Part 9 (2/2)

Occasionally the line moves a trifle forward or back, like the s.h.i.+fting record of a fever chart; but in general it remains the same.

It has remained the same since the first of November. A movement to thrust it forward in any one place is followed by a counter-attack in another place. The reserves must be drawn off and hurried to the threatened spot. Automatically the line straightens again.

The little map is dated the twenty-third of February. All through the spring and summer the line has remained unchanged. There will be no change until one side or the other begins a great offensive movement.

After that it will be a matter of the irresistible force and the immovable body, a question not of maps but of empires.

Between the confronting lines lies that tragic strip of No Man's Land, which has been and is the scene of so much tragedy. No Man's Land is of fixed length but of varying width. There are places where it is very narrow, so narrow that it is possible to throw across a hand grenade or a box of cigarettes, depending on the nearness of an officer whose business is war. Again it is wide, so that friendly relations are impossible, and sniping becomes a pleasure as well as an art.

It was No Man's Land that I was to visit the night of the entry in my journal.

From the neighbourhood of Ypres to the Swiss border No Man's Land varies. The swamps and flat ground give way to more rolling country, and this to hills. But in the north No Man's Land is a series of shallow lakes, lying in flat, unprotected country.

For Belgium, in desperation, last October opened the sluices and let in the sea. It crept in steadily, each high tide advancing the flood farther. It followed the lines of ca.n.a.l and irrigation ditches mile after mile till it had got as far south as Ypres, beyond Ypres indeed.

To the encroachment of the sea was added the flooding resulting from an abnormally rainy winter. Ordinarily the ditches have carried off the rain; now even where the inundation does not reach it lies in great ponds. Belgium's fertile sugar-beet fields are under salt water.

The method was effectual, during the winter, at least, in r.e.t.a.r.ding the German advance. Their artillery destroyed the towns behind the opposing trenches of the Allies, but their attempts to advance through the flood failed.

Even where the floods were shallow--only two feet or so--they served their purpose in masking the character of the land. From a wading depth of two feet, charging soldiers stepped frequently into a deep ditch and drowned ignominiously.

It is a n.o.ble thing, war! It is good for a country. It unites its people and develops national spirit!

Great poems have been written about charges. Will there ever be any great poems about these men who have been drowned in ditches? Or about the soldiers who have been caught in the barbed wire with which these inland lakes are filled? Or about the wounded who fall helpless into the flood?

The inland lakes that ripple under the wind from the sea, or gleam silver in the light of the moon, are beautiful, hideous, filled with bodies that rise and float, face down. And yet here and there the situation is not without a sort of grim humour. Brilliant engineers on one side or the other are experimenting with the flood. Occasionally trenches. .h.i.therto dry and fairly comfortable find themselves unexpectedly filling with water, as the other side devises some clever scheme for turning the flood from a menace into a military a.s.set.

In No Man's Land are the outposts.

The fighting of the winter has mystified many noncombatants, with its advances and retreats, which have yet resulted in no definite change of the line. In many instances this sharp fighting has been a matter of outposts, generally farms, churches or other isolated buildings, sometimes even tiny villages. In the inundated portion of Belgium these outposts are buildings which, situated on rather higher land, a foot or two above the flood, have become islands. Much of the fighting in the north has been about these island outposts. Under the conditions, charges must be made by relatively small bodies of men.

The outposts can similarly house but few troops.

They are generally defended by barbed wire and a few quick-firing guns. Their purpose is strategical; they are vantage points from which the enemy may be closely watched. They change sides frequently; are won and lost, and won again.

Here and there the side at the time in command of the outpost builds out from its trenches through the flood a pathway of bags of earth, topped by fascines or bundles of f.a.gots tied together. Such a path pays a tribute of many lives for every yard of advance. It is built under fire; it remains under fire. It is destroyed and reconstructed.

When I reached the front the British, Belgian and French troops in the north had been fighting under these conditions for four months. My first visit to the trenches was made under the auspices of the Belgian Ministry of War. The start was made from the _Mairie_ in Dunkirk, accompanied by the necessary pa.s.ses and escorted by an attache of the Military Cabinet.

I was taken in an automobile from Dunkirk to the Belgian Army Headquarters, where an officer of the headquarters staff, Captain F----, took charge. The headquarters had been a brewery.

Stripped of the impedimenta of its previous occupation, it now housed the officers of the staff.

Since that time I have frequently visited the headquarters staffs of various armies or their divisions. I became familiar with the long, bare tables stacked with papers, the lamps, the maps on the walls, the telephones, the coming and going of dispatch riders in black leather.

I came to know something of the chafing restlessness of these men who must sit, well behind the firing line, and play paper battles on which lives and empires hang.

But one thing never ceased to puzzle me.

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