Letters from France / Bean, C. E. W. (Charles Edwin Woodrow), 1879-1968

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters from France, by C. E. W. Bean


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org





Title: Letters from France


Author: C. E. W. Bean



Release Date: May 14, 2006  [eBook #18390]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS FROM FRANCE***


E-text prepared by Elaine Walker, Paul Ereaut, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 18390-h.htm or 18390-h.zip:
      (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/8/3/9/18390/18390-h/18390-h.htm)
      or
      (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/8/3/9/18390/18390-h.zip)





LETTERS FROM FRANCE

by

C. E. W. BEAN

War Correspondent for the Commonwealth of Australia

With a Map and Eight Plates







[Illustration: AUSTRALIANS WATCHING THE BOMBARDMENT OF POZIERES
Their mates were beneath that bombardment at the time]




Cassell and Company, Ltd
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

1917




To those other Australians who fell in the Sharpest Action their
Force has known, on July 19, 1916, before Fromelles, these Memories of a
Greater, but not a Braver, Battle are herewith Dedicated




PREFACE


These letters are in no sense a history--except that they contain the
truth. They were written at the time and within close range of the
events they describe. Half of the fighting, including the brave attack
before Fromelles, is left untouched on, for these pages do not attempt
to narrate the full story of the Australian Imperial Force in France.
They were written to depict the surroundings in which, and the spirit
with which, that history has been made; first in the quiet green Flemish
lowlands, then with a swift, sudden plunge into the grim, reeking, naked
desolation of the Somme. The record of the A.I.F., and its now
historical units in their full action, will be painted upon that
background some day. If these letters convey some reflection of the
spirit which fought at Pozieres, their object is well fulfilled. The
author's profits are devoted to the fund for nursing back to useful
citizenship Australians blinded or maimed in the war.

C. E. W. Bean.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

    Preface

 1. A Padre who said the Right Thing

 2. To the Front

 3. The First Impression--A Country with Eyes

 4. The Road to Lille

 5. The Differences

 6. The Germans

 7. The Planes

 8. The Coming Struggle: Our Task

 9. In a Forest of France

10. Identified

11. The Great Battle Begins

12. The British--Fricourt and La Boiselle

13. The Dug-outs of Fricourt

14. The Raid

15. Pozieres

16. An Abysm of Desolation

17. Pozieres Ridge

18. The Green Country

19. Trommelfeuer

20. The New Fighting

21. Angels' Work

22. Our Neighbour

23. Mouquet Farm

24. How the Australians were Relieved

25. On Leave to a New England

26. The New Entry

27. A Hard Time

28. The Winter of 1916

29. As in the World's Dawn

30. The Grass Bank

31. In the Mud of Le Barque

32. The New Draft

33. Why He is not "The Anzac"




LIST OF PLATES


Australians Watching the Bombardment of Pozieres

Sketch Map

"Talking with the Kiddies in the Street"

"An Occasional Broken Tree-Trunk"

No Man's Land

Along the Road to Lille

The Trenches here have to be Built Above the Ground in Breastwork

A Main Street of Pozieres

The Church Pozieres

The Windmill of Pozieres

The Barely Recognisable Remains of a Trench

The Tumbled Heap of Bricks and Timber which the World Knows as Mouquet
Farm

"Past the Mud-Heaps Scraped by the Road Gangs"





[Illustration: Rough sketch showing some of the German defences of
Pozieres and the direction of the Australian attacks between July 22 and
September 4, 1916. (From Pozieres to Mouquet Farm is just over a
mile.)]




LETTERS FROM FRANCE




CHAPTER I

A PADRE WHO SAID THE RIGHT THING

_France, April 8th, 1916._


The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the
Mediterranean sea. The liner heaved easily to a slow swell. In the waist
of the ship a densely packed crowd of sunburnt faces upturned towards a
speaker who leaned over the rail of the promenade deck above. Beside the
speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons across the
left breast. Every man in the Australian Imperial Force is as proud of
those ribbons as the leader who wears them so modestly.

Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High
over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the
wireless aerial backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only
yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from far, far
away over the brim of the world. "S.O.S.," it ran, "S.O.S." There
followed half inarticulate fragments of a latitude. That evening about
sundown we ran into the shreds of some ocean conversation about boats'
crews, and about someone who was still absent--just that broken fragment
in the buzz of the wireless conversation which runs around the world. A
big Australian transport, we knew, was some twelve hours away from us
upon the waters. Could it be about her that these personages of the
ocean were calling one to another? Days afterwards we heard that it had
not been an Australian or any other transport.

Somewhere in those dazzling seas there was an eye watching for us too,
just above the water, and always waiting--waiting--waiting--. It would
have been a rich harvest, that crowded deck below one. If the monster
struck just there he could not fail to kill many with the mere
explosion. But I don't believe a man in the crowd gave it a thought. The
strong, tanned, clean-shaven faces under the old slouch hats were all
gazing up in rapt attention at the speaker. For he was telling them the
right thing.

He was not a regular chaplain--there was no regular padre in that ship,
and we were likely to have no church parade until there was discovered
amongst the reinforcement officers one little subaltern who was a padre
in Tasmania, but who was going to the front as a fighting man. We had
heard other padres speak to troops on the eve of their plunging into a
great enterprise, when the sermon had made some of us wish that we only
had the power and gift to seize that wonderful opportunity as it might
be seized, and have done with texts and doctrines and speak to the men
as men. Every man there had his ideals--he was giving his life, as like
as not, because, however crude the exterior, there was an eye within
which saw truly and surely through the mists. And now when they stood on
the brink of the last great sacrifice, could he not seize upon those
truths--?

But this time we simply stood and wondered. For that slip of a figure in
khaki, high up there with one hand on the stanchion and the other
tapping the rail, was telling them a thousand times better than any of
us could ever have put it to himself exactly the things one would have
longed to say.

He told them first, his voice firm with conviction, that God had not
populated this world with saints, but with ordinary human men; and that
they need not fear that, simply because they might not have been
churchgoers or lived what the world calls religious lives, therefore God
would desert them in the danger and trials and perhaps the death to
which they went. "If I thought that God wished any man to be tortured
eternally," he said, "to be tortured for all time and not to have any
hope of heaven, then I would go down to Hell cheerfully with a smile on
my lips rather than worship such a being. I don't know whether a man may
put it beyond the power of God to help him. But I know this, that
whether you are bad or good, or religious or not religious, God is with
you all the time trying to help you.

"And what have we to fear now?" he went on, raising his eyes for a
moment from the puckered, interested brown foreheads below him and
looking out over the shimmering distant silver of the horizon, as if
away over there, over the edge of the world, he could read what the next
few months had in store for them. "We know what we have come for, and we
know that it is right. We have all read of the things which have
happened in Belgium and in France. We know that the Germans invaded a
peaceful country and brought these horrors into it, we know how they
tore up treaties like so much paper; how they sank the _Lusitania_ and
showered their bombs on harmless women and children in London and in the
villages of England. We came of our own free wills--we came to say that
this sort of thing shall not happen in the world so long as we are in
it. We know that we are doing right, and I tell you that on this mission
on which we have come, so long as every man plays the game and plays it
cleanly, he need not fear about his religion--for what else is his
religion than that? Play the game and God will be with you--never fear.

"And what if some of us do pass over before this struggle is ended--what
is there in that? If it were not for the dear ones whom he leaves behind
him, mightn't a man almost pray for a death like that? The newspapers
too often call us heroes, but we know we are not heroes for having come,
and we do not want to be called heroes. We should have been less than
men if we hadn't."

The rapt, unconscious approval in those weather-scarred upturned faces
made it quite obvious that they were with him in every word. In those
simple sentences this man was speaking the whole soul of Australia. He
looked up for a second to the wide sky as clear as his own conscience,
and then looked down at them again. "Isn't it the most wonderful thing
that could ever have happened?" he went on. "Didn't everyone of us as a
boy long to go about the world as they did in the days of Drake and
Raleigh, and didn't it seem almost beyond hope that that adventure would
ever come to us? And isn't that the very thing that has happened? And
here we are on that great enterprise going out across the world, and
with no thought of gain or conquest, but to help to right a great wrong.
What else do we wish except to go straight forward at the enemy--with
our dear ones far behind us and God above us, and our friends on each
side of us and only the enemy in front of us--what more do we wish than
that?"

There were tears in many men's eyes when he finished--and that does not
often happen with Australians. But it happened this time--far out there
on a distant sea. And that was because he had put his finger, just for
one moment, straight on to the heart of his nation.




CHAPTER II

TO THE FRONT

_France, April 8th._


So the Australians are in France. A great reception at the port of
landing, so we hear. A long, weary train journey in a troop train which
never alters its pace, but moves steadily on, halts for meals, jogs on
again, waits interminably outside strange junctions. Some days ago it
landed the first units, somewhere behind the front.

We reached France some time after the first units. The excitement of
seeing an Australian hat had long since evaporated. A few troops had
been left in camp near the port, and we met some of those on leave in
the big town. They might have been there since their babyhood for all
they or the big town cared.

And there we first heard mentioned the name of a town to which our
troops were supposed to have gone. It was quite a different town from
the one which we had heard of on board ship. It was snowing up there
where our men were, they said.

The train took us through beautiful country not yet touched by the
spring of the year. There were magnificent horses in the rich brown
fields--great draught horses such as I have never seen in any country
yet. But the figure that drove the harrow was always that of an old man
or a young boy; or, once or twice, of a woman. There were women digging
in the fields everywhere; or trudging back along the roads under great
bundles of firewood. The country was almost all cultivated land, one
vast farming industry. And they had managed to get through the whole
year's work exactly as if the men were there. As far as we could see
every field was ploughed, every green crop springing. It is a wonderful
performance.

We had not the least idea where we were going until in the end we
actually got there. Travelling in France is quite different from
travelling in Egypt or England. In Egypt you still exercise your brain
as to which train you shall travel by and where you will stay and where
you will change. But in France there is no need for you to think out
your own journey--it is useless for you to do so. The moment you reach
France the big hand of General Headquarters takes hold of you; and from
that instant it picks you up and puts you down as if you were a pawn on
a chessboard. Whatever the railway station, there is always a big
British policeman. The policeman directs you to the Railway Transport
Officer and the Railway Transport Officer tells you how long you will
stay and when you will leave and where you will go to next. And when you
get to the next place there is another policeman who sends you to
another Railway Transport Officer; until you finally come to a policeman
who directs you from the station and up the street of a little French
town, where, standing on the wet cobbles at the corner of the old city
square, under dripping stage scenery gables, you find another British
policeman who passes you to another policeman at another corner who
directs you under the very archway and into the very office which you
are intended by General Headquarters to reach.

And if you go on right up to the very trenches themselves you will find
that British policeman all the way; directing the traffic at every
country cross-road where there is likely to be a congestion of the great
lumbering motor-lorries; standing outside the ruined village church
which the long-range guns have knocked to pieces in trying to get at a
supply dump or a headquarters; waiting at the fork-roads where you
finally have to leave your motor-car and walk only in small parties if
you wish to avoid sudden death; on point duty at the ruined farmhouses
which it is unhealthy at certain hours of the day to pass. At the corner
where you finally turn off the road into the long, deepening
communication trench; even at the point where the second line trenches
cross the communication trench to the front trenches--in some cases you
find that policeman there also, faithfully telling you the way,
incidentally with a very close and critical eye upon you at the same
time.

He is simply the British policeman doing his famous old job in his
famous old way. He is mostly the London policeman, but there are
policemen from Burnley, from Manchester, from Glasgow amongst them. And
up near the lines you find the policeman from Sydney and Melbourne
waving the traffic along with a flag just as he used to do at the corner
of Pitt and King Streets. Just as he used to see that the by-laws of the
local council were carried out, so he now has to see to the rules and
orders made by the local general. It is a thankless job generally; but
when they get as far as this most people begin to be a little grateful
to the policeman.

Our railway train and the policeman had carried us over endless
farmlands, through forests, beside rivers, before we noticed, drawn up
along the side of a quarter of a mile of road, an endless procession of
big grey motor-lorries. Every one was exactly like the next--a tall grey
hood in front and a long grey tarpaulin behind. It was the first sign of
the front. Presently a French regiment went by along a country road--not
at all unlike our Australian troops in some ways--biggish fellows in
grey-blue overcoats, all singing a jolly song. They waved to us in the
same light-hearted way Australians have. There were more fair-haired
men, among some of the French troops we have seen, than there would be
in one of our own battalions.

After this there came great stores at intervals, and timber yards--hour
after hour of farmhouses and villages where there was a Tommy in every
doorway, Tommies in every barn, a Tommy's khaki jacket showing through
every kitchen window; until at last towards evening we reached a country
populated by the familiar old pea-soup overcoats and high-necked
jackets and slouch hats of Australians.

There they were, the men whom we had last seen on the Suez Canal--here
they were, already, in the orchard alongside of the old lichened,
steep-roofed barn--four or five of them squatting round a fire of
sticks, one stuffing his pipe and talking, talking, talking all the
while. I knew that they were happy there before ever they said it. A
track led across a big field--there were two Australians walking along
it. A road crossed the railway--two Australians were standing at the
open door of the house, and another talking to the kiddies in the
street. There was a platoon of them drilling behind a long barn.

A long way ahead of that, still going through an Australian country, we
stopped; and a policeman showed us to the station entrance where there
was a motor-car which took us and our baggage to the little house where
we were billeted. On the green door of the house next to it, behind the
pretty garden, was scrawled in chalk, "Mess--five officers." That was
where we were to feed.

[Illustration: "TALKING WITH THE KIDDIES IN THE STREET"]

It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant
sound--ever so familiar--the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at
Cape Helles. It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.

And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room,
across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever
and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light. It was the field
guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.

Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in
France.




CHAPTER III

THE FIRST IMPRESSION--A COUNTRY WITH EYES

_France, April, 1916._


Rich green meadows. Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges.
Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their
thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row
of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under
the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets--great bunches of
them--in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow
cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see the
flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside gathering
them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a farm at the
cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to run as yet,
totters across the road to her, laughing.

Only this morning, as we passed that same house, there was the low
whine of a shell, and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented
kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it. Then another and
another and another. We could see the white smoke of the shells floating
past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away. It
drifted slowly through the trees and then came another salvo. There were
some red roofs near--those of a neighbouring farm--but we could not see
whether they were firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or
at a working party if there were any; and I do not know now. As we came
back that way in the afternoon there was more shelling farther along.
The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in its direction for a
moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her.
Then they turned to the baby again.

Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages farther
on had mostly been battered and broken. There was a road running at a
little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered. There
was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings
there, all shattered, burnt and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of
desolation on the morning after a great city fire. Farther still was
open country again, where long communication trenches began to run
through the fields--but you could see none of this from where we stood.
Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had
looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk--snapped off short or
broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire.

Those distant trees would be growing over our firing line--or the
German.

It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of
its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost
every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few
yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of
powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here
you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which on
a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away
from the lines. The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy's
trenches, or your own--the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as
completely as if they did not exist.

[Illustration: "AN OCCASIONAL BROKEN TREE-TRUNK--SNAPPED OFF SHORT, OR
BROKEN DOWN AT A SHARP ANGLE, BY SHELL FIRE"]

[Illustration: NO MAN'S LAND The barrier which stretches from Belgium to
the Swiss border and which not the millions of Rockefeller could enable
him to cross]

But you realise, when you have been in that country for a little while,
that you have eyes upon you all the time--you are being watched as
you have never been watched in your life before. You move along the
country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home,
until, sooner or later, things happen which make you think suddenly and
think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the
usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows
when there is a sharp whiz and a crash, and a shrapnel shell from a
German seventy-seven (their field gun) bursts ten yards behind you. You
are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that a working
party is passing the corner frequently on some duty or another. You were
barely aware that there was a house near you.

Twenty-four hours later you hear that that house was levelled to the
ground next morning--a shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the
range--a high explosive into it to burst it up--and an incendiary shell
to burn the rubbish; and one more French family is homeless.

It takes you some time to realise that it was _you_ who burnt that
house--you and that working party which moved past the cross-roads so
often. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burst alongside that
hedge. Somebody must have been watching you all the time when you were
loitering with your map at that corner. Somebody, at any rate, must have
been marking down from the distance everything that happened at those
cross-roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the
while. And then for the first time you recall that those grey trees in
the distance must be behind the German lines; that distant roof and
chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; the
pretty blue hill against which the willows in the plain show out like a
row of railway sleepers is cut off from you by a barrier deeper than the
Atlantic--the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which
moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk, eyes are watching
for you all day long; telescopes are glaring at you; brains behind the
telescopes are patiently reconstructing, from every movement in our
roads or on our fields, the method of our life, studying us as a
naturalist watches his ants under a glass case.

Long before you get near the lines, away over the horizon before you,
there is floating what looks most like a flat white garden grub--small
because of its distance. Look to the south and to the north and you will
see at wide intervals others, one after the other until they fade into
the distance. Every fine day brings them out as regularly as the worms
rise after rain; they sit there all day long in the sky, each one
apparently drowsing over his own stretch of country. But they are
anything but drowsy. Each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain,
his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out
on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of
modern warfare--two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a
white insect very, very high--now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing
again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all
like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking any day.

But it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't _you_ who run the risk.
The observer is not there to drop bombs, in most cases, but to watch,
watch, watch. A motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some
work, extra traffic along a road--and a red tick goes down on a map;
that is all. You go away. But next day, or sometimes much sooner, that
red tick comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of
some German battery.

So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war
correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he
would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field
pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted
earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging,
reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape
put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner.




CHAPTER IV

THE ROAD TO LILLE

_France, April._


There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big
white letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township
for a hundred miles has that same signpost, showing you the way to the
great city of Northern France. But Rockefeller himself with all his
motor-cars could not follow its direction to-day. For the city to which
it points is six miles behind the German lines. You can get from our
lines the edge of some outlying suburb overlapping a distant hill-top.

And that is all that the French people can see of the second city of
their State. The distant roofs, the smoke rising from some great centre
of human activity nestled in a depression into which you cannot look;
you can peer at them all day long through a telescope and wonder why it
is they are stoking their chimneys, or what it is that causes the haze
to hang deeply on such and such a day over this or that corner--you can
study the place as an astronomer studies the faint markings upon the
surface of Mars. But to all intents and purposes that country is as much
cut off from you as is the farthest star.

For the war in which we are engaged means this--that you may travel from
any part of the world with the freedom of this twentieth century and all
its conveniences, until you come to the place where we are to-day. But,
when you come thus far, there is a line in front of you which no power
that has yet been produced in this world, from its creation to the
present day--not all the money nor all the invention--not all the
parliamentarians nor the philosophers--not all the socialism nor the
autocracy, the capital, nor the labour, the brain, nor the physical
power in the whole world has yet been able to pass. The German nation,
for reasons of its own, has put this line across another people's
country and made a fool of all the progress and civilisation on which we
relied so confidently up to a couple of years ago. I suppose it will all
grow unbelievable again some day--two hundred years hence they will
smile at such talk just as we did two years ago. But it will be as true
then as it is to-day--that a nation of officials and philosophers gone
mad has been able to place across the world a line which no man can at
present move.

I have seen that line at a fair number of places--since writing these
words, many miles away in my billet, working in the brick-floored
cottage bedroom by the light of an oil lamp, I have stepped to the door,
and there I can see it now, always flickering and flashing like faint
summer lightning under the clouds on the horizon. When you come to the
very limit--to the farthest point which you or any man on earth can
possibly reach by yourself--it is just a strip of green grass from
twenty to four hundred yards wide, straggling across France and Belgium
from the sea to the Swiss border. I suppose that French and English men
have sanctified every part of that narrow ribbon by dying there. But the
grass of those old paddocks grows unkempt like a shock head of hair. And
it has covered with a kindly mantle most of the terrible relics of the
past. A tuft, perhaps thicker than the rest, is all that marks where
last year lay a British soldier whose death represented the latest
effort of the world to cross the line the Germans laid.

You cannot even know what is going on in the country beyond that line.
You have to build up a science for deducing it from little signs, as a
naturalist might study the habits of a nest of ants. The Germans are
probably much more successful at that than we are.

It is strange to us that there are towns and cities over there only a
few miles away from us, and for a hundred miles back from that, of whose
life we know nothing except that they have been ravished and ruined by
the heavy hand of Prussian militarism. But, for the people who live
around us here, it is a tragedy of which I had not the least conception
until I actually saw it.

We had a cup of coffee the other day in the house of an old lady whose
husband had been called out two years ago, a few days after the war
began.

"All my own people are over there, monsieur," she said, nodding her head
towards the lines. "They were all living in the invaded country, and I
have not heard of them for eighteen months. I do not know whether they
are alive or dead. I only know that they are all ruined. They were
farmers, monsieur, comfortably off on a big farm. But consider the fines
that the Boches have put upon the country.

"The only thing we know, monsieur, it was from a cousin who was taken
prisoner by the Boches. You know we are allowed to write to the
prisoners, and they have the privilege to write to people in the invaded
country. So my family wrote to my cousin to ask news of my mother, who
was a very old woman. And after weeks and weeks the answer came
back--'Mother dead.'

"It was not so terrible that, monsieur, because my mother was old. But
then--he who was my dear friend," she always referred to her husband by
this term, "my dear friend used to write to us every day in those times.
He was fighting in Alsace, monsieur, and for his bravery he had been
promoted upon the field of battle to be an officer. He wrote every
single day to me and the children. We were always so united--never a
harsh word between us during all the years we were married--he was
always gentle and tender and affectionate--a good husband and father,
monsieur, and he sent the letter every day to my brother-in-law, who is
a soldier in Paris, and my brother-in-law sent it on to us.

"There came one day when he wrote to us saying that he was out behind
the trenches waiting for an attack which they were to make in two hours'
time. He had had his breakfast, and was smoking his pipe quite content.
There the letter ended, and for three days no letter came from my dear
friend. And then my brother-in-law wrote to his officer, and the answer
arrived--this, monsieur," she said, fumbling with shaking fingers in a
drawer where all her treasures were, and trying to hide her tears; and
handed me a folded piece of paper written on the battlefield.

It was from his captain, and it spoke of the death of as loyal and brave
a soldier as ever breathed. He was killed, the letter said, ten yards
from the enemy's trenches.

And it is so in every house that you go into in these villages. When the
billeting officer goes round to ask what rooms they have, it is
continually the same story. "Room, monsieur--yes, there is the room of
my son who was killed in Argonne--of my husband who was killed at
Verdun. He is killed, and my father and mother they are in the invaded
country, and I know nothing of them since the war."

[Illustration: ALONG THE ROAD TO LILLE]

But the road to the invaded country will be opened some day. These
people have not a doubt of it. If one thing has struck us more than any
other since we came to France, it is the spirit of the French. We came
here when the battle at Verdun was at its height; and yet from the
hour of landing I have not heard a single French man or woman that was
not utterly confident. There is a quiet resolution over this people at
present which makes a most impressive contrast to the jabber of the
world outside. Whatever may be the case with Paris, these country people
of France are one of the freshest and strongest nations on earth.

They are living their ordinary lives right up under the burst of the
German shells. Three of them were killed here the other day--three
children, playing about one minute at a street corner in front of their
own homes before Australian eyes, were lying dead there the next. Yet
the people are still there--it is their home, and why should they leave
it? An autocracy has no chance against a convinced, united, determined
democracy like this. More than anything I have seen it is this
surprising quiet resolution of the French which has made one confident
beyond a doubt that Frenchmen will pass some day again, by no man's
leave except their own, along the road to Lille.




CHAPTER V

THE DIFFERENCES

_France, April 25th._


The cottage door is open to the night. The soft air of a beautiful
evening following on a glorious day brushes past one into the room. As I
stand here the nightingale from a neighbouring garden is piping his
long, exquisite, repeated note till the air seems full of it. Far away
over the horizon is an incessant flicker like summer lightning, very
faint but quite continuous. Under the nightingale's note comes always a
dull grumble, throbbing and bumping occasionally, but seldom quite
ceasing. Someone is getting it heavily down there--it is not our
Australians; I think I know their direction.

It was just such a glorious day as this one has been, a year ago, when
this corps of untried soldiers suddenly rushed into the nightmare of a
desperate fight. At this moment of the night the rattle of rifle fire
was incessant all round the hills. Men were digging and firing and
digging in a dream which had continued since early dawn and had to
continue for two more days and nights before there was the first chance
of rest. They were old soldiers within twenty-four hours, as their
leader told them in an order which was circulated at the time. Only a
sprinkling of the men who were there are in the Anzac units to-day. But
they are the officers and the N.C.O.'s, and that means a great deal.

We have been here long enough now to discover the differences between
this front and the old fighting-line in Gallipoli. The rain has been
heavier in March than for thirty-five years, and April until yesterday
seemed almost as bad. The trenches are made passable by being floored
with a wooden pathway which runs on piles--underneath which is the
gutter of water and mud which is the real floor of the trench. Sometimes
the water rises in the communication trenches so that the boards float
or disappear, and if you happen to step into an interval between them
you may quite well sink to your waist in thin clay mud. The actual
firing trenches and the dug-outs there are mostly dry by comparison,
except where the accumulated task of draining them has been gaining on
some regiment which garrisons them, and the rear of the line is a morass
of foul-smelling clay.

This difficulty never really reached us in Gallipoli, though we might
possibly have found the trenches falling in upon us in the rains of
winter if we had stayed. The trenches in France are full of traces of
old dug-outs and mouldering sandbags, collapsed through rain in the dim
past before the timbering of all works was looked on as a necessity. In
Anzac we never had the timber for this, and one doubts if we ever could
have had it had we stayed. The soil there was dry and held well, and the
trenches were deep and very elaborate to a degree which one has not seen
approached in France. There may be some parts here where such trenches
are possible, and where they exist; but I have not seen them. It must be
remembered that in many places in France there are stretches of line
where it is impossible to dig a trench at all in winter, because you
meet water as soon as you scratch the surface; and therefore both our
line and the German are a breastwork built up instead of a trench dug
down. The curious thing is that in the trenches themselves you scarcely
realise the difference. Your outlook there is bounded in either case by
two muddy walls over which you cannot wisely put your head in the
daylight. The place may be a glorious green field, with flowers and
birds and little reedy pools, if you are two feet over the parapet.
But you see nothing from week-end to week-end except two muddy walls and
the damp, dark interior of a small dug-out. You see no more of the
country than you would in a city street. Trench life is always a city
life.

[Illustration: THE TRENCHES HERE HAVE TO BE BUILT ABOVE THE GROUND IN
BREASTWORK AND NOT DUG BELOW IT]

The trench routine is much the same as it was in Gallipoli, except that
in no part which I have seen is the tension anything like so great. At
Anzac you were hanging on to the edge of a valley by your finger-nails,
and had to steal every yard that you could in order to have room to
build up a second line, and if possible a third line beyond that. Here
both you and the enemy have scores of miles behind you, and two or three
hundred yards more or less makes no difference worth mentioning.

For this reason you would almost say that the German line in this
country was asleep compared with the line we used to know. A hundred and
fifty yards of green grass, with the skeleton that was once some old hay
wagon up-ended in the middle of it, and sky-blue water showing through
the grass blades in the depressions; a brown mud wall straggling along
the other side of the green--more or less parallel to your breastwork,
with white sandbags crowning it like an irregular coping; the
inevitable stumpy stakes and masses of rusted barbed wire in front. You
might watch it for an hour and the only sign of life you would see would
be a blue whiff of smoke from some black tin chimney stuck up behind it.
If you fire at the chimney probably it will be taken down. The other
day, chancing to look into a periscope, I happened for a moment to see
the top of a dark object moving along half hidden by the opposing
parapet. Some earth was being thrown up over the breastwork just there,
and probably the man had to step round the work which was going on. It
was the first and only time I have seen a German in his own lines.

The German here really snipes much more with his field gun than with his
rifle. He does use his rifle, too, and is a good shot, but slow. A spout
of dust on the parapet--and a periscope has been shattered in the
observer's hand within a few yards of us. But it is generally the German
field gun that does his real sniping for him, shooting at any small body
of men behind the lines. Half a dozen are quite enough to make a target,
if he sees them.

The Turks used to snipe us at times with their field guns and mountain
guns, but generally at certain fixed places--down near the mouth of the
Aghyl Dere, for example. The German snipes with them more generally.
There is no place that I have visited which can compare for perpetual
"unhealthiness" to Anzac Beach, but it is quite possible that such
places do exist.

The German gives you the impression of being a keener observer than the
Turk. The hills and trees behind his lines are really within view of you
over miles of your own country, though you scarcely realise it at first,
and they are full of eyes. Also every fine day brings out his balloons
like a crop of fat grubs--and also our own. In Gallipoli our ships had
the only balloons--the Turks had all the hill-tops.

The aeroplane here affords so big a part of the hourly spectacle of
warfare, and makes so great a difference in the obvious conditions of
the fight, that he deserves a letter to himself. But of all the
differences, by far the greatest is that our troops here have a
beautiful country and a civilised, enlightened population at the back of
them, which they are defending against the invading enemy whom they have
always hoped to meet. They are amongst a people like their own, living
in villages and cottages and paddocks not so different from those of
their own childhood. Right up into the very zone of the trenches there
are houses still inhabited by their owners. As we were entering a
communication trench a few days ago we noticed four or five British
soldiers walking across the open from a cottage. The officer with me
asked them what they were doing. "We've just been to the inn there,"
they said.

The people of that house were still living in it, with our trenches
wandering through their orchard.

In Gallipoli there were brigade headquarters in the actual fire
trenches. From the headquarters of the division or the corps you could
reach the line by ten minutes' hard walking, any time. It is a Sabbath
day's journey here--indeed, the only possible way of covering the longer
distances regularly is by motor-car or motor-cycle, and no one dreams of
using any other means. Nearly the whole army, except the troops in the
actual firing-line, lives in a country which is populated by its normal
inhabitants.

And--wherein lies the greatest change of all--the troops in the trenches
themselves can be brought back every few days into more or less normal
country, and have always the prospect before them at the end of a few
months of a stay in surroundings that are completely free from shell or
rifle fire, and within reach of village shops and the normal comforts
of civilisation. And throwing the weather and wet trenches and the rest
all in, that difference more than makes up for all of them.

"You see, a fellow must look after himself a bit," one of them said to
me the other day. "A man didn't take any care how he looked in
Gallipoli; but here with these young ladies about, you can't go around
like what we used to there."

Through one's mind there flashed well-remembered figures, mostly old
slouch hat and sunburnt muscle--the lightest uniform I can recollect was
an arrangement of a shirt secured by safety pins. Here they go more
carefully dressed than if they were on leave in Melbourne or Sydney.

Yesterday the country was _en fete_, the roads swarming with young and
old, and the fields with children picking flowers. The guns were bumping
a few miles away--mostly at aeroplanes. I went to the trenches with a
friend. Our last sight, as we came away from the region of them, was of
a group of French boys and girls and a few elders around a haystack; and
half a dozen big Australians, with rolled shirtsleeves, up on the
farming machinery helping them to do the work of the year.

That is _the_ difference.




CHAPTER VI

THE GERMANS

_France, May._


The night air on every side of us was full of strange sound. It was not
loud nor near, but it was there all the time. We could hear it even
while we talked and above the sound of our footsteps on the cobbles of
the long French highway. Ahead of us, and far on either side, came this
continuous distant rattle. It was the sound of innumerable wagons
carrying up over endless cobble stones the food and ammunition for
another day.

A cart clattered past from the front with the jingle of trace chains and
hammer of metal tyres upon stones. So one driver had finished his job
for the night. Farther on was a sound of voices and a chink of spades;
some way to our left across a field we can make out dark figures--they
may be stunted willows along the far hedge, or they may be a working
party going up, with their spades and picks over their shoulders, to
one of those jobs which in this flat country can only be done by night.

Twenty miles behind the lines, or more, you can see every night along
the horizon in front of you a constant low flicker of light--the flares
thrown up by both sides over the long ribbon of No Man's Land--the
ribbon which straggles without a break from one end of France to the
other. We were getting very close to that barrier now--within a couple
of miles of it; and the pure white stars of these glorified Roman
candles were describing graceful curves behind a fretwork of trees an
inch or two above the horizon. Every five or six seconds a rifle cracked
somewhere along the line--very different from the ceaseless pecking of
Gallipoli. Then a distant German machine-gun started its sprint,
stumbled, went on again, tripped again. A second machine-gun farther
down the line caught it up, and the two ran along in perfect step for a
while. Then a third joined in, like some distant canary answering its
mates. The first two stopped and left it trilling along by itself,
catching occasionally like a motor-car engine that misfires, until it,
too, stuttered into silence. "Some poor devils being killed, I
suppose," you think to yourself, "suppose they've seen a patrol out in
front of the lines, or a party digging in the open somewhere behind the
trenches." You can't help crediting the Germans--at first, when you come
to this place as a stranger--with being much more deadly than the Turks
both with their machine-guns and their artillery. But you soon learn
that it is by no means necessary that anyone is dying when you hear
their machine-guns sing a chorus. They may chatter away for a whole
night and nobody be in the least the worse for it. Their artillery can
throw two or three hundred shells, or even more, into one of its various
targets, not once but many times, and only a man or two be wounded;
sometimes no one at all. War is alike in that respect all the world
over, apparently; which is comforting.

Presently the road ends and the long sap begins. You plunge into the
dark winding alley much as into some old city's ugly by-lane. It is
Centennial Avenue. There is room in it to pass another man even when he
is carrying a shoulderful of timber. But you must be careful when you do
pass him, or one of you will find yourself waist deep in mud. I have
said before that you do not walk on the bottom of the trench as you did
in Gallipoli, but on a narrow wooden causeway not unlike the bridge on
which ducks wander down from the henhouse to the yard--colloquially
known as the "duck-boards." The days have probably passed when a man
could be drowned in the mud of a communication trench. But it is always
unpleasant to step off the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the
enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it
is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed
trench you are almost sure to flounder.

A party of men loaded with new duck-boards is blocked ahead of you. As
you stand there talking to another wayfarer and waiting for the unknown
obstacle to move, a bullet flicks off the parapet a few feet away. It
was at least a foot above the man's head and was clearly fired from some
rifle laid on the trench during the daytime. Every now and then the
parapet on one side becomes dense black against a dazzling white sky,
and the trench wall on the other side becomes a glaring white background
on which the shadow of your own head and shoulders sail slowly past you
in inky black silhouette. The sharp-cut shadow gradually rises up the
white trench wall, and all is black again until the enemy throws
another flare.

As you talk there comes suddenly over the flats on your left a brilliant
yellow flicker and a musical whine: "Whine--bang, whine--bang,
whine--bang, whine--bang," just like that spoken very quickly.

"That's right over the working party in Westminster Abbey," says the
last man in the procession. "Some bally fool lit a pipe, I suppose."

The man next him reckons it was about Lower George Street that got it
that time. "They been registerin' that place all day on an' off," he
says.

There was just that one swift salvo, and nothing more. Presently, when
the procession moved on, we came across men who had a shower of earth
thrown down their backs by the burst of those shells. Just one isolated
salvo in the night on one particular spot. Goodness knows what the
Germans saw or thought they saw. No one was hit, nothing was interfered
with. But it is a great mistake to think it all foolishness. The most
methodical soldier in the world is behind those other sandbags, and he
doesn't do things without reason.

Farther on we came through a series of hovels, more like dog
kennels than the shelters of men, to the dark parapet where men
are always watching, watching, across a hundred yards or so of
green pasture, the dark mud parapet on the other side. Here and
there over a dug-out there fidgets a tiny toy aeroplane such as
children make, or a miniature windmill. The aeroplane propeller is
revolving slowly, tail away from the enemy, clicking and rattling as
it turns. "Just-a-perfect-night-for-gas"--that is what the aeroplane
propeller is saying.

Once only in the night there is a clatter opposite--one machine-gun
started it, then two together, then forty or fifty rifles. Perhaps they
think they saw a patrol. The Turks used to get precisely similar
nerve-storms on Russell's Top. Nobody even troubles to remark it. Dawn
breaks over the watching figures without one incident to report.

It is after the light has grown and become fixed that you will notice,
if you look carefully for it, a thin film of blue smoke floating upwards
from behind the sandbags on the other side of No Man's Land. Only a
hundred and fifty yards away from you the German cook must be fitting
his old browned and burned dixies and kerosene tins over their early
morning fire.

We had our early morning coffee, too. And as we walked homewards we
found that from a particular point we were looking straight at a distant
barn roof which is in German territory. Near it, towards his trenches,
ran a road. Of curiosity we turned our telescopes on to that path, and
while we watched there strolled along it two figures in grey--grey
tunics, grey loose trousers, little grey buttony caps, walking down the
path towards us, talking, at their ease. Twenty seconds later along came
another pair.

Clearly they had said to themselves, "We must not walk about here except
in twos or threes or we shall draw a shell from one of those Verfluchte
British whizz-bangs."

And so those Germans strolled--as we did--from their breakfast to their
daily work.




CHAPTER VII

THE PLANES

_France, May._


Gallipoli had its own special difficulties for aeroplanes. There was no
open space on which they could dream of alighting at Anzac; and one
machine which had to come down at Suvla was shelled to pieces as soon as
it landed. So planes had to live at Imbros, and there were ten miles of
sea to be crossed before work began and after it finished, and some
planes, which went out and were never heard of, were probably lost in
that sea. There were brave flights far over the enemy's country. But,
until the very last days at Helles, there was scarcely ever an enemy's
plane which put up a successful fight against our own.

In France the enemy is almost as much in the air as we are. He has to be
reckoned with all the time, and fierce fighting in the air, either
against German machines or in face of German shell-fire such as we
scarcely even imagined in watching the air-fighting of Gallipoli, is
the daily spectacle of the trenches. We have seen a brave flight by a
German low down within rifle-shot. But never anything to compare with
the indifference to danger of the British pilots.

I was in the lines the other day when there sounded close at hand salvo
after salvo so fast that I took it for a bombardment. The Germans were
firing at one of our aeroplanes. It was flying as low as I ever saw a
plane fly in Gallipoli--you could make out quite clearly the rings
painted on the planes, which meant a British machine. A sputtering rifle
fire broke out from the German trenches opposite--their infantry were
firing at him. Then came that salvo again--twelve reports in quick
succession--a sheaf of shells whining overhead like so many
puppies--burst after burst in the sky, some short, some far past
him--you would swear they must have gone through him--one right over
him.

The hearts of our men were in their mouths as they watched. He sailed
straight through the shrapnel puffs, turned sharply, and steered away. A
new salvo broke out over the sky where he should have been. He
immediately swerved into it like a footballer making a dodging run, then
turned away again. A minute later a third sheaf of shells burst behind
him, following him up. "He ought to be safe now," one thought to
oneself, "but my word, they nearly got him--"

And then, as we were congratulating him on having escaped with a whole
skin, and breathing more freely at the thought--he turned slowly and
came straight up towards those guns again.

The Australians holding the trenches were delighted. "My word, he's got
more guts than what I have," said one. Sheaf after sheaf of shells burst
in the air all about him; but he steered straight up the middle of them
till he reached the point he wanted to make, and then wheeled and made
his patrol up and down over the trenches. He was flying higher but still
low, and the crackle of rifles again broke out from the German lines. He
was within the range of the feeblest "Archie" even at his highest. They
were literally just so many big shot-guns, firing at a great bird; only
this bird came up time and again to be shot at, simply trusting to the
chance that they would not hit him.

"The rest may take their luck, but I should be dead sick if they was to
get him," grunted a big Australian as he tugged a pull-through out of
his rifle.

Of course they will get him if he does that often--you only need two
eyes to know that. The communiques tell of it every week. As you scurry
past the hinterland of the lines in your motor-car you will sometimes
see two or three aeroplanes flying like great herons overhead. They seem
to be in company, keeping station almost, and holding on the same
course, all mates together--until you catch the cough of a machine-gun,
and realise that they are actually engaged in the deadliest sort of duel
which can possibly be fought in these days. In a battle of infantry you
are mostly hit by an unaimed shot, or a shot aimed into a mass of men.
Even if a man fires at you once, it is probably someone else whom he
aims at next time. But in the air the man who shoots at you is coming
after you, and intends to go on shooting at you until he kills. The
moment when you see an enemy's plane, and realise that you have to fight
it, must be one to set even the strongest nerves tingling.

Generally the aeroplane with the black crosses on its wings is very
high--barely visible. Sometimes, when the other planes are near it, it
swoops steeply to earth behind the German lines. Or it may be that, far
behind our own lines, you see a plane diving to earth at an angle which
makes you wonder whether it is falling or being steered. It straightens
out suddenly, and lands a few fields away. By the time you are there, a
cluster of khaki is already round it. An English boy steps out of it,
flushed and excited, and with intense strain written in his eyes and in
every jerk of his head. Out of the seat just behind him they are lifting
a man with a terrible wound in his side. In the arms of the seat from
which they lift him are two holes as big as a shell would make--but they
were not made by a shell. A cluster of bullets from the machine-gun of a
German plane at close range has passed in at one side of the seat and
out at the other. The rifle which the observer was carrying dropped from
his hands out into space, and the pilot saw it fall just before he
dived.

The German pilots are sometimes youngsters too--not very unlike our own.
Our first sight of active war in France was when the train stopped at a
country siding many miles behind the lines, and two British soldiers
with fixed bayonets marched a third man--a youngster with a slight fair
moustache--over the level crossing in front of us. He wore a grey peaked
cap and a short overcoat jacket with a warm collar and tall,
tight-fitting boots--very much like those of our own officers; and he
walked with a big, swift stride, looking straight ahead of him.
Somewhere, far over behind the German lines, they were probably
expecting him at that moment. His servant would be getting ready his
room. He had left the aerodrome only an hour before, and flown over
strange lines which we have never seen, but which had become as familiar
as his home to him, with no idea than to be back, as he always was
before, within an hour or so. And then something seems to be wrong with
the plane--he has to come down in a strange country; and within an hour
he is out of the war for good and all. He strides along biting his lip.
His comrades will expect him for an hour or so. By dinner-time they will
realise that there is another member gone from their mess.

While I am writing these words someone runs in to say that a German
aeroplane has been shot down--came down in flames, they say, and tore a
great hole in the roadside. There seems to be some such news every day,
now it is one of ours, now one of theirs. It is a brave game.

I suppose it needs a sportsman, even if he is a German, to fight in a
service like that. The pity of it that he is fighting for such an ugly
cause.




CHAPTER VIII

THE COMING STRUGGLE: OUR TASK

[Up to this time the Australians had been in quiet trenches in the green
lowlands near Armentieres. From this time the coming struggle began to
loom ahead.]

_France, May 23rd._


I sat down to write an article about a log-chopping competition. But the
irony of writing such things with other things on one's mind is too much
even for a war correspondent. One's pen goes on strike. One impression
above all has been brought home in the two months we have spent in
France. For some reason, people at home are colossally ignorant of the
task now in front of them. We have now seen three theatres of war, and
it was the same everywhere. Indeed, in Gallipoli we ourselves were just
as ignorant of the state of affairs elsewhere. All the news we had of
Salonica came from the English newspapers. We thought, "However
difficult things may be here, at any rate the Salonica army is only
waiting for a few more men before it cuts the railway to
Constantinople." Then somebody came from Salonica, and we found that the
army there was comforting itself with exactly the same reflections about
us. As for England, everyone who reached us from there arrived with the
conviction that we needed only a few more men to push through.

When the attempt to get through from Suvla failed the public turned to
Bulgaria, and, on the strength of what they read, many of those on the
Peninsula could not help doing the same. Now that we see with our eyes
the nature of Britain's task in France, there is only one depressing
thing about it, and that is that one doubts if the British people have
any more idea of its magnitude than it had of the difficulties of
Gallipoli.

The world hears from the British public vague talk of some future
offensive. It goes without saying that we hear nothing of any plans
here. If there were any, it would be in London that they would first
become common knowledge. But if such an offensive ever does happen, have
the British people any idea of its difficulties? In this warfare, when
you have brought up such artillery as was unbelievable even in the
first year of the war, and reduced miles of trenches to powder, and have
walked over the line of the works in front of you, a handful of batmen
and Headquarters' cooks may still hold up the greatest attack yet
delivered, and you may spend the next month dashing your strength away
against a barrier of ever-increasing toughness.

If an offensive ever is made, we know it will not be made without good
reason for its success. But everything which one has seen points to the
conclusion that a vague belief in the success of such an offensive ought
not to be the sole mental effort that a great part of the nation makes
towards winning the war. And yet, from what I saw lately during a recent
visit to Great Britain, I should say that such was the case. "If we fail
to break through," the public says, "surely the Russians will manage it,
or the French will succeed this time." Wherever we have seen the war
there is always this tendency to look elsewhere for success. There is
not the slightest doubt we have success in our power. The game is in our
hands if we will only play it. The talk about our resources and staying
power is not all "hot air," as the Americans say. The resources were
there, and it was always known that in the later stages of the war,
when Germany and our Allies who entered the war at final strength, had
used most of their resources, then those of Britain would become
decisive because she had not yet used them. That stage we are reaching
now--Britain's resources measured against those of Germany. We have the
advantage in entering it. The danger is that while we squander our
wealth without organisation, the German, by bringing all his brains and
resolution to bear on the problem, may so eke out his strained resources
as to outstay our rich ones.

One sees not the least sign that the British people understand this. I
do not know how it is in Australia, but in Britain life runs its normal
course. Gigantic sums flow away daily, and the only efforts at economy
one hears of are a Daylight Saving Act adopted only because Germany
adopted it first; a list of prohibited imports and petty economies,
which we mistook when first we read it for an elaborate satire; and a
pious hope, in the true voluntary and official British style, that meat
would be shunned on two days in the week.

By way of contrast there are dished out for our encouragement reports of
all the pains which the Germans are put to to economise food in their
country. Potatoes instead of flour, meat twice a week, food strictly
regulated by ticket, children taught to count between each mouthful in
order to avoid over-eating. We are supposed to draw comfort from this
contrast.

It is the most depressing literature we have. The obvious comment is,
"Well, there is a nation organised to win a war--that is the sort of
nation which the men in the opposite trenches have behind them. A nation
which has organised itself for war, and is already organising itself for
peace after the war"; and all that we, who are organised neither for war
nor peace, have, in answer to a national effort like that, is an
ignorant jeer at what is really the most formidable of the dangers
threatening us.

If the British Empire took the war as business, were ready to disturb
its daily life, alter its daily habits, to throw on the scrap-heap its
sacred individualism, and do and live for the national cause, no one
doubts but we could win this war so as to avoid an inconclusive peace.
Some of us were talking to a middle-aged British merchant. We had left
our fellows in France cheerfully facing unaccustomed mud and frosts,
cheerfully accepting the chance of being blown into undiscoverable
atoms or living horribly maimed in mind or body, cheerfully accepting
all this with the set, deliberate purpose of fighting on for a
conclusive settlement--one which put out of question for the future the
rule of brute force, or tearing up of treaties, or renewal of the
present war. We had left those fellows fighting for an ideal they
perfectly well realised, and cheerful in the belief that they would
attain it.

The merchant was dressed in black morning coat and black tie, and looked
in every way a very respectable merchant. He was full of respectable
hopes. But when we spoke of a long war he drew a long face and talked
lugubriously of dislocated trade and strain upon capital--doubted how
long the industry could stand it, and shook his head.

Whenever one thinks of that worthy man one is overcome with a
great anger. What he meant was that if the war went on he might be
broken, and that was a calamity which he could not be expected to
face. We thought of all those fellows in France--British, Australians,
Canadians--cheerfully offering their lives for an ideal at which this
worthy citizen shied because it might cost him his fortune. Suppose it
did, suppose he had to leave his fine home and end his days in a villa,
suppose he had to start as a clerk in someone else's counting-house,
what was it beside what these boys were offering? I think of a fair head
which I had seen matted in red mud, of young nerves of steel shattered
beyond repair, of a wild night at Helles, when I found, stumbling beside
me in the first bitterness of realisation, a young officer who a few
yards back had been shot through both eyes. And here was this worthy man
shaking his head for fear that their ideals might interfere with his
business.

As to which, one can only say that, if the British nation, or the
Australian nation, because it shirks interference with its normal life,
because it is afraid of State enterprise, because of any personal or
individual consideration whatever, lets this struggle go by default, and
by inconclusive peace, to the people which is organised body and soul in
support of the grey tunics behind the opposite parapet, then it is a
betrayal of every gallant heart now sleeping under the crosses on
Gallipoli, and of every boyish head that has reddened the furrows of
France.

There are good reasons for saying that the struggle is now with the
British Empire. With your staying power you can win. But in Heaven's
name, if you wish to win, if you have in you any of the ideals for which
those boys have died, cast your old prejudices to the winds and organise
your staying power. Organise! Organise! Organise!




CHAPTER IX

IN A FOREST OF FRANCE

_France, May 26th._


It was in "A forest of France," as the programme had it. The road ran
down a great aisle with the tall elm trees reaching to the sky, and
stretching their long green fingers far above, like the slender pillars
of a Gothic cathedral. Down the narrow road below sagged a big
motor-bus, painted grey, like a battleship; and, after it, a huge grey
motor-lorry; and, in front and behind them, an odd procession of
motor-cars of all sizes, bouncing awkwardly from one hollow in the road
to another.

Out of the dark interior of the motor-bus, as we passed it, there groped
a head with a grey slouch hat. It came slowly round on its long, brown,
wrinkled neck until it looked into our car. "Hey, mate," it said, "is
this the track to the races?" Then it smiled at the landscape in general
and withdrew into the interior like a snail into its shell. In this bus
was an Australian Brass Band.

We drew up where there was a collection of motor-cars, lorries, and odd
riding horses along the roadside, exactly as you might see at the picnic
races. We struck inland up one of those glades which the French
foresters leave at intervals running from side to side of their
well-managed forests. The green moss sank like a soft carpet beneath our
feet. The little watergutters bubbled beneath the twigs as we trod
across them. The cowslips and anemones nodded as our boots brushed them.
Hundreds of birds sang in the branches, and the sunlight came down in
shafts from the lacework patches of sky far above, and lit up patches of
grass, and fallen leaves, and moss-covered tree trunks, on which sat a
crowd chiefly of Australians and New Zealanders. As one of the English
correspondents said, "It was just such a forest as Shakespeare wrote
about." Who would have thought that scene believable two years before?

A contest had been arranged between Australasians and Canadians in
France to decide which could fell trees in the quickest time. It began
really with the French forest authorities, who insisted on the
well-known forest rule that no young trees under one metre twenty in
girth must be felled after the middle of May, because if you cut the
young tree after the sap begins to rise it will not grow again. The
British officer in control of the forest had obtained an extension until
the end of May, but he had to get felled by then all the young timber
that he wanted before September. He had borrowed some Maoris to help,
and he noticed how they cut and the sort of sportsmen they were. He was
struck with an idea. A French forest officer was with him. "How long do
you think it would take a New Zealander to chop down a tree like that?"
asked the Frenchman. "A minute," was the answer. "Unbelievable,"
exclaimed the Frenchman. A Maori was called up, and the tree was down in
forty seconds.

After that a contest was arranged between Maoris and French
wood-cutters. Trees had to be cut in the French style, which, it must be
admitted, is much neater and more economical, and about five times as
laborious. The trees are cut off at ground level, and so straightly that
the stump would not trip you if it were in the middle of the road. Each
team consisted of six men, and felled twelve small trees, using its own
accustomed axes. The Maoris won by four minutes.

It was out of this that the big contest sprang. The Canadians and
Australasians challenged one another. This time the teams were to be of
three men. Each team was to cut three trees--only service axes to be
used; but otherwise each man could cut in any style he wished. The trees
averaged about two feet thick--hard wood. The teams started to practise.
And the forest officers' problem was solved.

The teams tossed for trees, and tossed for the order in which they were
to cut. I believe that when some question arose out of this toss, the
Maoris immediately offered to toss again, in order to have no advantage
from the result.

It was interesting to see the difference of style. All three types of
colonial woodsmen cut the tree almost breast high, but the Australian
seemed to be the only one that took advantage of that understroke, with
a hiss through the clenched teeth, which looks so formidable when you
watch our timber-getters. It was a Canadian team which started. They cut
coolly, and the one whom I watched struck one by his splendid condition.
A wiry man, not thick-set, but well built and athletic, who never turned
a hair. I think he was perhaps too cool to win. His comrades were not
quite so fast as he. They cut the tree with a fairly narrow scarf, the
top cut coming down at a steep angle, and the lower cut coming straight
in to meet it, so that the upper end of the stump, when the tree falls,
is left cut off as straight as a table top. Their first tree crashed in
fourteen minutes, the next in fifteen, and then they all three tackled
the last and toughest, which fell in twenty-one; fifty minutes
altogether when the three times were added.

The next team was Australian. From the first rapid swing one's anxiety
was whether they could possibly stand the pace. They tackled the job so
much more fiercely than the Canadians. I watched a young Tasmanian, his
whole soul in it, brow wrinkled, and sweat pouring from his face. You
would have thought that he was cutting almost wildly, till you noticed
how every cut went home exactly on top of the cut before. These
Australians--they were Western Australians mostly--made a wide scarf,
the top cut coming down at an angle, and the lower cut coming up at a
similar angle to meet it, making a wide open angle between the two. The
odds would, I think, have been taken by most of those who went there as
being in favour of the Canadians; and it was a great surprise when the
three Australian trees were all down in thirty-one minutes and eight
seconds.

The New Zealanders cut third. Their team consisted of Maoris. They did
not seem to be cutting with the fire of the Australians. There was not
the visible energy; their actions struck one as easier, and one doubted
if their great, lithe, brown muscles were carrying them so fast.

Yet the time told the truth. Their three trees were down in twenty-two
minutes and forty seconds, and no one else approached them. One Canadian
team improved the Canadian time to forty-five minutes twenty-two
seconds. The Maoris seemed mostly to cut with a narrower scarf even than
the Canadians, both upper and lower cuts sloping downward at a narrow
angle. In fairness it must be said that the Maoris had practised about
six weeks, the Canadians and Australians about one week.

An Australian won the log-chopping competition; and the Canadians won
with the crosscut saw. A New Zealander won the competition for style.

Later the men were mostly sitting watching the Frenchmen, workers in the
forest, giving an exhibition cut. Two of a Canadian team were sitting on
a log next to me, yarning in the slow, quizzical drawl of the Canadian
countryman, when some of their mates sat down beside them. The man next
me turned to them, and the next instant they were all talking French
among themselves, talking it as their native tongue. Their officer, a
handsome youngster, spoke it too. It was not till that moment that I
realised that most of these Canadian woodsmen here were French.

Meanwhile the exhibition chop went on. The French woodsmen were digging
at the roots of their trees with long, ancient axes, more like a cold
chisel than a modern axe. "I think I could do as well with a knife and
fork," said one great kindly Australian as he watched with a smile.

But, to my mind, that exhibition was the most impressive of all. For
every one of those who took part in it was either an old man or a slip
of a slender boy.




CHAPTER X

IDENTIFIED

_France, June 28th._


It was about three months ago, more or less. The German observer,
crouched up in the platform behind the trunk of a tree, or in a chimney
with a loose brick in it--in a part of the world where the country
cottages, peeping over the dog-rose hedges, have more broken bricks in
them than whole ones--saw down a distant lane several men in strange
hats. The telescope wobbled a bit, and in the early light all objects in
the landscape took on much the same grey colour.

The observer rubbed his red eyes and peered again. Down the white streak
winding across a distant green field were coming a couple more of these
same hats. I expect Fritz saw a good number of them in those days. Many
of the wearers of those hats had never seen an aeroplane before; much
less two aeroplanes, fighting a duel with machine-guns at close range,
10,000 feet over their heads, or being sniped at by a battery of hidden
15-pounder guns, every shot marking itself for the open-mouthed
spectators by its little white cotton-wool shell burst.

The German observer spent several hours jotting painful notes into a
well-thumbed pocket-book, staring in the intervals through his
telescope. Then the tree shook. Something ponderous from below felt its
way up the creaking ladder. A red face, like the face of the sun, peered
over the platform.

"Anything new, Fritz?" it puffed.

"Ja; those new troops we have noticed yesterday--I think they were
Australians."

So the observer sent it back to his officer, and his officer sent it
back to the brigade, and the brigade sent it on to the division. The
division was a little sceptical. "That crowd is always making these wild
discoveries," grunted the divisional Intelligence Officer, but he
thought it worth while passing it on to the Army Corps, who in their
turn sent it to the Army; and so, in due course, it arrived in those
awe-inspiring circles where lives the great German military brain.

"So that is where they have turned up," said a very big man with
spectacles--a big man in more ways than one. And a note went down in
red ink in a particular page of a huge index, to appear duly printed in
the next edition of that portentous volume. Only, after the note, there
was a query.

Far away at the front, Fritz told his mates over their evening coffee
that the new regiment whose heads they had been noticing over the
parapet opposite were Australians.

"Black swine dogs, one of them nearly had me as I was bringing the
mail-bags," snorted a weedy youth scarcely out of his teens, looking
over the top of his coffee pot. "I always said that was a dangerous gap
where the communication trench crosses the ditch."

"You babies should keep your stupid heads down like your elders,"
retorted a grizzled reservist as he stuffed tobacco into the green china
bowl of a real German pipe.

The talk gradually went along the front line for about the distance of
one company's front on either side, that there had been a relief in the
British trenches, and that there were Australians over there. One man
had heard the sergeant saying so in the next bay of the trench; it meant
exactly as much to them as it would to Australian troops to hear the
corps opposite them was Bavarian or Saxon or Hanoverian. They knew the
English and the French possessed some of these colonial corps. They had
been opposite the Algerians in the Champagne before they came to this
part of the line.

"They are ugly swine to meet in the dark," they thought. "These white
and black colonial regiments."

Fritz lives very much in his dug-out--is very good at keeping his head
below the parapet--and he thought very little more about it. His head
was much fuller of the arrival of the weekly parcel of butter and cake
from his hardworking wife at home, and of the coming days when his
battalion would go out of the trenches into billets in the villages,
when he might get a pass to go to a picture theatre in Lille--he had
kept the old pass because a slight tear of the corner or a snick
opposite the date would make it good for use on half a dozen occasions
yet. He did not bother his head about what British division was holding
the trenches opposite to him.

But that divisional Intelligence Officer did--he worried very much. He
wanted to get a certain query removed from an index as soon as possible.

It is always best to get information for nothing. A good way to do this
is to make the enemy talk; and you may be able to make him talk back if
you send over a particular sort of talk to him. So a message was thrown
over into our lines, "Take care"; and "You offal dogs must bleed for
France."

This effort did not fetch any incriminating reply; and so, on a later
night, a lantern was flashed over the parapet, "Australian, go home," it
winked. "Go in the morning--you will be dead in the evening; we are
good."

Later again appeared a notice-board, "Advance Australia fair--if you
can."

Indeed, Fritz became quite talkative, and put up a notice-board,
"English defeat at sea--seven cruisers sunk, one damaged, eleven other
craft sunk. Hip! Hip! Hurrah!"

This did draw at last some of the men in the front line, and they
slipped over the parapet a placard giving a British account of the
losses in the North Sea fight. The putting up of notices is an irregular
proceeding, and this placard had to be withdrawn at once, even before
the Germans could properly read it. The result was an immediate message
posted on the German trenches, "Once more would you let us see the
message?" Still there was no sign from our trenches. So another
plaintive request appeared on the German parapet, "We beg of you to
show again the table of the fleet."

But they were Saxons. Clearly they did not believe all that their
Prussian brother told them about his naval victory. Another day they
hoisted a surreptitious request, "Shoot high--peace will be declared
June 15." They evidently had their gossip in the German trenches just as
we have it in ours--and as we had it in Sydney and Melbourne--absurd
rumours which run all round the line for a week, and which no amount of
experience prevents some people from believing.

"After all, these 'furphies' make life worth living in the trenches," as
one of our men said to me the other day. All the Germans, in a certain
part of the line opposite, now firmly believe that the war is going to
end on August 17th.

But this is merely the gossip of the German trenches telegraphed across
No Man's Land. I do not know how far the divisional Staff Officer
satisfied himself as the result of all his messages, but he did not
satisfy the gentleman with the big index.

"There is one way to find out who is there," the Big Man said, "and that
is always the same--to go there and bring some of them back."

And so twice in the next three weeks the German artillery fired about
L30,000 worth of shells, and a party of picked men stole across the
open, and in spite of a certain loss on one occasion they took back a
few prisoners. And the query went out of the index.

It would be quite easy to present to the German for a penny the facts
which it cost him L60,000 and good men's lives to obtain. When you know
this, you can understand why the casualties reported in the papers do
not any longer state the units of the men who have suffered them.




CHAPTER XI

THE GREAT BATTLE BEGINS

_France, July 1st._


Below me, in the dimple beyond the hill on which I sit, is a small
French town. Straight behind the town is the morning sun, only an hour
risen. Between the sun and the town, and, therefore, only just to be
made out through the haze of sunlight on the mists, are two lines--a
nearer and a farther--of gently sloping hill-tops. On those hills is
being fought one of the greatest battles in history. It is British
troops who are fighting it, and French. The Canadians are in their lines
in the salient. The Australians and New Zealanders--it has now been
officially stated--are at Armentieres.

A few minutes ago, at half-past six by summer-time, the British
bombardment, which has continued heavily for six days, suddenly came in
with a crash, as an orchestra might enter on its grand finale. Last
night, some of us who were out here watched the British shells playing
up and down the distant skyline, running over it from end to end as a
player might run the fingers of one hand lightly over the piano keys.
There were three or four flashes every second, here or there in that
horizon; night and day for six days that had continued. Within the last
few minutes, starting with two or three big heart bangs from a battery
near us, the noise suddenly expanded into a constant detonation. It was
exactly as though the player began, on an instant, to use all the keys
at once.

We now ought to be able to see, from where we sit with our telescopes,
the bursts of our shells on those distant ridges. But I cannot swear
that I see a single one. The sound of the bombarding is like the sound
of some titanic iron tank which a giant has set rolling rapidly down an
endless hill. We can hear the soft whine of scores of shells hurrying
all together through the air. Every five minutes or so a certain
howitzer, tucked into some hiding-place, vents its periodical growl, and
we can hear the huge projectile climbing slowly, up his steep gradient
with a hiss like that of water from a fire-hose. There is some other
heavy shell which passes us also, somewhere in the middle of his flight.
We cannot distinguish the report of the gun, and we do not hear the
shell burst; but at regular intervals we can quite distinctly hear the
monster making his way leisurely across our front.

We can distinguish in the uproar the occasional distant crash of a heavy
shell-burst. But not one burst can I see. The sun upon the mist makes
the distant hill crests just a vague blue screen against the sky.

There is one point on those hills where the two lines of trenches ought
to be clearly visible to us. With a good glass on a clear day you should
be able to distinguish anything as big as a man at that distance--much
more a line of men. Within less than an hour, at half-past seven, the
infantry will leave our trenches over twenty miles of front and launch a
great attack. The country town below us is Albert--behind the centre of
the British attack. One can see the tall, battered church tower rising
against the mist, with the gilt figure of the Virgin hanging at right
angles from the top like the arm of a bracket. On the hills beyond can
just be made out the woods of Fricourt behind the German line. They are
in the background behind Albert church tower. The white ruins of
Fricourt may be the blur in the background south of them. We shall be
attacking Fricourt to-day.

The Germans have not a single "sausage" in the air that I can see. The
sausage is the very descriptive name for the observation balloon. We
have twenty-one of them up, specking the sky as clearly as a
bacteriologist's slide is specked with microbes.

The Germans used to have a whole fleet of them looking down over us. But
a week ago our aeroplanes bombed all along the line, and eight of them,
more or less, went down in flames within a single afternoon.

7.10 a.m.--Six of our aeroplanes are flying over, very high, in a
wedge-shaped flight like that of birds. Single British aeroplanes have
been coming and going since the bombardment started. I have not seen any
German plane. The distant landscape is becoming fainter. The flashes of
our guns can be seen at intervals all over the slopes immediately below
us, and their blast is clearly shown by the film of smoke and dust which
hurries into the air. The haze makes a complete screen between us and
the battle.

7.15 a.m.--Our fire has become noticeably hotter. Some of us thought it
had relaxed slightly after the first ten minutes. I doubt if it really
did--probably we were growing accustomed to the sound. There is no doubt
about its increase now. We can hear the _crump_, _crump, crump_ of
heavy explosives almost incessantly. I fancy our heavy trench mortars
must have joined in.

7.20 a.m.--Another sound has suddenly joined in the uproar. It is the
rapid detonation of our lighter trench mortars.[1] I have never heard
anything like this before--the detonation of these crowds of mortars is
as rapid as if it were the rattle of musketry. Indeed, if it were not
for the heavy detonation one would put it down for rifle fire. Only
eight minutes now, and the infantry goes over the parapet along the
whole line.

[1] Note.--What I took for the sound of trench mortars was almost
certainly that of the British field guns. These heavy Somme bombardments
were then a novelty, and the idea that field guns could be firing like
musketry did not enter one's head. What I took for the sound of heavy
trench mortars was also, certainly, that of German shells.

7.27 a.m.--The heaviness of the bombardment has slightly decreased. A
large number of guns must be altering range on to the German back lines
in order to allow our infantry to make their attack. The hills are
gradually becoming clearer as the sun gets higher, but the haze will be
far too thick for us to see them go over.

7.29 a.m.--One minute to go. I have not seen a single German shell burst
yet. They may be firing on our trenches; they are not on our batteries.

7.32 a.m.--Ever so distant, but quite distinctly, under the thunder of
the bombardment I can hear the sound of far-off rifle firing.

So they are into it--and there are Germans still left in those trenches.

7.35 a.m.--Through the bombardment I can hear the chatter of a
machine-gun. And there is a new thunder added, quite distinguishable
from the previous sounds. It is only the last minute or so that one has
noticed it--a low, ceaseless pulsation.

It is the drumming of the German artillery upon our charging infantry.
Behind that blue screen they must be in the thick of it. God be with our
men!




CHAPTER XII

THE BRITISH--FRICOURT AND LA BOISELLE

_France, July 3rd._


Yesterday three of us walked out from near the town of Albert to a
hill-side within a few hundred yards of Fricourt. And there all day,
lying amongst the poppies and cornflowers, we watched the fight of the
hour--the struggle around Fricourt Wood and the attack on the village of
La Boiselle.

To call these places villages conveys the idea of recognisable streets
and houses. I suppose they were villages once, as pretty as the other
villages of France; each with its red roofs showing out against its
dark, overshadowing woodland. They are no more villages now than a
dust-heap. Each is a tumbled heap of broken bricks, like the remains of
a Chinese den after it has been pulled down by order of the local
council. Through this heap runs a network of German trenches, here and
there breaking through some still recognisable fragment of a wall.

It was by the sight of two or three English soldiers clambering up one
of these jagged fragments and peering into whatever lay beyond it, that
we knew, as we came in sight of Fricourt, that the village had already
been taken. A string of men was winding past the end of the dust-heap
into the dark wood behind it, where they became lost to view. Somewhere
in the heart of the wood was the _knock-knock_ of an occasional rifle.
So the fight had gone on thither.

In front of us was a long gentle hill-slope, gridironed with trenches
which broke out above the green grass like the wandering burrow of a
mole. The last visible trench was in redder soil and ran along the crest
of the hill. It passed through or near to several small woods and clumps
of trees--the edges of them torn to shreds with shell-fire. They stood
up against the skyline. In one of them, clearly visible, was a roadside
crucifix.

Our men possessed the whole of that slope right into the trench at the
top. We could see occasional figures strolling about the old German
trenches--probably from posts established here or there behind the line
of battle. All day long odd men wandered up or down some part of the
hill-side--a guard with a German prisoner coming down, a messenger or
stretcher-bearers going up. Now and then one could even see heads, with
our flat steel helmets on them, showing out from the red trench against
the skyline. So the fighting could not be severe at the moment on the
crest of the hill.

Yet we were clearly not holding the whole of that skyline trench. On its
southern or right-hand shoulder the hill ran into Fricourt Wood, which
covered all that end of it. At the lower end of the wood, standing out
against it, was the dusty yellow ruin which once was Fricourt. Behind
that shoulder of the hill was a valley, of which we could see the gentle
green slopes stretching away to Mametz and Montauban, both taken the day
before, in the first half-day's fighting. The green slopes must have
been covered with the relics of that attack. But the kindly grass, the
uncut growth of two years, hid them; and the valley, except for a few
thin white trench lines, might have been any other smiling summer
landscape.

When the wave of our attack swept through that country the Germans in
Fricourt village and wood still held on. Another promontory was left
jutting out into the wave of our attack in a similar village on our
left--La Boiselle, where the main road for Bapaume runs straight out
from our lines through the German front. We could see this heap of
yellow-brown ruins sticking up beyond the left shoulder of the opposite
hill much as Fricourt did on its right. There was a valley between, but
it could only be guessed. Boiselle, too, had the remains of a small wood
rising behind it. The bark hung from its ragged stumps as the rigging
droops from the broken masts of a wreck.

We were looking another way, watching our troops trying to creep up to
the extreme right-hand end of the red trench on the top of the hill. We
could see them on the centre of the crest; but here, where the trench
ran into the upper end of Fricourt Wood, there was apparently a check.
Men were lined up at this point, not in the trench, but lying down on
the surface a little on our side of it. From beyond that corner of the
wood there broke out occasionally a chatter of machine-gun fire.
Evidently the Germans still hung on there. The bursts of machine-gun
must have been against small rushes of our men across the open. I
believe that one British unit was attacking round this left-hand corner
of the wood while another was attacking around its right. The drive
through the wood was going forward at the same time. Clearly they were
having some effect; for out of the wood there suddenly appeared a number
of figures. Someone thought they were our men coming back, until it was
noticed that they were unarmed, and held their hands up. They were a
party of the enemy who had surrendered, and for the next quarter of an
hour we watched them being marched slowly down the hill-side opposite.

Our advance here seemed to be held up by some cause we could not see.
German 5.9 shell were falling just on our side of Fricourt village, and
in a line from there up the valley behind our attack. It was not a
really heavy barrage--big black shell-bursts at intervals on the ground,
helped by fairly constant white puffs of shrapnel in the air above them.
Just then our attention was attracted in quite another direction: La
Boiselle.

It had been fairly obvious for some time that La Boiselle was about to
be attacked. While the rest of the landscape before us was only treated
to an occasional shell-burst, heavy explosions had been taking place in
this clump of ruins. Huge roan-coloured bouquets of brickdust and ashes
leaped from time to time into the air and slowly dissolved into a tawny
mist which floated slowly beyond the scarred edge of the hill. It must
have been a big howitzer shell, or perhaps a very large trench mortar
bomb, which was making them. Gradually most of our artillery in the
background to the left of us seemed to be converging upon this village.
Suddenly, at a little before 4 p.m., there lashed on to the place the
shrapnel from three or four batteries of British field guns. They seemed
to be fired as fast as they could be served. Shell after shell laid whip
strokes across the dry earth as swiftly as a man could ply a lash. One
knew perfectly well that our infantry must now be advancing for the
attack, and that this hailstorm was to make the garrison, if any were
left, keep its heads down. But the shoulder of the hill prevented us
from seeing where the infantry was going to issue.

In the turmoil which covered that corner we scarcely noticed that the
nature of the shelling had suddenly changed. Our shell-bursts had gone
much farther up the hill--one realised that; and heavy black clouds were
spurting into the air below Boiselle, just behind the hill's shoulder.
The _crash, crash, crash, crash_ of four heavy shells, one following
another almost as quickly as you would read the words, focused all
one's attention on that point. The fire on it was growing. The Germans
were shooting down a valley, almost a funnel, invisible to us. But we
could see that the fire was increasing every minute; 4.2's were joining
in, and field guns; the lighter guns firing shrapnel, the heavier guns
high explosive. The black smoke of German high explosive streamed up the
valley like a thundercloud. La Boiselle was entirely hidden by it.

There could be no doubt now where our infantry was to attack. That
cauldron was the barrier of shell fire which the German artillery was
throwing in front of them.

It seemed no living thing could face it. Our fire had lengthened at
about 4 o'clock. The German barrage began almost immediately after.
Minute after minute passed without a sign of any troops of ours. Our
spirits fell. "It is one of these fearful attacks on small objectives,"
one thought, "where the enemy knows exactly where you must come out, and
is able to converge an impenetrable artillery fire on that one small
point. If you attack on a wide front, your artillery is bound to leave
some of the enemy's machine-guns unharmed. And when you have to mop up
the small points that are left, and attack on a small front, he gets
you with his artillery--you get it one way or the other." One took it
for granted that the head of this attack had been turned.

Suddenly, out of the mist, came the sound of a few rifle shots. Then
bursts of a machine-gun. It could only be the Germans firing on
advancing British infantry.

And presently they came out, running just beyond the shoulder of that
hill. We could only see their heads at first, tucked down into it as a
man bends when he hurries into a hailstorm. Presently the track on which
they were advancing--I don't know whether it was originally a road or a
trench, but it is a sort of chalky sandhill now[2]--brought them for a
moment rather to our side of the hill into partial shelter. Each section
that reached the place crouched down there for a moment. Spurts of
shrapnel lashed past them whirling the white dust. Black rolling clouds
sprang into existence on the earth beside them. Every minute one
expected to see one of them obliterate the whole party. But, at the end
of a minute or so, someone would pick himself up and run on--and the
remainder would follow.

[2] What we thought was a road or sandhill I afterwards found to be the
upturned edge of one of the two giant mine craters, south of La
Boiselle.

Not all of them. Some there were who did not stir with the rest. Other
figures came running up, heads down into it, often standing out black
against white bursts of chalk dust. I saw one gallant fellow racing up
quite alone, never stopping, running as a man runs a flat race. But
there were an increasing number who never moved. And, though we watched
them for an hour, they were still there motionless at the end of it.

For thirty minutes batches continued to come up. We could see them
building up a line a little farther up the hill, where another bank gave
cover. Then movement stopped and our heavy shell-bursts in La Boiselle
began again. The whole affair was being repeated a step farther forward.
The last we saw was the men leaping over the bank and down into the
space between them and the village.

This morning we went to the same view point. The firing had gone well
beyond Fricourt Wood. They were German shells which were now falling on
the smoking site of La Boiselle.

On the white bank there still lay twelve dark figures.




CHAPTER XIII

THE DUG-OUTS OF FRICOURT

_France, July 3rd._


Yesterday from the opposite slope of a gentle valley we watched Fricourt
village taken. This morning we walked down through the long grass across
what two days ago was No Man's Land into the old German defences. The
grass has been uncut for two years on these slopes, and that is why
there springs from them such a growth of flowers as I have rarely seen.
I think it was once a wheat field that we were walking through. It is a
garden of poppies, cornflowers, and mustard flower now.

Half-way down the slope we noticed that we were crossing a line which
seemed to have been strangely ruled through the wheat field. It was
covered with grass, but there was a line of baby apple trees on each
side of it. It took one some seconds to realise that it was a road.

We jumped across trench after trench of our own. At the bottom of the
valley we stepped over a trench which had a wire entanglement in front
of it. It was the old British front line. The space in front of it had
been No Man's Land.

Some of our men were still lying where shrapnel or rifle fire had caught
them. By them ran another old road up the valley. Beyond the road the
railway trucks were still standing as they have stood for two years in
what once was Fricourt siding. The foundations of Fricourt village stood
up a little beyond, against the dark shades of Fricourt Wood.
Immediately before us, in front of this battered white ash heap, were
the remains of the rusted wire which had once been the maze in front of
the German line.

We found fragments of that wire in the bottom of the trenches
themselves; lengths of it were lying among the shattered buildings
behind the lines. The British shells and bombs must have tossed it about
as you would toss hay with a rake. In the tumbled ruins behind the lines
you simply stepped from one crater into another. Into many of those
craters you could have placed a fair-sized room. One big shell, and two
unexploded bombs like huge ancient cannon balls, lay there on a shelf
covered with rubbish.

Through this rubbish heap were scattered odd fragments of farming
machinery--here an old wagon wheel--there a ploughshare or a portion of
a harrow--in another place some old iron press of which I do not know
the use. The rest of the village was like a deserted brick-field, or the
remains of some ancient mining camp--I do not think there were three
fragments of wall over 10 feet high left. And in and out of this debris
wandered the German front line. We jumped down into those trenches where
some shell had broken them in. They were deep and narrow, such as we had
in Gallipoli. Back from them led narrow, deep, winding communication
trenches which, curiously enough, in parts where we saw them, seemed to
have no supports to their walls such as all the trenches in the wet
country farther north must have. Here and there some shell-burst had
broken or shaken them in.

As we made our way along the front line we found, every few yards or so,
a low, squared, timbered opening below the parapet. A dozen wooden steps
led down and forwards into some dark interior far below.

We clambered down into the first of these chambers. It was exactly as
its occupants had left it. On the floor amongst some tumbled blankets
and odd pieces of clothing, socks for the most part, was scattered a
stock of German grenades, each like a grey jampot with a short handle.
The blankets had come from a series of bunks which almost filled up the
whole dark chamber. These bunks were made roughly of wood, in pairs one
over another, packed into every corner of the narrow space with as much
ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant ship. There were, I think, six of
them in that first chamber. Inlet into the wall, at the end of one set
of bunks, was a wooden box doing service for a cupboard. In it were a
penny novel, and three or four bottles of a German table water. At least
one of these was still full. So the garrison of Fricourt was not as hard
put to it for supplies as some of the German prisoners with whom I spoke
the day before. They had told me that for three or four days no water
could be brought to them up their communication trenches owing to the
British bombardment.

I expect that the garrison of Fricourt had been almost entirely in those
dug-outs during the bombardment. The chambers seemed to have more than
one entrance in some cases, and one suspects they also led into one
another underground. A subterranean passage led forward beneath the
parapet to a door opening into No Man's Land--you could see the daylight
at the end of it.

The fire trench was battered in places out of recognition. But here and
there we came across a bay of it which the bombardment had left more or
less untouched. There were slings of cartridges still hanging against
the wall of the trench. There were the two steel plates through which
they had peered out into No Man's Land, the slits in them half covered
by the flap so as just to give a man room to peep through them. There
was the machine-gun platform, with a long, empty belt still lying on it.
There was the periscope standing on its spike, which had been stuck into
the trench wall. It looked out straight across No Man's Land, but both
mirrors were gone.

As we picked our way through the brick heaps there came towards us a
British soldier with fixed bayonet, and an elderly bareheaded man. The
elderly man's hair was cut short, and was grizzly. He had not shaved for
three days. He was stout, but his face had a curious grey tinge shot
through the natural complexion. His lips were tightly compressed. He
looked about him firmly enough, but with that open-eyed gaze of a wild
animal which seemed to lack all comprehension. It was the face of a man
almost witless. He wore the uniform of a German captain.

He was one of the men who had been through that bombardment.




CHAPTER XIV

THE RAID

_France, July 9th._


During the first week of the battle of the Somme the Anzac troops far to
the north, near Armentieres, raided the German trenches about a dozen
times. Here is a sample of these raids.

We were late. For some reason we had decided to watch this one from the
firing-line. We had stayed too long at Brigade Headquarters getting the
details of the night's plan. Just as we hurried out of the end of the
communication trench into the dark jumble of the low sandbag
constructions which formed this part of the firing-line, there came two
bangs from the southward as if someone had hit an iron ship's tank with
a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.

A light showed dimly from one or two crevices in our trenches. We peeped
into one. It was very small, and someone was busy in there. The
bombardment was not half a minute old, but it was now continuous along
the whole horizon behind us. The noise was that of a large orchestra of
street boys each heartily banging his kerosene-tin drum. Our shells
streamed overhead with an almost continuous swish.

I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking
round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for
some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash
over the parapet to our right--perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one
of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend.

"One of our trench mortars, I think," says another. As we sit in the
narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt
whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above
our heads. We can hear the swish of our own shells, perhaps 100 feet up,
and the occasional rustle of some missile passing overhead a good deal
higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer shells
making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to
fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. I do not know,
but I rather suspect his duty is so to jumble up the walls and banks of
that trench as to prevent German supports from reaching their front line
without clambering into the open fields where our shrapnel is falling
like hail.

But under those two streams of overhead traffic is a third quite easily
distinguishable. It comes with short, descending screams--sheafs of them
together.

At the end of each there is a momentary glare over the sandbags, and the
bang as of an exploding rocket.

That is German shrapnel, bursting in the air and projecting its pellets
in a cone like a shot-gun. A little to the south of us there is a much
more formidable crash, always recurring several times in the minute. We
always know when that crash is coming by a certain fierce orange glare
which lights up the tops of our sandbags immediately before we hear the
sound. Three or four times the crash and the glare came together, and a
big cloud of stuffy-smelling white smoke drifted low overhead, and bits
of mud and earth cascaded down upon us from the sky above; and just for
two minutes the sheaf of four shells from some particular field battery,
which sent them passing as regularly as a clock about five times a
minute overhead, seemed to lower and burst just above us; and one or
two odd high-explosive bursts--4.2, I should say--crept in close upon us
from the rear, while the parapet gave several ponderous jumps towards us
from the other direction. One would swear that it had shifted inwards a
good inch, though I do not suppose it had. The dazzling orange flashes
and crashes close around us were rather like a bad dream. One could not
resist the reflection that often comes over a man when he begins his
holiday with a rough sea crossing, "How on earth did I ever imagine that
there was advantage to be obtained out of this?"

That was the moment which was chosen by one of the party to go along and
see that the men were all right. There was a sentry in the next bay of
the trench. All by himself, but "right as rain," as he puts it. Shrapnel
was breaking in showers on the parapet, swishing overhead like driven
hail. While the enemy is bursting shell on your parapet he cannot come
there himself. Provided that your sentry's nerves are all right, and
that a "crump" does not drop right into his little section of trench,
there is not much that can go wrong. And there is nothing much wanting
in the nerves of this infantry.

However, something had clearly gone wrong with this attack. It was
quite obvious that the enemy somehow or another knew that it was coming
off, and where; for he had begun to shoot back within a very few minutes
of our opening shot, and he was shooting very hard. Clearly he had
noticed some point in our preparations, and he too had prepared. "I will
teach these people a lesson this time," he thought, as he laid his guns
on the likely section.

Right in the midst of all this uproar we heard one of his machine-guns
cracking overhead. Then another joined in--we could hear them traversing
from flank to front and round to flank again. "Of course, the raiders
cannot have got in," one thought. "Perhaps he has seen them crossing No
Man's Land, and those machine-guns are on to them in the open. Poor
beggars! Not much chance for them now"--and one shivered at the thought
of them out there, open and defenceless to that hail. As the minutes
slipped on towards the hour, and our bombardment slackened, but the
enemy's did not, and no one stirred at all in the trenches, one felt
quite sure of it--of course, we had failed this time--well, we ought to
expect such failures; we cannot always hope to jump into German trenches
exactly whenever we please.

Just then a dark figure crept round the traverse of the buttress of the
trench. "Room in here?" he asked.

Two others came after him, bending, and then a fourth. We squeezed along
to make room.

"Was you hit?" asked the second man of the first.

"Only a bang on the scalp, and I wouldn't have got that if it hadn't
been for the prisoner--waiting to get him over."

"Keep your head down, Mac, you'll only get hit," said a third. "Where's
Mr. Franks--you all right, sir?--Mr. Little was hit, wasn't he?"

So these were the raiders, and they had come through it after all. They
were rather distracted. The man next me wiped his forehead, and took a
cigarette. He looked disinterestedly up at the shell-bursts, but he
talked very little. He looked on the raid as a bit of a failure,
clearly.

An hour later we heard all about it. The racket had quietened down. The
enemy was contenting himself with throwing a few shrapnel shells far
back over communication trenches. We were in a room lighted with
candles. In the midst of an interested crowd of half a dozen young
officers was a youngster in grey cloth, with a mud be-spattered coat, a
swollen face, and two bandaged hands. On the table were a coffee-pot,
some cups, and biscuits, and a small heap of loot--gas masks and
bayonets, and such stuff from German dug-outs. Most of the crowd was
interestedly fingering a grey steel helmet with a heavy steel shield or
visor in front of the forehead, evidently meant to be bullet-proof when
the wearer looked over the parapet. The prisoner was murmuring something
like "Durchgeschossen," "Durchgeschossen."

"He says he's shot through," said someone, who understood a little
German.

"Oh, nonsense," broke in a youth; "you were shot through the hand, old
man, but you were not shot there." The prisoner was pointing to his
ribs.

"Oh, you've got a rat," said the youngster, as the man went on pointing
to the same place. But he tore the man's shirt open quickly. "Yes, you
have, sure enough," he exclaimed, showing the small, neat entry hole of
a bullet in the side. "Here, sit down, old man, and take this," he added
tenderly, giving the man a cup of warm coffee, and pressing him to a
chair. The whole attitude had changed to one of solicitude.

It was while the prisoner sat there that we heard about the raid. They
clearly considered it something of a failure. They had to get through a
ditch full of water to their necks, then some trip-wire, then a
knee-deep entanglement, then a ditch full of rusty wire, then some
"French" coils of barbed wire, then more wire knee-deep, with trip-wire
after that. Moreover, the enemy's artillery fire was heavy. They simply
went on over the parapet into the enemy's trench for a few minutes and
killed with their bombs about a dozen Germans, and brought in as
prisoners those who were left wounded. Every man of their own who was
wounded they carried carefully back through the tempest in No Man's
Land. The Germans had spent at least as much artillery ammunition as we
had, and in spite of all the noise they had done wonderfully little
damage. We put a dozen of them out of action till the end of the war--a
dozen that our men saw and know of; and they may have put out of action
five of ours.

As we took a tired prisoner to the hospital through the grey light of
morning, I thought I would give, for a change, an account of a
"failure."

[It was almost immediately after this that the Australians were brought
down to the Somme battle. From this time on they left the neighbourhood
of green fields and farmhouses and plunged into the brown, ploughed-up
nightmare battlefield where the rain of shells has practically never
since ceased. They came into the battle in its second stage, exactly
three weeks after the British.]




CHAPTER XV

POZIERES

_France, July 26th._


I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come
out of action. They have fought such a fight that the famous division of
British regular troops on their flank sent them a message to say that
they were proud to fight by the side of them.

Conditions alter in a battle like this from day to day. But at the time
when the British attack upon the second German line in Longueval and
Bazentin ended, the farther village of Pozieres was left as the hub of
the battle for the time being. This point is the summit of the hill on
which the German second line ran. And, probably for that reason, the new
line which the Germans had dug across from their second line to their
third line--so as to have a line still barring our way when we had
broken through their second line--branched off near Pozieres to meet the
third line near Flers. The map of the situation at this stage of the
battle will show better than a page of description why it was necessary
that Pozieres should next be captured.

There were several days' interval between the failure of the first
attack on Pozieres and the night on which the Australians were put at
it. The Germans probably had little chance of improving their position
in the meanwhile, for the village was kept under a slow bombardment with
heavy shells and shrapnel which made movement there dangerous. Our
troops could see occasional parties of Germans hurrying through the
tattered wood and powdered, tumbled foundations. The garrison lost men
steadily, and on about the night of Thursday or Friday, July 20th or
21st, the Second Guard Reserve Division, which had been mainly
responsible for holding this part of the line, was relieved; and a fresh
division, from the lines in front of Ypres, was put in. The new troops
brought in several days' rations with them, and never lacked food or
water. It was probably a belated party of these new-comers that our men
noticed wandering through the village in daytime.

During the afternoon of Saturday our bombardment of Pozieres became
heavier. Most of these ruined villages are marked on this shell-swept
country by the trees around them. It is not that they originally stood
in a woodland; but when the village is a mere heap of foundations
powdered white the only relic of it left standing erect, if you except a
battered wall or two, is the shredded trunks and stumps of trees which
once made the gardens or orchards or hedges behind the houses. Our
troops had three obstacles before them--first a shallow, hastily dug
trench in the open in front of the trees around the village; then
certain trenches running generally through the trees and hedges and
behind a trench railway; thirdly, such lines as existed in the village
itself. The village is strung out along a stretch of the Albert-Bapaume
road up which the battle has advanced from the first. Just beyond the
village, near what remains of the Pozieres Mill on the very top of the
hill, is the German second line still (at time of writing) in possession
of the Germans. Another line crossing the road in front of the village
was then in their hands.

On Saturday afternoon our heavy shells were tearing at regular intervals
into the rear of the brickheaps which once were houses, and flinging up
branches of trees and great clouds of black earth from the woods. A
German letter was found next day dated "In Hell's Trenches." It added:
"It is not really a trench, but a little ditch, shattered with
shells--not the slightest cover and no protection. We have lost 50 men
in two days, and life is unendurable." White puffs of shrapnel from
field guns were lathering the place persistently, so that when the
German trenches were broken down it was difficult to repair them or move
in them.

Our men in their trenches were cleaning rifles, packing away spare kit,
yarning there much as they yarned of old over the stockyard fence or the
gate of the horse paddock.

That night, shortly after dark, there broke out the most fearful
bombardment I have ever seen. As one walked towards the battlefield, the
weirdly shattered woods and battered houses stood out almost all the
time against one continuous band of flickering light along the eastern
skyline. Most of it was far away to the east of our part of the
battlefield--in some French or British sector on the far right. There
must have been fierce fire upon Pozieres, too, for the Germans were
replying to it, hailing the roads with shrapnel and trying to fill the
hollows with gas shell. They must have suspected an attack upon this
part of their line as well, and were trying to hamper the reserves from
moving into position.

About midnight our field artillery lashed down its shrapnel upon the
German front line in the open before the village. A few minutes later
this fire lifted and the Australian attack was launched.

The Germans had opened in one part with a machine-gun before that final
burst of shrapnel, and they opened again immediately after. But there
would have been no possibility of stopping that charge with a fire
twenty times as heavy. The difficulty was not to get the men forward,
but to hold them. With a complicated night attack to be carried through
it was necessary to keep the men well in hand.

The first trench was a wretchedly shallow affair in places. Most of the
Germans in it were dead--some of them had been lying there for days. The
artillery in the meantime had lifted on to the German trenches farther
back. Later they lifted to a farther position yet. The Australian
infantry dashed at once from the first position captured, across the
intervening space over the tramway and into the trees.

It was here that the first real difficulty arose along parts of the
line. Some sections found in front of them the trench which they were
looking for--an excellent deep trench which had survived the
bombardment. Other sections found no recognisable trench at all, but a
maze of shell craters and tumbled rubbish, or a simple ditch reduced to
white powder. Parties went on through the trees into the village,
searching for the position, and pushed so close to the fringe of their
own shell fire that some were wounded by it. However, where they found
no trench they started to dig one as best they could. Shortly after the
bombardment shifted a little farther, and a third attack came through
and swept, in most parts, right up to the position which the troops had
been ordered to take up.

As daylight gradually spread over that bleached surface Australians
could occasionally be seen walking about in the trees and through the
part of the village they had been ordered to take. The position was
being rapidly "consolidated." German snipers in the north-east of the
village and across the main road could see them, too. A patrol was sent
across the main road to find a sniper. It bombed some dug-outs which it
found there, and from one of them appeared a white flag, which was waved
vigorously. Sixteen prisoners came out, including a regimental doctor.
There were several other dug-outs in this part and various scraps of
old trenches, probably the site of an old battery. The Germans, now that
they had been driven from their main lines, were naturally fighting from
the various scraps of isolated fortification which exist behind all
positions. During the afternoon two patrols were sent to clear out other
snipers from these half-hidden lurking places. But the garrison was
sufficiently organised to summon up some sort of reserve, and the
patrols had to come back after a short, sharp fight more or less in the
open.

After dark, the Australians pushed across the road through the village.
By morning the position had been improved, so that nearly the whole
village was secure against sudden attack.

An official report would read: "The same progress continued on Tuesday
night, and by Wednesday morning the whole of Pozieres was consolidated."
That is to say--in the heart of the village itself there was little more
actual hand-to-hand fighting. All that happened there was that, from the
time when the first day broke and found the Pozieres position
practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it. Hour after
hour--day and night--with increasing intensity as the days went on, he
rained heavy shell into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield
for miles around--that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing
in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute
after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would
place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and
landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through
a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear
shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with
black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy
pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black
clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men
worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon
as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand--building up whatever it
battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and
again.

What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would
go through a summer shower--too proud to bend their heads, many of them,
because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have
seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me, "I have to walk
about as if I liked it--what else can you do when your own men teach
you to?" The same thought struck me not once but twenty times.

On Tuesday morning the shelling of the day before rose to a crescendo,
and then suddenly slackened. The German was attacking. It was only a few
of the infantry who even saw him. The attack came in lines at fairly
wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozieres
windmill. Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage
of our own guns' shrapnel. The German lines swerved away up the hill.
The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling
over, as quickly as they might, from one shell crater to another, grey
backs hopping from hole to hole. They blazed away hard; but most of our
infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for. The artillery beat
back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and
ran. Again the enemy's artillery was turned on. Pozieres was pounded
more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to
onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an
ordeal. The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and
black dust towering above it like a Broken Hill dust-storm. Then
Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning. Again our
artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the
attack.

During all this time, in spite of the shelling, the troops were slowly
working forwards through Pozieres; not backwards. Every day saw fresh
ground gained. A great part of the men who were working through it had
no more than two or three hours' sleep since Saturday--some of them none
at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.

The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the
hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches
before-mentioned--the second-line German trench behind Pozieres and the
similar trench in front of it. The story of it will be told some day--it
would almost deserve a book to itself.




CHAPTER XVI

AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION

_France, August 1st._


When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation
could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under
which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city
underneath the shattered foundations of the village. And then their rat
city had been crushed in from above; and through the