VII

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been in the King's Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the little courtyard to high mass at the cathedral or to a game of bezique in some other mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens, unless in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with many hundreds of houses by bombs and gun-fire. My little room was on the floor below the garret, and here at night, after a long day in the fields up by Pozieres or Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to Bapaume, in the long struggle and slaughter over every inch of ground, I used to write my day's despatch, to be taken next day (it was before we were allowed to use the military wires) by King's Messenger to England.

Those articles, written at high speed, with an impressionism born out of many new memories of tragic and heroic scenes, were interrupted sometimes by air-bombardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens during the Somme fighting, to unload their bombs as near to the station as they could guess, which was not often very near. Generally they killed a few women and children and knocked a few poor houses and a shop or two into a wild rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote, listening to the crashing of glass and the anti-aircraft fire of French guns from the citadel, I used to wonder subconsciously whether I should suddenly be hurled into chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence, and now and again in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get my message done (the censors were waiting for it downstairs) I had to get up and walk into the passage to listen to the infernal noise in the dark city of Amiens. But I went back again and bent over my paper, concentrating on the picture of war which I was trying to set down so that the world might see and understand, until once again, ten minutes later or so, my will-power would weaken and the little devil of fear would creep up to my heart and I would go uneasily to the door again to listen. Then once more to my writing... Nothing touched the house in the rue Amiral Courbet while we were there. But it was into my bedroom that a shell went crashing after that night in March when Amiens was badly wrecked, and we listened to the noise of destruction all around us from a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other side of the way. I should have been sleeping still if I had slept that night in my little old bedroom when the shell paid a visit.

There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and when I think of darkness I think of that city in time of war, when all the streets were black tunnels and one fumbled one's way timidly, if one had no flash-lamp, between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming into sharp collision sometimes with other wayfarers. But up to midnight there were little lights flashing for a second and then going out, along the Street of the Three Pebbles and in the dark corners of side-streets. They were carried by girls seeking to entice English officers on their way to their billets, and they clustered like glowworms about the side door of the Hotel du Rhin after nine o'clock, and outside the railings of the public gardens. As one passed, the bright bull's-eye from a pocket torch flashed in one's eyes, and in the radiance of it one saw a girl's face, laughing, coming very close, while her fingers felt for one's badge.

"How dark it is to-night, little captain! Are you not afraid of darkness? I am full of fear. It is so sad, this war, so dismal! It is comradeship that helps one now!... A little love... a little laughter, and then—who knows?"

A little love... a little laughter—alluring words to boys out of one battle, expecting another, hating it all, lonely in their souls because of the thought of death, in exile from their own folk, in exile from all womanhood and tender, feminine things, up there in the ditches and shellcraters of the desert fields, or in the huts of headquarters staffs, or in reserve camps behind the fighting-line. A little love, a little laughter, and then—who knows? The sirens had whispered their own thoughts. They had translated into pretty French the temptation of all the little devils in their souls.

"Un peu d'amour-"

One flash-lamp was enough for two down a narrow street toward the riverside, and then up a little dark stairway to a lamp-lit room... Presently this poor boy would be stricken with disease and wish himself dead.



VIII

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading articles of English papers. (There was never any news of French fighting beyond the official communique and imaginary articles of a romantic kind written by French journalists in Paris about episodes of war.) In one corner of the estaminet was a group of bourgeois gentlemen talking business for a time, and then listening to a monologue from the woman behind the counter. I could not catch many words of the conversation, owing to the general chatter, but when the man went out the woman and I were left alone together, and she came over to me and put a photograph down on the table before me, and, as though carrying on her previous train of thought, said, in French, of course:

"Yes, that is what the war has done to me."

I could not guess her meaning. Looking at the photograph, I saw it was of a young girl in evening dress with her hair coiled in an artistic way and a little curl on each cheek. Madame's daughter, I thought, looking up at the woman standing in front of me in a grubby bodice and tousled hair. She looked a woman of about forty, with a wan face and beaten eyes.

"A charming young lady," I said, glancing again at the portrait.

The woman repeated her last sentence, word for word.

"Yes... that is what the war has done to me."

I looked up at her again and saw that she had the face of the young girl in the photograph, but coarsened, aged, raddled, by the passing years and perhaps by tragedy.

"It is you?" I asked.

"Yes, in 1913, before the war. I have changed since then—n'est-ce pas, Monsieur?"

"There is a change," I said. I tried not to express my thought of how much change.

"You have suffered in the war—more than most people?"

"Ah, I have suffered!"

She told me her story, and word for word, if I could have written it down then, it would have read like a little novel by Guy de Maupassant. She was the daughter of people in Lille, well-to-do merchants, and before the war married a young man of the same town, the son of other manufacturers. They had two children and were very happy. Then the war came. The enemy drove down through Belgium, and one day drew near and threatened Lille. The parents of the young couple said: "We will stay. We are too old to leave our home, and it is better to keep watch over the factory. You must go, with the little ones, and there is no time to lose."

There was no time to lose. The trains were crowded with fugitives and soldiers—mostly soldiers. It was necessary to walk. Weeping, the young husband and wife said farewell to their parents and set out on the long trail, with the two babies in a perambulator, under a load of bread and wine, and a little maid carrying some clothes in a bundle. For days they tramped the roads until they were all dusty and bedraggled and footsore, but glad to be getting farther away from that tide of field-gray men which had now swamped over Lille. The young husband comforted his wife. "Courage!" he said. "I have money enough to carry us through the war. We will set up a little shop somewhere." The maid wept bitterly now and then, but the young husband said: "We will take care of you, Margot. There is nothing to fear. We are lucky in our escape." He was a delicate fellow, rejected for military service, but brave. They came to Amiens, and hired the estaminet and set up business. There was a heavy debt to work off for capital and expenses before they would make money, but they were doing well. The mother was happy with her children, and the little maid had dried her tears. Then one day the young husband went away with the little maid and all the money, leaving his wife in the estaminet with a big debt to pay and a broken heart.

"That is what the war has done to me," she said again, picking up the photograph of the girl in the evening frock with a little curl on each cheek.

"C'est triste, Madame!"

"Oui, c'est triste, Monsieur!"

But it was not war that had caused her tragedy, except that it had unloosened the roots of her family life. Guy de Maupassant would have given just such an ending to his story.



IX

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private houses, became very friendly with the families who received them. Young girls of good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and schoolmasters, and merchants in a good way of business, found it delightful to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French, to take walks with them, and to arrange musical evenings with other girl friends who brought their young officers and sang little old French songs with them or English songs in the prettiest French accent. These young officers of ours found the home life very charming. It broke the monotony of exile and made them forget the evil side of war. They paid little gallantries to the girls, bought them boxes of chocolate until fancy chocolate was forbidden in France, and presented flowers to decorate the table, and wrote amusing verses in their autograph albums or drew sketches for them. As this went on they gained to the privilege of brotherhood, and there were kisses before saying "good night" outside bedroom doors, while the parents downstairs were not too watchful, knowing the ways of young people, and lenient because of their happiness. Then a day came in each one of these households when the officer billeted there was ordered away to some other place. What tears! What lamentations! And what promises never to forget little Jeanne with her dark tresses, or Suzanne with the merry eyes! Were they not engaged? Not formally, perhaps, but in honor and in love. For a time letters arrived, eagerly waited for by girls with aching hearts. Then picture post-cards with a line or two of affectionate greeting. Then nothing. Nothing at all, month after month, in spite of all the letters addressed with all the queer initials for military units. So it happened again and again, until bitterness crept into girls' hearts, and hardness and contempt.

"In my own little circle of friends," said a lady of Amiens, "I know eighteen girls who were engaged to English officers and have been forsaken. It is not fair. It is not good. Your English young men seem so serious, far more serious than our French boys. They have a look of shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, at first, and blush when one pays a pretty compliment. They are a long time before they take liberties. So we trust them, and take them seriously, and allow intimacies which we should refuse to French boys unless formally engaged. But it is all camouflage. At heart your English young men are just flirts. They play with us, make fools of us, steal our hearts, and then go away, and often do not send so much as a post-card. Not even one little post-card to the girls who weep their hearts out for them! You English are all hypocrites. You boast that you 'play the game.' I know your phrase. It is untrue.

"You play with good girls as though they were grues, and that no Frenchman would dare to do. He knows the difference between good girls and bad girls, and behaves, with reverence to those who are good. When the English army goes away from France it will leave many bitter memories because of that."



X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could see to walk along the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was quivering with flashes of white light, like summer lightning, and now and then there was a long, vivid glare of red touching the high clouds with rosy feathers; one of our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been blown up by that gun-fire, sullen and menacing, which never ceased for years. In that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some comrade, like Frederic Palmer or Beach Thomas, as tired and as thoughtful as oneself after a long day's journeying in the swirl of war, one's brain roved over the scenes of battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the agony up there, the death which was being done by those guns, and the stupendous sum of all this conflict. We saw, after all, only one patch of the battlefields of the world, and yet were staggered by the immensity of its massacre, by the endless streams of wounded, and by the growth of those little forests of white crosses behind the fighting-lines. We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind's eye—even in the darkness of an Amiens night—the vastness of the human energy which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more food and more shells, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching forward from back roads to the front, from which many would never come marching back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare horses, along hundreds of miles of roads—all the machinery of slaughter on the move. It was staggering in its enormity, in its detail, and in its activity. Yet beyond our sphere in the British section of the western front there was the French front, larger than ours, stretching right through France, and all their roads were crowded with the same traffic, and all their towns and villages were stirred by the same activity and for the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were crammed with the wreckage of youth. On the other side of the lines the Germans were busy in the same way, as busy as soldier ants, and the roads behind their front were cumbered by endless columns of transport and marching men, and guns and ambulances laden with bashed, blinded, and bleeding boys. So it was in Italy, in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria, Serbia, Mesopotamia, Egypt... In the silence of Amiens by night, under the stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our foreheads, with a glamour of light over the waters of the Somme, our spirit was stricken by the thought of this world-tragedy, and cried out in anguish against this bloody crime in which all humanity was involved. The senselessness of it! The futility! The waste! The mockery of men's faith in God!...

Often Palmer and I—dear, grave old Palmer, with sphinx-like face and honest soul—used to trudge along silently, with just a sigh now and then, or a groan, or a sudden cry of "O God!... O Christ!" It was I, generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: "Yes... and it's going to last a long time yet. A long time... It's a question who will hold out twenty-four hours longer than the other side. France is tired, more tired than any of us. Will she break first? Somehow I think not. They are wonderful! Their women have a gallant spirit... How good it is, the smell of the trees to-night!"

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at the cathedral, high and beautiful above the huddle of old, old houses on the quayside, with a faint light on its pinnacle and buttresses and immense blackness beyond them.

"Those builders of France loved their work," said Palmer. "There was always war about the walls of this cathedral, but they went on with it, stone by stone, without hurry."

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, but many times, and out of those little dark streets below the cathedral of Amiens came the spirit of history to teach our spirit with wonderment at the nobility and the brutality of men, and their incurable folly, and their patience with tyranny.

"When is it all going to end, Palmer, old man?"

"The war, or the folly of men?"

"The war. This cursed war. This bloody war."

"Something will break one day, on our side or the other. Those who hold out longest and have the best reserves of man-power."

We were starting early next day—before dawn—to see the beginning of another battle. We walked slowly over the little iron bridge again, through the vegetable market, where old men and women were unloading cabbages from a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue des Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was a light burning in the window of the censor's room. In there the colonel was reading The Times in the Louis Quinze salon, with a grave pucker on his high, thin forehead. He could not get any grasp of the world's events. There was an attack on the censor by Northcliffe. Now what did he mean by that? It was really very unkind of him, after so much civility to him. Charteris would be furious. He would bang the telephone—but—dear, dear, why should people be so violent? War correspondents were violent on the slightest provocation. The world itself was very violent. And it was all so dangerous. Don't you think so, Russell?

The cars were ordered for five o'clock. Time for bed.



XI

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain fell heavily out of a moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp flashed out except where a solitary woman scurried down the wet streets to lonely rooms. There were no British officers strolling about. They had turned in early, to hot baths and unaccustomed beds, except for one or two, with their burberries buttoned tight at the throat, and sopping field-caps pulled down about the ears, and top—boots which went splash, splash through deep puddles as they staggered a little uncertainly and peered up at dark corners to find their whereabouts, by a dim sense of locality and the shapes of the houses. The rain pattered sharply on the pavements and beat a tattoo on leaden gutters and slate roofs. Every window was shuttered and no light gleamed through.

On such a night I went out with Beach Thomas, as often before, wet or fine, after hard writing.

"A foul night," said Thomas, setting off in his quick, jerky step. "I like to feel the rain on my face."

We turned down as usual to the river. It was very dark—the rain was heavy on the quayside, where there was a group of people bareheaded in the rain and chattering in French, with gusts of laughter.

"Une bouteille de champagne!" The words were spoken in a clear boy's voice, with an elaborate caricature of French accent, in musical cadence, but unmistakably English.

"A drunken officer," said Thomas.

"Poor devil!"

We drew near among the people and saw a young officer arm in arm with a French peasant—one of the market porters—telling a tale in broken French to the audience about him, with comic gesticulations and extraordinary volubility.

A woman put her hand on my shoulder and spoke in French.

"He has drunk too much bad wine. His legs walk away from him. He will be in trouble, Monsieur. And a child—no older than my own boy who is fighting in the Argonne."

"Apportez-moi une bouteille de champagne, vite!..." said the young officer. Then he waved his arm and said: "J'ai perdu mon cheval" ("A kingdom for a bloody horse!"), "as Shakespeare said. Y a-t'il quelqu'un qui a vu mon sacre cheval? In other words, if I don't find that four-legged beast which led to my damnation I shall be shot at dawn. Fusille, comprenez? On va me fusiller par un mur blanc—or is it une mure blanche? quand l'aurore se leve avec les couleurs d'une rose et l'odeur d'une jeune fille lavee et parfumee. Pretty good that, eh, what? But the fact remains that unless I find my steed, my charger, my war-horse, which in reality does not belong to me at all, because I pinched it from the colonel, I shall be shot as sure as fate, and, alas! I do not want to die. I am too young to die, and meanwhile I desire encore une bouteille de champagne!"

The little crowd of citizens found a grim humor in this speech, one-third of which they understood. They laughed coarsely, and a man said:

"Quel drole de type! Quel numero!"

But the woman who had touched me on the sleeve spoke to me again.

"He says he has lost his horse and will be shot as a deserter. Those things happen. My boy in the Argonne tells me that a comrade of his was shot for hiding five days with his young woman. It would be sad if this poor child should be condemned to death."

I pushed my way through the crowd and went up to the officer.

"Can I help at all?"

He greeted me warmly, as though he had known me for years.

"My dear old pal, you can indeed! First of all I want a bottle of champagne-une bouteille de champagne-" it was wonderful how much music he put into those words—"and after that I want my runaway horse, as I have explained to these good people who do not understand a bloody word, in spite of my excellent French accent. I stole the colonel's horse to come for a joy-ride to Amiens. The colonel is one of the best of men, but very touchy, very touchy indeed. You would be surprised. He also has the worst horse in the world, or did, until it ran away half an hour ago into the blackness of this hell which men call Amiens. It is quite certain that if I go back without that horse most unpleasant things will happen to a gallant young British officer, meaning myself, who with most innocent intentions of cleansing his soul from the filth of battle, from the horror of battle, from the disgusting fear of battle—oh yes, I've been afraid all right, and so have you unless you're a damned hero or a damned liar—desired to get as far as this beautiful city (so fair without, so foul within!) in order to drink a bottle, or even two or three, of rich, sparkling wine, to see the loveliness of women as they trip about these pestilential streets, to say a little prayer in la cathedrale, and then to ride back, refreshed, virtuous, knightly, all through the quiet night, to deliver up the horse whence I had pinched it, and nobody any the wiser in the dewy morn. You see, it was a good scheme."

"What happened?" I asked.

"It happened thuswise," he answered, breaking out into fresh eloquence, with fantastic similes and expressions of which I can give only the spirit. "Leaving a Pozieres, which, as you doubtless know, unless you are a bloody staff-officer, is a place where the devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, where he leaves his victims' entrails hanging on to barbed wire, and where the bodies of your friends and mine lie decomposing in muddy holes—you know the place?—I put my legs across the colonel's horse, which was in the wagonlines, and set forth for Amiens. That horse knew that I had pinched him—forgive my slang. I should have said it in the French language, vole—and resented me. Thrice was I nearly thrown from his back. Twice did he entangle himself in barbed wire deliberately. Once did I have to coerce him with many stripes to pass a tank. Then the heavens opened upon us and it rained. It rained until I was wet to the skin, in spite of sheltering beneath a tree, one branch of which, owing to the stubborn temper of my steed, struck me a stinging blow across the face. So in no joyful spirit I came at last to Amiens, this whited sepulcher, this Circe's capital, this den of thieves, this home of vampires. There I dined, not wisely, but too well. I drank of the flowing cup—une bouteille de champagne—and I met a maiden as ugly as sin, but beautiful in my eyes after Pozieres—you understand—and accompanied her to her poor lodging—in a most verminous place, sir—where we discoursed upon the problems of life and love. O youth! O war! O hell!... My horse, that brute who resented me, was in charge of an 'ostler, whom I believe verily is a limb of Satan, in the yard without. It was late when I left that lair of Circe, where young British officers, even as myself, are turned into swine. It was late and dark, and I was drunk. Even now I am very drunk. I may say that I am becoming drunker and drunker."

It was true. The fumes of bad champagne were working in the boy's brain, and he leaned heavily against me.

"It was then that that happened which will undoubtedly lead to my undoing, and blast my career as I have blasted my soul. The horse was there in the yard, but without saddle or bridle.

"'Where is my saddle and where is my bridle, oh, naughty 'ostler?' I shouted, in dismay.

"The 'ostler, who, as I informed you, is one of Satan's imps, answered in incomprehensible French, led the horse forth from the yard, and, giving it a mighty blow on the rump, sent it clattering forth into the outer darkness. In my fear of losing it—for I must be at Pozieres at dawn—I ran after it, but it ran too fast in the darkness, and I stopped and tried to grope my way back to the stableyard to kill that 'ostler, thereby serving God, and other British officers, for he was the devil's agent. But I could not find the yard again. It had disappeared! It was swallowed up in Cimmerian gloom. So I was without revenge and without horse, and, as you will perceive, sir—unless you are a bloody staff-officer who doesn't perceive anything—I am utterly undone. I am also horribly drunk, and I must apologize for leaning so heavily on your arm. It's awfully good of you, anyway, old man."

The crowd was mostly moving, driven indoors by the rain. The woman who had spoken to me said, "I heard a horse's hoofs upon the bridge, la-bas."

Then she went away with her apron over her head.

Thomas and I walked each side of the officer, giving him an arm. He could not walk straight, and his legs played freakish tricks with him. All the while he talked in a strain of high comedy interlarded with grim little phrases, revealing an underlying sense of tragedy and despair, until his speech thickened and he became less fluent. We spent a fantastic hour searching for his horse. It was like a nightmare in the darkness and rain. Every now and then we heard, distinctly, the klip-klop of a horse's hoofs, and went off in that direction, only to be baffled by dead silence, with no sign of the animal. Then again, as we stood listening, we heard the beat of hoofs on hard pavements, in the opposite direction, and walked that way, dragging the boy, who was getting more and more incapable of walking upright. At last we gave up hope of finding the horse, though the young officer kept assuring us that he must find it at all costs. "It's a point of honor," he said, thickly. "Not my horse, you know Doctor's horse. Devil to pay to-morrow."

He laughed foolishly and said:

"Always devil to pay in morning."

We were soaked to the skin.

"Come home with me," I said. "We can give you a shake-down."

"Frightfully good, old man. Awfully sorry, you know, and all that. Are you a blooming general, or something? But I must find horse."

By some means we succeeded in persuading him that the chase was useless and that it would be better for him to get into our billet and start out next morning, early. We dragged him up the rue des Augustins, to the rue Amiral Courbet. Outside the iron gates I spoke to him warningly:

"You've got to be quiet. There are staff-officers inside..."

"What?... Staff officers?... Oh, my God!"

The boy was dismayed. The thought of facing staff-officers almost sobered him; did, indeed, sober his brain for a moment, though not his legs.

"It's all right," I said. "Go quietly, and I will get you upstairs safely."

It was astonishing how quietly he went, hanging on to me. The little colonel was reading The Times in the salon. We passed the open door, and saw over the paper his high forehead puckered with perplexity as to the ways of the world. But he did not raise his head or drop The Times at the sound of our entry. I took the boy upstairs to my room and guided him inside. He said, "Thanks awfully," and then lay down on the floor and fell into so deep a sleep that I was scared and thought for a moment he might be dead. I went downstairs to chat with the little colonel and form an alibi in case of trouble. An hour later, when I went into my room, I found the boy still lying as I had left him, without having stirred a limb. He was a handsome fellow, with his head hanging limply across his right arm and a lock of damp hair falling across his forehead. I thought of a son of mine, who in a few years would be as old as he, and I prayed God mine might be spared this boy's tragedy... Through the night he slept in a drugged way, but just at dawn he woke up and stretched himself, with a queer little moan. Then he sat up and said:

"Where am I?"

"In a billet at Amiens. You lost your horse last night and I brought you here."

Remembrance came into his eyes and his face was swept with a sudden flush of shame and agony.

"Yes... I made a fool of myself. The worst possible. How can I get back to Pozieres?"

"You could jump a lorry with luck."

"I must. It's serious if I don't get back in time. In any case, the loss of that horse—"

He thought deeply for a moment, and I could see that his head was aching to the beat of sledge-hammers.

"Can I wash anywhere?"

I pointed to a jug and basin, and he said, "Thanks, enormously."

He washed hurriedly, and then stared down with a shamed look at his muddy uniform, all creased and bedraggled. After that he asked if he could get out downstairs, and I told him the door was unlocked.

He hesitated for a moment before leaving my room.

"I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was very decent of you. Many thanks."

The boy was a gentleman when sober. I wonder if he died at Pozieres, or farther on by the Butte de Warlencourt... A week later I saw an advertisement in an Amiens paper: "Horse found. Brown, with white sock on right foreleg. Apply—"

I have a fancy it was the horse for which we had searched in the rain.



XII

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie's bar was on the left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o'clock by officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and made them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young staff-officers were there, explaining carefully how hard worked they were and how often they went under shell-fire. The fighting officers, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered at them, laughed hugely at the latest story of mirthful horror, arranged rendezvous at the Godebert restaurant, where they would see the beautiful Marguerite (until she transferred to la cathedrale in the same street) and our checks which Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in British honesty, not often, as he told me, being hurt by a "stumor." Charlie's bar was wrecked by shell-fire afterward, and he went to Abbeville and set up a more important establishment, which was wrecked, too, in a fierce air raid, before the paint was dry on the walls.

The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and women went all through the war, called into its white halls by the spirit of beauty which dwelt there, and by its silence and peace. The great west door was screened from bomb-splinters by sand-bags piled high, and inside there were other walls of sand-bags closing in the sanctuary and some of the windows. But these signs of war did not spoil the majesty of the tall columns and high roof, nor the loveliness of the sculptured flowers below the clerestory arches, nor the spiritual mystery of those great, dim aisles, where light flickered and shadows lurked, and the ghosts of history came out of their tombs to pace these stones again where five, six, seven centuries before they had walked to worship God, in joy or in despair, or to show their beauty of young womanhood—peasant girl or princess—to lovers gazing by the pillars, or to plight their troth as royal brides, or get a crown for their heads, or mercy for their dead bodies in velvet-draped coffins.

Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before other English soldiers, who came out with Edward the Black Prince, by way of Crecy, or with Harry the King, through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence, if Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time will think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who tramped up the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old flagstones, awed by the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden heartache for a closer knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God worshiped there—the God of Love—while, not far away, men were killing one another by high explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, bayonets, poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close fighting, with short daggers like butchers' knives, or clubs with steel knobs. I watched the faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like the Australians and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not religious by instinct or training, wandered round in a wondering way, with a touch of scorn, even of hostility, now and then, for these mysteries—the chanting of the Office, the tinkling of the bells at the high mass—which were beyond their understanding, and which they could not link up with any logic of life, as they knew it now, away up by Bapaume or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do, seemingly, with a night raid into Boche lines, when they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping Stoke bombs down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German boys, mad with fear, when the Australians jumped on them in the darkness and made haste with their killing. All the same, this great church was wonderful, and the Australians, scrunching their slouch-hats, stared up at the tall columns to the clerestory arches, and peered through the screen to the golden sun upon the high-altar, and touched old tombs with their muddy hands, reading the dates on them—1250, 1155, 1415—with astonishment at their antiquity. Their clean-cut hatchet faces, sun—baked, tanned by rain and wind, their simple blue-gray eyes, the fine, strong grace of their bodies, as they stood at ease in this place of history, struck me as being wonderfully like all that one imagines of those English knights and squires—Norman-English—who rode through France with the Black Prince. It is as though Australia had bred back to the old strain. Our own English soldiers were less arresting to the eye, more dapper and neat, not such evident children of nature. Gravely they walked up the aisles, standing in groups where a service was in progress, watching the movements of the priests, listening to the choir and organ with reverent, dreamy eyes. Some of them—country lads—thought back, I fancy, to some village church in England where they had sung hymns with mother and sisters in the days before the war. England and that little church were a long way off now, perhaps all eternity away. I saw one boy standing quite motionless, with wet eyes, without self-consciousness. This music, this place of thoughtfulness, had made something break in his heart... Some of our young officers, but not many, knelt on the cane chairs and prayed, face in hands. French officers crossed themselves and their medals tinkled as they walked up the aisles. Always there were women in black weeds kneeling before the side—altars, praying to the Virgin for husbands and sons, dead or alive, lighting candles below holy pictures and statues. Our men tiptoed past them, holding steel hats or field—caps, and putting their packs against the pillars. On the steps of the cathedral I heard two officers talking one day.

"How can one reconcile all this with the war?"

"Why not?... I suppose we're fighting for justice and all that. That's what The Daily Mail tells us."

"Seriously, old man. Where does Christ come in?"

"He wasn't against righteous force. He chased the money-changers out of the Temple."

"Yes, but His whole teaching was love and forgiveness. 'Thou shalt not kill.' 'Little children, love one another!' 'Turn the other cheek.'. .. Is it all sheer tosh? If so, why go on pretending?... Take chaplains in khaki—these lieutenant-colonels with black crosses. They make me sick. It's either one thing or the other. Brute force or Christianity. I am harking back to the brute—force theory. But I'm not going to say 'God is love' one day and then prod a man in the stomach the next. Let's be consistent."

"The other fellows asked for it. They attacked first."

"Yes, but we are all involved. Our diplomacy, our secret treaties, our philosophical dope over the masses, our imperial egotism, our trade rivalries—all that was a direct challenge of Might against Right. The Germans are more efficient and more logical—that's all. They prepared for the inevitable and struck first. We knew the inevitable was coming, but didn't prepare, being too damned inefficient... I have a leaning toward religion. Instinctively I'm for Christ. But it doesn't work in with efficiency and machine-guns."

"It belongs to another department, that's all. We're spiritual and animal at the same time. In one part of my brain I'm a gentleman. In another, a beast. It's conflict. We can't eliminate the beast, but we can control it now and then when it gets too obstreperous, and that's where religion helps. It's the high ideal—otherworldliness."

"The Germans pray to the same God. Praise Christ and ask for victory."

"Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems to me God is above all the squabbles of humanity—doesn't care a damn about them!—but the human soul can get into touch with the infinite and the ideal, even while he is doing butcher's work, and beastliness. That doesn't matter very much. It's part of the routine of life."

"But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation in the world. It creates cruelty and tyranny, and all bloody things. Surely if we believe in God—anyhow in Christian ethics—this war is a monstrous crime in which all humanity is involved."

"The Hun started it... Let's go and give the glad eye to Marguerite."

At night, in moonlight, Amiens cathedral was touched with a new spirituality, a white magic beyond all words of beauty. On many nights of war I walked round the cathedral square, looking up at that grand mass of masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming like silver and its sculptured tracery like lacework, and a flood of milky light glamorous on walls in which every stone was clear-cut beyond a vast shadow-world. How old it was! How many human eyes through many centuries had come in the white light of the moon to look at this dream in stone enshrining the faith of men! The Revolution had surged round these walls, and the screams of wild women, and their shrill laughter, and their cries for the blood of aristocrats, had risen from this square. Pageants of kingship and royal death had passed across these pavements through the great doors there. Peasant women, in the darkness, had wept against these walls, praying for God's pity for their hearts. Now the English officers were lighting cigarettes in the shelter of a wall, the outline of their features—knightly faces—touched by the moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in the sky beyond the river.

"A good night for a German air raid," said one of the officers.

"Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep," said the other man.

The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their shutters.



XIII

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice—a big, grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways, and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her scales. There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition of war for passers-by to see. Many of them revealed no faces, but were white masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round their heads. Others showed only the upper parts of their faces, and the places where their jaws had been were tied up with white rags. There were men without noses, and men with half their scalps torn away. French children used to stare through the railings at them, gravely, with childish curiosity, without pity. English soldiers gave them a passing glance, and went on to places where they might be made like this, without faces, or jaws, or noses, or eyes. By their uniforms I saw that there were Chasseurs Alpins, and Chasseurs d'Afrique, and young infantrymen of the line, and gunners. They sat, without restlessness, watching the passers-by if they had eyes to see, or, if blind, feeling the breeze about them, and listening to the sound of passing feet.



XIV

The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the tow-path, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite bank, and past the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness in days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture—these Cottages where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come for week-ends of boating and fishing—and their garden gates at the end of wooden bridges over back-waters were of iron twisted into the shapes of swans or flowers, and there were snails of terra-cotta on the chimney-pots, and painted woodwork on the walls, in the worst taste, yet amusing and pleasing to the eye in their green bowers. I remember one called Mon Idee, and wondered that any man should be proud of such a freakish conception of a country house. They were abandoned during the war, except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French officers and their light o' loves, and the tow-path was used only by stray couples who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers walking out with French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the river in long, shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, cauliflowers, and asparagus, and farther up-stream there was a boat-house where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort—the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war by Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead bodies floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter's yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were the bad cases—French boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me one day.

"That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!"

"Yes. That is war, Madame."

She put a skinny hand on my arm.

"Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?"

"Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines."

"The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?"

"Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields."

"Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I have lost mine."

"Where was that, Madame?"

"Over there."

She pointed up the Somme.

"He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades."

"It is sad, Madame."

"Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur."

"Au revoir, Madame."



XV

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station, organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the city and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he had refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did not guess that one day I should be a patient there. That was two years later, at the end of the Somme battles. I was worn out and bloodless after five months of hard strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten me up in the fields where lay the unburied dead.

"Trench fever," said the doctor.

"You look in need of a rest," said the matron. "My word, how white you are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?"

I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of the New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which officers lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.

"That's all right. You're going to die!" said a rosy—cheeked young orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy with a fine, delicate face, a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a pile of books at his elbow—all by Anatole France. It was the first time I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak and helpless, but interested in my surroundings. The day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand girl whom the general chaffed with sarcastic humor, and who gave back more than she got, went off duty with a cheery, "Good night, all!" and the night nurse took her place, and made a first visit to each bed. She was a dainty little woman with the complexion of a delicate rose and large, luminous eyes. She had a nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for all these men, who were like children in her hands. They seemed glad at her coming.

"Good evening, sister!" said one man after another, even one who had laid with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on his face.

She knelt down beside each one, saying, "How are you to-night?" and chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I heard a boy's voice say: "Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only given me two minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in love with you, you know, and I have been waiting all day for your beauty!"

There was a gust of laughter in the ward.

"The child is at it again!" said one of the officers.

"When are you going to write me another sonnet?" asked the nurse. "The last one was much admired."

"The last one was rotten," said the boy. "I have written a real corker this time. Read it to yourself, and don't drop its pearls before these swine."

"Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all."

An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the bedclothes off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas.

"I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't want to be a hero! I don't want to die! I want to be loved!... I'm a glutton for love!"

In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a schoolboy who was mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother. With his tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to chide him. It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had thrown off his clothes he snuggled under them again and said: "All right, I'll be good. Only I want a kiss before I go to sleep."

I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life. But he was killed... I had a letter from his stricken mother months afterward. The child was "Missing" then, and her heart cried out for him.

Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire—I suppose he had been in a cotton-mill or a factory—a hard-headed, simple-hearted fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of "the wife." But his nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the dreams that came to him.

"Sister," he said, "don't let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can't bear it."

"You will sleep better to-night," she said. "I am putting something in your milk. Something to stop the dreaming."

But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in a dazed way, saying:

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" trembling with fear, so that the bed was shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he called out, hushing him down, whispering to him.

"I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep," he told me. "It's what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn't it? Nerves, you know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before this war."

The little night nurse came to my bedside.

"Can't you sleep?"

"I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?"

She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.

"Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep."

In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red glasses, and now and then all through the night matches were lighted, illuminating the room for a second, followed by the glowing end of a cigarette shining like a star in the darkness.

The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about violently, gave strange jerks and starts. Sometimes they spoke aloud in their sleep.

"That isn't a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell."

"Now then, get on with it, can't you?"

"Look out! They're coming! Can't you see them moving by the wire?"

The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their sleep; lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness. Sights which they had tried to forget stared at them through their closed eyelids. The daylight came and the night nurse slipped away, and the day nurse shook one's shoulders and said: "Time to wash and shave. No malingering!"

It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as rats had to sit up in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave themselves.

"You're merciless!" I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse dabbed my back with cold iodine at six o'clock on a winter morning, with the windows wide open.

"Oh, there's no mercy in this place!" said the strong-minded girl. "It's kill or cure here, and no time to worry."

"You're all devils," said the New Zealand general. "You don't care a damn about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the time the doctor comes around. I'm a general, I am, and you can't order ME about, and if you think I'm going to shave at this time in the morning you are jolly well mistaken. I am down with dysentery, and don't you forget it. I didn't get through the Dardanelles to be murdered at Amiens."

"That's where you may be mistaken, general," said the imperturbable girl. "I have to carry out orders, and if they lead to your death it's not my responsibility. I'm paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my duty, rough or smooth, kill or cure."

"You're a vampire. That's what you are."

"I'm a nurse."

"If ever I hear you're going to marry a New Zealand boy I'll warn him against you."

"He'll be too much of a fool to listen to you."

"I've a good mind to marry you myself and beat you every morning."

"Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm!"

* * *

Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as the German mark was the railway station we were in the center of the danger-zone. There was a frightful noise of splintering glass and smashing timber between each crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the anti—aircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of those officers who had come down from the fighting—lines nerve-racked and fever-stricken. They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about from bed to bed, with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed no other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at that time, though they had done the hero's job all right.

It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that an officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, "If there is another air raid I shall go mad." He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.



XVI

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st, when our lines were stormed and broken by his men's odds against our defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like all who knew what had happened better than the troops themselves. Every day after the first break-through we pushed out in different directions—Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes until we came up with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back and back, day after day, with increasing speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It was a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and sticks these soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our front-lines, were trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks, ambulances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, agricultural implements, transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A. tents, gun-horse and mule columns, while rear-guard actions were being fought within gunfire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back along the roads in this uproar of traffic, and word came that a further retreat was happening and that the enemy had broken through again...

Amiens seemed threatened on the morning when, to the north, Albert was held by a mixed crowd of Scottish and English troops, too thin, as I could see when I passed through them, to fight any big action, with an enemy advancing rapidly from Courcellette and outflanking our line by Montauban and Fricourt. I saw our men marching hastily in retreat to escape that tightening net, and while the southern side of Amiens was held by a crowd of stragglers with cyclist battalions, clerks from headquarters staffs, and dismounted cavalry, commanded by Brigadier-General Carey, sent down hurriedly to link them together and stop a widening gap until the French could get to our relief on the right and until the Australians had come down from Flanders. There was nothing on that day to prevent the Germans breaking through to Amiens except the courage of exhausted boys thinly strung out, and the lagging footsteps of the Germans themselves, who had suffered heavy losses all the way and were spent for a while by their progress over the wild ground of the old fighting-fields. Their heavy guns were far behind, unable to keep pace with the storm troops, and the enemy was relying entirely on machine-guns and a few field-guns, but most of our guns were also out of action, captured or falling back to new lines, and upon the speed with which the enemy could mass his men for a new assault depended the safety of Amiens and the road to Abbeville and the coast. If he could hurl fresh divisions of men against our line on that last night of March, or bring up strong forces of cavalry, or armored cars, our line would break and Amiens would be lost, and all our work would be in jeopardy. That was certain. It was visible. It could not be concealed by any camouflage of hope or courage.

It was after a day on the Somme battlefields, passing through our retiring troops, that I sat down, with other war correspondents and several officers, to a dinner in the old Hotel du Rhin in Amiens. It was a dismal meal, in a room where there had been much laughter and, throughout the battles of the Somme, in 1916, a coming and going of generals and staffs and officers of all grades, cheery and high-spirited at these little tables where there were good wine and not bad food, and putting away from their minds for the time being the thought of tragic losses or forlorn battles in which they might fall. In the quietude of the hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered by flower-beds, I had had strange conversations with boys who had revealed their souls a little, after dinner in the darkness, their faces bared now and then by the light of cigarettes or the flare of a match.

"Death is nothing," said one young officer just down from the Somme fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. "I don't care a damn for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck... My nerves are like fiddle-strings."

In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between their stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and ditches under frightful fire which had "wiped out" their platoons or companies. A bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling gull, used to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his wing, and its head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on the figures in khaki—until suddenly it would clap its long bill rapidly in a wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire—"Curse the bloody bird!" said officers startled by this evil and reminiscent noise—and caper with ridiculous postures round the imperturbable gull... Beyond the lines, from the dining-room, would come the babble of many tongues and the laughter of officers telling stories against one another over their bottles of wine, served by Gaston the head-waiter, between our discussions on strategy—he was a strategist by virtue of service in the trenches and several wounds—or by "Von Tirpitz," an older, whiskered man, or by Joseph, who had a high, cackling laugh and strong views against the fair sex, and the inevitable cry, "C'est la guerre!" when officers complained of the service... There had been merry parties in this room, crowded with the ghosts of many heroic fellows, but it was a gloomy gathering on that evening at the end of March when we sat there for the last time. There were there officers who had lost their towns, and "Dadoses" (Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies) whose stores had gone up in smoke and flame, and a few cavalry officers back from special leave and appalled by what had happened in their absence, and a group of Y.M.C.A. officials who had escaped by the skin of their teeth from huts now far behind the German lines, and censors who knew that no blue pencil could hide the truth of the retreat, and war correspondents who had to write the truth and hated it.

Gaston whispered gloomily behind my chair: "Mon petit caporal"—he called me that because of a fancied likeness to the young Napoleon—"dites donc. Vous croyex quils vont passer par Amiens? Non, ce n'est pas possible, ca! Pour la deuxieme fois? Non. Je refuse a le croire. Mais c'est mauvais, c'est affreux, apres tant de sacrifice!"

Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for company's sake, fixing up accounts as though the last day of reckoning had come...as it had. Her hair, with its little curls, was still in perfect order. She had two dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a waxen pallor. She was working out accounts with a young officer, who smoked innumerable cigarettes to steady his nerves. "Von Tirpitz" was going round in an absent-minded way, pulling at his long whiskers.

The war correspondents talked together. We spoke gloomily, in low voices, so that the waiters should not hear.

"If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the coast."

"Will that be a win for the Germans, even then?"

"It will make it hell in the Channel."

"We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire."

"France won't give in now, whatever happens. And England never gives in."

"We're exhausted, all the same. It's a question of man-power."

"They're bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow."

"I don't see that at all. There's still a line..."

"A line! A handful of tired men."

"It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux to-night. It commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map."

"They won't."

"We keep on saying, 'They won't.' We said, 'They won't get the Somme crossings!' but they did. Let's face it squarely, without any damned false optimism. That has been our curse all through."

"Better than your damned pessimism."

"It's quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is to keep them back? There's nothing up the road."

"It would look silly if we were all captured to-night. How they would laugh!"

"We shouldn't laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on things."

"How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication. Anything may happen in the night."

Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There were two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass. Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways. Then some one laughed.

"Not this time!"

The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table, and lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the loud hum of airplanes, the well known "zooz-zooz" of the Gothas' double fuselage. More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the same sound of explosives and falling masonry. The anti—aircraft guns got to work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells winging over the roofs.

"Bang!... Crash!"

That was nearer again.

Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.

"They're making a mess outside. Perhaps we'd better get away before it gets too hot."

Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer who was settling up for a group of others.

The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly bright and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets were flooded with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver above intense black shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by projecting walls.

"Curse the moon!" said one officer. "How I hate its damned light"

But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions. Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.

An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.

"A fellow was killed just by my side." he said. "We were standing in a doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a log, without a sound, as dead as a door-nail."

There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note which vibrated like 'cello strings, very loudly, and with that sinister noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they passed across the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel below them. From time to time they went away until they were specks of silver and black; but always they came back again, or others came, with new stores of bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went on all through the night.

I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was impossible. My will-power was not strong enough to disregard those crashes in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful falling noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which I lay engulfed in the chaos of this wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many times I said, "To hell with it all... I'm going to sleep," and then sat up in the darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on the electric light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in the corridor there was a stampede of heavy boots. Officers were running to get into the cellars before the next crash, which might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law of gravity. I walked along the corridor, now deserted, and saw a stairway littered with broken glass, which my feet scrunched. There were no lights in the basement of the hotel, but I had a flash-lamp, going dim, and by its pale eye fumbled my way to a stone passage leading to the cellar. That flight of stone steps was littered also with broken glass. In the cellar itself was a mixed company of men who had been dining earlier in the evening, joined by others who had come in from the streets for shelter. Some of them had dragged down mattresses from the bedrooms and were lying there in their trench-coats, with their steel hats beside them. Others were sitting on wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while there were others on their knees, and their faces in their hands, trying to sleep. There were some of the town majors who had lost their towns, and some Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three private soldiers, and some motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel lying together on dirty straw. By one of the stone pillars of the vaulted room two American war correspondents—Sims and Mackenzie—were sitting on a packing-case playing cards on a board between them. They had stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering light played on their faces and cast deep shadows under their eyes. I stood watching these men in that cellar and thought what a good subject it would be for the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a comfortable place. There was only one place on the bare stones, and when I lay down there my bones ached abominably, and it was very cold. Through an aperture in the window came a keen draft and I could see in a square of moonlit sky a glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A direct hit on the Hotel du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this vaulted room and end a game of cards. After fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that the room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this damp cellar and these hard stones. I returned to it and lay down on the bed again and switched off the light. But the noises outside, the loneliness of the room, the sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again. Many houses round about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage was being made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the room, smoking cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty explosion, very close, made all my nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the best place. If one had to die it was better to be in the company of friends. Down I went again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He, too, was a wanderer between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.

"I am getting bored with this," he said. "It's absurd to think that this filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense calls one down. Anyhow, I can't sleep."

We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well as sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the mattresses, vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ol' Bill, with a fierce frown above his black mustache. Sims and Mackenzie still played their game of cards, silently, between the guttering candles.

I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the cellar, six times that night. There was never ten minutes' relief from the drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens. It was at four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me wandering before.

"Let us go for a walk," he said. "The birds will be away by dawn."

It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hotel du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of horses and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The air raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first light of dawn came into the sky....

That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops—where there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many people must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own houses—I never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of the tragedy in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the first high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them about the city, destroying many other houses. A fire started by these shells formed a great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois Cailloux, where there had been an arcade and many good shops and houses. I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted ironwork when I went through the city after the day of exodus.



XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect—I often think of Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the enemy—but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in another.

One of our sentries came out of a little house near the Place and said:

"Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, sir. They've been falling pretty thick on the east side. Made no end of a mess!"

On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Australian headquarters, on the left bank of the Somme, we ate sandwiches in the public gardens outside the Hotel du Rhin. There were big shell-holes in the flower-beds, and trees had been torn down and flung across the pathway, and there was a broken statue lying on the grass. Some French and English soldiers tramped past. Then there was no living soul about in the place which had been so crowded with life, with pretty women and children, and young officers doing their shopping, and the business of a city at work.

"It makes one understand what Rome was like after the barbarians had sacked and left it," said a friend of mine.

"There is something ghastly about it," said another.

We stood round the Hotel du Rhin, shut up and abandoned. The house next door had been wrecked, and it was scarred and wounded, but still stood after that night of terror.

One day during its desolation I went to a banquet in Amiens, in the cellars of the Hotel de Ville. It was to celebrate the Fourth of July, and an invitation had been sent to me by the French commandant de place and the English A. P. M.

It was a beau geste, gallant and romantic in those days of trouble, when Amiens was still closely beleaguered, but safer now that Australians and British troops were holding the lines strongly outside, with French on their right southward from Boves and Hangest Wood. The French commandant had procured a collection of flags and his men had decorated the battered city with the Tricolor. It even fluttered above some of the ruins, as though for the passing of a pageant. But only a few cars entered the city and drew up to the Town Hall, and then took cover behind the walls.

Down below, in the cellars, the damp walls were garlanded with flowers from the market-gardens of the Somme, now deserted by their gardeners, and roses were heaped on the banqueting-table. General Monash, commanding the Australian corps, was there, with the general of the French division on his right. A young American officer sat very grave and silent, not, perhaps, understanding much of the conversation about him, because most of the guests were French officers, with Senators and Deputies of Amiens and its Department. There was good wine to drink from the cold vaults of the Hotel de Ville, and with the scent of rose and hope for victory in spite of all disasters—the German offensive had been checked and the Americans were now coming over in a tide—it was a cheerful luncheon-party. The old general, black-visaged, bullet-headed, with a bristly mustache like a French bull—terrier, sat utterly silent, eating steadily and fiercely. But the French commandant de place, as handsome as Athos, as gay as D'Artagnan, raised his glass to England and France, to the gallant Allies, and to all fair women. He became reminiscent of his days as a sous-lieutenant. He remembered a girl called Marguerite—she was exquisite; and another called Yvonne—he had adored her. O life! O youth!... He had been a careless young devil, with laughter in his heart....



XVIII

I suppose it was three months later when I saw the first crowds coming back to their homes in Amiens. The tide had turned and the enemy was in hard retreat. Amiens was safe again! They had never had any doubt of this homecoming after that day nearly three months before, when, in spite of the enemy's being so close, Foch said, in his calm way, "I guarantee Amiens." They believed what Marshal Foch said. He always knew. So now they were coming back again with their little bundles and their babies and small children holding their hands or skirts, according as they had received permits from the French authorities. They were the lucky ones whose houses still existed. They were conscious of their own good fortune and came chattering very cheerfully from the station up the Street of the Three Pebbles, on their way to their streets. But every now and then they gave a cry of surprise and dismay at the damage done to other people's houses.

"O la la! Regardez ca! c'est affreux!"

There was the butcher's shop, destroyed; and the house of poor little Madeleine; and old Christopher's workshop; and the milliner's place, where they used to buy their Sunday hats; and that frightful gap where the Arcade had been. Truly, poor Amiens had suffered martyrdom; though, thank God, the cathedral still stood in glory, hardly touched, with only one little shellhole through the roof.

Terrible was the damage up the rue de Beauvais and the streets that went out of it. To one rubbish heap which had been a corner house two girls came back. Perhaps the French authorities had not had that one on their list. The girls came tripping home, with light in their eyes, staring about them, ejaculating pity for neighbors whose houses had been destroyed. Then suddenly they stood outside their own house and saw that the direct hit of a shell had knocked it to bits. The light went out of their eyes. They stood there staring, with their mouths open... Some Australian soldiers stood about and watched the girls, understanding the drama.

"Bit of a mess, missy!" said one of them. "Not much left of the old home, eh?"

The girls were amazingly brave. They did not weep. They climbed up a hillock of bricks and pulled out bits of old, familiar things. They recovered the whole of a child's perambulator, with its wheels crushed. With an air of triumph and shrill laughter they turned round to the Australians.

"Pour les bebes!" they cried.

"While there's life there's hope," said one of the Australians, with sardonic humor.

So the martyrdom of Amiens was at an end, and life came back to the city that had been dead, and the soul of the city had survived. I have not seen it since then, but one day I hope I shall go back and shake hands with Gaston the waiter and say, "Comment ca va, mon vieux?" ("How goes it, my old one?") and stroll into the bookshop and say, "Bon jour, mademoiselle!" and walk round the cathedral and see its beauty in moonlight again when no one will look up and say, "Curse the moon!"

There will be many ghosts in the city at night—the ghosts of British officers and men who thronged those streets in the great war and have now passed on.



PART SIX. PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME



I

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than generalship—by the fate which decides the doom of men.

The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by Ypres, were defensive actions of rear—guards holding the enemy back by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race were being raised.

The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn their lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the daily visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two years it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons against the enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach them. At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of '16, it was France which sustained the full weight of the German offensive on the western front and broke its human waves, until they were spent in a sea of blood, above which the French poilus, the "hairy ones," stood panting and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks. The Germans had failed to deal a fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German High Command, aghast at their own losses—six hundred thousand casualties—already conscious, icily, of a dwindling man-power which one day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow or other they must smash a way out by sledge-hammer blows, left and right, west and east, from that ring of nations which girdled them. On the west they would stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of their strength, but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by that enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the back of the narrow brains of those bald-headed vultures on the German General Staff), they most feared as their future peril—England. They had been fools to let the British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the folly of the madness by which they had flung the gauntlet down to the souls of proud peoples arrayed against them.

Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six hundred thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England, immense reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks before the summer foliage turned to russet tints.

Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean harness and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get their targets. We were strong in "heavies," twelve-inchers, 9.2's, eight-inchers, 4.2's, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled sixty-pounders terrible in their long range and destructiveness. Our aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon squadron, and our aviators had been trained in the school of General Trenchard, who sent them out over the German lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and how to die like little gentlemen.

For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned "buses"—primitive machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying Fokkers who waited for them behind a screen of cloud and then "stooped" on them like hawks sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery, replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless they flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men gained an absolute supremacy by greater daring—there was nothing they did not dare—and by equal skill. As a caution, not wasting their strength in unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful concentrations. But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy cost of life, kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes.

The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in this direction a merry hell was being prepared.

There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast to the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts and tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing stations near the front the wounded—the human wreckage of routine warfare—were being evacuated "in a hurry" to the base, and from the base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so that all the wards might be empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying up. There was a sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being made for a multitude that was coming.

"We shall be very busy," said the doctors.

"We must get all the rest we can now," said the nurses.

"In a little while every bed will be filled," said the matrons.

Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four wounded Germans, Wurtemburgers and Bavarians, too ill to move just then. Each of them had lost a leg under the surgeon's knife. They were eating strawberries, and seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them.

"Wie befinden sie sich?"

"Ganz wohl; wir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung."

I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard where the "shell-shocks" sat about, dumb, or making queer, foolish noises, or staring with a look of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room came a sound of singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so mad!

"We are clearing them out," said the medical officer. "There will be many more soon."

How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. It was the only secret, and even that was known in London, where little ladies in society were naming the date, "in confidence," to men who were directly concerned with it—having, as they knew, only a few more weeks, or days, of certain life. But I believe there were not many officers who would have surrendered deliberately all share in "The Great Push." In spite of all the horror which these young officers knew it would involve, they had to be "in it" and could not endure the thought that all their friends and all their men should be there while they were "out of it." A decent excuse for the safer side of it—yes. A staff job, the Intelligence branch, any post behind the actual shambles—and thank God for the luck. But not an absolute shirk.

Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, rows and rows of bell tents and pavilions stained to a reddish brown. Small cities of them were growing up on the right of the road between Amiens and Albert—at Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous-Corbie. I thought they might be for troops in reserve until I saw large flags hoisted to tall staffs and men of the R.A.M.C. busy painting signs on large sheets stretched out on the grass. It was always the same sign—the Sign of the Cross that was Red.

There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains were traveling on light railways day and night to railroads just beyond shell-range. What was all the weight they carried? No need to ask. The "dumps" were being filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells, covered by tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. Enormous shells, some of them, like gigantic pigs without legs. Those were for the fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2's. There was enough high-explosive force littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map.

"It does one good to see," said a cheery fellow. "The people at home have been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been packing those things. Well done, Munitions!"

I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of satisfaction that at least when our men attacked they would have a power of artillery behind them. It might help them to smash through to a finish, if that were the only way to end this long-drawn suicide of nations.

My friend was shocked when I said:

"Curse all munitions!"



II

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the approach of that new phase of war which they called "The Great Push," as though it were to be a glorified football-match. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know the thoughts of vast masses of men moved by some sensational adventure. But a man would be a liar if he pretended that British troops went forward to the great attack with hangdog looks or any visible sign of fear in their souls. I think most of them were uplifted by the belief that the old days of trench warfare were over forever and that they would break the enemy's lines by means of that enormous gun-power behind them, and get him "on the run." There would be movement, excitement, triumphant victories—and then the end of the war. In spite of all risks it would be enormously better than the routine of the trenches. They would be getting on with the job instead of standing still and being shot at by invisible earth-men.

"If we once get the Germans in the open we shall go straight through them."

That was the opinion of many young officers at that time, and for once they agreed with their generals.

It seemed to be a question of getting them in the open, and I confess that when I studied the trench maps and saw the enemy's defensive earthworks thirty miles deep in one vast maze of trenches and redoubts and barbed wire and tunnels I was appalled at the task which lay before our men. They did not know what they were being asked to do.

They had not seen, then, those awful maps.

We were at the height and glory of our strength. Out of England had come the flower of our youth, and out of Scotland and Wales and Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Even out of Ireland, with the 16th Division of the south and west, and the 36th of Ulster. The New Armies were made up of all the volunteers who had answered the call to the colors, not waiting for the conscription by class, which followed later. They were the ardent ones, the young men from office, factory, shop, and field, university and public school. The best of our intelligence were there, the noblest of our manhood, the strength of our heart, the beauty of our soul, in those battalions which soon were to be flung into explosive fires.



III

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads behind the front.

I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there was a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-day and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and old ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line of transport wagons came through the square.

"By Jove!... Australians!"

There was no mistaking them. Their slouch-hats told one at a glance, but without them I should have known. They had a distinctive type of their own, which marked them out from all other soldiers of ours along those roads of war.

They were hatchet-faced fellows who came riding through the little old market town; British unmistakably, yet not English, not Irish, nor Scottish, nor Canadian. They looked hard, with the hardness of a boyhood and a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the softer training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially for the girls round the stalls), but resolute, clean-cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though born to riding, and drove their wagons with a recklessness among the little booths that was justified by half an inch between an iron axle and an old woman's table of colored ribbons.

Those clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dust-covered men, who had come out of the hell of the Dardanelles and the burning drought of Egyptian sands, looked wonderfully fresh in France. Youth, keen as steel, with a flash in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the street.

They were glad to be there. Everything was new and good to them (though so old and stale to many of us), and after their adventures in the East they found it splendid to be in a civilized country, with water in the sky and in the fields, with green trees about them, and flowers in the grass, and white people who were friendly.

When they came up in the train from Marseilles they were all at the windows, drinking in the look of the French landscape, and one of their officers told me that again and again he heard the same words spoken by those lads of his.

"It's a good country to fight for... It's like being home again."

At first they felt chilly in France, for the weather had been bad for them during the first weeks in April, when the wind had blown cold and rain-clouds had broken into sharp squalls.

Talking to the men, I saw them shiver a little and heard their teeth chatter, but they said they liked a moist climate with a bite in the wind, after all the blaze and glare of the Egyptian sun.

One of their pleasures in being there was the opportunity of buying sweets! "They can't have too much of them," said one of the officers, and the idea that those hard fellows, whose Homeric fighting qualities had been proved, should be enthusiastic for lollipops seemed to me an amusing touch of character. For tough as they were, and keen as they were, those Australian soldiers were but grown-up children with a wonderful simplicity of youth and the gift of laughter.

I saw them laughing when, for the first time, they tried on the gas-masks which none of us ever left behind when we went near the fighting-line. That horror of war on the western front was new to them.

Poison-gas was not one of the weapons used by the Turks, and the gas-masks seemed a joke to the groups of Australians trying on the headgear in the fields, and changing themselves into obscene specters ... But one man watching them gave a shudder and said, "It's a pity such splendid boys should have to risk this foul way of death." They did not hear his words, and we heard their laughter again.

On that first day of their arrival I stood in a courtyard with a young officer whose gray eyes had a fine, clear light, which showed the spirit of the man, and as we talked he pointed out some of the boys who passed in and out of an old barn. One of them had done fine work on the Peninsula, contemptuous of all risks. Another had gone out under heavy fire to bring in a wounded friend... "Oh, they are great lads!" said the captain of the company. "But now they want to get at the Germans and finish the job quickly. Give them a fair chance and they'll go far."

They went far, from that time to the end, and fought with a simple, terrible courage.

They had none of the discipline imposed upon our men by Regular traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with none but the gipsy law in their hearts, intolerant of restraint, with no respect for rank or caste unless it carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind the lines, quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, primitive men, but lovable, human, generous souls when their bayonets were not red with blood. Their discipline in battle was the best. They wanted to get to a place ahead. They would fight the devils of hell to get there.

The New-Zealanders followed them, with rosy cheeks like English boys of Kent, and more gentle manners than the other "Anzacs," and the same courage. They went far, too, and set the pace awhile in the last lap. But that, in the summer of '16, was far away.

In those last days of June, before the big battles began, the countryside of the Somme valley was filled with splendor. The mustard seed had spread a yellow carpet in many meadows so that they were Fields of the Cloth of Gold, and clumps of red clover grew like flowers of blood. The hedges about the villages of Picardy were white with elderflower and drenched with scent. It was haymaking time and French women and children were tossing the hay on wooden pitchforks during hot days which came between heavy rains. Our men were marching through that beauty, and were conscious of it, I think, and glad of life.