Part 4 (1/2)

Yet the Seventh Division had been destroyed at the First battle of Ypres, only its framework had remained; its large reinforcements had been worked off in the night-raids and at Neuve Chapelle, and its second reinforcements had been almost exhausted at this Festubert. The speeches were made, not so much to the heroes as to new drafts. Kitchener's army was however flooding into France, and despite enormous casualties we were beginning in a way to have a national army. What was left of the old army became the instructors of the new. The regular army gave way to the volunteers.

It was a time of heart-searching in England. Optimism and pessimism began to be sharply defined. Russia had been routed. Lord Northcliffe made his sensational effort to make an easy-going London face bitter reality. Mr. Lloyd George at the Ministry of Munitions began to take a larger broader view of the military aspect of the war than did most of his colleagues. Preparations were made for the manufacture of sh.e.l.ls for the terrific onslaught of the Somme next year. Whilst many poor fools still thought that 1915 would see us through the strife, plans on the basis of a three or four years struggle were being definitely made. Then we were beginning to manufacture poison gas and had at last invented a handy bomb--the Mills grenade, our answer to the stick-bombs which dangled from the belts of German soldiers. It was a time of far-reaching military plans and dreams. All grown-up children who were not themselves tin soldiers were playing soldiers. Flying men carried terror across the skies, and sailors of submarines carried it under the sea. No prophet knew the number of men who would have to be killed before the politicians would be ready to come to Versailles to discuss the matter.

From England, France and Germany three or four million must actually die--that fact was unknown. In the summer of 1915 the number who had died was far from that figure. It is curious however to think of the many who had laid themselves down in earth's earthy bed in the full faith that their sacrifice would not be in vain--to think of the proud Germans, the fine ones, not the base ones, who believed in their Kaiser and that wonderful German Fatherland to which they owed their life before they owed their death, and to think of what was to come. Germany and her Kaiser not only defeated but humiliated and cast lower than all nations in old Europe; to think of the loyal Russian soldiers who perished in the first enthusiasm of the war with a bright starry faith in Russia, her Church and her Tsar, of the Grand Duke Oleg for instance, that young hero whose warm blood grew cold whilst the street-bred people of Berlin knocked nails in great Hindenburg's wooden statue--to think of these first Russians who lay dead with their weapons beside them in 1914-15, and then to think of the hideous revolution and those murders in Ekaterinburg when all Russia fell; to think of the fine youth of England and Scotland, of France, of Serbia, who died in the faith not only of national victory but of a victory for humanity, the boys whose fragment of iron destiny clove their brains or rived their hearts at the outset of the fray, and then to think of that sordid clash of selfishness at Versailles and of the untamed menagerie of Europe let loose in 1920. The spiritualists quickly claimed to get special messages from the dead. But did the dead only speak to the spiritualists? Did they say nothing more than was said to them? Most of us alas, hear nothing or only a ”Dinna ye hear it?” a wailing of the pipes at an infinite number of poor soldiers' funerals.

Well, the war enters a new phase in the summer of 1915. It will be fought in a larger more terrible way, the number of millions of deaths will begin after a while to seem not so far off. Killing becomes the religion of the hour.

The first hundreds of thousands of the volunteers roll up. The old Seventh Division which we have been following is broken up and reconstructed. The Guards Division was formed. So Scots Guards and Grenadiers marched away to join new comrades, to leave behind brave Borders and Gordons and Devons and Duke of Wellingtons. The 92nd feted the Scots, the Devons the Grenadiers; the Gordon pipers played all the laments of the clans and ”_Will ye no come back again!_”

And they went to Wizernes to prepare for the battle of Loos--a conflict which the gallant Highland lads were destined to enter first and the bright polished Guards but second, yet both to s.h.i.+ne and die.

In June General Foch's Tenth Army launched its Artois attack against the great ridge of ”Notre Dame de Lorette” which commands the Lens country from the South as the high ground of Loos does from the North. A hundred thousand Frenchmen perished for Notre Dame and it is henceforth a place of pilgrimage for France. The battle was the prelude to our battle of Loos and whilst the great new British army in reserve drilled and marched away to the North, it heard each night the drum-fire of the 75's rolling from the South. Later in the war when the British took over all the line 'twixt Lens and Arras the Canadians took Foch's victory a step further and captured Vimy Ridge. What Foch did in the summer of '15 was however to be eclipsed by what the combined armies should do in the autumn. Reliance was placed chiefly on the new man-power. The earlier battles of Neuve Chapelle and Festubert had been tests of the relations.h.i.+p of gun-power and man-power. Opinion inclined to support the theory that a superiority in numbers was the most telling factor in a battle. This seemingly was disproved, and the next theory was that in order to obtain victory there must be overwhelming superiority both in guns and in men. The Somme battle proved that even these were not enough.

In the battle of Loos however all the interest was centred on men, men personally. The new base was St. Omer, the picturesque ecclesiastical town with its castellated church towers in relief against the sky--all so thronged with khaki--henceforth till the war ends to be a great war centre. France lies in a bower beyond, and there are squads of poplar trees on hills, and green and happy meadows never scarred by sh.e.l.ls or wilted by gas. On the left on the road out to Wizernes is now a large cemetery, and here lie French dead with the tricolour upon them, British with an infinity of flowers and wreaths, Americans with grim and tall white crosses--American dead who will not be exhumed perhaps. Behind the American graves stand wedges of unpainted wood--a Chinese plot where lie what was mortal of many unknown coolies. On the right lie Germans, on the left _soldados_ of Portugal. This is called playfully the souvenir cemetery--there are so many of the dead they can be thus arranged, as children might arrange their toys. St. Omer was known as a great base hospital to which alas, so many were called to look their last upon their dying children, dying sons of England breathing out their last words before their bodies were laid away. There are those who are fond of saying that everything began at St. Omer. But for many also it was the place where it all--_ended_.

The cemetery past, (How it rains on it now!) you come to aerodromes all tortured and torn, indications of Handley Page but no indications of those who fly, the cages are all empty and there stands not a sentry. In plain blunt English the pa.s.ser-by is told that ”_Trespa.s.sers will be shot_” but in the heavy rain of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon a muddy crowd of French boys are playing a football match. Chinamen evidently worked beside these aerodromes, for you see their scrawls on the sheds and shelters.

Wizernes, where the Guards Division was formed, lies in a hollow below a long green ridge. Most of it is painted white--including _Au bon Diable_ a tavern of some name. The people know a pa.s.sing Englishman, not by the cut of his clothes alone but by his walk and his complexion and style.

Standing at their doorways old men give military salutes to any Englishman who happens to go by. All know bits of our tongue, of which they are as proud as if they had wounds to show. A poor woman in a little beer-house has eight daughters, five of whom are married and a sixth has a child by a Canadian. Little Renee, flaxen-haired, ruddy-cheeked, is getting on very well and the mother adores her, though a father in the New World his progeny has forgotten. This sixth daughter of substantial mother was in service at Havre and met the soldier there; she is now in service at St. Omer and not at all ”ruined.” There are thousands of baby tokens of the war in France. Some died no doubt, through lack of care; lightly they came and lightly they go, but a widespread sentimental feeling about departed Tommy s.h.i.+elds those who now, live from any feeling of disgrace.

Of course the men at the base begot more infants than the men in the line, the latter were too much used up for ”love” or ”l.u.s.t,” saw fewer girls and had less time on their hands. But all had their opportunities.

As we know, a great number of marriages were effected, and not a few overseas men are now living with French wives.

That has little however to do with Wizernes, whence behold Lord Cavan's men marching away one dull September morn. The music of the bands is refracted from that long parallel ridge of hill which goes with the road toward Arques--the drums, the fifes, the brilliant array; each company compact, glittering--the new Division. Some of it is utterly new, such as 4th Grenadiers and 1st Welsh straight from Little Sparta, others trail already a great war history from other divisions of the old army.

But the numbers are good. Sergeants are yelling at men who will be dead in a few weeks' time. Men are silently reviling those on whom destiny itself will quickly take revenge. All looks very authentic and lasting.

Unchecked optimism moreover reigns supreme. These compact units in their unhurried and ever regular quick march believe that they will win the war. Lens will be taken by others. They will come into action at the critical moment, somewhere near Douai. They will pierce the German belt of defence, split the enemy army, ”roll up their line,” and Germany realising that she is beaten will at once sue for peace. There may be some delay in formalities--then home for Christmas!

Behold in the Grand Place at Arques immaculate General Heywood inspecting his Third Brigade with its new units. Arques has a tall obelisk there now--_a ses cent cinquante heroiques et glorieux enfants, mort pour la France et la liberte_.

These inspections were as great an ordeal as the going into battle itself. In the line at least there were no drill-sergeants and regimental sergeant-majors. However, inspections cease and the long march in the rain begins, and new leather beats cobbled highways for many a long fifty minutes, and weary backs and feet find ten minutes in the hour all too little for recuperation. A little-touched happy agricultural country, with Calvaries here and there erected and blessed in 1919 in token of thanks that the land was spared from invasion. By Aire to Fontaine St. Hilaire, to the sight of the first coal pyramids of the Lens country and to the hearing of the first mighty thunders of the opening great battle. The Guards were told that they were intended for a sort of anchor to the cavalry. The Division would press on, and somewhere beyond Loos the cavalry would come up from behind, pa.s.s through the ranks, and press on to Douai. The Division would perhaps come into action at the Ca.n.a.l at Douai. So when the cavalry overtook the Guards whilst yet on the road to Loos it was a.s.sumed that the whole British army was in advance of its program, Douai taken, and the enemy in disorderly retreat. But on the day when optimism reached its height a Colonel in a motor coming back from the front gave the duller tidings that the attack had been held up. However, the sight of the cavalry regiments going past in all their splendour was a sort of lasting encouragement in the simple soldier's mind.

It is a gloomy sordid country with dirty mining villages placarded with yellow appeals to the proletariat and ”Vive la Russie!” ”Vive la revolution sociale!” and dirty homes and black-faced men in sooty coaly s.h.i.+rts--miserable Sailly, miserable Vermelles. Then the road debouches upon wide open country, the terrain and the landscape of the battle. It is a chalky heath interlaced and inter-run with trenches and barbed wire. The trenches were mostly dug by Scottish miners and were said to be the admiration of the troops in 1915. But standards in trench digging were low in the first year of the war, and one does not admire them now.

The landmarks of the horizon are peaked coal-heaps. The road which goes to Lens is bare and hard. Loos and Hulluch are on the left, and also the German line. Close in to the suburbs of Lens the line crosses the road.

Sh.e.l.ls must have come thick and fast on these September days. It is not a covetable country to march over under fire. One wonders what exactly the first divisions accomplished here on the days before the Guards came up. Special correspondents were given facilities at the time and one remembers among other things Mr. Buchan's despatch with its native pride in Highland regiments, and a sort of belief that they themselves had won the day. One had the impression of a sort of trial charge of kilted lads which showed what they would do later on. Indeed some of the Highlanders must have actually got into Lens. Nothing could stop them but death.

Were the lines between Vermelles and Loos German? These were supposed to have been captured during the first days of the attack. The Guards in artillery formation swept across leftward to Loos, past the spent legions--to the line, to Hill 70, the barrier to Lens city.

It is memorable to be in Loos on the anniversary of the opening of the battle, to walk up Hill 70 by the sharp-dug clumsy communication-trench, to reach the lateral lines on the brow of the hill and look down toward the shattered town. And Loos lies in disruption and dejection. It lost every roof, now it has perhaps a score of new ones visible to the eye.

The machinery of the pit-head is all down, likewise the clangorous iron tower which sh.e.l.ls seemed unable to destroy. Rusty wreckage runs along the base of the coal heap, the length of a long train. Heavy green shrub almost covers the coal embankment. On Hill 70 itself the old rusty wire remains, though so scanty as if much had corroded away. Sh.e.l.l-holes seem to afford more cover than the pitiful sc.r.a.pings in the chalk of the old trenches. There is a burnt-out wood on the left; on the right is the insurgent industrialism of unruined fosses; ahead are chalk-pits, chalk-mounds, thistles, dry gra.s.s, poppies, all dazzling in a bright September noon. Innumerable gra.s.shoppers are whispering in the breeze, and from all horizons one hears also the softened clatter of building.

You can even hear what is going on in Lens.

There is little of the debris of the fight--a rotten b.u.t.t-end of a rifle, a few shreds of German bombs, an old-fas.h.i.+oned gas bag. One recalls that the British first used gas at Loos. The air on Hill 70 on that September day was pregnant with gas. Many of our fellows died of it. The Germans on their side made much use of stick-bombs. The hill was strewn with ”buckshee” bombs. Did not a young soldier valiantly digging drive a pick through one, and send himself and Lord Petre of the Grenadiers to better country? The enemy manufactured vast quant.i.ties of this bomb--it was a pet toy of his, curiously exemplifying his mind. Its stated object was to terrify rather than to kill, and Englishmen believing more in iron and ”good shrapnel effects” always despised it.

But it was responsible for an enormous number of accidents.

On the brow of the hill and beyond there are increasing signs of German habitation. Near a vast white wallowing mine-crater there is a barricade of sand-bags and wire, the point of difference 'twixt friend and foe.

After that one soon comes upon those wooden framed cellarways which plunge from the side of the trench into the bowels of the earth. They go down and down and are seldom explored by soldier or civilian. Some of these have their gruesome secrets in their dark depths. Many Germans were killed in them. Fear and industry conceived them. They were safe enough at ordinary times, but death-traps in an attack; a man at the bottom of a steep pit stood little chance against an enemy at the door with a bomb. The British and French in this case understood the war better than the Germans. A slighter cover or shelter whilst giving less sense of security did give vigilance and alertness. Germany dug the grave of her cause far from the ends she had in view and settled down to a war of concrete and defence when she should have understood her lines as the merest temporary abiding places on the way to victory. It prolonged the settlement for years.

How the cornflowers blossom on the German side! Did not they sow the seeds here for their Kaiser. They sowed the seed--and now it blossoms on the wilderness. Bright blue flowers s.h.i.+ne in the midst of withered nature, otherwise in September 1920 the crest of Hill 70 is so covered with brittle yellow weeds that a match would set it aflame from end to end. It is like a dried inland beach of the old war. The waves no longer roll up with thunder and expire as once they did. But you can see in imagination the young Guards officer in his Burberry, cane in hand leading his flower of manhood--forward, forward, toward the sh.o.r.e of Lens--see the expiring first line and the second line that follows pa.s.sing through and over it, the third that goes again---- They were the waves which at last crumbled all defences.

Not that Loos was a triumph of attack. Little justice will no doubt be done on our side to the German defence of Lens, but it was a defence which rivalled ours of Ypres. The enemy was driven back on both sides of it during the later campaigns of the war (chiefly in 1917). Technically and theoretically the Germans could be forced to yield it at any moment. But in practice it could not be taken from them. We'd take it were it of iron; they'd hold it were it of b.u.t.ter. Artillery laid the town flat, but artillery could not destroy the cellars, and of every cellar the German, with the reinforcement of iron and concrete, made a machine-gun nest or post for riflemen. For the rest, we held nearly all the Vermelles--Lens road, and the greater part of that from La Ba.s.see to Lens. From Hill 70 one sees geographically a wide landscape of the war.

It was a remarkable vantage-ground for beholding the doings of one's own side.