Part 9

So much for the first-fruits. The ultimate results are only now beginning to appear in the steady retreat of German forces, unable to stand another attack, on the same line, now that the protection of the winter pause is over. "How far are we from our guns?" I ask the officer beside me. And, as I speak, a flash to the north-east on the higher ground towards Pozières lights up the grey distance. My companion measures the hillside with his eyes. "About 1,000 yards." Their objective now is a temporary German line in front of Bapaume. But we shall be in Bapaume in a few days. And then?

Death--Victory--Work; these are the three leading impressions that rise and take symbolic shape amid these scenes. Let me turn now to the last. For anyone with the common share of heart and imagination, the first thought here must be of the dead--the next, of swarming life. For these slopes and roads and ruins are again alive with men. Thousands and thousands of our soldiers are here, many of them going up to or coming back from the line, while others are working--working--incessantly at all that is meant by "advance" and "consolidation."

The transformation of a line of battle into an efficient "back of the Army" requires, it seems, an amazing amount of human energy, contrivance, and endurance. And what we see now is, of course, a second or third stage. First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actual battlefield. For this the work of the men now at work here--R.E.'s and Labour battalions--is too skilled and too valuable. It is done by fatigues and burying parties from the battalions in occupation of each captured section. The dead are buried; the poor human fragments that remain are covered with chlorate of lime; equipments of all kinds, the litter of the battlefield, are brought back to the salvage dumps, there to be sorted and sent back to the bases for repairs.

Then--or simultaneously--begins the work of the Engineers and the Labour men. Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-holes filled up for the driving through of new roads and railways, and the provision of places where tents, huts, dumps, etc., are to stand. Roughly speaking, I see, as I look round me, that a great deal of this work is here already far advanced. There are hundreds of men, carts, and horses at work on the roads, and everywhere one sees the signs of new railway lines, either of the ordinary breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for the advanced carriage of food and ammunition. Here also is a great encampment of Nissen huts; there fresh preparations for a food or an ammunition dump.

With one pair of eyes one can only see a fraction of what is in truth going on. But the whole effect is one of vast and increasing industry, of an intensity of determined effort, which thrills the mind hardly less than the thought of the battle-line itself. "Yes, war is work," writes an officer who went through the Somme fighting, "much more than it is fighting. This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers find out here." Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will go cheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; and when the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder of the world.

On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of the Mametz wood upon our left. More graveyards, carefully tended; spaces of peace amid the universal movement. And always, on the southern horizon, those clear lines of British trenches, whence sprang on July 1st, 1916, the irresistible attack on Montauban and Mametz. Suddenly, over the desolate ground to the west, we see a man hovering in mid-air, descending on a parachute from a captive balloon that seems to have suffered mishap. The small wavering object comes slowly down; we cannot see the landing; but it is probably a safe one.

Then we are on the main Albert road again, and after some rapid miles I find myself kindly welcomed by one of the most famous leaders of the war. There, in a small room, which has surely seen work of the first importance to our victories on the Somme, a great General discusses the situation and the future with that same sober and reasoned confidence I have found everywhere among the representatives of our Higher Command. "Are we approaching victory? Yes; but it is too soon to use the great word itself. Everything is going well; but the enemy is still very strong. This year will decide it; but may not end it."

* * * * *

So far my recollections of March 3rd. But this is now April 26th, and all the time that I have been writing these recollections, thought has been leaping forward to the actual present--to the huge struggle now pending between Arras and Rheims--to the news that comes crowding in, day by day, of the American preparations in aid of the Allies--to all that is at stake for us and for you. Your eyes are now turned like ours to the battle-line in France. You triumph--and you suffer--with us!

No. 6

May 3rd, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--My last letter left me returning to our village lodgings under the wing of G.H.Q. after a memorable day on the Somme battle-fields. That night the talk at the Visitors' Château, during and after a very simple dinner in an old panelled room, was particularly interesting and animated. The morning's newspapers had just arrived from England, with the official communiques of the morning. We were pushing nearer and nearer to Bapaume; in the fighting of the preceding day we had taken another 128 prisoners; and the King had sent his congratulations to Sir Douglas Haig and the Army on the German withdrawal under "the steady and persistent pressure" of the British Army "from carefully prepared and strongly fortified positions--a fitting sequel to the fine achievements of my Army last year in the Battle of the Somme." There was also a report on the air-fighting and air-losses of February--to which I will return.

It was, of course, already obvious that the German retreat on the Somme was not--so far--going to yield us any very large captures of men or guns. Prisoners were indeed collected every day, but there were no "hauls" such as, little more than a month after this evening of March 3rd, were to mark the very different course of the Battle of Arras. Discussion turned upon the pace of the German retreat and the possible rate of our pursuit. "Don't forget," said an officer, "that they are moving over good ground, while the pursuit has to move over bad ground--roads with craters in them, ground so pitted with shell-holes that you can scarcely drive a peg between them, demolished bridges, villages that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The enemy has his guns with him; ours have to be pushed up over the bad ground. His machine-guns are always in picked and prepared positions; ours have to be improvised."

And also--"Don't forget the weather!" said another. Every misty day--and there were many in February--was very skilfully turned to account. Whenever the weather conditions made it impossible to use the eyes of our Air Service, men would say to each other on our side, "He'll go back a lot to-day!--somewhere or other." But in spite of secrecy and fog, how little respite we had given him! The enemy losses in casualties, prisoners, and stores during February were certainly considerable; not to speak of the major loss of all, that of the strongly fortified line on which two years of the most arduous and ingenious labour that even Germany can give had been lavished. "And almost everywhere," writes an eye-witness, "he was hustled and harried much more than is generally known." As you go eastward, for instance, across the evacuated ground you notice everywhere signs of increasing haste and flurry, such as the less complete felling of trees and telegraph posts. It was really a fine performance for our infantry and our cavalry patrols, necessarily unsupported by anything like our full artillery strength, to keep up the constant pressure they did on an enemy who enjoyed almost the full protection of his. It was dreadful country to live and fight in after the Germans had gone back over it, much worse than anything that troops have to face after any ordinary capture of an enemy line.

The fact is that old axioms are being everywhere revised in the light of this war. In former wars the extreme difficulty of a retreat in the face of the enemy was taken for granted. But this war--I am trying to summarise some first-hand opinion as it has reached me--has modified this point of view considerably.

We know now that for any serious attack on an enemy who has plenty of machine-guns and plenty of successive well-wired positions a great mass of heavy and other artillery is absolutely indispensable. And over ground deliberately wrecked and obstructed such artillery must take time to bring up. And yet--to repeat--how rapidly, how "persistently" all difficulties considered, to use the King's adjective, has the British Army pressed on the heels of the retreating enemy!

None of the officers with whom I talked believed that anything more could have been done by us than was done. "If it had been we who were retreating," writes one of them, "and the Germans who were pursuing, I do not believe they would have pushed us so hard or caused us as much loss, for all their pride in their staff work."

And it is, of course, evident from what has happened since I parted from my hosts at the Château, that we have now amply succeeded during the last few weeks in bringing the retreating enemy to bay. No more masked withdrawals, no more skilful evasions, for either Hindenburg or his armies! The victories of Easter week on and beyond the Vimy Ridge, and the renewed British attack of the last few days--I am writing on May 1st--together with the magnificent French advance towards Laon and to the east of Reims, have been so many fresh and crushing testimonies to the vitality and gathering force of the Allied armies.

What is to be the issue we wait to see. But at least, after the winter lull, it is once more joined; and with such an army as the War Office and the nation together, during these three years, have fashioned to his hand--so trained, so equipped, so fired with a common and inflexible spirit--Sir Douglas Haig and his lieutenants will not fail the hopes of Great Britain, of France--and of America!

At the beginning of March these last words could not have been added. There was an American professor not far from me at dinner, and we discussed the "blazing indiscretion" of Herr Zimmermann's Mexican letter. But he knew no more than I. Only I remember with pleasure the general tone of all the conversation about America that I either engaged in or listened to at Headquarters just a month before the historic meeting of Congress. It was one of intelligent sympathy with the difficulties in your way, coupled with a quiet confidence that the call of civilisation and humanity would very soon--and irrevocably--decide the attitude of America towards the war.

* * * * *

The evening at the Château passed only too quickly, and we were sad to say good-bye, though it left me still the prospect of further conversation with some members of the Intelligence Staff on my return journey from Paris and those points of the French line for which, thanks to the courtesy of the French Headquarters, I was now bound.

The last night under the little schoolmistress's quiet roof amid the deep stillness of the village was a wakeful one for me. The presence of the New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely living thing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as the amazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole end--the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of the strongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as a moral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of the preceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mighty instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.

How much I have heard of training since my arrival in France! It is not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper. Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr. Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.

But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to "do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the nation in its collected and corporate character" controlling the individual will in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals.

What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great Britain to-day--what we are about to witness in your own country--a nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea submitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes; accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain--death itself--rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school, resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed education is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than the youth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching of any strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical.

Training--"askêsis"--with either death, or the loss of all that makes honourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that is the present preoccupation of this nation in arms. Even the football games I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all part of this training. They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement. They are part of the system by which men are persuaded--not driven--to submit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even in their times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated that they end by demanding it.

As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery the terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with a shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horrible process of war has not brutalised the British soldier--you remember the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!--that he still remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the ideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that this relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace, and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things.