Chapter Four:

Lie

The status, influence, and respect that serious creative writers enjoyed in 1914–18 did not come without a cost. They were establishment figures, the pals of press barons, prime ministers, and kings, well paid and much honored, and thus with a stake in preserving the status quo, not only politically and socially, but in terms of victory and what it would take to insure it. When they were asked to contribute to the war effort with their writing, they knew what was expected of them—at the minimum, a certain flexibility in regards to the truth; at the maximum, a willingness to lie.

“Prevaricate” might be the most generous verb to apply here, or, borrowing a term from our own day, “slant.” Rudyard Kipling, himself one of the most enthusiastic slanters, would publish after the war—and the death of his son in combat—this bitter couplet from “Epitaphs of War.”

“If any question why we died

Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

The pressure on writers to do this was enormous, and their response—speaking now in their defense—was probably sincere and not cynical. They saw the war as a fight for civilization and they genuinely hated the enemy. They felt guilty at not taking part in the battles themselves. They had their status, their careers, their income to worry about. Many of them were given official duties and titles, to which their vanity was not immune. Some had sons serving in the trenches; all had friends and relatives there. They had genuine respect for the fighting men. Taken on tours of the battlefields, they were shown what the military staff wanted them to see and kept tight on the leash.

Lie? They wouldn’t have seen it that way. “Propagandize” is the worst they would have admitted to, a word that did not then carry the negative connotation it has today. Words contributing to victory were to them no bad thing.

The war was going badly now, becoming the endless nightmare writers only slowly realized was upon them. The year 1916 saw the bloodlettings at Verdun and on the Somme, catastrophes which not only killed hundreds of thousands of young men, but affected the Western imagination in ways that were and are incalculable.

Yet there were writers willing to portray these battles as total victories, never mind the death toll or the continued stalemate. Take the infamous First Day of the Somme, July 1, 1916, and the British writers’ response.

“The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain,” wrote C. E. Montague, who served in the trenches.

“And our Press came out bland and copious and graphic, with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day—a victory really. Men who lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed.”

Even today’s historians have to reach to explain how truly terrible July 1 was.

“The casualties suffered by the British on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme,” Martin Middlebrook points out,

“[s]tands comparison not only with other battles, but with complete wars. The British Army’s loss on that one day easily exceeds the battle casualties in the Crimean War, the Boer War, and the Korean War combined.”

John Keegan puts the July 1 casualties, on the British side alone, at over sixty thousand killed, wounded, and missing, or, to bring it home to Americans, about the same number of names that appear on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington; many of these casualties occurred in the battle’s first ten minutes.

“To the British army, it was and would remain their greatest military catastrophe of their national history. The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.”

It’s well to remember that last line when reading some of the writers included in this chapter.

What angered the soldiers most—and can still anger you today—was the manly breeziness of style many writers felt the need for when writing of the war. Montague, whose wartime job included shepherding VIP writers on their official tours of the trenches, wrote how they invariably adopted

“a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his dispatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than ‘going over the top;’ that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for these men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.”

And writers could be guilty of something far worse than jauntiness. Many of them too easily believed tales of German atrocities … Huns poisoning the wells, Huns spreading influenza germs, Huns putting ground glass in Red Cross bandages … the better to whip up war fever and spur enlistments. Twenty-five years later, this would come back to haunt the world, when a new German army, a new German regime, committed atrocities that made World War I’s seem like harmless misdemeanors. Because a credulous public had been sold crucified nuns and burning babies in the First War, they were fatally slow to buy Auschwitz and ovens in the Second.

As historian Rick Atkinson points out, the exaggerated reports of German atrocities in 1914–18, when subsequently discovered to be mostly fabrications, “left an enduring legacy of skepticism,” with a poll finding that barely one-third of the British public in 1944 believed rumors of the concentration camps.

Some Great War writers, even figures of the establishment with much to lose, responded more honestly. Included here, along with the lies and the jauntiness, are more measured responses by Richard Harding Davis and H. G. Wells, the first writing about the difficulties correspondents faced in getting out the truth, the latter agonizing, via his Mr. Britling, over the writer’s role in all the horror.

Still other writers, ones we’ll examine in a later chapter, found the courage to protest the killing, not from the safety and hindsight of the 1920s, but while it was actually taking place. Another of the war’s many ironies: the writers who expected honors and rewards for their wholehearted support of the war are now looked upon as little better than liars, while the ones who had nothing but obloquy heaped on them in 1916 now seem like prescient heroes who command our respect.

The propagandists were not without their critics even at the time. George Bernard Shaw, reading Kipling and his ilk, railed at “the incitements and taunts of elderly non-combatants, and the verses of poets jumping at the cheapest chance in their underpaid profession.”

Perhaps the fairest thing that can be said of them, looking back, is that their writing, in its forced jauntiness and optimism, represents the last struggle of a doomed way of looking at the world as it confronts the horrors of a century that would demand a much darker response.

Arnold J. Toynbee would by the 1940s become perhaps the best-known historian in the Western world, thanks to his twelve-volume A Study of History, which got his face on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. In the years since, his reputation has declined, with historians finding his emphasis on religious and spiritual factors in the workings of history to be exaggerated.

He was twenty-five when the war broke out, and he went to work for the Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Service, later serving as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. His 1917 book, The German Terror in Belgium; A Historical Record, is prefaced with his assurance that “with the documents now published on both sides it is at last possible to present a clear narrative of what actually happened to the civil population in the countries overrun by the German Armies during the first three months of the European war.”

But was it clear? Toynbee repeats every rumor and unsubstantiated report as fact, though he admits to exercising his “own judgement as to which of the inferences is truth.” It’s written in a hard-hitting documentary style, with specific names, dates, and places giving the feel of unbiased reportage.

After the war, many of these atrocities were discovered to be either fabricated for propaganda purposes, or the tragic, unavoidable result of the chaos that enveloped the battle zone. Still, war crimes against non-combatants, including women and children, were committed, particularly in Belgium, by German soldiers (whose fears were whipped up by their own writers at home) fearful of franc-tireurs like those the army had faced in France in 1870. A recent history puts the number of Belgian civilians killed at well over five thousand, and shows that the terrorizing of the populace was condoned and actively promoted by the German general staff, just as British writers originally claimed.

Many prominent German intellectuals, including the scientists Max Planck and Wilhelm Röntgen, defended their army, blaming Belgian civilians for the atrocities and insisting upon the army’s right of reprisal.

Ernest Lissauer, a thirty-two-year-old German-Jewish poet and dramatist, is only remembered now for two moments of inspired vitriol. He coined the phrase Gott strafe England, May God punish England, which became the vow of the Germany army—and, in the Second World War, the origin of the word “strafing” as slang for machine-gunning from the air.

His poem set to music, Hassgesang, the notorious “Hymn of Hate,” did even more to stir up German morale, and, when recited in England, stirred up morale there just as thoroughly. Arthur Conan Doyle, for one, found it absolutely beyond the pale.

“This sort of thing is very painful and odious, and fills us with a mixture of pity and disgust, and we feel as if—instead of a man—we are really fighting with a furious screaming woman.”

Lissauer’s hymn made him famous in Germany. The Kaiser decorated him, and Hassgesang was printed and distributed to German soldiers on the western front.

If Lissauer’s poem had any permanent value, it was its role in inspiring one of the great minor poems of World War I, written by the British satirist J. C. Squire.

“God heard the embattled nations sing and shout

‘Gott strafe England!’ and ‘God Save the King!’

Gott save this, God that, and God the other thing

‘Good God!’ said God. ‘I’ve got my work cut out.’”

The Kaiser, with his pompous military garb and knack for inflammatory comments, was an easy target for Allied writers, included the eighty-one-year-old novelist and critic W. D. Howells, who represented all that was good and bad in the American literary establishment at the turn of the twentieth century. Another old-timer asked to contribute to the war effort, a few months before his death, was Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, who managed to turn the German destruction of Rheims cathedral to good propaganda purpose. Howells was famous for being a literary realist, Rostand for being a literary romantic, but the aging writers obviously saw eye-to-eye on the war, and the German’s alleged policy of Schrecklickeit—Frightfulness.

The young “war poets” like Sassoon, Graves, and Owen, would become famous for their antiwar stance and their graphic descriptions of suffering in battle, but the most famous poet during the war continued to be the forty-nine-year-old Rudyard Kipling, the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize (1907); he was known for his wholehearted jingoism, if not his outright bloodthirstiness. Beloved before the war for his depiction of common English soldiers embroiled in one Imperialistic scrap after another, he didn’t see any reason to soften his pro-military stance once Germans across the Channel became the enemy and not just some Zulu tribesmen on the fringes of Empire.

His enthusiasm for war would have tragic consequences. His seventeen-year-old son John wanted to enlist in the army, but was rejected because of his weak eyesight. Kipling pulled strings with his friends in the army to get him past the physical to a commission in the Irish Guards. John died in the Battle of Loos in 1915, and Kipling and his wife never got over it. Kipling’s lament, “My Boy Jack,” continues to be one of his most often read poems today.

I have Kipling’s account of a battlefield tour (taken before his son’s death), France at War; on the Frontiers of Civilization, on the desk beside me. The cover depicts, in a softly colored patina, the three furled flags of England, France, and Russia; on the flyleaf is a small sticker showing it was purchased from The Corner Book Store in Boston. Even more interesting, at least to me, is the page with the publishing information. “Doubleday and Page” it says, “1915,” and “Garden City, New York.”

This was the famous Country Life Press, only a block or two from the house I grew up in, and only a few blocks farther from the old site of Camp Mills where my friends and I played touch football near the monument to the Rainbow Division.

After the war, Kipling worked on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission in establishing the dignified and moving western front cemeteries. He selected the phrase “Their Name Liveth for Evermore” from Ecclesiastes, found on the Stone of Remembrance in many of these cemeteries, and suggested “Known Unto God” for the headstones of the unidentified. Further, he chose the phrase “The Glorious Dead” for the Cenotaph in Whitehall—a phrase that, when used now, has become mostly ironic.

No writer in World War I worked more industriously than John Buchan—or was more tightly embedded in his nation’s military and political establishment. Already famous for his adventure novels (including The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into one of Hitchcock’s early films), Buchan would be the writer the soldiers read in the trenches, with his novel Greenmantle, with its plot of wartime espionage and suspense, being their special favorite.

Buchan, who was thirty-nine and suffering ill health, still managed to make major contributions to the war effort. He served on Haig’s staff in France, writing communiques and weekly battle summaries; worked for the Intelligence Corps escorting journalists on tours of the front; wrote, for the War Propaganda Bureau, the multi-volume History of the War, which became a huge bestseller; was put in charge of foreign propaganda for the Department of Information; and, to cap it all, became the man responsible for briefing King George V on the progress of the war.

“I have had many queer jobs in my life,” he said of the last, “but this is the queerest.”

The Battle of the Somme—with vivid photos and detailed maps—was published only a few months after the battle, though it has the remote tone of a history written many years later. Buchan’s summary of the first day’s fighting—along with Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s description that follows—should be compared with what the historians had to say about it in the chapter introduction.

Critic Peter Buitenhuis sums up Buchan’s Somme thusly:

“The account contains all the ringing clichés and exaggerations of the genre, and by representing that almost unmitigated hell in such glowing colors, Buchan falsifies the whole military situation on the Western Front. By his omission and exaggerated claims he makes not only the common soldier but also the commanding generals look superb.”

Buchan’s brother and many of his friends were killed in the war. He felt slighted at its conclusion at not receiving more honors for his contributions, though this was rectified in 1935, when the King appointed him the first Baron Tweedsmuir and Governor General of Canada.

Thanks to his “thrillers” and their star, superspy Richard Hannay, Buchan is still read today, and is regarded as one of the founders of the modern suspense story and a formative influence on writers like Ian Fleming and John Le Carré. The John Buchan Society publishes a journal to keep his work alive; this includes operating a John Buchan Museum in Peebles, Scotland.

Babies on Bayonets

—Arnold J. Toynbee

The devastation done by the Germans in their advance was light compared with the outrages they committed when the Belgian sortie of August 25th drove them back from Malines towards the Aerschot-Louvain line.

In Malines itself, they destroyed 1,500 houses from first to last, and revenged themselves atrociously on the civil population. A Belgian soldier saw them bayonet an old woman in the back, and cut off a young woman’s breasts. Another saw them bayonet a woman and her son. They shot a police inspector in the stomach as he came out of his door, and blew off the head of an old woman at a window. A child of two came out into the street as eight drunken soldiers were marching by. A man in the second file stepped aside and drove his bayonet with both hands into the child’s stomach. He lifted the child into the air on his bayonet and carried it away, he and his comrades still singing. The child screamed when the soldier stuck it with his bayonet, but not afterwards. This incident was reported by two witnesses. Another woman was found dead with twelve bayonet wounds between her shoulders and her waist. Another—between 16 and 20 years old—who had been killed by a bayonet, “was kneeling, and her hands were clasped, and the bayonet had pierced both hands. I also saw a boy of about 16,” continues the witness, “who had been killed by a bayonet thrust through his mouth. In the same house there was an old woman lying dead.”

The next place from which the Germans were driven was Hofstade, and here, too, they revenged themselves before they went. They left the corpses of women lying in the streets. There was an old woman mutilated with the bayonet. There was a young pregnant woman who had been ripped open. In the lodge of a chateau the porter’s body was found lying on a heap of straw. He had been bayonetted in the stomach—evidently, while in bed, for the empty bed was soaked with blood. The blacksmith of Hofstade—also bayonetted—was lying on the doorstep. Adjoining the blacksmith’s house there was cafe, and here a middle-aged woman lay dead, and a boy of about 16. The boy was found kneeling in an attitude of supplication. Both his hands had been cut off. “One was on the ground, the other hanging by a bit of skin.” His face was smeared with blood. He was seen in this condition by twenty-five separate witnesses.

“I went with an artilleryman,” states another Belgian soldier, “to find his parents who lived in Hofstade. All the houses were burning except the one where this man’s parents lived. On forcing the door we saw lying on the floor of the room on which it opened the dead bodies of a man, a woman, a girl, and a boy, who, the artilleryman told us, were his father and mother and brother and sister. Each of them had both feet cut off just above the ankle, and both hands just above the wrist. The poor boy rushed straight off, took one of the horses from his gun, and rode in the direction of the German lines. We never saw him again.”

At Sempst, as the Germans evacuated the village, they dragged the inhabitants out by firing into the cellars. The hostages were taken to the bridge. “One young man was carrying in his arms his little brother, 10 or 11 years old, who had been run over before the war and could not walk. The soldiers told the man to hold up his arms. He said he could not, as he must hold his brother, who could not walk. Then a German soldier hit him on the head with a revolver, and he let the child fall.”

At Weerde, 34 houses were burnt. As the Germans retreated they bayonetted two little girls standing in the road and tossed them into the flames of a burning house—their mother was standing by. At Capelle-au-Bois, the Belgian troops found two girls hanging naked from a tree with their breasts cut off, and two women bayonetted in house, caught as they were making preparations to flee. A woman told them how German soldiers had violated her daughter successively in an adjoining room.

The Belgian troops found the body of a woman on the road, stripped to the waist with her breasts cut off. There was another woman with her head cut off and her body mutilated. There was a child with its stomach slashed open with a bayonet, and another—two or three years old—nailed to a door by its hands and feet.

From The German Terror in France, by Arnold J. Toynbee; George H. Doran Co.; New York, 1917.

Hymn of Hate

—Ernest Lissauer

French and Russian, they matter not

A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot

We love them not, we hate them not,

We hold the Weichsel and Vosges gate.

We have but one and only hate,

We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe and one alone.

He is known to you all, he is known to you all,

He crouches behind the dark gray flood

Full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall,

Cut off by waves that are thicker than blood.

Come, let us stand at the Judgement Place,

An oath to swear to, face to face.

An oath of bronze no wind can shake,

An oath for our sons and their sons to take.

Come, hear the word, repeat the word,

Throughout the Fatherland make it heard.

We will never forego our hate,

We have but a single hate,

We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe and one alone—

ENGLAND!

Take you the folk of earth in pay,

With bars of gold your ramparts lay

Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow,

Ye reckon well, but not well enough now,

French and Russian, they matter not,

A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,

We fight the battle with bronze and steel,

And the time that is coming Peace will seal.

You we will hate with a lasting hate,

We will never forego our hate,

Hate by water and hate by land,

Hate of the head and hate of the hand,

Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,

Hate of seventy million choking down.

We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe and one alone—

ENGLAND!

From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Co., New York, 1915; translation Barbara Henderson.

Mother is the Name of the Gun

—Arthur Conan Doyle

It was to an artillery observation post that we were bound, and once again my description must be bounded by discretion. Suffice it, that in an hour I found myself, together with a razor-keen young artillery observer and an excellent old sportsman of a Russian prince, jammed into a very small space, and staring through a slit at the German lines. In front of us lay a vast plain, scarred and slashed, with bare places at intervals, such as you see where gravel pits break a green common. Not a sign of life or movement, save some wheeling crows. And yet down there, within a mile or so, is the population of a city. Far away a single train is puffing at the back of the German lines. We are here on a definite errand. Away to the right, nearly three miles off, is a small red house, dim to the eye but clear in the glasses, which is suspected as a German post. It is to go up this afternoon.

The gun is some distance away, but I hear the telephone directions. “Mother will soon do her in,” remarks the gunner boy cheerfully. “Mother” is the name of the gun. “Give her five six three four,” he cries through the ’phone. “Mother” utters a horrible bellow from somewhere on our right. An enormous spout of smoke rises ten seconds later from near the house. “Raise her seven five,” says our boy encouragingly. “Mother” roars more angrily than ever. “How will that do?” she seems to say.

I wonder how the folk in the house are feeling as the shells creep ever nearer. “Gun laid, sir,” says the telephone. “Fire!” I am looking through my glass. A flash of fire on the house, a huge pillar of dust and smoke—then it settles and an unbroken field is there. The German post has gone up. “It’s a dear little gun,” says the officer boy.

We are all led off to be introduced to “Mother,” who sits, squat and black, amid twenty of her grimy children who wait upon and feed her. She is an important person is “Mother,” and her importance grows. It gets clearer with every month that it is she, and only she, who can lead us to the Rhine. She can and she will if the factories of Britain can beat those of the Hun. See to it, you working men and women of Britain. Work now if you rest for ever after, for the fate of Europe and of all that is dear to us is in your hands. For “Mother” is a dainty eater, and needs good food and plenty …

That night we dined with yet another type of the French soldier, General A., who commands the corps of which my friend has one division. Each of these French generals has a striking individuality of his own which I wish I could fix on paper. Their only common point is that each seems to be a rare good soldier. The corps general is Athos with a touch of d’Artagnan. He is well over six feet high, bluff, jovial, with a huge, upcurling moustache, and a voice that would rally a regiment. It is a grand figure which should have been done by Van Dyck with lace collar, hand on sword, and arm akimbo. Jovial and laughing was he, but a stern and hard soldier was lurking behind the smiles.

His name may appear in history, and so may Humbert’s, who rules all the army of which the other corps is a unit. Humbert is a Lord Robert’s figure, small, wiry, quick-stepping, all steel and elastic, with a short, sharp upturned moustache, which one could imagine as crackling with electricity in moments of excitement like cat’s fur. What he does or says is quick, abrupt and to the point. He fires his remarks like pistol shots at this man or that.

Once to my horror he fixed me with his hard little eyes, and demanded, “Sherlock Holmes, est ce qu’il est un soldat dans l’armee Anglaise?”

The whole table waited in an awful hush.

“Mais, mon general,” I stammered. Il est trop vieux pour service.”

There was general laughter, and I felt that I had scrambled out of an awkward place.

And talking of awkward places, I had forgotten about that spot upon the road whence the Boche observer could see our motor-cars. He had actually laid a gun upon it, the rascal, and waited all the long day for our return. No sooner did we appear upon the slope than a shrapnel shell burst above us, but somewhat behind me, as well as to the left. Had it been straight the second car would have got it, and there might have been a vacancy in one of the chief editorial chairs in London. The General shouted to the driver to speed up, and we were soon safe from the German gunners.

One gets perfectly immune to noises in these scenes, for the guns which surround you make louder crashes than any shell which bursts about you. It is only when you actually see the cloud over you that your thoughts come back to yourself, and that you realise that in this wonderful drama you may be a useless super, but none the less you are on the stage and not in the stalls.

From A Visit to Three Fronts, by Arthur Conan Doyle; George M. Doran Co.; New York, 1916.

The Master Spirit of Hell

— W. D. Howells

The Little Children

“Suffer little children to come unto me,”

Christ said, and answering with infernal glee,

“Take them!” the arch-fiend scoffed, and from the tottering walls

Of their wrecked homes, and from the cattle’s stalls,

And the dogs’ kennels, and the cold

Of the waste fields, and from the hapless hold

Of their dead mothers’ arms, famished and bare

And maimed by shot and shell,

The master-spirit of hell

Caught them up, and through the shuddering air

Of the hope-forsaken world

The little ones he hurled,

Mocking that Pity in his pitiless might—

The anti-Christ of Schrecklickeit.

From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1916.

Vandal Guns of Dull Intent

—Edmond Rostand

The Cathedral

“Deathless” is graven deeper on thy brow;

Ghouls have no power to end thy endless sway.

The Greek of old, the Frenchman of today,

Before thy riven shrine are bending now.

A wounded fortress straightaway lieth prone,

Not so the Temple dies; its roof may fall,

The sky its covering vault, an azure pall,

Doth droop to crown its wealth of lacework stone.

Praise to you, Vandal guns of dull intent!

We lacked till now our Beauty’s monument.

Twice hallowed o’er by insult’s brutal hand,

As Pallas owns on Athens’ golden hill,

We have it now, thanks to your far-flung brand!

Your shame—our gain, misguided German skill!

From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Co., New York, 1915; translation Frances C. Fay.

These Terrific Symbols

—Rudyard Kipling

The ridge with the scattered pines might have hidden children at play. Certainly a horse would have been quite visible, but there was no hint of guns, except a semaphore which announced it was forbidden to pass that way, as the battery was fighting. The Boches must have looked for that battery, too. The ground was pitted with shell holes of all calibres—some of them as fresh as mole-casts in the misty damp morning; others where the poppies had grown from seed to flower all through the summer.

“And where are the guns?” I demanded at last.

They were almost under one’s hand, their ammunition in cellars and dug-outs beside them. As far as one can make out, the 75 gun has no pet name. The bayonet is Rosalie, the virgin of Bayonne, but the 75, the watchful nurse of the trenches and the little sister of the Line, seems to be always soixante-quinze. Even those who love her best do not insist she is beautiful. Her merits are French—logic, directness, simplicity, and the supreme gift of “occasionality.” She is equal to everything on the spur of the moment. One sees and studies the few appliances that make her do what she does, and one feels that any one could have invented her.

“As a matter of fact,” says a commandant, “anybody—or rather, everybody did. The general idea is after such-and-such a system, the patent of which has expired, and we improved it; the breech action, with slight modification, is somebody else’s; the sighting is perhaps a little special; and so is the traversing, but, at bottom, it is only an assembly of variations and arrangements.”

That, of course, is all that Shakespeare ever got out of the alphabet. The French Artillery make their own guns as he made his plays. It is just as simple as that.

The gun-servers stood back with the bored contempt of the professional for the layman who intrudes on his mysteries. Other civilians had come that way before—had seen, and grinned, and complimented and gone their way, leaving the gunners high up on the bleak hillside to grill or mildew or freeze for weeks and months.

Then she spoke. Her voice was higher pitched, it seemed, than ours—with a more shrewish tang to the speeding shell. Her recoil was as swift and as graceful as the shrug of a French-woman’s shoulders; the empty case leaped forth and clanged against the trail; the tops of two or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each other, though there was no wind.

“They’ll be bothered down below to know the meaning of our single shot. We don’t give them one dose at a time as rule,” somebody laughed.

We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came back from the mist that clogged the lower grounds, though no shell of this war was ever launched with more earnest prayers that it might do hurt …

A shell must fall somewhere, and by the law of averages occasionally lights straight as a homing pigeon on the one spot it can wreck most. Then earth opens for yards around, and men must be dug out—some merely breathless, who shake their ears, swear, and carry on, and others whose souls have gone loose among terrors. These have to be dealt with as their psychology demands, and the French officer is a good psychologist. One of them said: “Our national psychology has changed. I do not recognize it myself.”

“What made the change?”

“The Boche. If he had been quiet for another twenty years the world must have been his—rotten, but all his. Now he is saving the world.”

“How?”

“Because he has shown us what Evil is. We—you and I, England and the rest—had begun to doubt the existence of Evil. The Boche is saving us.”

Then we had another look at the animal in its trench—a little nearer this time than before, and quieter on account of the mist. Pick up the chain anywhere you please, you shall find the same observation post, table, map, observer, and telephonist; the same always-hidden, always-ready guns; the same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from Switzerland to the sea. The handling of war varies with the nature of the country, but the tools are unaltered. One looks upon them at last with the same weariness of wonder as the eye receives from endless repetitions of Egyptian hieroglyphics. A long, low profile, with a lump to one side, means the field-gun and its attendant ammunition case; a circle and slot stand for an observation-post; the trench is a bent line, studded with vertical plumes of explosion; the great guns of position, coming and going on their motors, repeat themselves as scarabs; and man himself is a small blue smudge, no larger than a foresight, crawling and creeping or watching and running among all these terrific symbols …

“This is the end of the line,” said the Staff Officer, kindest and most patient of chaperons. It buttressed itself on a fortress among the hills. Beyond that, the silence was more awful than the mixed noise of business to the westward. In mileage on the map the line must be between four and five hundred miles; in actual trench-work many times that distance. It is too much to see at full length; the mind does not readily break away from the obsession of its entirety or the grip of its detail. One visualizes the thing afterwards as a white-hot gash, worming all across France between intolerable sounds and lights, under ceaseless blasts of whirled dirt. Nor is it any relief to lose oneself among wildernesses of piling, stoning, timbering, concreting, and wire-work, or incalculable quantities of soil thrown up raw to the light and cloaked by the changing seasons—as the unburied dead are cloaked.

Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it. It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that keeps us from the Beast goes with it.

Where the rifle and bayonet serve, men use those tools along the front. Where the knife gives better results, they go in behind the hand-grenades with the naked twelve-inch knife. Each race is supposed to fight in its own way, but this war has passed beyond all known ways. They say that the Belgians in the north settle accounts with a certain dry passion which has varied very little since their agony began. Some sections of the English line have produced a soft-voiced, rather reserved type, which does its work with its mouth shut. The French carry an edge to their fighting, a precision, and a dreadful knowledge coupled with an insensibility to shock, unlike anything one has imagined of mankind.

From France at War, by Rudyard Kipling; Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, 1915.

Few Wished Themselves Elsewhere

—John Buchan

The first day of July dawned hot and cloudless, though a thin fog, the relic of the damp of the past week, clung to the hollows. At half-past five the hill just west of Albert offered a singular view. It was almost in the centre of the section allotted to the Allied attack, and from it the eye could range on the left up and beyond the Ancre to the high ground around Beaumont Hamel and Serre; in front of the great lift of tableland behind which lay Bapaume; and to the right past the woods of Fricourt to the valley of the Somme. Every gun along the front was speaking, and speaking without pause. Great spurts of dust on the slopes showed where a heavy shell had burst, and black and white gouts of smoke dotted the middle distance like the little fires in a French autumn field. Lace-like shrapnel wreaths hung in the sky, melting into the morning haze. The noise was strangely uniform, a steady rumbling, as if the solid earth were muttering in a nightmare, and it was hard to distinguish the deep tones of the heavies, the vicious whip-like crack of the field guns and the bark of the trench mortars.

About 7:15 the bombardment rose to that hurricane pitch of fury which betokened its close. It was as if titanic machine guns were at work all around the horizon. Then appeared a marvellous sight, the solid spouting of the enemy slopes—as if they were lines of reefs on which a strong tide was breaking. In such a hell it seemed that no human thing could live. Through the thin summer vapour and the thicker smoke which clung to the foreground there were visions of a countryside actually moving—moving bodily in debris into the air. And now there was a fresh sound—a series of abrupt and rapid bursts which came gustily from the first lines. These were the new trench mortars—wonderful little engines of death.

The staff officers glanced at their watches, and at half-past seven precisely there came a lull. It lasted for a second or two, and then the guns continued their tale. But the range had been lengthened everywhere, and from a bombardment the fire had become a barrage. For, on a twenty-five mile front, the Allied infantry had gone over the parapets.

The point of view of the hill-top was not that of the men in the front trenches. The crossing of the parapets is the supreme moment in modern war. The troops are outside defences, moving across the open to investigate the unknown. It is the culmination of months of training for officers and men, and the least sensitive feels the drama of the crisis. Most of the British troops engaged had twenty months before been employed in the peaceable civilian trades. In their ranks were every class and condition—miners from north central England, factory hands from the industrial centers, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers, men who in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger, and men whose chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride. Nerves may be attuned to the normal risks of trench warfare and yet shrink from the desperate hazard of a charge into the enemy’s line.

But to one who visited the front before the attack the most vivid impression was that of quiet cheerfulness. There were no shirkers and few who wished themselves elsewhere. One man’s imagination might be more active than another’s, but the will to fight, and to fight desperately, was universal. With the happy gift of the British soldier they had turned the ghastly business of war into something homely and familiar. Accordingly they took everything as part of the day’s work, and awaited the supreme moment without heroics and without tremor, confident in themselves, confident in their guns, and confident in the triumph of their cause. There was no savage lust of battle, but that far more formidable thing—a resolution which needed no rhetoric to support it. Norfolk’s words were true of every man of them:

“As gentle and as jocund as to jest

Go I to fight. Truth hath a quiet breast.”

In that stubborn action against impossible odds the gallantry was so universal and absolute that it is idle to select special cases. In each mile there were men who performed the incredible. Nothing finer was done in the war. The splendid troops, drawn from those volunteers who had banded themselves together for another cause, now shed their blood like water for the liberty of the world.

That grim struggle from Thiepval northward was responsible for by far the greater number of Allied losses of the day But, though costly, it was not fruitless, for it occupied the bulk of the German defence. It was the price that had to be paid for the advance of the rest of the front. For, while in the north the living wave broke vainly and gained little, in the south “by creeks and inlets making” the tide was flowing strongly shoreward. Our major purpose was attained …

No great thing is achieved without a price, and on the Somme fell the very flower of our race, the straightest of limb, the keenest of brain, the most eager of spirit. The young men who died almost before they had gazed on the world, the makers and the doers who left their tasks unfinished, were greater in their deaths than in their lives. Out of their loss they won for mankind an enduring gain.

From The Battle of the Somme, by John Buchan; Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1917.

Nearer Than Any Other Woman

—Mrs. Humphrey Ward

A young artillery officer was asked to show us the way. We reached a ruined village from which all normal inhabitants had been long since cleared away. The shattered church was there, and I noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hanging on its chancel wall. A little farther and the boyish artillery-officer, our leader, turned and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping through seas of mud down into the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed that no aeroplane overhead could guess it.

There it was—how many of its fellows I had seen in the Midland and northern workshops!—its muzzle just showing in the dark, and nine or ten high-explosive shells lying on the bench in front of the breech. One is put in. We stand back a little, and the sergeant tells me to put my fingers in my ears and look straight at the gun. Then comes the shock—not so violent as I expected—and the cartridge case drops out. The shell has sped on its way to the German trenches—with what result to human flesh and blood? But I remember thinking very little of that.

Now indeed we were in the battle! It was discussed whether we should be taken zigzag through the fields to the entrance of the communication-trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and the Captain was evidently relieved when we elected to turn back. Shall I always regret that lost opportunity? That was the nearest that any woman could personally have come to it! But I doubt whether anything more—anything, at least, that was possible—could have deepened the whole effect. We had been already nearer than any woman—even a nurse—had been, in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of impressions was full ….

The first of July dawned, a beautiful summer morning, and the British and French infantry sprang over their parapets and rushed to the attack on both sides of the Somme. Twelve hours after the fighting began, Sir Douglas Haig telegraphed: “Heavy fighting has continued all day between the rivers Somme and Ancre. On the right of our attack we have captured the German labyrinth of trenches on a front of seven miles to a depth of 1,000 yards, and have stormed and occupied the strongly fortified villages of Montauban and Mametz. In the centre, we have gained many strong points. Up to date, 2,000 German prisoners have passed through our collecting stations. The large number of the enemy dead on the battle-fields indicate that the German losses have been very severe.”

So much for the first day’s news. The attack was well begun …

The result on the Somme has set the heart of England aflame; even while we ponder those long, long casualty lists which represent the bitter price that British fathers and mothers, British wives and daughters have paid, and must still pay, for the only victory which will set up once again the reign of law and humanity in Europe.

From England’s Effort, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

The World Has a Right to Know

—Richard Harding Davis

When I returned to New York every second man I knew greeted me sympathetically with: “So you had to come home, hey? They wouldn’t let you see a thing.” And if I had time I told him all I saw was the German, French, Belgian, and English armies in the field, Belgium in ruins and flames, the Germans sacking Louvain, in the Dover Straits dreadnoughts, cruisers, torpedo destroyers, submarines, hydroplanes; in Paris bombs falling from air-ships and a city put to bed at 9 o’clock; battle-fields covered with dead men; fifteen miles of artillery firing across the Aisne at fifteen miles of artillery; the bombardment of Rheims with shells lifting the roofs as easily as you would lift the cover of a chafing-dish and digging holes in the streets, and the cathedral on fire; I saw hundreds of thousands of soldiers from India, Senegal, Morocco, Ireland, Australia, Algiers, Bavaria, Prussia, Scotland, saw them at the front in action, saw them marching over the whole northern half of Europe, saw them wounded and helpless, saw thousands of women and children sleeping under hedges and haystacks with on every side of them their homes blazing in flames or crashing in ruins.

That was part of what I saw. What during the same two months did the man at home see? If he were lucky he saw the Braves win the World Series, or the Vernon Castles dance the fox-trot …

The army calls for your father, husband, son—calls for your money. It enters upon a war that destroys your peace of mind, wrecks your business, kills the men of your family, the man you were going to marry, the son you brought into the world. And to you the army says: “This is our war. We will fight it in our own way, and of it you can only learn what we choose to tell you. We will not let you know whether your country is winning the fight or is in danger, whether we have blundered and the soldiers are starving, whether they gave their lives gloriously or through our lack of preparation or inefficiency are dying of neglected wounds.” And if you answer that you will send with the army correspondents to write reports home and tell you, not the plans for the future and the secrets of the army, but what are already accomplished facts, the army makes reply: “No, these men cannot be trusted. They are spies.”

Not for one moment does the army honestly think those men are spies. But it is the excuse nearest at hand.

This is a world war, and my contention is that the world has a right to know, not what is going to happen next, but at least what has happened. If men have died nobly, if women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if for no military necessity and without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

Those who are carrying on this war behind a curtain, who have enforced this conspiracy of silence, tell you that in their good time the truth will be known.

It will not.

Some men are trained to fight, others are trained to write. The latter can tell you of what they have seen so that you, safe at home at the breakfast table, also can see it. Any newspaper correspondent would rather send his paper news than a descriptive story. But news lasts only until you have told it to the next man, and if in this war the correspondent is not to be permitted to send the news I submit he should at least be permitted to tell what has happened in the past. The war is a world enterprise, and in it every man, woman and child is an interested stockholder. They have a right to know what is going forward. The directors’ meetings should not be held in secret.

From With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

Old Men Don’t Go

—H. G. Wells

Mr. Britling’s conception of his own share in the great national uprising was a very modest one. He was a writer, a footnote to reality; he had no trick of command over men, his role was observation rather than organisation, and he saw himself only as an insignificant individual dropping from his individuality into his place in a great machine, taking a rifle in a trench, guarding a bridge, filing a cartridge until the great task was done. Sunday night was full of imaginations of order, of the countryside standing up to its task, of roads cleared and resources marshalled, of the petty interests of private life altogether set aside. And mingling with that it was still possible for Mr. Britling, he was still young enough, to produce such dreams of personal service, of sudden emergencies swiftly and bravely met, of conspicuous daring and exceptional rewards, such dreams as hover in the brains of every imaginative recruits …

It was acutely shameful to him that all these fine lads should be going off to death and wounds while the men of forty and over lay snug at home. How stupid it was to fix things like that! Here were the fathers, who had done their work, shot their bolts, returned some value for the costs of their education, unable to get training, unable to be of service, shamefully safe, doing April fool work as special constables; while their young innocents, untried, all their gathering possibilities of service unbroached, went down into the deadly trenches … The war would leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children …

He felt himself as a cowardly brute, fat, wheezy, out of training. He writhed with impotent humiliation.

How stupidly the world is managed.

He began to fret and rage. He could not lie in peace in his bed; he got up and prowled about his room, blundering against chairs and tables in the darkness … We were too stupid to do the most obvious things; we were sending all these boys into hardship and pitiless danger; we were sending them ill-equipped, insufficiently supported, we were sending our children through the fires of Moloch, because essentially we English were a world of indolent, pampered, sham good-humored, old and middle-aged men. (So he distributed the intolerable load of self-accusation.) Why was he doing nothing to change things, to make them better? What was the good of an assumed modesty, an effort at tolerance for and confidence in these boozy old lawyers, those ranting platform men, those stiff-witted officers and hide-bound officials? They were butchering the youth of England.

Old men sat out of danger contriving death for the lads in the trenches. That was the reality of the thing. “My son!” he cried sharply in the darkness. His sense of our national deficiencies became tormentingly, fantastically acute. It was as if all his cherished delusions had fallen from the scheme of things … What was the good of making believe that up there they were planning some great counterstroke that would end in victory? It was as plain as daylight that they had neither the power of imagination nor the collective intelligence ever to conceive of a counterstroke. The old men would sit at their tables, replete and sleepy, and shake their cunning old heads. The press would chatter and make odd ambiguous sounds like a shipload of monkeys in a storm. The political harridans would get the wrong men appointed, would attack every possible leader with scandal and abuse and falsehood …

The spirit and honour and drama had gone out of this war.

Our only hope now was exhaustion. Our only strategy was to barter blood for blood—trusting that our tank would prove the deeper …

While into this tank stepped Hugh, young and smiling …

The war became a nightmare vision.

From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan; New York, 1917.