Introductory material (continued 2)

And now we, who began with 45 kilometres of the battle-line, have gradually become responsible for 185, so that "at last," says a French friend to me in Paris, "our men can have a rest, some of them for the first time! And, by Heaven, they've earned it!"

Yet, in this "taking over" there are many feelings concerned. For the French poilu and our Tommy it is mostly the occasion for as much fraternisation as their fragmentary knowledge of each other's speech allows; the Frenchman is proud to show his line, the Britisher is proud to take it over; there are laughter and eager good will; on the whole, it is a red-letter day. But sometimes there strikes in a note "too deep for tears." Here is a fragment from an account of a "taking over," written by an eye-witness:

Trains of a prodigious length are crawling up a French railway. One follows so closely upon another that the rear truck of the first is rarely out of sight of the engine-driver of the second. These trains are full of British soldiers. Most of them are going to the front for the first time. They are seated everywhere, on the trucks, on the roof—legs dangling over the edge—inside, and even over the buffers. Presently they arrive at their goal. The men clamber out on to the siding, collect their equipment and are ready for a march up country. A few children run alongside them, shouting, "Anglais!" "Anglais!" And some of them take the soldiers' hands and walk on with them until they are tired.

Now the trenches are reached, and the men break into single file. But the occasion is not the usual one of taking over a few trenches. We are relieving some sixty miles of French line. There is, however, no confusion. The right men are sent to the right places, and everything is done quietly. It is like a great tide sweeping in, and another sweeping out. Sixty miles of trenches are gradually changing their nationality.

The German, a few yards over the way, knows quite well what is happening. A few extra shells whizz by; a trench mortar or two splutter a welcome; but it makes little difference to the weary German who mans the trenches over against him. Only, the new men are fresh and untired, and the German has no Ally who can give him corresponding relief.

It has all been so quietly done! Yet it is really a great moment. The store of man power which Great Britain possesses is beginning to take practical effect. The French, who held the long lines at the beginning of war, who stood before Verdun and threw their legions on the road to Péronne, are now being freed for work elsewhere. They have "carried on" till Great Britain was ready, and now she is ready.

* * * * *

This was more than the beginning of a new tour of duty [says another witness]. I felt the need of some ceremony, and I think others felt the need of it too. There were little half-articulate attempts, in the darkness, of men trying to show what they felt—a whisper or two—in the queer jargon that is growing up between the two armies. An English sentry mounted upon the fire-step, and looked out into the darkness beside the Frenchman, and then, before the Frenchman stepped down, patted him on the shoulder, as though he would say: "These trenches—all right!—we'll look after them!"

Then I stumbled into a dug-out. A candle burnt there, and a French officer was taking up his things. He nodded and smiled. "I go," he said. "I am not sorry, and yet——" He shrugged his shoulders. I understood. One is never sorry to go, but these trenches—these bits of France, where Frenchmen had died—would no longer be guarded by Frenchmen. Then he waved his hand round the little dug-out. "We give a little more of France into your keeping." His gesture was extravagant and light, but his face was grave as he said it. He turned and went out. I followed. He walked along the communication trench after his men, and I along the line of my silent sentries. I spoke to one or two, and then stood on the fire-step, looking out into the night. I had the Frenchman's words in my head: "We give a little more of France into your keeping!" It was not these trenches only, where I stood, but all that lay out there in the darkness, which had been given into our keeping. Its dangers were ours now. There were villages away there in the heart of the night, still unknown to all but the experts at home, whose names—like Thiepval and Bazentin—would soon be English names, familiar to every man in Britain as the streets of his own town. All this France had entrusted to our care this night.

Such were the scenes that were quietly going on, not much noticed by the public at home during the weeks of February and March, and such were the thoughts in men's minds. How plainly one catches through the words of the last speaker an eager prescience of events to come!—the sweep of General Gough on Warlencourt and Bapaume—the French reoccupation of Péronne.

One word for the cathedral of Amiens before we leave the bustling streets of the old Picard capital. This is so far untouched and unharmed, though exposed, like everything else behind the front, to the bombs of German aeroplanes. The great west front has disappeared behind a mountain of sandbags; the side portals are protected in the same way, and inside, the superb carvings of the choir are buried out of sight. But at the back of the choir the famous weeping cherub sits weeping as before, peacefully querulous. There is something irritating in his placid and too artistic grief. Not so is "Rachel weeping for her children" in this war-ravaged country. Sterner images of Sorrow are wanted here—looking out through burning eyes for the Expiation to come.

* * * * *

Then we are off, bound for Albert, though first of all for the Headquarters of the particular Army which has this region in charge. The weather, alack! is still thick. It is under cover of such an atmosphere that the Germans have been stealing away, removing guns and stores wherever possible, and leaving rear-guards to delay our advance. But when the rear-guards amount to some 100,000 men, resistance is still formidable, not to be handled with anything but extreme prudence by those who have such vast interests in charge as the Generals of the Allies.

Our way takes us first through a small forest, where systematic felling and cutting are going on under British forestry experts. The work is being done by German prisoners, and we catch a glimpse through the trees of their camp of huts in a barbed-wire enclosure. Their guards sleep under canvas! … And now we are in the main street of a large picturesque village, approaching a château. A motor lorry comes towards us, driven at a smart pace, and filled with grey-green uniforms. Prisoners!—this time fresh from the field. We have already heard rumours on our way of successful fighting to the south.

The famous Army Commander himself, who had sent us a kind invitation to lunch with him, is unexpectedly engaged in conference with a group of French generals; but there is a welcome suggestion that on our way back from the Somme he will be free and able to see me. Meanwhile we go off to luncheon and much talk with some members of the Staff in a house on the village street. Everywhere I notice the same cheerful, one might even say radiant, confidence. No boasting in words, but a conviction that penetrates through all talk that the tide has turned, and that, however long it may take to come fully up, it is we whom it is floating surely on to that fortune which is no blind hazard, but the child of high faith and untiring labour. Of that labour the Somme battlefields we were now to see will always remain in my mind—in spite of ruin, in spite of desolation—as a kind of parable in action, never to be forgotten.

No. 5

April 26th, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—Amid the rushing events of these days—America rousing herself like an eagle "with eyes intentive to bedare the sun"; the steady and victorious advance along the whole front in France, which day by day is changing the whole aspect of the war; the Balfour Mission; the signs of deep distress in Germany—it is sometimes difficult to throw oneself back into the mood of even six weeks ago! History is coming so fast off the loom! And yet six weeks ago I stood at the pregnant beginnings of it all, when, though nature in the bitter frost and slush of early March showed no signs of spring, the winter lull was over, and everywhere on the British front men knew that great things were stirring.

Before I reached G.H.Q., Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had already reported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancre during February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied our efforts in the summer of 1916. That is to say, after three months of trench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed to have let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm and darkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme had moved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November. Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that during these three months strange things had been happening.

About the middle of November, after General Gough's brilliant strokes on the Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and Beaumont Hamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote—"For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme are over. Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of their countries here. They will not thereby achieve anything more." Yet when this was written the German Higher Command was already well aware that the battle of the Somme had been won by the Allies, and that it would be impossible for Germany to hold out on the same ground against another similar attack.

Three months, however, of an extraordinarily hard winter gave them a respite, and enabled them to veil the facts from their own people. The preparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights of January helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must have actually begun not many weeks after General Gough's last successes on the Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather, before Grandcourt and Bapaume. So that in the latter half of February, when General Gough again pushed forward, it was to feel the German line yielding before him; and by March 3rd, the day of my visit to the Somme, it was only a question of how far the Germans would go and what the retreat meant.

Meanwhile, in another section of the line our own plans were maturing, which were to bear fruit five weeks later in the brilliant capture of that Vimy ridge I had seen on March 2, filling the blue middle distance, from the bare upland of Notre Dame de Lorette. If on the Somme the anvil was to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle of Arras the hammer was to take its full revenge.

These things, however, were still hidden from all but the few, and in the first days of March the Germans had not yet begun to retire in front of the French line further south. The Somme advance was still the centre of things, and Bapaume had not yet fallen. As we drove on towards Albert we knew that we should be soon close behind our own guns, and within range of the enemy's.

No one who has seen it in war-time will ever forget the market-place of Albert—the colossal heaps of wreck that fill the centre of it; the new, pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco building of the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn and broken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdry ornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last, the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, in dumb protest to God and man. The gilded statue, which now hangs at right angles to the tower, has, after its original collapse under shell-fire, been fixed in this position by the French Engineers; and it is to be hoped that when the church comes to be rebuilt the figure will be left as it is. There is something extraordinarily significant and dramatic in its present attitude. Whatever artistic defects the statue may have are out of sight, and it seems as it hangs there, passionately hovering, above the once busy centre of a prosperous town, to be the very symbol and voice of France calling the world to witness.

A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along the Albert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims' way for generations to come.

"To other folk," writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his Battle of the Somme, "and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I suppose; but to us—La Boisselle and Ovillers—my hat!"

To walk about in those hells! I went along the "sunken road" all the way to Contalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! The new troops coming up now go barging across in the most light-hearted way. It means no more to them than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how we watered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play there now, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have a sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.

The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter—so far, at least, as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene itself—held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them. The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the air—mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in hour by hour.

"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing left but mud and dust.

Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some "hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see. Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the countryside.

Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course. "British!" says the officer in front—who was himself in the battle. Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our bearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the British and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-past seven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of our people, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victory prepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns; made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millions of workers—men and women—on the lathes and in the filling factories of these islands.

We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenches and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearly two years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these defences impregnable," says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the winter has made us at home—on paper—so familiar. "The numerous woods and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements—everything that the best brains of the German Army could devise for our destruction—had been lavished on the German lines. And behind the first line was a second—and behind the second line a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so vast a system. What remains of it—and of all the workings of the German mind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into the dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans flung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, and then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behind which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain, mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies might live.

"There were no stragglers, none!" Let us never forget that cry of exultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw the young untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappear into the hell beyond. And there in the packed graveyards that dot these slopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks in after days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by those who fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn ever in the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force.

"Life is but the pebble sunk, Deeds the circle growing!"

And from the deeds done on this hillside, the suffering endured, the life given up, the victory won, by every kind and type of man within the British State—rich and poor, noble and simple, street-men from British towns, country-men from British villages, men from Canadian prairies, from Australian and New Zealand homesteads—one has a vision, as one looks on into the future, of the impulse given here spreading out through history, unquenched and imperishable. The fight is not over—the victory is not yet—but on the Somme no English or French heart can doubt the end.

The same thoughts follow one along the sunken road to Contalmaison. Here, first, is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped confusion of sandbags, of broken and overturned crosses, of graves tossed into a common ruin. And a little further are the ruins of Contalmaison, where the 3rd Division of the Prussian Guards was broken and 700 of them taken prisoners. Terrible are the memories of Contalmaison! Recall one letter only!—the letter written by a German soldier the day before the attack: "Nothing comes to us—no letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches—it is horrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven days since this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces." And from another letter: "Every one of us in these five days has become years older—we hardly know ourselves."

It was among these intricate remains of trenches and dug-outs, round the fragments of the old chateau, that such things happened. Here, and among those ghastly fragments of shattered woods that one sees to south and east—Mametz, Trônes, Delville, High Wood—human suffering and heroism, human daring and human terror, on one side and on the other, reached their height. For centuries after the battle of Marathon sounds of armed men and horses were heard by night; and to pry upon that sacred rendezvous of the souls of the slain was frowned on by the gods. Only the man who passed through innocently and ignorantly, not knowing where he was, could pass through safely. And here also, in days to come, those who visit these spots in mere curiosity, as though they were any ordinary sight, will visit them to their hurt.

* * * * *

So let the first thoughts run which are evolved by this brown and torn devastation. But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back, first, to the victory—to the results of all that hard and relentless fighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorable battlefield north and south of the Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners, between five and six hundred guns of different calibres, and more than a thousand machine guns, had fallen to the Allies in four months and a half. Many square miles of French territory had been recovered. Verdun—glorious Verdun—had been relieved. Italy and Russia had been helped by the concentration of the bulk of the German forces on the Western front. The enemy had lost at least half a million men; and the Allied loss, though great, had been substantially less. Our new armies had gloriously proved themselves, and the legend of German invincibility was gone.

So much for the first-fruits. The ultimate results are only now beginning to appear in the steady retreat of German forces, unable to stand another attack, on the same line, now that the protection of the winter pause is over. "How far are we from our guns?" I ask the officer beside me. And, as I speak, a flash to the north-east on the higher ground towards Pozières lights up the grey distance. My companion measures the hillside with his eyes. "About 1,000 yards." Their objective now is a temporary German line in front of Bapaume. But we shall be in Bapaume in a few days. And then?

Death—Victory—Work; these are the three leading impressions that rise and take symbolic shape amid these scenes. Let me turn now to the last. For anyone with the common share of heart and imagination, the first thought here must be of the dead—the next, of swarming life. For these slopes and roads and ruins are again alive with men. Thousands and thousands of our soldiers are here, many of them going up to or coming back from the line, while others are working—working—incessantly at all that is meant by "advance" and "consolidation."

The transformation of a line of battle into an efficient "back of the Army" requires, it seems, an amazing amount of human energy, contrivance, and endurance. And what we see now is, of course, a second or third stage. First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actual battlefield. For this the work of the men now at work here—R.E.'s and Labour battalions—is too skilled and too valuable. It is done by fatigues and burying parties from the battalions in occupation of each captured section. The dead are buried; the poor human fragments that remain are covered with chlorate of lime; equipments of all kinds, the litter of the battlefield, are brought back to the salvage dumps, there to be sorted and sent back to the bases for repairs.

Then—or simultaneously—begins the work of the Engineers and the Labour men. Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-holes filled up for the driving through of new roads and railways, and the provision of places where tents, huts, dumps, etc., are to stand. Roughly speaking, I see, as I look round me, that a great deal of this work is here already far advanced. There are hundreds of men, carts, and horses at work on the roads, and everywhere one sees the signs of new railway lines, either of the ordinary breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for the advanced carriage of food and ammunition. Here also is a great encampment of Nissen huts; there fresh preparations for a food or an ammunition dump.

With one pair of eyes one can only see a fraction of what is in truth going on. But the whole effect is one of vast and increasing industry, of an intensity of determined effort, which thrills the mind hardly less than the thought of the battle-line itself. "Yes, war is work," writes an officer who went through the Somme fighting, "much more than it is fighting. This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers find out here." Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will go cheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; and when the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder of the world.

On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of the Mametz wood upon our left. More graveyards, carefully tended; spaces of peace amid the universal movement. And always, on the southern horizon, those clear lines of British trenches, whence sprang on July 1st, 1916, the irresistible attack on Montauban and Mametz. Suddenly, over the desolate ground to the west, we see a man hovering in mid-air, descending on a parachute from a captive balloon that seems to have suffered mishap. The small wavering object comes slowly down; we cannot see the landing; but it is probably a safe one.

Then we are on the main Albert road again, and after some rapid miles I find myself kindly welcomed by one of the most famous leaders of the war. There, in a small room, which has surely seen work of the first importance to our victories on the Somme, a great General discusses the situation and the future with that same sober and reasoned confidence I have found everywhere among the representatives of our Higher Command. "Are we approaching victory? Yes; but it is too soon to use the great word itself. Everything is going well; but the enemy is still very strong. This year will decide it; but may not end it."

* * * * *

So far my recollections of March 3rd. But this is now April 26th, and all the time that I have been writing these recollections, thought has been leaping forward to the actual present—to the huge struggle now pending between Arras and Rheims—to the news that comes crowding in, day by day, of the American preparations in aid of the Allies—to all that is at stake for us and for you. Your eyes are now turned like ours to the battle-line in France. You triumph—and you suffer—with us!

No. 6

May 3rd, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—My last letter left me returning to our village lodgings under the wing of G.H.Q. after a memorable day on the Somme battle-fields. That night the talk at the Visitors' Château, during and after a very simple dinner in an old panelled room, was particularly interesting and animated. The morning's newspapers had just arrived from England, with the official communiques of the morning. We were pushing nearer and nearer to Bapaume; in the fighting of the preceding day we had taken another 128 prisoners; and the King had sent his congratulations to Sir Douglas Haig and the Army on the German withdrawal under "the steady and persistent pressure" of the British Army "from carefully prepared and strongly fortified positions—a fitting sequel to the fine achievements of my Army last year in the Battle of the Somme." There was also a report on the air-fighting and air-losses of February—to which I will return.

It was, of course, already obvious that the German retreat on the Somme was not—so far—going to yield us any very large captures of men or guns. Prisoners were indeed collected every day, but there were no "hauls" such as, little more than a month after this evening of March 3rd, were to mark the very different course of the Battle of Arras. Discussion turned upon the pace of the German retreat and the possible rate of our pursuit. "Don't forget," said an officer, "that they are moving over good ground, while the pursuit has to move over bad ground—roads with craters in them, ground so pitted with shell-holes that you can scarcely drive a peg between them, demolished bridges, villages that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The enemy has his guns with him; ours have to be pushed up over the bad ground. His machine-guns are always in picked and prepared positions; ours have to be improvised."

And also—"Don't forget the weather!" said another. Every misty day—and there were many in February—was very skilfully turned to account. Whenever the weather conditions made it impossible to use the eyes of our Air Service, men would say to each other on our side, "He'll go back a lot to-day!—somewhere or other." But in spite of secrecy and fog, how little respite we had given him! The enemy losses in casualties, prisoners, and stores during February were certainly considerable; not to speak of the major loss of all, that of the strongly fortified line on which two years of the most arduous and ingenious labour that even Germany can give had been lavished. "And almost everywhere," writes an eye-witness, "he was hustled and harried much more than is generally known." As you go eastward, for instance, across the evacuated ground you notice everywhere signs of increasing haste and flurry, such as the less complete felling of trees and telegraph posts. It was really a fine performance for our infantry and our cavalry patrols, necessarily unsupported by anything like our full artillery strength, to keep up the constant pressure they did on an enemy who enjoyed almost the full protection of his. It was dreadful country to live and fight in after the Germans had gone back over it, much worse than anything that troops have to face after any ordinary capture of an enemy line.

The fact is that old axioms are being everywhere revised in the light of this war. In former wars the extreme difficulty of a retreat in the face of the enemy was taken for granted. But this war—I am trying to summarise some first-hand opinion as it has reached me—has modified this point of view considerably.

We know now that for any serious attack on an enemy who has plenty of machine-guns and plenty of successive well-wired positions a great mass of heavy and other artillery is absolutely indispensable. And over ground deliberately wrecked and obstructed such artillery must take time to bring up. And yet—to repeat—how rapidly, how "persistently" all difficulties considered, to use the King's adjective, has the British Army pressed on the heels of the retreating enemy!

None of the officers with whom I talked believed that anything more could have been done by us than was done. "If it had been we who were retreating," writes one of them, "and the Germans who were pursuing, I do not believe they would have pushed us so hard or caused us as much loss, for all their pride in their staff work."

And it is, of course, evident from what has happened since I parted from my hosts at the Château, that we have now amply succeeded during the last few weeks in bringing the retreating enemy to bay. No more masked withdrawals, no more skilful evasions, for either Hindenburg or his armies! The victories of Easter week on and beyond the Vimy Ridge, and the renewed British attack of the last few days—I am writing on May 1st—together with the magnificent French advance towards Laon and to the east of Reims, have been so many fresh and crushing testimonies to the vitality and gathering force of the Allied armies.

What is to be the issue we wait to see. But at least, after the winter lull, it is once more joined; and with such an army as the War Office and the nation together, during these three years, have fashioned to his hand—so trained, so equipped, so fired with a common and inflexible spirit—Sir Douglas Haig and his lieutenants will not fail the hopes of Great Britain, of France—and of America!

At the beginning of March these last words could not have been added. There was an American professor not far from me at dinner, and we discussed the "blazing indiscretion" of Herr Zimmermann's Mexican letter. But he knew no more than I. Only I remember with pleasure the general tone of all the conversation about America that I either engaged in or listened to at Headquarters just a month before the historic meeting of Congress. It was one of intelligent sympathy with the difficulties in your way, coupled with a quiet confidence that the call of civilisation and humanity would very soon—and irrevocably—decide the attitude of America towards the war.

* * * * *

The evening at the Château passed only too quickly, and we were sad to say good-bye, though it left me still the prospect of further conversation with some members of the Intelligence Staff on my return journey from Paris and those points of the French line for which, thanks to the courtesy of the French Headquarters, I was now bound.

The last night under the little schoolmistress's quiet roof amid the deep stillness of the village was a wakeful one for me. The presence of the New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely living thing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as the amazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole end—the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of the strongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as a moral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of the preceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mighty instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.

How much I have heard of training since my arrival in France! It is not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper. Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr. Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.

But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to "do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the nation in its collected and corporate character" controlling the individual will in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals.

What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great Britain to-day—what we are about to witness in your own country—a nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea submitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes; accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain—death itself—rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school, resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed education is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than the youth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching of any strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical.

Training—"askêsis"—with either death, or the loss of all that makes honourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that is the present preoccupation of this nation in arms. Even the football games I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all part of this training. They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement. They are part of the system by which men are persuaded—not driven—to submit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even in their times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated that they end by demanding it.

As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery the terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with a shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horrible process of war has not brutalised the British soldier—you remember the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!—that he still remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the ideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that this relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace, and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things.

But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew Arnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire" during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of conscription," was told by his companion that "sooner than submit to conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life underground." An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by the way, as contrasted with the present state of things!—since it both shows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of "doing as it likes," when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings out its equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to be supreme over the individual interest and will.

But the stubbornness, the discipline, the sacrifice of the armies in the field are not all we want. The stubbornness of the nation at home, of the men and the women, is no less necessary to the great end. In these early days of March every week's news was bringing home to England the growing peril of the submarine attack. Would the married women, the elder women of the nation, rise to the demand for personal thought and saving, for training—in the matter of food—with the same eager goodwill as thousands of the younger women had shown in meeting the armies' demand for munitions? For the women heads of households have it largely in their hands.

The answer at the beginning of March was matter for anxiety. It is still matter for anxiety now—at the beginning of May.

Let us, however, return for a little to the Army. What would the marvellous organisation which England has produced in three years avail us, without the spirit in it,—the body, without the soul? All through these days I have been conscious, in the responsible men I have been meeting, of ideals of which no one talks, except when, on very rare occasions, it happens to be in the day's work like anything else to talk of ideals—but which are, in fact, omnipresent.

I find, for instance, among my War Office Notes, a short address given in the ordinary course of duty by an unnamed commandant to his officer-cadets. It appears here, in its natural place, just as part of the whole; revealing for a moment the thoughts which constantly underlie it.

"Believe me when I tell you that I have never found an officer who worked who did not come through. Only ill-health and death stand in your way. The former you can guard against in a great measure. The latter comes to us all, and for a soldier, a soldier's death is the finest of all. Fear of death does not exist for the man who has led a good and honest life. You must discipline your bodies and your minds—your bodies by keeping them healthy and strong, your minds by prayer and thought."

As to the relation between officers and men, that also is not talked about much, except in its more practical and workaday aspects—the interest taken by officers in the men's comfort and welfare, their readiness to share in the men's games and amusements, and so on. And no one pretends that the whole British Army is an army of "plaster saints," that every officer is the "little father" of his men, and all relations ideal.

But what becomes evident, as one penetrates a little nearer to the great organism, is a sense of passionate responsibility in all the finer minds of the Army towards their men, a readiness to make any sacrifice for them, a deep and abiding sense of their sufferings and dangers, of all that they are giving to their country. How this comes out again and again in the innumerable death-stories of British officers—those few words that commemorate them in the daily newspapers! And how evident is the profound response of the men to such a temper in their officers! There is not a day's action in the field—I am but quoting the eye-witnesses—that does not bring out such facts. Let a senior officer—an "old and tried soldier"—speak. He is describing a walk over a battlefield on the Ancre after one of our victories there last November:

"It is a curious thing to walk over enemy trenches that I have watched like a tiger for weeks and weeks. But what of the boys who took those trenches, with their eleven rows of barbed wire in front of them? I don't think I ever before to-day rated the British soldier at his proper value. His sufferings in this weather are indescribable. When he is not in the trenches his discomforts are enough to kill any ordinary mortal. When he is in the trenches it is a mixture between the North Pole and Hell. And yet when the moment comes he jumps up and charges at the impossible—and conquers it! … Some of the poor fellows who lay there as they fell looked to me absolutely noble, and I thought of their families who were aching for news of them and hoping against hope that they would not be left unburied in their misery.

"All the loving and tender thoughts that are lavished on them are not enough. There are no words to describe the large hearts of these men. God bless 'em! And what of the French on whose soil they lie? Can they ever forget the blood that is mingled with their own? I hope not. I don't think England has ever had as much cause to be proud as she has to-day."

Ah! such thoughts and feelings cut deep. They would be unbearable but for the saving salt of humour in which this whole great gathering of men, so to speak, moves suspended, as though in an atmosphere. It is everywhere. Coarse or refined, it is the universal protection, whether from the minor discomforts or the more frightful risks of war. Volumes could be filled, have already been filled, with it—volumes to which your American soldier when he gets to France in his thousands will add considerably—pages all his own! I take this touch in passing from a recent letter:

"A sergeant in my company [writes a young officer] was the other day buried by a shell. He was dug out with difficulty. As he lay, not seriously injured, but sputtering and choking, against the wall of the trench, his C.O. came by. 'Well, So-and-so, awfully sorry! Can I do anything for you?' 'Sir,' said the sergeant with dignity, still struggling out of the mud, 'I want a separate peace!'"

And here is another incident that has just come across me. Whether it is Humour or Pathos I do not know. In this scene they are pretty close together—the great Sisters!

A young flying officer, in a night attack, was hit by a shrapnel bullet from below. He thought it had struck his leg, but was so absorbed in dropping his bombs and bringing down his machine safely that, although he was aware of a feeling of faintness, he thought no more of it till he had landed in the aerodrome. Then it was discovered that his leg had been shot away, was literally hanging by a shred of skin, and how he had escaped bleeding to death nobody could quite understand. As it was, he had dropped his bombs, and he insisted on making his report in hospital.

He recovered from the subsequent operation, and in hospital, some weeks afterwards, his C.O. appeared, with the news of his recommendation for the D.S.O. The boy, for he was little more, listened with eyes of amused incredulity, opening wider and wider as the Colonel proceeded. When the communication was over, and the C.O., attributing the young man's silence to weakness or grateful emotion, had passed on, the nurse beside the bed saw the patient bury his head in the pillow with a queer sound of exasperation, and caught the words, "I call it perfectly childish!"

That an act so simple, so all in the bargain, should have earned the D.S.O. seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!

* * * * *

With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting of our airmen behind the enemy lines.

"Many of them don't come back. What then? They will have done their job."

The report which reaches the château on our last evening illustrates this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February, 60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were "missing" or "brought down."

But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more startling report—that for April—lies before me. "There has not been a month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never reached such a tremendous figure," says the Times. The record number so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme fighting—322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German—269 of them brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147; the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service, realise at all the conditions of this fighting—its daring, its epic range, its constant development!

All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the treacheries of the very air itself.

In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges, pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his enemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with every gun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition, unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops of the machine.

But apart from active fighting, take such a common experience as what is called "a long reconnaissance." Pilot and observer receive their orders to reconnoitre "thoroughly" a certain area. It may be winter, and the cold at the height of many thousand feet may be formidable indeed. No matter. The thing is done, and, after hours in the freezing air, the machine makes for home; through a winter evening, perhaps, as we saw the two splendid biplanes, near the northern section of the line, sailing far above our heads into the sunset, that first day of our journey. The reconnaissance is over, and here is the first-hand testimony of one who has taken part in many, as to what it means in endurance and fatigue:

"Both pilot and observer are stiff with the cold. In winter it is often necessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilled parts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with the continual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyes are bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginable ache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, though sleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer must make his report and hand it in to the proper quarter."

So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting, though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air, squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, the fighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming more wonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"—I recall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid the noise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks before the battle of Arras—"when the great move begins we shall get the mastery again, as we did on the Somme."

Ask the gunners in the batteries of the April advance, as they work below the signalling planes; ask the infantry whom the gunners so marvellously protect, as to the truth of the prophecy!

"Our casualties are really light," writes an officer in reference to some of the hot fighting of the past month. Thanks, apparently, to the ever-growing precision of our artillery methods; which again depend on aeroplane and balloon information. So it is that the flying forms in the upper air become for the soldier below so many symbols of help and protection. He is restless when they are not there. And let us remember that aeroplanes were first used for artillery observation, not three years ago, in the battle of Aisne, after the victory of the Marne.

But the night in the quiet village wears away. To-morrow we shall be flying through the pleasant land of France, bound for Paris and Lorraine. For I am turning now to a new task. On our own line I have been trying to describe, for those who care to listen, the crowding impressions left on a woman-witness by the huge development in the last twelve months of the British military effort in France. But now, as I go forward into this beautiful country, which I have loved next to my own all my life, there are new purposes in my mind, and three memorable words in my ears:

"Reparation—Restitution—Guarantees!"

No. 7

May 10th, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—We are then, for a time, to put France, and not the British line, in the forefront of these later letters. For when I went out on this task, as I think you know, I had two objects in mind—intimately connected. The first was to carry on that general story of the British effort, which I began last year under your inspiration, down to the opening of this year's campaign. And the second was to try and make more people in this country, and more people in America, realise—as acutely and poignantly as I could—what it is we are really fighting for; what is the character of the enemy we are up against; what are the sufferings, outrages, and devastations which have been inflicted on France, in particular, by the wanton cruelty and ambition of Germany; for which she herself must be made to suffer and pay, if civilisation and freedom are to endure.

With this second intention, I was to have combined, by the courtesy of the French Headquarters, a visit to certain central portions of the French line, including Soissons, Reims, and Verdun. But by the time I reached France the great operations that have since marked the Soissons-Reims front were in active preparation; roads and motor-cars were absorbed by the movements of troops and stores; Reims and Verdun were under renewed bombardment; and visits to this section of the French line were entirely held up. The French authorities, understanding that I chiefly wished to see for myself some of the wrecked and ruined villages and towns dealt with in the French official reports, suggested, first Senlis and the battle-fields of the Ourcq, and then Nancy, the ruined villages of Lorraine, and that portion of their eastern frontier line where, simultaneously with the Battle of the Marne, General Castelnau directed from the plateau of Amance and the Grand Couronné that strong defence of Nancy which protected—and still protects—the French right, and has baulked all the German attempts to turn it.

Meanwhile, in the early days of March, the German retreat, south of the Somme and in front of the French line, was not yet verified; and the worst devastation of the war—the most wanton crime, perhaps, that Germany has so far committed—was not yet accomplished. I had left France before it was fully known, and could only realise, by hot sympathy from a distance, the passionate thrill of fury and wild grief which swept through France when the news began to come in from the evacuated districts. British correspondents with the advancing armies of the Allies have seen deeds of barbarism which British eyes and hearts will never forget, and have sent the news of them through the world. The destruction of Coucy and Ham, the ruin and plunder of the villages, the shameless loot everywhere, the hideous ill-treatment of the country folk, the deportation of boys and girls, the massacre of the fruit trees—these things have gone deep into the very soul of France, burning away—except in the minds of a few incorrigible fanatics—whatever foolish "pacificism" was there, and steeling the mind and will of the nation afresh to that victory which can alone bring expiation, punishment, and a peace worth the name. But, everywhere, the ruins with which northern, central, and eastern France are covered, whether they were caused by the ordinary processes of war or not, are equally part of the guilt of Germany. In the country which I saw last year on the Belgian border, from the great phantom of Ypres down to Festubert, the ravage is mainly the ravage of war. Incessant bombardment from the fighting lines has crumbled village after village into dust, or gashed the small historic towns and the stately country houses. There is no deliberate use of torch and petrol, as in the towns farther south and east. Ypres, however, was deliberately shelled into fragments day after day; and Arras is only a degree less carefully ruined. And whatever the military pretext may be, the root question remains—"Why are the Germans in France at all?" What brought them there but their own determination, in the words of the Secret Report of 1913 printed in the French Yellow book, to "strengthen and extend Deutschtum (Germanism) throughout the entire world"? Every injury that poor France in self-defence, or the Allies at her side, are forced to inflict on the villages and towns which express and are interwoven with the history and genius of the French, is really a German crime. There is no forgiveness for what Germany has done—none! She has tried to murder a people; and but for the splendid gifts of that people, she would have achieved her end.

Perhaps the tragedy of what is to be seen and heard at Senlis, on the battle-grounds of the Ourcq, and in the villages of Lorraine, was heightened for me by the beauty of the long drive south from the neighbourhood of G.H.Q.—some hundred and forty miles. It was a cold but clear March day. We had but parted from snow a little while, and we were soon to find it again. But on this day, austerely bright, the land of France unrolled before us its long succession of valley and upland, upland and valley. Here, no trace of the invader; generally speaking no signs of the armies; for our route lay, on an average, some forty miles behind the line. All was peace, solitude even; for the few women, old men, and boys on the land scarcely told in the landscape. But every mile was rich in the signs and suggestion of an old and most human civilisation—farms, villages, towns, the carefully tended woods, the fine roads running their straight unimpeded course over hill and dale, bearing witness to a State sense, of which we possess too little in this country.

We stopped several times on the journey—I remember a puncture, involving a couple of hours' delay, somewhere north of Beauvais—and found ourselves talking in small hot rooms with peasant families of all ages and stages, from the blind old grandmother, like a brooding Fate in the background, to the last toddling baby. How friendly they were, in their own self-respecting way!—the grave-faced elder women, the young wives, the children. The strength of the family in France seems to me still overwhelming—would we had more of it left in England! The prevailing effect was of women everywhere carrying on—making no parade of it, being indeed accustomed to work, and familiar with every detail of the land; having merely added the tasks of their husbands and sons to their own, and asking no praise for it. The dignity, the essential refinement and intelligence—for all their homely speech—of these solidly built, strong-faced women, in the central districts of France, is still what it was when George Sand drew her Berri peasants, nearly a hundred years ago.

Then darkness fell, and in the darkness we went through an old, old town where are the French General Headquarters. Sentries challenged us to right and left, and sent us forward again with friendly looks. The day had been very long, and presently, as we approached Paris, I fell asleep in my corner, only to be roused with a start by a glare of lights, and more sentries. The barrière of Paris!—shining out into the night.

Two days in Paris followed; every hour crowded with talk, and the vivid impressions of a moment when, from beyond Compiègne and Soissons—some sixty miles from the Boulevards—the French airmen flying over the German lines were now bringing back news every morning and night of fresh withdrawals, fresh villages burning, as the sullen enemy relaxed his hold.

On the third day, a most courteous and able official of the French Foreign Office took us in charge, and we set out for Senlis on a morning chill and wintry indeed, but giving little sign of the storm it held in leash.

To reach Senlis one must cross the military enceinte of Paris. Many visitors from Paris and other parts of France, from England, or from America, have seen by now the wreck of its principal street, and have talked with the Abbé Dourlent, the "Archiprêtre" of the cathedral, whose story often told has lost but little of its first vigour and simplicity, to judge at least by its effect on two of his latest visitors.

We took the great northern road out of Paris, which passes scenes memorable in the war of 1870. On both sides of us, at frequent intervals, across the flat country, were long lines of trenches, and belts of barbed wire, most of them additions to the defences of Paris since the Battle of the Marne. It is well to make assurance doubly sure! But although, as we entered the Forest of Chantilly, the German line was no more than some thirty-odd miles away, and since the Battle of the Aisne, two and a half years ago, it has run, practically, as it still ran in the early days of this last March, the notion of any fresh attack on Paris seemed the merest dream. It was indeed a striking testimony to the power of the modern defensive—this absolute security in which Paris and its neighbourhood has lived and moved all that time, with—up to a few weeks ago—the German batteries no farther off than the suburbs of Soissons. How good to remember, as one writes, all that has happened since I was in Senlis!—and the increased distance that now divides the German hosts from the great prize on which they had set their hearts.

How fiercely they had set their hearts on it, the old Curé of Senlis, who is the chief depository of the story of the town, was to make us feel anew.

One enters Senlis from Paris by the main street, the Rue de la République, which the Germans deliberately and ruthlessly burnt on September 2nd and 3rd, 1914. We moved slowly along it through the blackened ruins of houses large and small, systematically fired by the German pétroleurs, in revenge for a supposed attack by civilians upon the entering German troops. Les civils ont tiré—it is the universal excuse for these deeds of wanton barbarism, and for the hideous cruelties to men, women, and children that have attended them—beginning with that incident which first revealed to a startled world the true character of the men directing the German Army—the burning and sack of Louvain. It is to be hoped that renewed and careful investigation will be made—(much preliminary inquiry has already of course taken place)—after the war into all these cases. My own impression from what I have heard, seen, and read—for what it may be worth—is that the plea is almost invariably false; but that the state of panic and excitement into which the German temperament falls, with extraordinary readiness, under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troops traversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for an honest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers, without excusing at all the deeds to which it led. Of this abnormal excitability, the old Curé of Senlis gave one or two instances which struck me.

We came across him by chance in the cathedral—the beautiful cathedral I have heard Walter Pater describe, in my young Oxford days, as one of the loveliest and gracefullest things in French Gothic. Fortunately, though the slender belfry and the roof were repeatedly struck by shrapnel in the short bombardment of the town, no serious damage was done. We wandered round the church alone, delighting our eyes with the warm golden white of the stone, the height of the grooved arches, the flaming fragments of old glass, when we saw the figure of an old priest come slowly down the aisle, his arms folded. He looked at us rather dreamily and passed. Our guide, Monsieur P., followed and spoke to him. "Monsieur, you are the Abbé Dourlent?"

"I am, sir. What can I do for you?"

Something was said about English ladies, and the Curé courteously turned back. "Will the ladies come into the Presbytère?" We followed him across the small cathedral square to the old house in which he lived, and were shown into a bare dining-room, with a table, some chairs, and a few old religious engravings on the walls. He offered us chairs and sat down himself.

"You would like to hear the story of the German occupation?" He thought a little before beginning, and I was struck with his strong, tired face, the powerful mouth and jaw, and above them, eyes which seemed to have lost the power of smiling, though I guessed them to be naturally full of a pleasant shrewdness, of what the French call malice, which is not the English "malice." He was rather difficult to follow here and there, but from his spoken words and from a written account he placed in my hands, I put together the following story:

"It was August 30th, 1914, when the British General Staff arrived in Senlis. That same evening, they left it for Dammartin. All day, and the next two days, French and English troops passed through the town. What was happening? Would there be no fighting in defence of Paris—only thirty miles away? Wednesday, September 2nd—that was the day the guns began, our guns and theirs, to the north of Senlis. But, in the course of that day, we knew finally there would be no battle between us and Paris. The French troops were going—the English were going. They left us—marching eastward. Our hearts were very sore as we saw them go.

"Two o'clock on Wednesday—the first shell struck the cathedral. I had just been to the top of the belfry to see, if I could, from what direction the enemy was coming. The bombardment lasted an hour and a half. At four o'clock they entered. If you had seen them!"

The old Curé raised himself on his seat, trying to imitate the insolent bearing of the German cavalry as they led the way through the old town which they imagined would be the last stage on their way to Paris.

"They came in, shouting 'Paris—Nach Paris!' maddened with excitement. They were all singing—they were like men beside themselves."

"What did they sing, Monsieur le Curé?—Deutschland über alles'?"

"Oh, no, madame, not at all. They sang hymns. It was an extraordinary sight. They seemed possessed. They were certain that in a few hours they would be in Paris. They passed through the town, and then, just south of the town, they stopped. Our people show the place. It was the nearest they ever got to Paris.

"Presently, an officer, with an escort, a general apparently, rode through the town, pulled up at the Hôtel de Ville, and asked for the Maire—angrily, like a man in a passion. But the Maire—M. Odent—was there, waiting, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville.

"Monsieur Odent was my friend—he gave me his confidence. He had resisted his nomination as Mayor as long as he could, and accepted it only as an imperative duty. He was an employer, whom his workmen loved. One of them used to say—'When one gets into M. Odent's employ, one lives and dies there.' Just before the invasion, he took his family away. Then he came back, with the presentiment of disaster. He said to me—'I persuaded my wife to go. It was hard. We are much attached to each other—but now I am free, ready for all that may come.'

"Well, the German general said to him roughly:

"'Is your town quiet? Can we circulate safely?'

"M. Odent said, 'Yes. There is no quieter town in France than Senlis.'

"'Are there still any soldiers here?'

"M. Odent had seen the French troops defiling through the town all the morning. The bombardment had made it impossible to go about the streets. As far as he knew there were none left. He answered, 'No.'

"He was taken off, practically under arrest, to the Hôtel, and told to order a dinner for thirty, with ice and champagne. Then his secretary joined him and proposed that the adjoints, or Mayor's assistants, should be sent for.

"'No,' said M. Odent, 'one victim is enough.' You see he foresaw everything. We all knew what had happened in Belgium and the Ardennes.

"The German officer questioned him again.

"'Why have your people gone?—why are these houses, these shops, shut? There must be lights everywhere—all through the night!'

"Suddenly—shots!—in the Rue de la République. In a few seconds there was a furious fusillade, accompanied by the rattle of machine guns. The officer sprang up.

"'So this is your quiet town, Monsieur le Maire! I arrest you, and you shall answer with your life for the lives of my soldiers.'

"Two men with revolvers were set to guard him. The officer himself presently took him outside the town, and left him under guard, at the little village of Poteau, at the edge of a wood."

* * * * *

What had happened? Unluckily for Senlis and M. Odent, some of the French rear-guard—infantry stragglers, and a small party of Senegalese troops—were still in the southern quarter of the town when the Germans entered. They opened fire from a barrack near the Paris entrance and a sharp engagement followed which lasted several hours, with casualties on both sides. The Germans got the better, and were then free to wreak their fury on the town.

They broke into the houses, plundered the wine shops, first of all, and took fifty hostages, of whom twenty-six perished. And at half-past five, while the fighting was still going on, the punitive burning of the town began, by a cyclist section told off for the work and furnished with every means for doing it effectively. These men, according to an eyewitness, did their work with wild shouts—"cris sauvages."

A hundred and seventeen houses were soon burning fiercely. On that hot September evening, the air was like a furnace. Before long the streets were full of blazing débris. Two persons who had hidden themselves in their cellars died of suffocation; yet to appear in the streets was to risk death at the hands of some drunk or maddened soldier.

At the opening of the French attack, a German officer rushed to the hospital, which was full of wounded, in search of francs-tireurs. Arrived there, he saw an old man, a chronic patient of the hospital and half idiotic, standing on the steps of the building. He blew the old man's brains out. He then forced his way into the hospital, pointing his revolver at the French wounded, who thought their last hour had come. He himself was wounded, and at last appeared to yield to the remonstrances of the Sister in charge, and allowed his wound to be dressed. But in the middle of the dressing, he broke away without his tunic, and helmetless, in a state of mad excitement, and presently reappeared with a file of soldiers. Placing them in the street opposite the rooms occupied by the French wounded, he ordered them to fire a volley. No one was hurt, though several beds were struck. Then the women's wards were searched. Two sick men, éclopés without visible wounds, were dragged out of their beds and would have been bayoneted then and there but for the entreaties of the nurses, who ultimately released them.

An awful night followed in the still burning or smouldering town. Meanwhile, at nine o'clock in the evening a party of German officers betook themselves to the hamlet of Poteau—a village north of Senlis—where M. Odent had been kept under guard since the afternoon. Six other hostages were produced, and they were all marched off to a field near Chamant at the edge of a wood. Here the Maire was called up and interrogated. His companion, eight or nine metres away, too far to hear what was said, watched the scene. As I think of it, I seem to see in the southern sky the glare of burning Senlis; above it, and spread over the stubble fields in which the party stood, a peaceful moonlight. In his written account, the Curé specially mentions the brightness of the harvest moon.

Presently the Maire came back to the six, and said to one, Benoit Decreys, "Adieu, my poor Benoit, we shall not see each other again —they are going to shoot me." He took his crucifix, his purse containing a sum of money, and some papers, out of his pocket, and asked that they should be given to his family. Then pressing the hands held out to him, he said good-bye to them all, and went back with a firm step to the group of officers. Two soldiers were called up, and the Maire was placed at ten paces' distance. The soldiers fired, and M. Odent fell without a sound. He was hastily buried under barely a foot of earth, and his six companions were left on the spot through the night expecting the same fate, till the morning, when they were released. Five other hostages, "gathered haphazard in the streets," were shot the same night in the neighbourhood of Chamant.

Meanwhile the Curé, knowing nothing of what was happening to the Maire, had been thinking for his parishioners and his church. When the bombardment began he gathered together about a hundred and twenty of them, who had apparently no cellars to take refuge in, and after sheltering them in the Presbytère for a time, he sent them with one of his vicaires out of the town. Then—to continue his narrative:

"I went to the southern portal of the cathedral, and stood there trembling at every burst of shrapnel that struck the belfry and the roof, and running out into the open, at each pause, to be sure that the church was still there. When the firing ceased, I went back to the Presbytère.

"Presently, furious sounds of blows from the place. I went out. I saw some enemy cyclists, armed with fragments of stone, breaking in one of the cathedral doors, another, with a hatchet, attacking the belfry door. At the sight of me, they rushed at me with their revolvers, demanding that I should take them to the top of the belfry. 'You have a machine gun there!' 'Nothing of the sort, monsieur. See for yourselves.' I unlocked the door, and just as I put my foot on the first step, the fusillade in the town began. The soldiers started. 'You are our prisoner!' cried their chief, turning to me, as though to seize me.

"'I know it. You have me in your hands.' I went up before them, as quickly as my age allowed. They searched everywhere, and, of course, found nothing. They ran down and disappeared."

But that was not the end of the Abbé's trouble. He was presently sent for to the German Headquarters, at the Hotel du Grand Cerf, where the table spread for thirty people, by the order of M. Odent, was still waiting for its guests. The conversation here between the Curé and the officer of high rank who spoke to him is worth repeating. From the tenor of it, the presumption is that the officer was a Catholic—probably a Bavarian.

"I asked leave to go back to the Presbytère.

"'Better stay here, Monsieur le Curé. You will be safer. The burning is going on. To-morrow, your town will be only a heap of ruins.'

"'What is our crime?'

"'Listen to that fusillade. Your inhabitants are attacking us, as they did at Louvain. Louvain has ceased to exist! We will make of Senlis another Louvain, so that Paris and France may know how we treat those who may imitate you. We have found small shot (chevrotines) in the body of one of our officers.'

"'Already?'—I thought. How had there been any time for the post-mortem? But I was too crushed to speak.

"'And also from your belfry we have been fired on!'

"At that I recovered myself.

"'Sir—what may have passed in the streets, I cannot say. But as to the cathedral I formally deny your charge. Since war broke out, I have always had the keys of the belfry. I did not even give them to your soldiers, who made me take them there. Do you wish me to swear it?'

"The officer looked at me.

"'No need. You are a Catholic priest. I see you are sincere.'

"I bowed."

A scene that throws much light! A false charge—an excited reference to Louvain—monstrous threat—the temper, that is, of panic, which is the mother of cruelty. At that very moment, the German troops in the Rue de la Republique were driving parties of French civilians in front of them, as a protection from the Senegalese troops who were still firing from houses near the Paris exit from the town. Four or five of these poor people were killed by French bullets; a child of five forced along, with her mother, was shot in the thigh. Altogether some twenty or thirty civilians seem to have been killed.

Next day more houses were burnt. Then, for a time, the quiet of desolation. All the normal population were gone, or in the cellars. But twenty miles away to the southeast, great things were preparing. The German occupation of Senlis began, as we have seen, on a Wednesday, September 2nd. On Saturday the 5th, as we all know, the first shots were fired in that Battle of the Ourcq which was the western section of the Battle of the Marne. By that Saturday, already, writes the Abbé Dourlent:

"There was something changed in the attitude of the enemy. What had become of the brutal arrogance, the insolent cruelty of the first days? For three days and nights, the German troops, an army of 300,000 men, defiled through our streets. It was not the road to Paris, now, that they asked for—it was the way to Nanteuil, Ermenonville, the direction of the Marne. On the faces of the officers, one seemed to read disappointment and anxiety. Close to us, on the east, the guns were speaking, every day more fiercely. What was happening?"

All that the Curé knows is that in a house belonging to persons of his acquaintance, where some officers of the rear-guard left behind in Senlis are billeted, two of the young officers have been in tears—it is supposed, because of bad news. Another day, an armoured car rushes into Senlis from Paris; the men in it exchange some shots with the German soldiers in the principal place, and make off again, calling out, "Courage! Deliverance is coming!"

Then, on the 9th, just a week from the German entry, there is another fusillade in the streets. "It is the Zouaves, knocking at the doors, dragging out the conquerors of yesterday, now a humbled remnant, with their hands in the air."

And the Curé goes on to compare Senlis to the sand which the Creator showed to the sea. "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." "The grain of sand is Senlis, still red with the flames which have devoured her, and with the blood of her victims. To these barbarians she cries—'You want Paris?—you want France? Halt! No road through here!'"

* * * * *

This combination of the Curé's written and spoken account is as close to the facts as I can make it. His narrative as he gave it to me, of what he had seen and felt, was essentially simple, and, to judge from the French official reports, with which I have compared it, essentially true. There are some discrepancies in detail, but nothing that matters. The murder of M. Odent, of the other hostages, of the civilians placed in front of the German troops, and of four or five other victims; the burning out by torch and explosive of half a flourishing town, because of a discreditable mistake, the fruit of panic and passion,—these crimes are indelibly marked on the record of Germany. She has done worse elsewhere. All the same, this too she will never efface. Let us imagine such things happening at Guildford, or Hatfield, or St. Albans!

We parted with M. le Curé just in time to meet a pleasant party of war correspondents at the very inn, the Hôtel du Cerf, which had been the German Headquarters during the occupation. The correspondents were on their way between the French Headquarters and the nearest points of the French line, Soissons or Compiègne, from whose neighbourhood every day the Germans were slowly falling back, and where the great attacks of the month of April were in active preparation. Then, after luncheon, we sallied out into the darkening afternoon, through the Forest of Ermenonville, and up to the great plateau, stretching north towards Soissons, southwards towards Meaux, and eastwards towards the Ourcq, where Maunoury's Sixth Army, striking from Paris and the west, and the English Army, striking from the south—aided by all the gallant French line from Château Thierry to the Grand Couronné—dealt that staggering blow against the German right which flung back the German host, and, weary as the way has been since, weary as it may still be, in truth, decided the war.

But the clouds hang lower as we emerge on the high bare plain. A few flakes—then, in a twinkling, a whirling snow-storm through which we can hardly see our way. But we fight through it, and along the roads every one of which is famous in the history of the battle. At our northernmost point we are about thirty miles from Soissons and the line. Columns of French infantry on the march, guns, ammunition, stores, field kitchens, pass us perpetually; the motor moves at a foot's pace, and we catch the young faces of the soldiers through the white thickened air. And our most animated and animating companion, Monsieur P——, with his wonderful knowledge of the battle, hails every landmark, identifies every farm and wood, even in what has become, in less than an hour, a white wilderness. But it is of one village only, of these many whose names are henceforth known to history, that I wish to speak—the village of Vareddes. In my next letter I propose to tell the ghastly story of the hostages of Vareddes.

No. 8

May 17th, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—Shall I ever forget that broad wintry plateau of the Ourcq, as it lay, at the opening of March, under its bed of snow, with its ruined villages, its graves scattered over the fields, its utter loneliness, save for the columns of marching soldiers in the roads, and the howling wind that rushed over the fields, the graves, the cemeteries, and whistled through the gaping walls of the poor churches and farms? This high spreading plain, which before the war was one scene of rural plenty and industrious peace, with its farm lands and orchards dropping gently from the forest country of Chantilly, Compiègne, and Ermenonville, down to the Ourcq and the Marne, will be a place of pilgrimage for generations to come. Most of the Battle of the Marne was fought on so vast a scale, over so wide a stretch of country—about 200 miles long, by 50 broad—that for the civilian spectator of the future it will never be possible to realise it as a whole, and very difficult even to realise any section of it, topographically, owing to the complication of the actions involved. But in the Battle of the Ourcq, the distances are comparatively small, the actions comparatively simple and intelligible, while all the circumstances of the particular struggle are so dramatic, and the stakes at issue so vast, that every incident is, as it were, writ large, and the memory absorbs them more easily.

An Englishwoman, too, may be glad it was in this conspicuous section of the battle-field, which will perhaps affect the imagination of posterity more easily than any other, that it fell to the British Army to play its part. To General Joffre the glory of the main strategic conception of the great retreat; to General Gallieni the undying honour of the rapid perception, the quick decision, which flung General Maunoury, with the 6th Army, on Von Kluck's flank and rear, at the first hint of the German general's swerve to the southeast; to General Maunoury himself, and his splendid troops, the credit of the battle proper, across the broad harvest fields of the Ourcq plateau. But the advance of the British troops from the south of the Marne, on the heels of Von Kluck, was in truth all-important to the success of Maunoury on the Ourcq. It was the British Expeditionary Force which made the hinge of the battle-line, and if that hinge had not been strong and supple—in all respects equal to its work—the sudden attack of the 6th Army, on the extreme left of the battle-line, and the victory of General Foch in the centre, might not have availed. In other words, had Von Kluck found the weak spot he believed in and struck for, all would have been different. But the weak spot existed only in the German imagination. The British troops whom Von Kluck supposed to be exhausted and demoralised, were in truth nothing of the sort. Rested and in excellent condition, they turned rejoicing upon the enemy, and, in concert with the French 6th Army, decided the German withdrawal. Every one of the six Armies aligned across France, from Paris to the Grand Couronne, had its own glorious task in the defeat of the German plans. But we were then so small a proportion of the whole, with our hundred and twenty thousand men, and we have become since so accustomed to count in millions, that perhaps our part in the "miracle of the Marne" is sometimes in danger of becoming a little blurred in the popular English—and American—conception of the battle. Is not the truth rather that we had a twofold share in it? It was Von Kluck's miscalculation as to the English strength that tempted him to his eastward march; it was the quality of the British force and leadership, when Sir John French's opportunity came, that made the mistake a fatal one.

How different the aspect of the Ourcq plateau at the opening of the battle in 1914, from the snowy desolation under which we saw it! Perfect summer weather—the harvest stacks in the fields—a blazing sun by day, and a clear moon by night. For the first encounters of the five days' fighting, till the rain came down, Nature could not have set a fairer scene. And on the two anniversaries which have since passed, summer has again decked the battle-field. Thousands have gone out to it from Paris, from Meaux, and the whole country-side. The innumerable graves, single or grouped, among the harvest fields and the pastures, have been covered with flowers, and bright, mile after mile, with the twinkling tricolour, as far as the eye could see. At Barcy and Etrépilly, the centres of the fight, priests have blessed the graves, and prayed for the dead.

There has been neither labour nor money indeed as yet wherewith to rebuild the ruined villages and farms, beyond the most necessary repairs. They stand for the most part as the battle left them. And the fields are still alive with innumerable red flags—distinct from the tricolour of the graves—which mark where the plough must avoid an unexploded shell. In a journal of September 1914, a citizen of Senlis describes passing in a motor through the scene of the fight, immediately after the departure of the Germans, when the scavenging and burying parties were still busy.

"How can I describe it? Where to begin? Abandoned farms, on hills of death! The grain-giving earth, empty of human beings. No labourers—no household smoke. The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out, and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of their normal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot. Poor farms of the Ile-de-France!—dwellings of old time, into whose barns the rich harvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year—old tiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss—plain hospitable rooms where masters and servants met familiarly together:—you are no more than calcined and blackened stones! Not a living animal in the ruined stalls, not an ox, not a horse, not a sheep. One flies from the houses, only to find a scene more horrible in the fields. Corpses everywhere, of men and horses. And everywhere in the fields unexploded shells, which it would be death to touch, which have already made many unsuspecting victims.

"Sometimes, as the motor draws near, a man or a woman emerges from a building, having still on their faces the terror of the hours they have lived through. They scarcely look at us. They are absorbed in their losses, in the struggle to rescue something from the wreck. As soon as they are sure it is not the Germans come back, they turn away, with slow steps, bewildered by what they have suffered."

The small party in the motor includes a priest, and as it passes near Betz, at the northern end of the battle-field, they see a burying-party of French Territorials at work. The officer in charge beckons to the priest, and the priest goes to speak to him.

"Monsieur l'Abbé, we have just buried here twenty-two French soldiers." He points to a trench freshly dug, into which the earth has just been shovelled.

"They are Breton soldiers," the officer explains, "and the men of my burying company are Bretons too. They have just discovered that these dead men we have gathered from the fields were soldiers from a regiment recruited in their own district. And seven of them have recognised among these twenty-two dead, one a son, one a son-in-law, one a brother. Will you come, Monsieur l'Abbé, and say a few words to these poor fellows?"

So the Abbé goes to the new-made grave, reads the De Profundis, says a prayer, gives the benediction, and then speaks. Tears are on the strong, rugged faces of the bare-headed Bretons, as they gather round him. A group, some little distance off, which is writing the names of the dead on a white cross, pauses, catches what is going on, and kneels too, with bent heads….

It is good to linger on that little scene of human sympathy and religious faith. It does something to protect the mind from the horror of much that has happened here.

* * * * *

In spite of the storm, our indefatigable guide carried us through all the principal points of the battle-line—St. Soupplêts—Marcilly— Barcy—Etrépilly—Acy-en-Multien; villages from which one by one, by keen, hard fighting, the French attack, coming eastwards from Dammartin to Paris, dislodged the troops of Von Kluck; while to our right lay Trocy, and Vareddes, a village on the Ourcq, between which points ran the strongest artillery positions of the enemy. At Barcy, we stopped a few minutes, to go and look at the ruined church, with its fallen bell, and its graveyard packed with wreaths and crosses, bound with the tricolour. At Etrépilly, with the snow beating in our faces, and the wind howling round us, we read the inscription on the national monument raised to those fallen in the battle, and looking eastwards to the spot where Trocy lay under thick curtains of storm, we tried to imagine the magnificent charge of the Zouaves, of the 62nd Reserve Division, under Commandant Henri D'Urbal, who, with many a comrade, lies buried in the cemetery of Barcy.

Five days the battle swayed backwards and forwards across this scene, especially following the lines of the little streams flowing eastwards to the Ourcq, the Thérouanne, the Gergogne, the Grivette. "From village to village," says Colonel Buchan, "amid the smoke of burning haystacks and farmsteads, the French bayonet attack was pressed home."

"Terrible days of life-and-death fighting! [writes a Meaux resident, Madame Koussel-Lepine] battles of Chambry, Barcy, Puisieux, Acy-en-Multien, the 6th, 7th, and 8th of September—fierce days to which the graves among the crops bear witness. Four hundred volunteers sent to attack a farm, from which only seven come back! Ambuscades, barricades in the streets, loopholes cut in the cemetery walls, trenches hastily dug and filled with dead, night fighting, often hand to hand, surprises, the sudden flash of bayonets, a rain of iron, a rain of fire, mills and houses burning like torches—fields red with the dead and with the flaming corn fruit of the fields, and flower of the race!—the sacrifice consummated, the cup drunk to the lees."

Moving and eloquent words! They gain for me a double significance as I look back from them to the little scene we saw at Barcy under the snow—a halt of some French infantry, in front of the ruined church. The "salut an drapeau" was going on, that simple, daily rite which, like a secular mass, is the outward and visible sign to the French soldier of his country and what he owes her. This passion of French patriotism—what a marvellous force, what a regenerating force it has shown itself in this war! It springs, too, from the heart of a race which has the Latin gift of expression. Listen to this last entry in the journal of Captain Robert Dubarle, the evening before his death in action:

"This attack to-morrow, besides the inevitable emotion it rouses in one's thoughts, stirs in me a kind of joyous impatience, and the pride of doing my duty—which is to fight gladly, and die victorious. To the last breath of our lives, to the last child of our mothers, to the last stone of our dwellings, all is thine, my country! Make no hurry. Choose thine own time for striking. If thou needest months, we will fight for months; if thou needest years, we will fight for years—the children of to-day shall be the soldiers of to-morrow.

"Already, perhaps, my last hour is hastening towards me. Accept the gift I make thee of my strength, my hopes, my joys and my sorrows, of all my being, filled with the passion of thee. Pardon thy children their errors of past days. Cover them with thy glory—put them to sleep in thy flag. Rise, victorious and renewed, upon their graves. Let our holocaust save thee—Patrie, Patrie!"