pauses while we try to get our bearings.
There to the south, on our right, and curving
94 ENEMY PREPARATIONS [No. 5
eastward, are two trench lines perfectly clear
still on the brown desolation, the British and
the enemy front hnes. From that further
hne, at half-past seven on the summer morn-
ing for ever blazoned in the annals of our
people, the British Army went over the
parapet, to gather in the victory prepared
for it by the deadly strength and accuracy
of British guns ; made possible in its turn
by the labour in far- of! England of milhons
of workers — men and women — on the lathes
and in the filhng factories of these islands.
We move on up the road. Now we are
among what remains of the trenches and
dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's
despatch. *' During nearly two years' pre-
parations the enemy had spared no pains
to render these defences impregnable,^' says
the Commander-in-Chief ; and he goes on to
describe the successive hnes of deep trenches,
the bomb-proof shelters, and the ware entangle-
ments with which the war correspondence of
the winter has made us at home — on paper —
so famihar. " The numerous woods and
villages had been turned into veritable for-
tresses."' The deep cellars in the villages,
the pits and quarries of a chalk country,
No. 5] GERMAN DUG-OUTS 95
provided cover for machine guns and trench
mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys
deep, " and connected by passages as much
as thirty feet below the surface of the ground.''
Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun
emplacements — ^everything that the best
brains of the German Army could devise for
our destruction — had been lavished on the
German hues. And behind the first fine was
a second — and behind the second fine a third.
And now here we stand in the midst of
what was once so vast a system. What
remains of it — and of all the workings of
the German mind that devised it ? We leave
the motor and go to look into the dug-outs
which line the road, out of which the dazed
and dying Germans flung themselves at the
approach of our men after the bombardment,
and then Captain F. guides us a little further
to a huge mine crater, and we sink into the
mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look
out over what once was Ovillers, northward
towards Thiepval, and the slopes behind which
runs the valley of the Ancre ; up and over
this torn and naked land, where the new
armies of Great Britain, through five months
of some of the deadliest fighting known to
96 " THERE WERE NO STRAGGLERS " [No. 5
history, fought their way yard by yard,
ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring
nothing for pain, mutilation and death so
that England and the cause of the Allies
might live.
*' There were no stragglers, none I " Let
us never forget that cry of exultant amaze-
ment wrung from the lips of an eye-witness,
who saw the young untried troops go over
the parapet in the July dawn and disappear
into the hell beyond. And there in the
packed graveyards that dot these slopes he
thousands of them in immortal sleep ; and
as the Greeks in after days knew no nobler
oath than that which pledged a man by those
who fell at Marathon, so may the memory
of those who fell here burn ever in the heart
of England, a stern and consecrating force.
" Life is but the pebble sunk.
Deeds the circle growing ! "
And from the deeds done on this hillside,
the suffering endured, the hfe given up, the
victory won, by every kind and type of man
within the British State— rich and poor, noble
and simple, street men from British towns,
country-men from British villages, men from
Canadian prairies, from Austrahan and New
No. 5] CONTALMAISON 97
Zealand homesteads — one lias a vision, as one
looks on into the future, of the impulse given
here spreading out through history, un-
quenched and imperishable. The fight is
not over — the victory is not yet — but on
the Somme no Enghsh or French heart can
doubt the end.
The same thoughts follow one along the
sunken road to Contalmaison. Here, first,
is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped
confusion of sandbags, of broken and over-
turned crosses, of graves tossed into a common
ruin. And a Httle further are the ruins of
Contalmaison, where the 3rd Division of the
Prussian Guards was broken and 700 of them
taken prisoners. Terrible are the memories
of Contalmaison ! Recall one letter only !
— the letter written by a German soldier the
day before the attack : " Nothing comes to
us — no letters. The English keep such a
barrage on our approaches — it is horrible.
To-morrow morning it will be seven days
since this bombardment began ; we cannot
hold out much longer. Everything is shot
to pieces.'' And from another letter :
" Every one of us in these five days has be-
come years older — we hardly know ourselves.''
8
98 DEVASTATION [No. 5
It was among these intricate remains of
trenches and dug-outs, round the fragments
of the old chateau, that such things happened.
Here, and among those ghastly fragments
of shattered woods that one sees to south
and east— Mametz, Trones, Delville, High
Wood— human sufiering and heroism, human
daring and human terror, on one side and on
the other, reached their height. For centuries
after the battle of Marathon sounds of armed
men and horses were heard by night ; and
to pry upon that sacred rendezvous of the
souls of the slain was frowned on by the gods.
Only the man who passed through innocently
and ignorantly, not knowing where he was,
could pass through safely. And here also,
in days to come, those who visit these spots
in mere curiosity, as though they were any
ordinary sight, will visit them to their hurt.
• • • • •
So let the first thoughts run which are
evolved by this brown and torn devastation.
But the tension naturally passes, and one
comes back, first, to the victory — to the results
of all that hard and relentless fighting, both
for the British and the French forces, on this
memorable battlefield north and south of the
No. 5] RETREATING GERMANS 99
Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners, between
j&ve and six hundred guns of different caUbres,
and more than a thousand machine guns,
had fallen to the Allies in four months and
a half. Many square miles of French territory
had been recovered. Verdun — glorious Ver-
dun — had been relieved. Italy and Russia
had been helped by the concentration of the
bulk of the German forces on the Western
front. The enemy had lost at least half a
million men ; and the Allied loss, though
great, had been substantially less. Our new
armies had gloriously proved themselves,
and the legend of German invincibility was
gone.
So much for the first-fruits. The ultimate
results are only now beginning to appear in
the steady retreat of German forces, unable
to stand another attack, on the same line,
now that the protection of the winter pause
is over. " How far are we from our guns 1 "
I ask the officer beside me. And, as I speak,
a flash to the north-east on the higher ground
towards Pozi^res Ughts up the grey distance.
My companion measures the hillside with his
eyes. " About 1,000 yards.'' Their objective
now is a temporary German line in front of
100 DEATH, VICTORY, WORK [No. 5
Bapaume. But we shall be in Bapaume in
a few days. And then ?
Death — Victory — Work ; these are the three
leading impressions that rise and take symboHc
shape amid these scenes. Let me turn now
to the last. For anyone with the common
share of heart and imagination, the first
thought here must be of the dead — the next,
of swarming life. For these slopes and roads
and ruins are again ahve with men. Thousands
and thousands of our soldiers are here, many
of them going up to or coming back from
the line, while others are working — working
— incessantly at all that is meant by " ad-
vance " and ** consohdation.""
The transformation of a line of battle into
an efficient " back of the Army '" requires,
it seems, an amazing amount of human energy,
contrivance, and endurance. And what we
see now is, of course, a second or third stage.
First of all there is the " clearing up " of the
actual battlefield. For this the work of the
men now at work here — R.E.'s and Labour
battahons — is too skilled and too valuable.
It is done by fatigues and burying parties
from the battahons in occupation of each
captured section. The dead are buried ; the
No. 5] WORK OF THE R.E. 101
poor human fragments that remain are covered
with, chlorate of Ume ; equipments of all
kinds, the htter of the battlefield, are brought
back to the salvage dumps, there to be sorted
and sent back to the bases for repairs.
Then — or simultaneously — begins the work
of the Engineers and the Labour men.
Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-
holes filled up for the driving through of
new roads and railways, and the provision
of places where tents, huts, dumps, etc., are
to stand. Koughly speaking, I see, as I look
round me, that a great deal of this work is
here already far advanced. There are hun-
dreds of men, carts, and horses at work on
the roads, and everywhere one sees the signs
of new railway lines, either of the ordinary
breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for
the advanced carriage of food and ammunition.
Here also is a great encampment of Nissen
huts ; there fresh preparations for a food or
an ammunition dump.
With one pair of eyes one can only see a
fraction of what is in truth going on. But
the whole efiect is one of vast and increasing
industry, of an intensity of determined efiort,
which thrills the mind hardly less than the
102 A PARACHUTE [No. 5
thought of the battle-line itself. ** Yes, war
is work/* writes an officer who went through
the Sonime fighting, '* much more than it is
fighting. This is one of the surprises that
the New Army soldiers find out here." Yet
for the hope of the fighting moment men
will go cheerfully through any drudgery, in
the long days before and after ; and when
the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the
wonder of the world.
On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt,
the shattered remnants of the Mametz wood
upon our left. More graveyards, carefully
tended ; spaces of peace amid the universal
movement. And always, on the southern
horizon, those clear lines of British trenches,
whence sprang on July 1st, 1916, the irre-
sistible attack on Montauban and Mametz.
Suddenly, over the desolate ground to the
west, we see a man hovering in mid-air, des-
cending on a parachute from a captive balloon
that seems to have suffered mishap. The
small wavering object comes slowly down ;
we cannot see the landing ; but it is probably
a safe one.
Then we are on the main Albert road again,
and after some rapid miles I find myself kindly
No. 5] APPROACHING VICTORY 103
welcomed by one of the most famous leaders
of the war. There, in a small room, which
has surely seen work of the first importance
to our victories on the Somme, a great General
discusses the situation and the future with
that same sober and reasoned confidence I
have found everywhere among the repre-
sentatives of our Higher Command. '* Are
we approaching victory ? Yes ; but it is
too soon to use the great word itself. Every-
thing is going well ; but the enemy is still very
strong. This year will decide it ; but may
not end it."
• • • • •
So far my recollections of March 3rd. But
this is now April 26th, and all the time that
I have been writing these recollections, thought
has been leaping forward to the actual present
— to the huge struggle now pending between
Arras and Rheims — to the news that comes
crowding in, day by day, of the American
preparations in aid of the AlUes — to all that
is at stake for us and for you. Your eyes are
now turned like ours to the battle-Hne in
France. You triumph — and you sufier — with
us !
No. 6
3Iay Zrd, 1917.
Dear Mr. Roosevelt, — My last letter left
me returning to our village lodgings under the
wing of G.H.Q. after a memorable day on the
Somme battle-fields. That night the talk at
the Visitors' Chateau, during and after a very
simple dinner in an old panelled room, was
particularly interesting and animated. The
morning's newspapers had just arrived from
England, with the official communiques of the
morning. We were pushing nearer and nearer
to Bapaume ; in the fighting of the preceding
day we had taken another 128 prisoners ; and
the King had sent his congratulations to Sir
Douglas Haig and the Army on the German
withdrawal under " the steady and persistent
pressure " of the British Army " from care-
fully prepared and strongly fortified positions
— a fitting sequel to the fine achievements of
my Army last year in the Battle of the
Somme.'' There was also a report on the
104
No. 6] GERMAN RETREAT 105
air-fighting and air-losses of February — to
which. I will return.
It was, of course, already obvious that the
German retreat on the Somme was not — so far
— going to yield us any very large captures
of men or guns. Prisoners were indeed col-
lected every day, but there were no " hauls ""
such as, Httle more than a month after this
evening of March 3rd, were to mark the very
different course of the Battle of Arras. Dis-
cussion turned upon the pace of the German
retreat and the possible rate of our pursuit.
*' Don't forget,'" said an officer, " that they
are moving over good ground, while the pur-
suit has to move over bad ground — roads
with craters in them, ground so pitted with
shell-holes that you can scarcely drive a peg
between them, demohshed bridges, villages
that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The
enemy has his guns with him ; ours have to
be pushed up over the bad ground. His
machine-guns are always in picked and pre-
pared positions ; ours have to be improvised.''
And also — " Don't forget the weather ! "
said another. Every misty day — and there
were many in February — was very skilfully
turned to account. Whenever the weather
106 ENEMY LOSSES [No. 6
conditions made it impossible to use the
eyes of our Air Service, men would say to each,
other on our side, " He'll go back a lot to-day !
— somewhere or other." But in spite of
secrecy and fog, how little respite we had
given him ! The enemy losses in casualties,
prisoners, and stores during February were
certainly considerable; not to speak of the
major loss of all, that of the strongly fortified
hne on which two years of the most arduous
and ingenious labour that even Germany can
give had been lavished. " And almost
everywhere," writes an eye-witness, " he was
hustled and harried much more than is
generally known." As you go eastward, for
instance, across the evacuated ground you
notice everywhere signs of increasing haste
and flurry, such as the less complete fel-
ling of trees and telegraph posts. It was
really a fine performance for our infantry
and our cavalry patrols, necessarily unsup-
ported by anything like our full artillery strength,
to keep up the constant pressure they did
on an enemy who enjoyed ahnost the full
protection of his. It was dreadful country to
live and fight in after the Germans had gone
back over it, much worse than anything that
No. 6] NEED OF ARTILLERY 107
troops liave to face after any ordinary capture
of an enemy line.
The fact is that old axioms are being every-
where revised in the light of this war. In
former wars the extreme difficulty of a re-
treat in the face of the enemy was taken for
granted. But this war — I am trying to sum-
marise some first-hand opinion as it has
reached me — has modified this point of view
considerably.
We know now that for any serious attack
on an enemy who has plenty of machine-guns
and plenty of successive well-wired positions
a great mass of heavy and other artillery is
absolutely indispensable. And over ground
dehberately wrecked and obstructed such
artillery must take time to bring up. And yet
— to repeat — how rapidly, how "persistently "
all difiiculties considered, to use the King's
adjective, has the British Army pressed on
the heels of the retreating enemy !
None of the officers with whom I talked
beheved that anything more could have been
done by us than was done. " If it had been
we who were retreating," writes one of them,
** and the Germans who were pursuing, I do
not beheve they would have pushed us so
108 AWAITING THE ISSUE [No. 6
hard or caused us as much loss, for all their
pride in their stafi work/'
And it is, of course, evident from what has
happened since I parted from my hosts at the
Chateau, that we have now amply succeeded
during the last few weeks in bringing the
retreating enemy to bay. No more masked
withdrawals, no more skilful evasions, for either
Hindenburg or his armies ! The victories of
Easter week on and beyond the Vimy Ridge,
and the renewed British attack of the last
few days — I am writing on May 1st — together
with the magnificent French advance towards
Laon and to the east of Reims, have been
so many fresh and crushing testimonies to
the vitahty and gathering force of the AlUed
armies.
What is to be the issue we wait to see. But
at least, after the winter lull, it is once more
joined ; and with such an army as the War
Office and the nation together, during these
three years, have fashioned to his hand — so
trained, so equipped, so fired with a common
and inflexible spirit — Sir Douglas Haig and his
heutenants will not fail the hopes of Great
Britain, of France — and of America !
At the beginning of March these last words
No. 6] HERR ZIMMERMANN 109
could not have been added. There was an
American professor not far from me at dinner,
and we discussed the " blazing indiscretion "
of Herr Zimmermann's Mexican letter. But he
knew no more than I. Only I remember with
pleasure the general tone of all the conversa-
tion about America that I either engaged in
or listened to at Headquarters just a month
before the historic meeting of Congress. It
was one of intelhgent sympathy with the
difficulties in your way, coupled with a quiet
confidence that the call of civihsation and
humanity would very soon — and irrevocably
— decide the attitude of America towards the
war.
. • • •
The evening at the Chateau passed only too
quickly, and we were sad to say good-bye,
though it left me still the prospect of further
conversation with some members of the In-
telligence Staff on my return journey from
Paris and those points of the French Hue for
which, thanks to the courtesy of the French
Headquarters, I was now bound.
The last night under the little schoohnis-
tress's quiet roof amid the deep stillness of
the village was a wakeful one for me. The
no TRAINING [No. 6
presence of the New Armies, as of some vast,
impersonal, and yet intensely living thing,
seemed to be all around me. First, as an
organisation, as the amazing product of Eng-
lish patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole
end — the defence of civiHsation against the
immoral attack of the strongest mihtary
machine in the world. And then, so to speak,
as a moral entity, for my mind was full of
the sights and sounds of the preceding days,
and the Army appeared to me, not only as the
mighty instrument for war which it already is,
but as a training school for the Empire, likely
to have incalculable effect upon the future.
How much I have heard of training since
my arrival in France ! It is not a word that
has been so far representative of our English
temper. Far from it. The central idea of
Enghsh Hfe and politics, said Mr. Bright, " is
the assertion of personal liberty.'' It was, I
suppose, this assertion of personal Hberty
which drove our extreme Liberal wing before
the war into that determined fighting of the
Naval and Military Estimates year after year,
that determined hatred of anything that
looked like " militarism,'' and that constant
behttlement of the soldier and his profession
No. 6] A NATIONAL IDEA 111
which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a
reasonable " militarism/' to the tender mercies
of the German variety.
But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to
say, in face of the general British approval of
Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something
greater than the " assertion of personal
liberty," than the freedom to "do as you
like " ; and he put forward against it the
notion of ** the nation in its collected and
corporate character " controlUng the indi-
vidual will in the name of an interest wider
than that of individuals.
What he had in view was surely just what
we are witnessing in Great Britain to-day —
what we are about to witness in your own
country — a nation becoming the voluntary
servant of an idea, and for that idea sub-
mitting itself to forms of Hfe quite new to it,
and far removed from all its ordinary habits ;
giving up the freedom to do as it likes ; accept-
ing the extremities of discomfort, hardship,
and pain — death itself — rather than abandon
the idea ; and so putting itself to school,
resolutely and of its own free will, that when
its piece of self-imposed education is done, it
can no more be the same as it was before than
112 TRAINING [No. 6
the you til wlio has yielded himself loyally to
the pounding and stretching of any strenuous
discipline, intellectual or physical.
Training — " askesis " — with either death, or
the loss of all that makes honourable hfe, as
the ultimate sanction behind the process,
that is the present preoccupation of this
nation in arms. Even the football games I
saw going on in the course of our drive to
Albert were all part of this training. They
are no mere amusement, though they are
amusement. They are part of the system by
which men are persuaded — not driven — to
submit themselves to a scheme of careful
physical training, even in their times of rest ;
by which they find themselves so invigorated
that they end by demanding it.
As for the elaboration of everything else in
this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying
staff courses, the bombing and bayonet
schools, the special musketry and gas schools,
the daily and weekly development of aviation,
the technical industry and skill, both among
the gunners abroad and the factory workers
at home, which has now made our artillery
the terror of the German army: a woman
can only realise it with a shudder, and
No. 6] FIGHTING FOR. PEACE 113
find comfort in two beliefs. First, tliat
the whole horrible process of war has not
brutahsed the British soldier — you remember
the Army Commander whom I quoted in an
earher letter ! — that he still remains human
and warm-hearted through it all, protected
morally by the ideal he willingly serves.
Secondly, in the conviction that this relentless
struggle is the only means that remains to us
of so chaining up the wild beast of war, as
the Germans have let it loose upon the world,
that our children and grandchildren at least
shall live in peace, and have time given them
to work out a more reasonable scheme of
things.
But, at any rate, we have gone a long way
from the time when Matthew Arnold, talking
with " the manager of the Claycross works in
Derbyshire " during the Crimean War, " when
our want of soldiers was much felt and some
people were talking of conscription,'' was
told by his companion that " sooner than sub-
mit to conscription the population of that
district would flee to the mines, and lead a
sort of Eobin Hood Hfe underground.'' An
illuminating passage, in more ways than one,
by the way, as contrasted with the present
9
lU STUBBORNNESS AND DISCIPLINE [No.6
state of things ! — since it both shows the
stubbornness of the British temper in defence
of " doing as it Ukes/' when no spark of an
ideal motive fires it ; and also brings out its
equal stubbornness to-day in support of a
cause which it feels to be supreme over the
individual interest and will.
But the stubbornness, the discipline, the
sacrifice of the armies in the field are not all
we want. The stubbornness of the nation
at home, of the men and the women, is no less
necessary to the great end. In these early
days of March every week's news was bringing
home to England the growing peril of the sub-
marine attack. Would the married women,
the elder women of the nation, rise to the
demand for personal thought and saving, for
training — in the matter of food — with the same
eager goodwill as thousands of the younger
women had shown in meeting the armies'
demand for munitions ? For the women heads