Part 17 (1/2)

We sped on, the same flat country, the same grey fields, the same files of soldiers moving across those fields toward distant billets, the same transports and ambulances, and over all the same colourless sky.

Not very long ago some inquiring British scientist discovered that on foggy days in London the efficiency of the average clerk was cut down about fifty per cent. One begins to wonder how much of this winter _impa.s.se_ is due to the weather, and what the bright and active days of early spring will bring. Certainly the weather that day weighed on me. It was easier to look out through the window of the car than to get out and investigate. The penetrating cold dulled our spirits.

A great lorry had gone into the mud at the side of the road and was being dug out. A horse neatly disembowelled lay on its back in the road, its four stark legs pointed upward.

”They have been firing at a German _Taube_,” said the Commandant, ”and naturally what goes up must come down.”

On the way back we saw the same horse. It was dark by that time, and some peasants had gathered round the carca.s.s with a lantern. The hide had been cut away and lay at one side, and the peasants were carving the animal into steaks and roasts. For once fate had been good to them. They would dine that night.

Everywhere here and there along the road we had pa.s.sed the small sheds that sentries built to protect themselves against the wind, little huts the size of an American patrol box, built of the branches of trees and thatched all about with straw.

Now we pa.s.sed one larger than the others, a shed with the roof thatched and the sides plastered with mud to keep out the cold.

The Commandant halted the car. There was one bare little room with a wooden bench and a door. The bench and the door had just played their part in a tragedy.

I have been asked again and again whether it is true that on both sides of the line disheartened soldiers have committed suicide during this long winter of waiting. I have always replied that I do not know.

On the Allied side it is thought that many Germans have done so; I daresay the Germans make the same contention. This one instance is perfectly true. But it was the result of an accident, not of discouragement.

The sentry was alone in his hut, and he was cleaning his gun. For a certain length of time he would be alone. In some way the gun exploded and blew off his right hand. There was no one to call on for help. He waited quite a while. It was night. n.o.body came; he was suffering frightfully.

Perhaps, sitting there alone, he tried to think out what life would be without a right hand. In the end he decided that it was not worth while. But he could not pull the trigger of his gun with his left hand. He tried it and failed. So at last he tied a stout cord to the trigger, fastened the end of it to the door, and sitting on the bench kicked the door to. They had just taken him away.

Just back of Ypres there is a group of buildings that had been a great lunatic asylum. It is now a hospital for civilians, although it is partially destroyed.

”During the evacuation of the town,” said the Commandant, ”it was decided that the inmates must be taken out. The asylum had been hit once and sh.e.l.ls were falling in every direction. So the nuns dressed their patients and started to march them back along the route to the nearest town. Sh.e.l.ls were falling all about them; the nuns tried to hurry them, but as each sh.e.l.l fell or exploded close at hand the lunatics cheered and clapped their hands. They could hardly get them away at all; they wanted to stay and see the excitement.”

That is a picture, if you like. It was a very large asylum, containing hundreds of patients. The nuns could not hurry them. They stood in the roads, faces upturned to the sky, where death was whining its shrill cry overhead. When a sh.e.l.l dropped into the road, or into the familiar fields about them, tearing great holes, flinging earth and rocks in every direction, they cheered. They blocked the roads, so that gunners with badly needed guns could not get by. And behind and all round them the nuns urged them on in vain. Some of them were killed, I believe.

All about great holes in fields and road tell the story of the h.e.l.l that beat about them.

Here behind the town one sees fields of graves marked each with a simple wooden cross. Here and there a soldier's cap has been nailed to the cross.

The officers told me that in various places the French peasants had placed the dead soldier's number and identifying data in a bottle and placed it on the grave. But I did not see this myself.

Unlike American towns, there is no gradual approach to these cities of Northern France; no straggling line of suburbs. Many of them were laid out at a time when walled cities rose from the plain, and although the walls are gone the tradition of compactness for protection still holds good. So one moment we were riding through the sh.e.l.l-holed fields of Northern France and the next we were in the city of Ypres.

At the time of my visit few civilians had seen the city of Ypres since its destruction. I am not sure that any had been there. I have seen no description of it, and I have been asked frequently if it is really true that the beautiful Cloth Hall is gone--that most famous of all the famous buildings of Flanders.

Ypres!

What a tragedy! Not a city now; hardly a skeleton of a city. Rumour is correct, for the wonderful Cloth Hall is gone. There is a fragment left of the facade, but no repairing can ever restore it. It must all come down. Indeed, any storm may finish its destruction. The ma.s.sive square belfry, two hundred and thirty feet high and topped by its four turrets, is a sh.e.l.l swaying in every gust of wind.

The inimitable arcade at the end is quite gone. Nothing indeed is left of either the Cloth Hall, which, built in the year 1200, was the most remarkable edifice of Belgium, or of the Cathedral behind it, erected in 1300 to succeed an earlier edifice. General M---- stood by me as I stared at the ruins of these two great buildings. Something of the tragedy of Belgium was in his face.

”We were very proud of it,” he said. ”If we started now to build another it would take more than seven hundred years to give it history.”

There were sh.e.l.ls overhead. But they pa.s.sed harmlessly, falling either into the open country or into distant parts of the town. We paid no attention to them, but my curiosity was roused.

”It seems absurd to continue sh.e.l.ling the town,” I said. ”There is nothing left.”

Then and there I had a lesson in the new warfare. Bombardment of the country behind the enemy's trenches is not necessarily to destroy towns. Its strategical purpose, I was told, is to cut off communications, to prevent, if possible, the bringing up of reserve troops and transport wagons, to destroy ammunition trains. I was new to war, with everything to learn. This perfectly practical explanation had not occurred to me.