpower with which it was attempted and support

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VIII

VIII

In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened, and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent to Italy with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas Haig's command. At that very time, also, after the bloody losses in Flanders, the French government and General Headquarters brought severe pressure upon the British War Council to take over a greater length of line in

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IX

IX

Ludendorff's great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its gaps filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young brothers of the elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to strike again, and on August 8th the Canadians and Australians north and south of the Somme, led by many tanks, broke the enemy's line beyond Amiens and slowly bu

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X

X

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility of this strife, smote at one's heart. What fools the Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasti

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I

I

In this book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as I observed them, and gained first-hand knowledge of them in their daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it was, nor selected gruesome morsels and joined them together to make a jig-saw puzzle for ghoulish delight. Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his dreadful book Le Feu, gave the unrelieved blackness of this human drama, I have here and in other books shown the light as well as the shade in which our men l

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II

II

The people of all countries were deeply involved in the general blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no passionate appeal in the name of Christ or in the name of humanity for the cessation of the slaughter of boys and the suicide of nations and for a reconciliation of peoples upon terms of some more reasonable argument than that of high explosives. Peace proposals from the Pope, from Germany, from Austria, were rejected with fierce denunciation, most passionate scorn, as “peace plots” and “peac

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III

III

The character of European peoples failed in common sense and in Christian charity. It did not fail in courage to endure great agonies, to suffer death largely, to be obedient to the old tradition of patriotism and to the stoic spirit of old fighting races. In courage I do not think there was much difference between the chief combatants. The Germans, as a race, were wonderfully brave until their spirit was broken by the sure knowledge of defeat and by lack of food. Many times through all those ye

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IV

IV

What of England?... Looking back at the immense effort of the British people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure, and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, and does, indeed, acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The traditions of a thousand years of history filled with war and travail and adventure, by which old fighting races had blended with different strains of blood and temp

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V

V

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets, filled some of these young men with distress and disgust, strengthened into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate falsification of news (the truth of which they heard from private channels) made them discredit the whole presentation of our case and state. They said, “Propaganda!” with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public men, pre

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VI

VI

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution, followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word “Bolshevism,” and knew not what it meant. The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war, with an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay, betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous that arms and armaments sent out from England had

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VII

VII

The men came home in a queer mood, startling to those who had not watched them “out there,” and to those who welcomed peace with flags. Even before their homecoming, which was delayed week after week, month after month, unless they were lucky young miners out for the victory push and back again quickly, strange things began to happen in France and Flanders, Egypt and Palestine. Men who had been long patient became suddenly impatient. Men who had obeyed all discipline broke into disobedience bord

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VIII

VIII

Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted by pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such thoughts are not seething among our working-classes. It will only be averted by cutting at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our political state of its corruption and folly, and by a clear, strong call of noble-minded men to a new way of life in which a great people believing in the honor and honesty of its leadership and in fair reward for good labor

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IX

IX

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange splendor, like a ship that goes down with drums beating and banners flying, we are racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are sorely stricken and in dire poverty and debt, we have extended the responsibilities of empire and of world—power as though we had illimitable wealth. Our sphere of influence includes Persia, Thibet, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt—a vas

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