Part 6 (1/2)

Suddenly there is a note of warning in the restaurant, whisperings about _l'officier_, to make it appear as if the men were drinking beer, the woman comes and takes the wine-bottles and pours their contents into metal tankards, sweeps the table clean of wine driblets, and reprimands the topers.

They pull themselves together and take on a sobered gait. One of them opens a sand-bag in his possession and brings out two enormous doorsteps of bread and b.u.t.ter. Silence reigns. There is a suspense. Someone evidently is expected. Will it be a dapper, constrained, politely inquisitive British officer? Hardly! Ah, here he is! Enter fiery British sergeant-major with bristling moustache and bright crown on his sleeve, stout, smart, and red.

”Na then,” says he, darting upon the Falstaffs, ”play the game, play the bloomin' game. Come on, travai in the cemetery. Officeer come, no bon pour moy, bon pour vous, no bon pour moy. Com' on now or I'll jolly well have to s.h.i.+ft yer. The Belgiques and the Algerians know all about yer.

It's all over the place.”

”Ca ne fait rien.”

”Ca-ne-fait-rien pour vous but not pour moy. Officeer bocu fache avec moy. You no catch it, I catch it, compris?”

One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.

”Yers I know,” says the sergeant-major indignantly. ”Moy zig-zag las'

night. But n-no zig-zag to-day.”

They offer him their gla.s.ses--apparently of beer. He sips one and then drains it, and then drains the other one too.

”Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others,” he continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.

”Na then,” says he. ”Quick March to the cemetery!” And they go.

How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the living!

The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn suns.h.i.+ne the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some sh.o.r.es when a neap-tide leaves them bare.

Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. The _sinistres_ of the Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits, levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their little petrol-ploughs. The sh.e.l.l-splashed approaches to the line can with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real wors.h.i.+p bending over _la France_ and he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred times what he has already done--and he will do it. A hundredth part of the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and rise on full fleshy stalks, and they are thick like a wall. They grow from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible yet, though not so terrible if still impa.s.sable. You see gleaming above the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross s.h.i.+ning afar and make it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some s.h.i.+p to a white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a conventional scribble on the moor--the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out on to a limy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the returned peasants making _sauter les abris_ with dynamite, and then the eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from the centre of a large tableland. It is the b.u.t.te of Warlencourt, for the possession and retention of which what quant.i.ties of blood were shed, the famous b.u.t.te which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs.

Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light Infantry--to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf.

Regt. 159 who held the b.u.t.te against all comers in 1916 and recaptured it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their monument a concrete base. From the top of the b.u.t.te there is a complete circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods, wrecks of villages--a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the great Somme scene.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from Albert runs smooth and level below the b.u.t.te, a track for s.p.a.ce-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness of the ma.s.sed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorials of the German dead--Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short of it--like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of 1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front; rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to superintend a burying party--some three hundred sodden green bundles to be disposed of--three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find ”the everlasting arms.” He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the war-bred cynicism of those who believed in letting _others_ be heroic.

He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in ”putting his back into it,” and doing even the meanest duty as if it were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men.

He was so energetic in the football field playing officers versus sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his grave at C---- and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males, _entre eux_, a ”man's man.” Poor hero--from that night of burying green bundles to that morning when we buried him--he marched through the valley of the shadow of death, tormented as Pilgrim was by hobgoblins and satyrs. But when he died he shed his war body, he shed that lurid phraseology, and became once more, no doubt, the Kingsley-Carlylean hero that he was, with some sort of knowledge of human sorrow which those who lived in peace knew not. So it must have been also with those who once breathed within the sodden green bundles. They shook off something evil when they died, but in pa.s.sing through it they must somehow have understood more.

Sorrow dimmed the eyes even of the hardest swearer of the Army. And the dead now constrain us to a new human tenderness, they empower us to touch more delicately and to understand more deeply--to love more. Pity for us if we do not now live differently because of the dead!

Thus as one walks through Bapaume and sees the children of new Bapaume playing in their innocence in the streets and the ruins, one can look down on them more tenderly, more caressingly, for the sake of the dead, pa.s.sing on, as it were, man's forgiveness to man. And in our relations.h.i.+ps with the grown-ups, our neighbours, ourselves dressed differently, we can have more patience, more compa.s.sion, more readiness to help and to be kind. It comes from the dead, it comes from the living who were dead.

What that winter was before the Germans retreated! What the hours on the Cross were before the Saviour died! In our loathing of pain we shudder to think of it. Others bore it; we must bear it. And when the time is pa.s.sed Golgotha remains, that Golgotha which was in fact so near to the gate of the Temple itself. In Bapaume, where all houses have been made vaults, stand the white ruins of a church, greyish-white and spectral as if of the material of another world. But for its pointing walls it is one white ruin, loveliness in a heap and the baleful shadow of the hand of the malefactor. In the ruins of the church of the leaning Virgin at Albert the first words one reads are JESUS NATUS EST, as if the ruins had been given tongue to say in the moment of death the supreme Christian paradox, and at Bapaume as you reverently approach this strange new _Pieta_ you see still unshattered the Church's Latin carved on stone--AD MEUM SANCTUARIUM--to My sanctuary. If, like Thomas, you do not believe, you must go forth and touch with your hands and feel with your eyes--to My sanctuary!

Bapaume lies more abased even than Albert. It is as if its stones had had a soul and been afraid, vibrant with the horror of humanity. The consternation of inanimate matter is expressed in its ruins. The Hotel de Ville, its seat of power, was evidently built of large granite blocks which the rising German mine of March 1917 must have scattered like hail over the town. And amidst these mighty stones flew the tender bodies and the spirits of the French deputes, Albert Taillandier and Raoul Briquet, who had just said in their hearts--_The enemy hath departed_, when the enemy was suddenly at their doors.

The _sinistres_ are living in cellars and wooden huts. The railway-station is two ”baby elephants” of rusty iron. Where were large shops and as one can imagine, in the old days, shop-fronts full of ladies' costumes and hats, windows displaying bedroom suites of furniture, windows full of stationery and books, are now diminutive piles of rubbish pathetically ticketed with the name of the old establishment--Maison Betrancourt, Maison this, Maison that--_transferee a un autre lieu_. In the Grande Place stands the much-shrapnelled base of a monument where the stone hero has gone to join the hero he commemorated, and the spite of a new era has even endeavoured to erase his name.

Where thousands lived and loved and pushed their trade and died, now but a few hundred hold together in the midst of the wilderness. They have a.s.sembled from all points of the compa.s.s. War whirled some to Germany, some to Paris, some to the Pyrenees. The hopeful came back and the faithful decided to stay. It is a picture of human triumph over destruction, but only a pathetic triumph, not a glorious one. In the summer, with long days and warm nights it is less unnatural to live in this waste. Warmth and light join the _sinistres_ to all France and Europe, but winter with its short days and cold and great darkness folds away the vision of a resurrection. A poky train, without lights, creeps at night from Achiet to Bapaume through villages of fearful name.

Bapaume becomes conscious of all the dreadful places which surround it, places whose names are full of the awe of death and of the war--Riencourt, Bullecourt, Ervillers, Mory, Vaulx-Vraucourt, and a hundred others, nothing in themselves but held in the cerements of the dead.

It is a strange walk now, to the Hindenburg line. You are traversing ground which was four times overtrodden and overfought. The Germans took it in 1914. We sh.e.l.led it in 1916 and drove the enemy out in 1917. The enemy swept over it in March 1918 and then let it go as he retired in September. German, French, and British lie buried beside one another.