The enemy had built eight pontoon bridges over the Yser canal, but all of them had been destroyed. This was a good piece of news. But against it was the heavy loss of a Belgian company holding another bridge further down the river. At Dixmude the Belgians held the outer streets. Outside there had been heavy trench fighting. The enemy had charged several times with the bayonet, but had been raked back by the mitrailleuses.
Things were going on rather well at most parts of the line.
The French batteries were getting the range every time, and their gunners were guessing at heaps of German dead. The Belgian infantry was holding firm. Their cavalry was out of action for the time, trying to keep warm on the roadsides.
That was all the truth that I could get out of a tangle of confused details. All through another day I watched the business of battle—a strange, mysterious thing in which one fails to find any controlling brain. Regiments came out of the trenches and wandered back, caked with clay, haggard for lack of sleep, with a glint of hunger in their eyes. Guns passed along the roads with ammunition wagons, whose axles shrieked over the stones. For an hour a Belgian battery kept plugging shots towards the enemy's lines. The artillerymen were leisurely at their work, handling their shells with interludes of conversation. At luncheon time they lay about behind the guns smoking cigarettes, and I was glad, for each of their shots seemed to wreck my own brain. At a neighbouring village things were more lively. The enemy was turning his fire this way. A captive balloon had signalled the position, and shrapnels were bursting close. One shell tore up a great hole near the railway line.
Shell after shell fell upon one dung-heap—mistaken perhaps for a company of men. Shrapnel bullets pattered into the roadway, a piece of jagged shell fell with a clatter.
My own chauffeur—a young man of very cool nerve and the best driver I have known—picked it up with a grin, and then dropped it, with a sharp cry. It was almost red-hot. The flames of the enemy's batteries could be seen stabbing through a fringe of trees, perhaps two kilometres away, by Pervyse. Their shells were making puff-balls of smoke over neighbouring farms, and for miles round I could see the clouds stretching out into long, thin wisps. The air throbbed with horrible concussions, the dull full boom of big guns, the sharp staccato of the smaller shell, and the high singing note of it as it came soaring overhead. Gradually one began to realize the boredom of battle, to acquire some of that fantastic indifference to the chance of death which enables the soldiers to stir their soup without an upward glance at a skyful of jagged steel. Only now and then the old question came to one, "This—or the next?"
It was only the adventure of searching out the wounded that broke the monotony for the Belgian ambulance men. At first they were not hard to find—they were crowded upon the straw in cottage parlours, cleared of all but the cheap vases on the mantelshelf and family photographs tacked upon walls that had not been built for the bloody mess of tragedy which they now enclosed. On their bodies they bore the signs of the tremendous accuracy of the enemy's artillery, and by their number, increasing during the day, one could guess at the tragic endurance of the Belgian infantry in the ring of iron which was closing upon them; drawing just a little nearer by half a village or half a road as the hours passed. The ambulances carried them away to the station of Fortem, where those who could still sit up were packed into a steam tram, and where the stretcher-cases were taken to the civil hospital at Furnes by motor transport. But in outlying farmsteads in the zone of fire, and in isolated cottages which had been struck by a chance shot, were other wounded men difficult to get. It was work for scouting cars, and too dangerous for ambulances.
Some volunteers made several journeys down the open roads to places not exactly suitable for dalliance. Lieutenant de Broqueville called upon me for this purpose several times because I had a fast little car. I was glad of the honour, though when he pointed to a distant roof where a wounded man was reported to be lying, it looked to me a long, long way in the zone of fire. Two houses blown to pieces by the side of a ditch showed that the enemy's shells were dropping close, and it was a test of nerves to drive deliberately through the flat fields with sharp, stabbing flashes on their frontiers, and right into the middle of an infernal tumult of guns.
It was in the darkness that I went back to Furnes again, with the last of the wounded—a French corporal, who groaned in anguish at every jolt in the road, and then was silent with his head flopping sideways in a way that frightened me. Several times I called back to him, "Courage, mon vieux! … Comment allez vous?" But he made no answer and there were times when I thought I had a dead man behind me. A biting wind was blowing, and I leaned over his seat to put a blanket over him. But it always blew off that dead-grey face and blood-stained body. Once he groaned, and I was glad to hear the sound and to know that he was still alive. Another man trudging along the highway, using his rifle as a crutch, called out. He spoke the word blessé, and I stopped to take him up and sped on again, glancing to right and left at the villages on fire, at the quick flashes of Belgian and German artillery signalling death to each other in the night. The straight trees rushed by like tall, hurrying ghosts. For most of the way we drove without our head-lights through tunnels of darkness. "Queer, isn't it?" said my driver, and it was his only comment on this adventure in the strangest drama of his life.
19
That night the wind came howling across the flat fields into Furnes and a rain-storm broke in fierce gusts upon the convent walls. In this old building with many corridors and innumerable windows, panes of glass rattled and window-sashes creaked and doors banged like thunderclaps. It was impossible to keep a candle alight down any of the passages unless it were protected in a lantern, and a cold mist crept into the house, stealthily striking one with a clammy chill. I stayed up most of the night in the kitchen, having volunteered to stoke the fires and fill hot-water bottles for the wounded. Most of the nurses had gone to bed utterly exhausted. Only two or three of them remained in the wards with one of the doctors. Every now and then the outer bell would jangle, and I would hear the wheels of an ambulance crunching into the courtyard.
"Blessés!" said a woman who was watching the fires with me.
But we could not take in another blessé as there were no more beds or bed-spaces, and after despairing conversations Belgian ambulance officers at the front door of the convent went elsewhere. The house became very quiet except for the noise of the wind and the rain. In the scullery where I sat by the stoves which were in my charge, I could only hear one voice speaking. It was speaking two rooms away, in a long, incessant monologue of madness. Now and again a white-faced nurse came out for newly-filled water-bottles, and while I scalded my fingers with screws which would not fit and with boiling water poured into narrow necks, she told me about a French officer who was dying.
"He wants his wife so badly. He would die quite happily if he could only see her for a minute. But she is in Paris, and he will be dead before the morning comes… I have written a letter for him, and he kissed it before I wrote his wife's address. He keeps calling out her name."
The scullery was warm and cosy, in spite of all the draughts. Sitting back in a wooden chair, I nearly fell asleep, because I had had a long day in the fields and fatigue threatened to overwhelm me. But I wakened with a start when a door opened, letting in a sudden blast of cold air and the noise of the beating rain, and then banged with violence. I seemed to hear footsteps coming across the kitchen floor, and, with an eerie feeling of some new presence in the convent, I strode out of the scullery. A queer little figure startled me. It was a girl in man's clothes, except for a white cap on her head, tight-fitting above her eyes. She was dripping wet and caked in slimy mud, and she faltered forward a little and spoke in French.
"I am very wet. And so tired and hungry! If I could sleep here, on the floor, and dry myself a little——-"
"Who are you?" I asked. There seemed something uncanny in this little figure coming out of the wild night.
It appeared that she was one of two Belgian girls who since the beginning of the war had acted as infirmières with the Belgian troops, giving the first aid in the trenches, carrying hot soup to them, and living with them under fire. She seemed hardly more than a child, and spoke childishly in a pitiful way, while she twisted the corner of her jacket so that water came out and made a pool about her on the boards. She dried herself in front of the fire and ate—ravenously— some food which had been left on a side-table, and then lay down in a corner of the refectory, falling into the deepest sleep as soon as her head had touched the mattress. She did not wake next morning, though fifty-five people made a clatter at the breakfast-table, and at four in the afternoon she was still sleeping, like a sick child, with her head drooping over the mattress.
20
That day, owing to the heavy rain in the night, the roads were slimy with mud, so that the cars skidded almost over the brim of the dykes. There was more movement among the troops, less sitting about for orders. Officers were riding up and down the roads, and wheeling into little groups for quick discussion. Something was happening— something more than the ding-dong slam of the guns. A regiment of Belgian infantry came plodding through the mud, covered with whitish clay even to their top-hats. They were earth-men, with the blanched look of creatures who live below ground. The news was whispered about that the enemy was breaking through along one of the roads between Nieuport and Fumes. Then the report came through that they had smashed their way to Wulpen.
"We hope to hold them," said an officer, "but Fumes is in danger. It will be necessary to clear out."
In consequence of this report, it was necessary to be quick in the search for the wounded who had been struck down in the night. The medical men were resolute not to go until they had taken in all that could be removed in time. A little crowd of them were in a small villa along the road. They were wet to the skin and quite famished, without food or drink. A car went back for hot coffee and bread. There was another group of wounded in the church of Oudecapelle.
They were bad cases, and lay still upon the straw. I shall never forget the picture of that church with its painted statues huddled together and toppled down. St. Antony of Padua and St. Sebastian were there in the straw, and crude pictures of saints on the walls stared down upon those bodies lying so quiet on the floor. It was the house of God, but it was filled with the cruelty of life, and those statues seemed to mock at men's faith.
In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by the people. They had packed a few things into bundles and made ready to leave their homes. In the convent where I had helped to wash up and to fill the part of odd-job man when I was not out with the "flying column," the doctors and nurses were already loading the ambulances with all their cases. The last of the wounded was sent away to a place of safety. He was a man with a sabre-cut on his head, who for four days had lain quite still, with a grave Oriental face, which seemed in the tranquillity of death.
A group of nuns pleaded to be taken with the doctors and nurses. They could help in the wards or in the kitchen—if only they might go and escape the peril of the German soldiery.
I went across the square to my own room in the Hôtel de la Couronne, and put a few things together. A friend of mine who helped me told the story of a life—the mistakes that had nearly ruined it, the adventures of a heart. A queer conversation at a time when the enemy was coming down the road. The guns were very loud over Wulpen way. They seemed to be coming closer. Yet there was no panic. There was even laughter in the courtyard of the hospital, where the doctors tossed blankets, mattresses, food stores and stoves into the motor ambulances. They were in no hurry to go. It was not the first or the second time they had to evacuate a house menaced by the enemy. They had made a habit of it, and were not to be flurried. I helped the blue-eyed boy to lift the great stoves. They were "some" weight, as an American would say, and both the blue-eyed boy and myself were plastered with soot, so that we looked like sweeps calling round for orders. I lifted packing-cases which would have paralysed me in times of peace and scouted round for some of the thousand and one things which could not be left behind without a tragedy. But at last the order was given to start, and the procession of motor-cars started out for Poperinghe, twenty-five kilometres to the south. Little by little the sound of the guns died away, and the cars passed through quiet fields where French troops bivouacked round their camp fires. I remember that we passed a regiment of Moroccans half- way to Poperinghe, and I looked back from the car to watch them pacing up and down between their fires, which glowed upon their red cloaks and white robes and their grave, bearded Arab faces. They looked miserably cold as the wind flapped their loose garments, but about these men in the muddy field there was a sombre dignity which took one's imagination back to the day when the Saracens held European soil.
21
It was dark when we reached Poperinghe and halted our cars in the square outside the Town Hall, among a crowd of other motor-cars, naval lorries, mitrailleuses, and wagons. Groups of British soldiers stood about smoking cigarettes and staring at us curiously through the gloom as though not quite sure what to make of us. And indeed we must have looked an odd party, for some of us were in khaki and some of us in civilian clothes with Belgian caps, and among the crowd of nurses was a carriage-load of nuns, huddled up in their black cloaks. Warning of our arrival in Poperinghe should have been notified to the municipal authorities, so that they might find lodgings for us; and the Queen of the Belgians had indeed sent through a message to that effect, But there seemed to be some trouble about finding a roof under which to lay our heads, and an hour went by in the square while the lady in charge of the domesticity department interviewed the mayor, cajoled the corporation, and inspected convents down side streets. She came back at last with a little hopelessness in her eyes.
"Goodness knows where we can go! There doesn't seem room for a mouse in Poperinghe, and meanwhile the poor nurses are dying of hunger. We must get into some kind of shelter."
I was commissioned to find at least a temporary abode and to search around for food; not at all an easy task in a dark town where I had never been before and crowded with the troops of three nations. I was also made the shepherd of all these sheep, who were commanded to keep their eyes upon me and not to go astray but to follow where I led. It was a most ridiculous position for a London journalist of a shy and retiring nature, especially as some of the nurses were getting out of hand and indulging in private adventures. One of them, a most buxom and jolly soul, who, as she confided to me, "didn't care a damn," had established friendly relations with a naval lieutenant, and I had great trouble in dragging her away from his engaging conversation. Others had discovered a shop where hot coffee was being served to British soldiers who were willing to share it with attractive ladies. A pretty shepherd I looked when half my flock had gone astray!
Then one of the chauffeurs had something like an apoplectic stroke in the street—the effect of a nervous crisis after a day under shell-fire— and with two friendly "Tommies" I helped to drag him into the Town Hall. He was a very stout young man, with well-developed muscles, and having lain for some time in a state of coma, he suddenly became delirious and tried to fight me. I disposed of him in a backyard, where he gradually recovered, and then I set out again in search of my sheep. After scouting about Poperinghe in the darkness, I discovered a beer tavern with a fair-sized room in which the party might be packed with care, and then, like a pocket patriarch with the children of Israel, I led my ladies on foot to the place of sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head from the glamour of the pewter pots. The others crowded in anyhow and said in a dreadful chorus, like Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew," "We want our supper!"
A brilliant inspiration came to me. As there were British troops in Poperinghe, there must also be British rations, and I had glorious visions of Maconochie and army biscuits. Out into the dark streets again I went with my little car, and after wayside conversations with British soldiers who knew nothing but their own job, found at last the officer in charge of the commissariat. He was a tall fellow and rather haughty in the style of a British officer confronted abruptly with an unusual request. He wanted to know who the devil I was, not liking my civilian clothes and suspecting a German spy. But he became sympathetic when I told him, quite dishonestly, that I was in charge of a British field ambulance under the Belgian Government, which had been forced to evacuate Fumes as the enemy had broken through the Belgian lines. I expressed my gratitude for his kindness, which I was sure he would show, in providing fifty-five army rations for fifty- five doctors and nurses devilishly hungry and utterly destitute. After some hesitation he consented to give me a "chit," and turning to a sergeant who had been my guide down a dark street, said: "Take this officer to the depot and see that he gets everything he wants." It was a little triumph not to be appreciated by readers who do not know the humiliations experienced by correspondents in time of war.
A few minutes later the officer came padding down the street after me, and I expected instant arrest and solitary confinement to the end of the war. But he was out for information.
"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, very politely, "but would you mind giving me a sketch of the military situation round your part?"
I gave him an outline of the affair which had caused the Belgian headquarters staff to shift from Furnes, and though it was, I fancy, slightly over-coloured, he was very much obliged… So, gloriously, I drove back to the beer-tavern with the fifty-five army rations which were enough to feed fifty-five starving people for a week, and was received with cheers. That night, conscious of good deeds, I laid down in the straw of a school-house which had been turned into a barracks, and by the light of several candle-ends, scribbled a long dispatch, which became a very short one when the British censor had worked his will with it.
22
After all, the ambulance column did not have to stay in Poperinghe, but went back to their old quarters, with doctors, nurses and nuns, and all their properties. The enemy had not followed up its advantages, and the Belgian troops, aided by French marines and other French troops who now arrived in greater numbers, thrust them back and barred the way to Dunkirk. The waters of the Yser had helped to turn the tide of war. The sluice-gates were opened and flooded the surrounding fields, so that the enemy's artillery was bogged and could not move.
For a little while the air in all that region between Furnes and Nieuport, Dixmude and Pervyse, was cleansed of the odour and fume of battle. But there were other causes of the German withdrawal after one day, at least, when it seemed that nothing short of miraculous aid could hold them from a swift advance along the coast. The chief cause was to be found at Ypres, where the British army sustained repeated and most desperate onslaughts. Ypres was now the storm centre in a ten- days' battle of guns, which was beyond all doubt the most ferocious and bloody episode in the first year of war on the Western side of operations. Repeatedly, after being checked in their attacks by a slaughter which almost annihilated entire regiments, the Germans endeavoured to repair their shattered strength by bringing up every available man and gun for another bout of blood. We know now that it was one of the most awful conflicts in which humanity has ever agonized. Heroism shone through it on both sides. The resistance and nerve strength of the British troops were almost superhuman; and in spite of losses which might have demoralized any army, however splendid in valour, they fought on with that dogged spirit which filled the trenches at Badajoz and held the lines of Torres Vedras, a hundred years before, when the British race seemed to be stronger than its modern generation.
There were hours when all seemed lost, when it was impossible to bring up reserves to fill the gaps in our bleeding battalions, when so many dead and wounded lay about and so few remained to serve the guns and hold the trenches that another attack pushed home would have swept through our lines and broken us to bits. The cooks and the commissariat men took their places in the trenches, and every man who could hold a rifle fired that day for England's sake, though England did not know her peril.
But the German losses were enormous also, and during those ten days they sacrificed themselves with a kind of Oriental valour, such as heaped the fields of Omdurman with Soudanese. The Kaiser was the new Mahdi for whom men died in masses, going with fatalistic resignation to inevitable death. After a lull for burning and burial, for the refilling of great gaps in regiments and divisions, the enemy moved against us with new masses, but again death awaited them, in spite of all their guns, and the British held their ground.
They held their ground with superb and dauntless valour, and out of the general horror of it all there emerges the fine, bright chivalry of young officers and men who did amazing deeds, which read like fairy tales, even when they are told soberly in official dispatches. In this slaughter field the individual still found a chance now and then of personal prowess, and not all his human qualities had been annihilated or stupefied by the overwhelming power of artillery.
23
The town of Ypres was added to the list of other Belgian towns like those in which I saw the ruin of a nation.
It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks and shattered glass. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between, furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.
The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the tale of this tragedy.
On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.
The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding, or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which they will never find the right words.
Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax one of the dogs to come with them. "Might have brought us luck," they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast. But it slunk back into the ruin of its master's house, distrustful of men who did things not belonging to the code of beasts.
24
Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said. Yet in a general way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres masses of men did not fight so much as stand until they died.
"We just wait for death," said a Belgian officer one night, "and wonder if it doesn't reach us out of all this storm of shells. It is a war without soul or adventure. In the early days, when I scoured the country with a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it. Any audacity we had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment. The individual counted."
"But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do—infantry, cavalry, scouts? It is the gun that does all the business heaving out shells, delivering death in a merciless way. It is guns, with men as targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees around us by a storm of hail. Our men are falling like the leaves, and the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on either side. One week of death is followed by another week of death. The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on again. It is appalling."
The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch of wounded—a thousand of them—were lying on the straw. "It is appalling," he said. "The destruction of this shell-fire is making a shambles of human bodies. How can we cope with it? What can we do with such a butchery?"
Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields, men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.
Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.
It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the country between Dixmude and Nieuport. There was a strange silence behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines, were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards the region round Ypres.
Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again, and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells, firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.
Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something—soldiers or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.
Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the convent, and one smashed into the Hôtel de la Noble Rose, going straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.
French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude was retaken by the Germans.
As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy. They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.
If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their destruction of this fine old Flemish town.
But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many thousands of dead and wounded.
The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.
25
The character of the fighting in this part of Flanders entered into the monotone of the winter campaign and, though the censorship was blamed for scarcity of news, there was really nothing to conceal in the way of heroic charges by cavalry, dashing bayonet attacks, or rapid counter-movements by infantry in mass. Such things for which public imagination craved were not happening.
What did happen was a howling gale shrieking across the dunes, and swirling up the sands into blinding clouds, and tearing across the flat marshlands as though all the invisible gods of the old ghost world were racing in their chariots.
In the trenches along the Yser men crouched down close to the moist mud to shelter themselves from a wind which was harder to dodge than shrapnel shells. It lashed them with a fierce cruelty. In spite of all the woollen comforters and knitted vests made by women's hands at home, the wind found its way through to the bones and marrow of the soldiers so that they were numbed. At night it was an agony of cold, preventing sleep, even if men could sleep while shells were searching for them with a cry of death.
The gunners dug pits for themselves, and when they ceased fire for a time crawled to shelter, smoking through little outlets in the damp blankets in which they had wrapped their heads and shoulders. They tied bundles of straw round their legs to keep out the cold and packed old newspapers inside their chests as breast-plates, and tried to keep themselves warm, at least in imagination.
There was no battlefield in the old idea of the world. How often must one say this to people at home who think that a modern army is encamped in the fields with bivouac fires and bell tents? The battle was spread over a wide area of villages and broken towns and shattered farmhouses, and neat little homesteads yet untouched by fire or shell. The open roads were merely highways between these points of shelter, in which great bodies of troops were huddled—the internal lines of communication connecting various parts of the fighting machine.
It was rather hot, as well as cold, at Oudecapelle and Nieucapelle, and along the line to Styvekenskerke and Lom-bardtzyde. The enemy's batteries were hard at work again belching out an inexhaustible supply of shells. Over there, the darkness was stabbed by red flashes, and the sky was zigzagged by waves of vivid splendour, which shone for a moment upon the blanched faces of men who waited for death.
Through the darkness, along the roads, infantry tramped towards the lines of trenches, to relieve other regiments who had endured a spell in them. They bent their heads low, thrusting forward into the heart of the gale, which tore at the blue coats of these Frenchmen and plucked at their red trousers, and slashed in their faces with cruel whips. Their side-arms jingled against the teeth of the wind, which tried to snatch at their bayonets and to drag the rifles out of their grip. They never raised their heads to glance at the Red Cross carts coming back.
Some of the French officers, tramping by the side of their men, shouted through the swish of the gale:
"Courage, mes petits!"
"II fait mauvais temps pour les sales Boches!"
In cottage parlours near the fighting lines—that is to say in the zone of fire, which covered many villages and farmsteads, French doctors, buttoned up to the chin in leather coats, bent over the newest batches of wounded.
"Shut that door! Sacred name of a dog; keep the door shut! Do you want the gale to blow us up the chimney?"
But it was necessary to open the door to bring in another stretcher where a man lay still.
"Pardon, mon capitaine," said one of the stretcher-bearers, as the door banged to, with a frightful clap.
Yesterday the enemy reoccupied Dixmude.
So said the official bulletin, with its incomparable brevity of eloquence.
26
For a time, during this last month in the first year of the war, I made my headquarters at Dunkirk, where without stirring from the town there was always a little excitement to be had. Almost every day, for instance, a German aeroplane—one of the famous Taube flock— would come and drop bombs by the Town Hall or the harbour, killing a woman or two and a child, or breaking many panes of glass, but never destroying anything of military importance (for women and children are of no importance in time of war), although down by the docks there were rich stores of ammunition, petrol, and material of every kind. These birds of death came so regularly in the afternoon that the Dunquerquoises, who love a jest, even though it is a bloody one, instead of saying "Trois heures et demie," used to say, "Taube et demie" and know the time.
There was a window in Dunkirk which looked upon the chief square. In the centre of the square is the statue of Jean-Bart, the famous captain and pirate of the seventeenth century, standing in his sea- boots (as he once strode into the presence of the Sun-King) and with his sword raised above his great plumed hat. I stood in the balcony of the window looking down at the colour and movement of the life below, and thinking at odd moments—the thought always thrust beneath the surface of one's musings—of the unceasing slaughter of the war not very far away across the Belgian frontier. All these people here in the square were in some way busy with the business of death. They were crossing these flagged stones on the way to the shambles, or coming back from the shell-stricken towns, là bas, as the place of blood is called, or taking out new loads of food for guns and men, or bringing in reports to admirals and the staff, or going to churches to pray for men who have done these jobs before, and now, perhaps, lie still, out of it.
This square in Dunkirk contained many of the elements which go to make up the actions and reactions of this war. It seemed to me that a clever stage manager desiring to present to his audience the typical characters of this military drama—leaving out the beastliness, of course—would probably select the very people and groups upon whom I was now looking down from the window. Motor-cars came whirling up with French staff officers in dandy uniforms (the stains of blood and mud would only be omitted by Mr. Willie Clarkson). In the centre, just below the statue of Jean-Bart, was an armoured-car which a Belgian soldier, with a white rag round his head, was explaining to a French cuirassier whose long horse-hair queue fell almost to his waist from his linen-covered helm. Small boys mounted the step and peered into the wonder-box, into the mysteries of this neat death-machine, and poked grubby fingers into bullet-holes which had scored the armour-plates. Other soldiers—Chasseurs Alpins in sky-blue coats, French artillery men in their dark-blue jackets, Belgian soldiers wearing shiny top-hats with eye-shades, or dinky caps with gold or scarlet tassels, and English Tommies in mud-coloured khaki— strolled about the car, and nodded their heads towards it as though to say, "That has killed off a few Germans, by the look of it. Better sport than trench digging."
The noise of men's voices and laughter—they laugh a good deal in war time, outside the range of shells—came up to the open window; overpowered now and then by the gurgles and squawks of motor- horns, like beasts giving their death-cries. With a long disintegrating screech there came up a slate-grey box on wheels. It made a semicircular sweep, scattering a group of people, and two young gentlemen of the Royal Naval Air Service sprang down and shouted "What-ho!" very cheerily to two other young gentlemen in naval uniforms who shouted back "Cheer-o!" from the table under my balcony.
I knew all of them, especially one of the naval airmen who flies what he calls a motor-bus and drops bombs with sea curses upon the heads of any German troops he can find on a morning's reconnaissance. He rubs his hand at the thought that he has "done in" quite a number of the "German blighters." With a little luck he hopes to nobble a few more this afternoon. A good day's work like this bucks him up wonderfully, he says, except when he comes down an awful whop in the darned old motor-bus, which is all right while she keeps going but no bloomin' use at all when she spreads her skirts in a ploughed field and smashes her new set of stays. Oh, a bad old vixen, that seaplane of his! Wants a lot of coaxin'.
A battery of French artillery rattled over the cobblestones. The wheels were caked with clay, and the guns were covered with a grey dust. They were going up Dixmude way, or along to Ramscapelle. The men sat their horses as though they were glued to the saddles. One of them had a loose sleeve pinned across his chest, but a strong grip on his bridle with his left hand. The last wheels rattled round the corner, and a little pageant, more richly coloured, came across the stage. A number of Algerian Arabs strode through the square, with a long swinging gait. They were wearing blue turbans above the flowing white "haik" which fell back upon their shoulders, and the white burnous which reached to their ankles. They were dark, bearded men; one of them at least with the noble air of Othello, the Moor, and with his fine dignity.
They stared up at the statue of Jean-Bart, and asked a few questions of a French officer who walked with a shorter step beside them. It seemed to impress their imagination, and they turned to look back at that figure with the raised sword and the plumed hat. Three small boys ran by their side and held out grubby little hands, which the Arabs shook, with smiles that softened the hard outlines of their faces.
Behind them a cavalcade rode in. They were Arab chiefs, on little Algerian horses, with beautifully neat and clean limbs, moving with the grace of fallow deer across the flagged stones of Dunkirk. The bridles glistened and tinkled with silver plates. The saddles were covered with embroidered cloths. The East came riding to the West. These Mohammedans make a religion of fighting. It has its ritual and its ceremony—even though shrapnel makes such a nasty mess of men.
So I stood looking down on these living pictures of a city in the war zone. But now and again I glanced back into the room behind the window, and listened to the scraps of talk which came from the lounge and the scattered chairs. There was a queer collection of people in this room. They, too, had some kind of business in the job of war, either to kill or to cure. Among them was a young Belgian lieutenant who used to make a "bag" of the Germans he killed eaeh day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost count. Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet cup of coffee. A young surgeon spoke some words which I heard as I turned my head from the window.
"It's the frightful senselessness of all this waste of life which makes one sick with horror…"
Another doctor came in with a tale from Ypres, where he had taken his ambulances under shell-fire.
"It's monstrous," he said, "all the red tape! Because I belong to a volunteer ambulance the officers wanted to know by what infernal impudence I dared to touch the wounded. I had to drive forty miles to get official permission, and could not get it then… And the wounded were lying about everywhere, and it was utterly impossible to cope with the numbers of them… They stand on etiquette when men are crying out in agony! The Prussian caste isn't worse than that."
I turned and looked out of the window again. But I saw nothing of the crowd below. I saw only a great tide of blood rising higher and higher, and I heard, not the squawking of motor-horns, but the moans of men in innumerable sheds, where they lie on straw waiting for the surgeon's knife and crying out for morphia. I saw and heard, because I had seen and heard these things before in France and Belgium.
In the room there was the touch of quiet fingers on a piano not too bad. It was the music of deep, soft chords. A woman's voice spoke quickly, excitedly.
"Oh! Some one can play. Ask him to play! It seems a thousand years since I heard some music. I'm thirsty for it!"
A friend of mine who had struck the chords while standing before the piano, sat down, and smiled a little over the notes.
"What shall it be?" he asked, and then, without waiting for the answer, played. It was a reverie by Chopin, I think, and somehow it seemed to cleanse our souls a little of things seen and smelt. It was so pitiful that something broke inside my heart a moment. I thought of the last time I had heard some music. It was in a Flemish cottage, where a young lieutenant, a little drunk, sang a love-song among his comrades, while a little way off men were being maimed and killed by bursting shells.
The music stopped with a slur of notes. Somebody asked, "What was that?"
There was the echo of a dull explosion and the noise of breaking glass. I looked out into the square again from the open window, and saw people running in all directions.
Presently a man came into the room and spoke to one of the doctors, without excitement.
"Another Taube. Three bombs, as usual, and several people wounded. You'd better come. It's only round the corner."
It was always round the corner, this sudden death. Just a step or two from any window of war.
27
Halfway through my stay at Dunkirk I made a trip to England and back, getting a free passage in the Government ship Invicta, which left by night to dodge the enemy's submarines, risking their floating mines. It gave me one picture of war which is unforgettable. We were a death-ship that night, for we carried the body of a naval officer who had been killed on one of the monitors which I had seen in action several times off Nieuport. With the corpse came also several seamen, wounded by the same shell. I did not see any of them until the Invicla lay alongside the Prince of Wales pier. Then a party of marines brought up the officer's body on a stretcher. They bungled the job horribly, jamming the stretcher poles in the rails of the gangway, and, fancying myself an expert in stretcher work, for I had had a little practice, I gave them a hand and helped to carry the corpse to the landing-stage. It was sewn up tightly in canvas, exactly like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who received it.
"Where are you going to put that, Dick?"
"Oh, stow it over there, Bill!"
That was how a British hero made his home-coming.
But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to ugly sights. It was when the wounded seamen came up from below. The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.
After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards, turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country round Furnes. But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will remain to me like a tragic song. I had been sprinkled with the blood of Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead. I am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men— the remnants of an army—who, without much help from French or English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender, and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the enemy from their last patch of soil. It was worth the risk of death to see those things.
Chapter VIII The Soul Of Paris
1
In the beginning of the war it seemed as though the soul had gone out of Paris and that it had lost all its life.
I have already described those days of mobilization when an enormous number of young men were suddenly called to the colours out of all their ways of civil life, and answered that summons without enthusiasm for war, hating the dreadful prospect of it and cursing the nation which had forced this fate upon them. That first mobilization lasted for twenty-one days, and every day one seemed to notice the difference in the streets, the gradual thinning of the crowds, the absence of young manhood, the larger proportion of women and old fogeys among those who remained. The life of Paris was being drained of its best blood by this vampire, war. In the Latin Quarter most of the students went without any preliminary demonstrations in the café d'Harcourt, or speeches from the table-tops in the cheaper restaurants along the Boul' Miche, where in times of peace any political crisis or intellectual drama produces a flood of fantastic oratory from young gentlemen with black hair, burning eyes, and dirty finger-nails. They had gone away silently, with hasty kisses to little mistresses, who sobbed their hearts out for a night before searching for any lovers who might be left.
In all the streets of Paris there was a shutting up of shops. Every day put a new row of iron curtains between the window panes, until at the end of the twelfth day the city seemed as dismal as London on a Sunday, or as though all the shops were closed for a public funeral. Scraps of paper were pasted on the barred-up fronts.
"Le magasin est fermé à cause de la mobilisation."
"M. Jean Cochin et quatre fils sont au front des armées."
"Tout le personel de cet établissement est mobilisé."
A personal incident brought the significance of the general mobilization sharply to my mind. I had not realized till then how completely the business of Paris would be brought to a standstill, and how utterly things would be changed. Before leaving Paris for Nancy and the eastern frontier, I left a portmanteau and a rug in a hotel where I had become friendly with the manager and the assistant manager, with the hall porter, the liftman, and the valet de chambre. I had discussed the war with each of these men and from each of them had heard the same expressions of horror and dismay. The hall porter was a good-humoured soul, who confided to me that he had a pretty wife and a new-born babe, who reconciled him to the disagreeable side of a life as the servant of any stranger who might come to the hotel with a bad temper and a light purse…
On coming back from Nancy I went to reclaim my bag and rug. But when I entered the hotel something seemed different. At first I could not quite understand this difference. It seemed to me for a moment that I had come to the wrong place. I did not see the hotel porter nor the manager and assistant manager. There was only a sharp- featured lady sitting at the desk in loneliness, and she looked at me, as I stared round the hall, with obvious suspicion. Very politely I asked for my bag and rug, but the lady's air became more frigid when I explained that I had lost the cloak-room ticket and could not remember the number of the room I had occupied a few days before.
"Perhaps there is some means by which you could prove that you stayed here?" said the lady.
"Certainly. I remember the hall porter. His name is Pierre, and he comes from the Midi."
She shook her head.
"There is no hall porter, Monsieur. He has gone."
"And then the valet de chambre. His name is François. He has curly hair and a short brown moustache."
The lady shook her head in a most decided negative.
"The present valet de chambre is a bald-headed man, and clean- shaven, monsieur. It must have been another hotel where you stayed."
I began to think that this must undoubtedly be the case, and yet I remembered the geography of the hall, and the pattern of the carpet, and the picture of Mirabeau in the National Assembly.
Then it dawned on both of us.
"Ah! Monsieur was here before August 1. Since then everyone is mobilized. I am the manager's wife, Monsieur, and my husband is at the front, and we have hardly any staff here now. You will describe the shape of your bag…"
2
The French Government was afraid of the soul of Paris. Memories of the Commune haunted the minds of men who did not understand that the character of the Parisian has altered somewhat since 1870. Ministers of France who had read a little history, were terribly afraid that out of the soul of Paris would come turbulence and mob-passion, crises de nerfs, rioting, political strife, and panics. Paris must be handled firmly, sobered down by every possible means, kept from the knowledge of painful facts, spoon-fed with cheerful communiqués whatever the truth might be, guarded by strong but hidden force, ready at a moment's notice to smash up a procession, to arrest agitators, to quell a rebellion, and to maintain the strictest order.
Quietly, but effectively, General Galièni, the military governor of "the entrenched camp of Paris," as it was called, proceeded to place the city under martial law in order to strangle any rebellious spirit which might be lurking in its hiding places. Orders and regulations were issued in a rapid volley fire which left Paris without any of its old life or liberty. The terrasses were withdrawn from the cafés. No longer could the philosophic Parisian sip his petit verre and watch the drama of the boulevards from the shady side of a marble-topped table. He must sit indoors like an Englishman, in the darkness of his public-house, as though ashamed of drinking in the open. Absinthe was banned by a thunder-stroke from the Invalides, where the Military Governor had established his headquarters, and Parisians who had acquired the absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment which would reduce them to physical and moral wrecks, as creatures of the drug habit suddenly robbed of their nerve-controlling tabloids. It was an edict welcomed by all men of self-control who knew that France had been poisoned by this filthy liquid, but they too became a little pale when all the cafés of Paris were closed at eight o'clock.
"Sapristi! Qu'est qu'on peut faire les soirs? On ne peut pas dormir tout le temps! Et la guerre durera peut-être trois mois!"
To close the cafés at eight o'clock seemed a tragic infliction to the true Parisian, for whom life only begins after that hour, when the stupidity of the day's toil is finished and the mind is awakened to the intellectual interests of the world, in friendly conversation, in philosophical discussions, in heated arguments, in wit and satire. How then could they follow the war and understand its progress if the cafés were closed at eight o'clock? But the edict was given and Paris obeyed, loyally and with resignation.
Other edicts followed, or arrived simultaneously like a broadside fired into the life of the city. Public processions "with whatever patriotic motive" were sternly prohibited. "Purveyors of false news, or of news likely to depress the public spirit" would be dealt with by courts-martial and punished with the utmost severity. No musical instruments were to be played after ten o'clock at night, and orchestras were prohibited in all restaurants. Oh, Paris, was even your laughter to be abolished, if you had any heart for laughter while your sons were dying on the fields of battle?
The newspaper censors had put a strangle grip upon the press, not only upon news of war but also upon expressions of opinion. Gustave Hervé signed his name three days a week to blank columns of extraordinary eloquence. Georges Clemenceau had a series of striking head-lines which had been robbed of all their text. The intellectuals of Paris might not express an opinion save by permission of the military censors, most of whom, strangely enough, had German names.
The civil police under direction of the Military Governor were very busy in Paris during the early days of the war. Throughout the twenty- four hours, and especially in the darkness of night, the streets were patrolled by blue-capped men on bicycles, who rode, four by four, as silently as shadows, through every quarter of the city. They had a startling habit of surrounding any lonely man who might be walking in the late hours and interrogating him as to his nationality, age and business.
Several times I was arrested in this way and never escaped the little frousse which came to me when these dark figures closed upon me, as they leapt from their bicycles and said with grim suspicion:
"Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!"
My pockets were bulging with papers, which I thrust hurriedly into the lantern-light for a close-eyed scrutiny.
They were very quick to follow the trail of a stranger, and there was no sanctuary in Paris in which he might evade them. Five minutes after calling upon a friend in the fifth floor flat of an old mansion at the end of a courtyard in the Rue de Rivoli, there was a sharp tap at his door, and two men in civil clothes came into the room, with that sleuth-hound look which belongs to stage, and French, detectives. They forgot to remove their bowler hats, which seemed to me to be a lamentable violation of French courtesy.
"Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!"
Again I produced bundles of papers—permis de séjour in Paris, Amiens, Rouen, Orleans, Le Mans; laisser-passer to Boulogne, Dieppe, Havre, Dunkirk, Aire-sur-Lys, Béthune and Hazebrouck; British passports and papiers visés by French consuls, French police, French generals, French mayors, and French stationmasters. But they were hardly satisfied. One man with an ugly bulge in his side- pocket—you have seen at Drury Lane how quickly the revolver comes out?—suggested that the whole collection was not worth an old railway ticket because I had failed to comply with the latest regulation regarding a photograph on the permis de séjour… We parted, however, with mutual confidence and an expression of satisfaction in the Entente Cordiale.
3
One scene is clear cut in my memory, as it was revealed in a narrow street of Paris where a corner lantern flung its rays down upon the white faces of two men and two women. It was midnight, and I was waiting outside the door of a newspaper office, where my assistant was inquiring for the latest bulletins of war. For some minutes I watched this little group with an intuition that tragedy was likely to leap out upon them. They belonged to the apache class, as it was easy to see by the cut of the men's trousers tucked into their boots, with a sash round the waist, and by the velvet bonnets pulled down sideways over their thin-featured faces and sharp jaws. The women had shawls over their heads and high-heeled shoes under their skirts. At the Alhambra in London the audience would have known what dance to expect when such a group had slouched into the glamour of the footlights. They were doing a kind of slow dance now, though without any music except that of women's sobs and a man's sibilant curses. The younger of the two men was horribly drunk, and it was clear that the others were trying to drag him home before trouble came. They swayed with him up and down, picked him up when he fell, swiped him in the face when he tried to embrace one of the women, and lurched with him deeper into the throat of the alley. Then suddenly the trouble came. Four of those shadows on bicycles rode out of the darkness and closed in.
As sharp and distinct as pistol shots two words came to my ears out of the sudden silence and stillness which had arrested the four people:
"Vos papiers!"
There was no "s'il vous plait" this time.
It was clear that one at least of the men—I guessed it was the drunkard—had no papers explaining his presence in Paris, and that he was one of the embusqués for whom the Military Governor was searching in the poorer quarters of the city (in the richer quarters there was not such a sharp search for certain young gentlemen of good family who had failed to answer the call to the colours), and for whom there was a very rapid method of punishment on the sunny side of a white wall. Out of the silence of that night came shriek after shriek. The two women abandoned themselves to a wild and terror- stricken grief. One of them flung herself on to her knees, clutching at an agent de police, clasping him with piteous and pleading hands, until he jerked her away from him. Then she picked herself up and leant against a wall, moaning and wailing like a wounded animal. The drunkard was sobered enough to stand upright in the grasp of two policemen while the third searched him. By the light of the street lamp I saw his blanched face and sunken eyes. Two minutes later the police led both men away, leaving the women behind, very quiet now, sobbing in their shawls.
It was the general belief in Paris that many apaches were shot pour encourager les autres. I cannot say that is true—the police of Paris keep their own secrets—but I believe a front place was found for some of them in the fighting lines. Paris lost many of its rebels, who will never reappear in the Place Pigalle and the Avenue de Clichy on moonless nights. Poor devils of misery! They did but make war on the well-to-do, and with less deadly methods, as a rule, than those encouraged in greater wars when, for trade interests also, men kill each other with explosive bombs and wrap each other's bowels round their bayonets and blow up whole companies of men in trenches which have been sapped so skilfully that at the word "Fire!" no pair of arms or legs remains to a single body and God Himself would not know His handiwork.
4
For several months there was a spy mania in Paris, and the police, acting under military orders, showed considerable activity in "Boche" hunting. It was a form of chase which turned me a little sick when I saw the captured prey, just as I used to turn sick as a boy when I saw a rat caught in a trap and handed over to the dogs, or any other animal run to earth. All my instincts made me hope for the escape of the poor beast, vermin though it might be.
One day as I was sitting in the Café Napolitain on one of my brief excursions to Paris from the turmoil in the wake of war, I heard shouts and saw a crowd of people rushing towards a motor-car coming down the Boulevard des Italiens. One word was repeated with a long-drawn sibilance:
"Espion! Espion!"
The spy was between two agents de police. He was bound with cords and his collar had been torn off, so that his neck was bare, like a man ready for the guillotine. Somehow, the look of the man reminded me in a flash of those old scenes in the French Revolution, when a French aristocrat was taken in a tumbril through the streets of Paris. He was a young man with a handsome, clear-cut face, and though he was very white except where a trickle of blood ran down his cheek from a gash on his forehead, he smiled disdainfully with a proud curl of the lip. He knew he was going to his death, but he had taken the risk of that when he stayed in Paris for the sake of his country. A German spy! Yes, but a brave man who went rather well to his death through the sunlit streets of Paris, with the angry murmurs of a crowd rising in waves about him.
On the same night I saw another episode of this spy-hunting period, and it was more curious. It happened in a famous restaurant not far from the Comédie Française, where a number of French soldiers in a variety of uniforms dined with their ladies before going to the front after a day's leave from the fighting lines. Suddenly, into the buzz of voices and above the tinkle of glasses and coffee-cups one voice spoke in a formal way, with clear, deliberate words. I saw that it was the manager of the restaurant addressing his clients.
"Messieurs et Mesdames,—-My fellow-manager has just been arrested on a charge of espionage. I have been forbidden to speak more than these few words, to express my personal regret that I am unable to give my personal attention to your needs and pleasure."
With a bow this typical French "patron"—surely not a German spy!— turned away and retreated from the room. A look of surprise passed over the faces of the French soldiers. The ladies raised their pencilled eyebrows, and then—so quickly does this drama of war stale after its first experience—continued their conversation through whiffs of cigarette smoke.
5
But it was not of German spies that the French Government was most afraid. Truth to tell, Paris was thronged with Germans, naturalized a week or two before the war and by some means or other on the best of terms with the police authorities, in spite of spy- hunts and spy-mania, which sometimes endangered the liberty of innocent Englishmen, and Americans more or less innocent. It was only an accident which led to the arrest of a well-known milliner whose afternoon-tea parties among her mannequins were attended by many Germans with business in Paris of a private character. When this lady covered up the Teutonic name of her firm with a Red Cross flag and converted her showrooms into a hospital ward, excellently supplied except with wounded men, the police did not inquire into the case until a political scandal brought it into the limelight of publicity.
The French Government was more afraid of the true Parisians. To sober them down in case their spirit might lead to trouble, the streets of Paris were kept in darkness and all places of amusement were closed as soon as war was declared. In case riots should break forth from secret lairs of revolutionary propaganda, squadrons of Gardes Republicains patrolled the city by day and night, and the agents de police were reinforced by fusiliers marins with loaded rifles, who— simple fellows as they are—could hardly direct a stranger to the Place de la Concorde or find their own way to the Place de la Bastille.
At all costs Paris was not to learn the truth about the war if there were any unpleasant truths to tell. For Paris there must always be victories and no defeats. They must not even know that in war time there were wounded men; otherwise they might get so depressed or so enraged that (thought the French Government) there might be the old cry of "Nous sommes trahis!" with a lopping off of Ministers' heads and dreadful orgies in which the streets of Paris would run red with blood. This reason alone—so utterly unreasonable, as we now know—may explain the farcical situation of the hospitals in Paris during the first two months of the war. Great hotels like the Astoria, Claridge's, and the Majestic had been turned into hospitals magnificently equipped and over-staffed. Nothing that money could buy was left unbought, so that these great palaces might be fully provided with all things necessary for continual streams of wounded men. High society in France gave away its wealth with generous enthusiasm. Whatever faults they might have they tried to wash them clean by charity, full- hearted and overflowing, for the wounded sons of France. Great ladies who had been the beauties of the salons, whose gowns had been the envy of their circles, took off their silks and chiffons and put on the simple dress of the infirmière and volunteered to do the humblest work, the dirty work of kitchen-wenches and scullery-girls and bedroom-maids, so that their hands might help, by any service, the men who had fought for France. French doctors, keen and brilliant men who hold a surgeon's knife with a fine and delicate skill, stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war. The best brains of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris.
But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on for weeks. After the battle of the Marne, when the wounded were pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert of beds. Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides— women whose beauty was famous through Europe—they murmured "Allahu akbar" in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a Mohammedan paradise.
It was a comedy in which there was a frightful tragedy. The doctors and surgeons standing by these empty beds, wandering through operating-theatres magnificently appointed, asked God why their hands were idle when so many soldiers of France were dying for lack of help, and why Paris, the nerve-centre of all railway lines, so close to the front, where the fields were heaped with the wreckage of the war, should be a world away from any work of rescue. It was the same old strain of falsity which always runs through French official life. "Politics!" said the doctors of Paris; "those cursed politics!"
But it was fear this time. The Government was afraid of Paris, lest it should lose its nerve, and so all trains of wounded were diverted from the capital, wandering on long and devious journeys, side-tracked for hours, and if any ambulances came it was at night, when they glided through back streets under cover of darkness, afraid of being seen.
They need not have feared, those Ministers of France. Paris had more courage than some of them, with a greater dignity and finer faith. When the French Ministry fled to Bordeaux without having warned the people that the enemy was at their gates, Paris remained very quiet and gave no sign of wild terror or of panic-stricken rage. There was no political cry or revolutionary outburst. No mob orator sprang upon a café chair to say "Nous sommes trahis!" There was not even a word of rebuke for those who had doctored the official communiqués and put a false glamour of hope upon hideous facts. Hurriedly and dejectedly over a million people of Paris fled from the city, now that the Government had led the way of flight. They were afraid, and there was panic in their exodus, but even that was not hysterical, and men and women kept their heads, though they had lost their hopes. It was rare to see a weeping woman. There was no wailing of a people distraught. Sadly those fugitives left the city which had been all the world to them, and the roads to the south were black with their multitudes, having left in fear but full of courage on the road, dejected, but even then finding a comedy in the misery of it, laughing —as most French women will laugh in the hour of peril—even when their suffering was greatest and when there was a heartache in their humour.
6
After all the soul of Paris did not die, even in those dark days when so many of its inhabitants had gone, and when, for a little while, it seemed a deserted city. Many thousands of citizens remained, enough to make a great population, and although for a day or two they kept for the most part indoors, under the shadow of a fear that at any moment they might hear the first shells come shrieking overhead, or even the clatter of German cavalry, they quickly resumed the daily routine of their lives, as far as it was possible at such a time. The fruit and vegetable-stalls along the Rue St. Honoré were thronged as usual by frugal housewives who do their shopping early, and down by Les Halles, to which I wended my way through the older streets of Paris, to note any change in the price of food, there were the usual scenes of bustling activity among the baskets and the litter of the markets. Only a man who knew Paris well could detect a difference in the early morning crowds—the absence of many young porters who used to carry great loads on their heads before quenching their thirst at the Chien Qui Fume, and the presence of many young girls of the midinette class, who in normal times lie later in bed before taking the metro to their shops.
The shops were closed now. Great establishments like the Galeries Lafayette had disbanded their armies of girls and even many of the factories in the outer suburbs, like Charenton and La Villette, had suspended work, because their mechanics and electricians and male factory hands had been mobilized at the outset of the war. The women of Paris were plunged into dire poverty, and thousands of them into idleness, which makes poverty more awful. Even now I can hardly guess how many of these women lived during the first months of the war. There were many wives who had been utterly dependent for the upkeep of their little homes upon men who were now earning a sou a day as soldiers of France, with glory as a pourboire. So many old mothers had been supported by the devotion of sons who had denied themselves marriage, children, and the little luxuries of life in order that out of their poor wages in Government offices they might keep the woman to whom they owed their being. Always the greater part of the people of Paris lives precariously on the thin edge of a limited income, stinting and scraping, a sou here, a sou there, to balance the week's accounts and eke out a little of that joie de vivre, which to every Parisian is an essential need. Now by the edict of war all life's economies had been annihilated. There were no more wages out of which to reckon the cost of an extra meal, or out of which to squeeze the price of a seat at a Pathé cinema. Mothers and wives and mistresses had been abandoned to the chill comfort of national charity, and oh, the coldness of it!