SILHOUETTES FROM THE FRONT

I.—The Way to the Trenches

They have a saying among the followers of Mohammed, “Shun him who has thrice made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Holy City! His conversation is an offence.” It is, indeed, the vice of travellers that they will talk. No man is safe from us if only we have been anywhere he has not been—from Birr, as the song says, to Bareilly. But the temptation of the trenches is the most formidable of all. Who has resisted it? Raw and ripe we have each of us tried to daub his own picture of that amazing fact, of the strange shifts and incredible devisings to which civilised nations have been forced to resort in order to save civilisation. One brush will add a stroke that escapes another. All the brushes and books, and all the cinema films together will never come near the reality. That is the sole rationale of these thumb-nail silhouettes.

If you were to ask any patron of the present Continental tour for his first impression, he would probably note the excellence of the travelling arrangements. Tickets are free, or rather they are not necessary. It is impossible to miss your train: the columns of them thunder without haste and without rest from the remotest station back at home to the ultimate railhead where their thunder dies in that of the guns. The sea-lacunæ are obliterated by an all but unbroken bridge of untorpedoed transports. Delays due to loss of luggage are unknown. You may, indeed, lose your luggage, but you do not delay. There are no tips on this journey, and it would be idle to book seats in advance. An avoidable expense, for you will get there without them. Either with a draft, a post of minor importance but yet of some; or with your battalion in all the pomp and circumstance of war; or, likely enough, in these latter days as an isolated officer reinforcement with a typed telegram and a moving order, you will arrive. Of course there are incidental divagations. With traffic rigidly scheduled and regulated as it must be, an occasional traveller is to be found who has lost his way and has perhaps accomplished ten kilometres between dawn and dusk. I met one such, and said—

“You seem to have lost your unit?”

“Lost my unit?” he replied with intense rancour. “I have lost my company, lost my battalion, lost my brigade, lost my division, my corps. A little more and I shall have lost the b——y British Expeditionary Force.”

Indubitably it is the perfection of transportation. Napoleon said, or is supposed to have said, that an army, like a snake, moves on its belly. The truth is, of course, that the art of war is, as to six-sevenths of it, the art of carrying heavy things from one place to another. You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames—that to marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate ratio decidendi of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a fit symbol of their sacrifice. But you must move a great deal that is less obvious and more necessary. When you export an army such as ours, which is in reality a nation and not a small one, you must send with it a government. Now knowledge, and the administrative body in which it expresses itself, is of all things the most difficult to export. This scheme of transportation is the first miracle of sheer brain-power that strikes you, but it is not the greatest. I do not scruple to say that as a study in government, that is to say, in the efficient conduct of human things in the mass, the present army, as organised through G.H.Q., is far more impressive than most civil constitutions.

I do not speak merely of the actual Higher Command. Your heads of that must carry all the apparatus of all its range from minor tactics to military statesmanship. Note, rather, then, when you send an army you must send a Treasury, a General Post Office, a Judiciary and Record Office, and one hardly knows what beside. Your quartermaster-general has got to be the Selfridge of six million gaily grumbling customers, who are perpetually on the move. A mere battalion quartermaster must possess qualities that would win a fortune in a large suburban shop.

And it is possible to overlook the service of information—the signallers. Everywhere the army goes it lays behind it a tentacular network of news-carrying wire. The arm of its reporting power is indefinitely longer than that of any Associated Press. From the company dug-out in the front trench to Sir Douglas Haig, and from him to Whitehall, there is no gap. On the earth, beneath it and above, this nerve-system extends: aeroplane, observation balloon, patrol, vedette, sniping-post, all collect their varying toll of fact and surmise; electricity, drilled to the use of the men who wear the blue-and-white bands, vibrates it on to its destination. And so is this particular area of the army cerebrum kept alive and alert. I have hardly spoken of the A.S.C., of the endless chain of supply that for ever runs and returns on its infallible cogs about the roads and railways.

There are other, many other, things to admire as patterns of organisation. It is what our subalterns, with their strict and shy economy of speech, describe as a “great show.” All the world has heard of carrying on. But it was first of all necessary to carry. And we have carried to war across the seas not a mere army, but a people in arms.

II.—The Long Endurance

In the history of war, especially as it was practised by the Irish regiments, we have been accustomed to the brief ecstasy of assault, the flash of bayonets, the headlong avalanche of death and victory.... Often there had been, before this sharp decision, the heroism of a long march. But in general, instantaneity had been the characteristic of Irish soldiers as it is of Irish football forwards. There are instances enough of the old quality in this war from Festubert to Suvla Bay, from Loos to that shell-powdered sinister terrain over which the Ulster Division swept in its great charges. But there is another heroism. The three chapters of this war may well bear for rubrics: the Grim Retreat, the Long Endurance, the Epic Push. It is of the second that I write here.

Note that this, the greatest, is also the dullest of all recorded campaigns. It is wrong, indeed, to call it a campaign or even a series of campaigns: one had better style it the Wall-paper War. Everywhere the same type and development of fighting, the same pattern repeated and indefinitely repeated. It is true that the walls are the walls of the world, and the colours are those of life and death. None the less the effect on the mind is that of near bigness, which is always of its nature wearisome. It is not of that weariness of the detached mind that I now write, but of the more intimate and crushing fatigue of the actual man on the spot. There may very well be units of this immense army that on their return home will have apparently little to show for their lost blood.

People will say to them—

“I suppose you were in the dash at X? No? Oh, it was the capture of Y? I mean, of course, the round-up at Z?”

And they will answer rather dully—

“No. We just held on. We are the lot that just stuck to A, and weren’t shifted out of B.”

And the response will be a disappointed and belittling “Oh yes!”

But, when it is understood, this long endurance will be seen to be something very notable in itself, and, more than that, an essential element in the slow and great victory. Movements are picturesque, but in order that something should move it was necessary that something should stand still. The ends of a lever move effectively only when it is based on an unmoving fulcrum. If the rivet of a scissors did not stand fast, the blades would cut little. And the tale of the units to whom it came merely to hold the line is the great tale.

In the trenches it is the day-by-dayness that tells and tries. It is always the same tone of duty: certain days in billets, certain days in reserve, certain days in the front trench. One is reminded of those endless chains by which some well-buckets are worked, except that nothing or very little ever seems to come up in the bucket to pay the labour of turning. General Joffre as grignotard is one of the phrase-makers of the war. But this nibbling process works both ways. We nibble; they nibble. They are nibbled; we are nibbled. A few casualties every turn, another grating of the saw-teeth of death and disease, and before very long a strong unit is weak. And, of course, the nerve-strain is not slight. Everybody going up to the trenches from the C. O. down to the last arrival in the last draft knows it to be moral certainty that there are two or three that will not march back. Everybody knows that it may be anybody. In the trenches death is random, illogical, devoid of principle. One is shot not on sight, but on blindness, out of sight. You feel that a man who is hit has had worse luck than a golfer whose opponent holes out in one at a blind hole. Yet these things do happen. Very few people are hit by lightning, and in a storm it is a comfort to remember this. But some people are hit by lightning. Here one is in a place where a very trivial piece of geographical bad luck may be fatal. There is much to nibble the nerves.

One likes to image this whole task of holding the line under the image of a sentry-group. This is not to depreciate any other man or any other function. From colonel down all the world here has the same job. The sentry-group is the symbol. A figure in khaki stands on the shelf of fire-bag, his steel helmet forming a serious bulge over the parapet as he peers through the night towards the German lines. His comrade sits on the shelf beside him waiting to help, to report, to carry the gas-alarm, the alarm of an attack. Over there in front across No Man’s Land there are shell-holes and unburied men. Strange things happen there. Patrols and counter-patrols come and go. There are two sinister fences of barbed wire, on the barbs of which blood-stained strips of uniform and fragments more sinister have been known to hang uncollected for a long time. The air is shaken with diabolical reverberations; it is stabbed with malign illumination as the Véry lights shoot up, broaden to a blaze, and go out. This contrast of night and light and gloom is trying to the eyes. The rifle-grenades and trench-mortars, flung at short range, that scream through the air are trying to the ears. They may drop a traverse away, and other men not charged for the moment with his duty may seek shelter. But not he. Strange things issue from No Man’s Land, and the eyes of the army never close or flinch. And so, strained, tense and immovable he leans and looks forward into the night of menace.

But the trench has not fallen. As for him, he carried his pack for Ireland and Europe, and now pack-carrying is over.

He has held the line.

III.—Rhapsody on Rats

What first strikes one in a trench is, contrary to report, not the Rat but the Slat. A trench-board is a sort of ladder, laid horizontally along a ditch of ill repute, and the rungs of this ladder are the slats. It is true that if this ladder were set upright it would be impossible to climb it, for the slats are too close together. Nevertheless, it has the form and aspirations of a ladder, and yearns towards the vertical. To follow the windings of the trench, this board is of necessity made in short sections. Now, one often enters a trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.

It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never been counted. You can walk from the North Sea to the foot-hills of the Alps with the soles of your boots continuously beslatted, save where there is an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair. At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised by American tourist companies—they are said to have already purchased the ground—with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.

Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China in that there has never been a census of its population, but that it approximates to the mathematical infinite. They are everywhere—large rats, small rats, bushy rats, shy rats and impudent, with their malign whiskers, their obscene eyes, loathsome all the way from overlapping teeth to kangaroo tail. You see them on the parades and the shelter-roofs at night, slinking along on their pestiferous errands. You lie in your dug-out, famished, not for food (that goes without saying), but for sleep, and hear them scurrying up and down their shafts, nibbling at what they find, dragging scraps of old newspapers along, with intolerable cracklings, to bed themselves. They scurry across your blankets and your very face. Nothing suppresses their numbers. Not dogs smuggled in in breach of regulations. Not poison, which most certainly ought not to be used. Not the revolver-practice in which irritated subalterns have been known to indulge. Men die and rats increase.

I see just one defence that they can make: it was not they who invaded our kingdom, but we who invaded theirs. We descended, we even dug ourselves down to their level. It is true that in our heroic moments we may style the trenches the New Catacombs to which freedom descended for a while to return in triumph. But it is also true that they are rat-holes, rat-avenues, rat-areas. The dramatic translation of an old period was called “The Birds”; the dramatisation of this must be called “The Rats.” Strangely enough, it has been left for me to tell the decisive chapter of the inner history of the war. Kaiser Wilhelm, whose resemblance to a rat has been too little noticed—you have but to take the wax out of his moustache and allow it to droop—was seated in his ugly palace at Potsdam, considering his ultimatum to Serbia, when there suddenly appeared before him, down the chimney or out of some diplomatic orifice in the panelling, a Rat, the master and pattern of all rats. “Majesty!” said he, “I am come to offer you my aid in this war which you are planning. As you are the Emperor of all the Germans, so am I the Emperor of all the Rats. Our interests coincide.”

They conferred together very shrewdly, and struck an alliance. “Good!” said his Majesty, slapping his thigh. “It is decided. We are with-one-another-firmly-united. The war will begin forthwith.”

So the great quintessential Super-Rat, the Rattish Ding an sich, left to mobilise his forces, and the Kaiser drew over a sheet of paper and wrote the magical and black word that unlocks Hell. And the great rat called in his Austria, which is the louse, and his Turkey, which is the sand-flea, and his Bulgaria, which is that porter of poison, the fly. So the battle was joined between the clean and the obscene.

It must be said for the Kaiser that with this one ally he kept faith. Ratavia has increased enormously in population and prosperity. It has suffered from no menace of famine, for Wilhelm, the faith-keeper, has even sacrificed his own subjects generously in order to avert that calamity.

But the end is not yet. The Emperor of the Rats will come once again to Potsdam.

“Majesty!” he will say. “I am a student of Treitschke, who teaches that an alliance is to be kept by the stronger of two associates only as long as his profit lies that way.” And as Majesty, shrivelled, decaying with the pallor of death on him, trembles in his chair the Great Rat will add—

“I propose to annex you.”