Epilogue:

Guide

The killing and the irony lasted until the very end. On the morning of November 11, 1918, with the armies knowing in advance that firing on the western front would cease at 11:00 a.m., there were still over ten thousand casualties, including 2,738 dead—a one-day butcher’s bill comparable to D-Day’s in the next war. Ambitious officers wanted to burnish their war record while they still could, old scores were yet to be settled, and some units either didn’t get the message about the armistice or chose to ignore it; a good many died when gunners celebrated by firing off a last round. Among the casualties were Private George Ellison, shot by a sniper just east of Mons at two minutes before 11:00, the last official British fatality of the war, and Private Henry Gunther, killed by German machine gunners as he charged a roadblock near Ville-devant-Chaumont at 10:59, the last official American fatality of the war.

November 11, 1918, is usually thought of as a time of wild celebration across the victorious Allied nations, but it’s clear that this mood was far from universal. Too many families mourned too many sons for them to feel anything but sorrow. Writers picked up on this sense of loss (George Bernard Shaw: “Every promising young man I know has been blown to bits”) and, looking toward the future, added many somber warnings.

Here is D. H. Lawrence voicing his opinion at an Armistice night party in London.

“I suppose you think the war is over and that we shall go back to the kind of world you lived in before. But the war isn’t over. The hate and evil are greater now than ever. Very soon war will break out again and overwhelm you. It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of sun before the winter. The war isn’t over. The evil will be worse because the hate will be dammed up in men’s hearts and will show itself in all sorts of ways which will be worse than war.”

No writer was more unlike Lawrence than H. Rider Haggard, the adventure novelist known for King Solomon’s Mines, but he shared the same foreboding.

“The Germans will neither forgive nor forget. They have been beaten by England and they will live and die to smash England—she will never have a more deadly enemy than the new Germany. In future years the easy-going, self-centered English will forget that just across the sea there is a mighty, cold-hearted and remorseless people waiting to strike her through the heart. For strike they will someday.”

Thomas Hardy, at seventy-eight, found a more nuanced way to express the 11/11/18 mood.

Calm fell. From heaven distilled a clemency;

There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;

Some could, some could not, shake off misery:

The Sinister Spirit sneered, “It had to be!”

And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

The moment the war ended thousands of people—“pilgrims,” as the press called them—began spontaneously making their way to the western front battlefields to see for themselves where the fighting had taken place. Many of these first visitors were parents who had lost sons and wives who had lost husbands; they needed to find what we now call “closure,” seeking the graves of their soldiers or, if they were among the huge numbers of missing, at least their names on a monument or plaque.

The killing fields hadn’t been prettied up yet—the devastation was plain to be seen—and a careless pilgrim, straying across the trenches, could easily blow herself up on a buried shell (as, a hundred years later, a careless Belgian farmer occasionally still does). Mildred Aldrich, from her little village of Huiry, writes movingly of her own pilgrimage to the nearby American battlefield at Chateau-Thierry in the excerpt included on page 308.

Along with the mourners came thousands of well-heeled tourists, curious to explore the famous battlefields. As early as 1917, the Michelin Tire Company had begun issuing guidebooks to the western front, meticulously researched and heavily illustrated with maps and evocative photos of French villages before the fighting and their ruins afterwards. Included—and this was very rare in books published during the war—were photographs of dead soldiers lying where they fell. These early guides, published while the war was still on, may have given ordinary people, fed nothing but propaganda, their first look at a truthful depiction of the carnage.

The Michelin editors set out their intentions in a brief forward.

“For the benefit of tourists who wish to visit the battle-fields and mutilated towns of France we have tried to produce a work combining a practical guide and a history … Such a visit should be a pilgrimage, not merely a journey across the ravaged land. Seeing is not enough, one must understand; a ruin is more moving when one knows what has caused it; a stretch of country which might seem dull and uninteresting to the unenlightened eye becomes transformed at the thought of the battles that have been fought there … Our readers will not find any attempt at literary effect in these pages; the truth is too beautiful and tragic to be altered for the sake of embellishing the story.”

The anonymous compilers of these guides took great pains to include even small sites of interest, so after directing tourists to where three elderly hostages were shot by the Germans outside the village of Varreddes during the Battle of the Marne, they lead them on, with great specificity, to another landmark.

“After having traversed Varreddes and before re-crossing the canal a tree will be noticed on the left of the road (the 38th on the way out) which has been pierced by a 75 shell as by a punching press.”

Enough of these guidebooks were published that they form a Great War genre of their own, one that remains surprisingly moving and evocative a hundred years later; there is no better way to understand what the ravaged western front looked like than by perusing the Michelin battlefield guides published immediately after the war ended.

Closely linked to these was another style of postwar book: the visit to the old western front by soldier-writers who had once served there. Almost all of these are thoughtful, well-written, and moving, and they form a bridge to the harder, more disillusioned novels and memoirs that were published in the 1920s, which came to form the canon of World War I literature. C. E. Montague called his own account of this mood Disenchantment, one of the earliest to be published—the extract included in this section points the way to the familiar literature of the war, the books whose power and impact still determine how we remember it.

A hundred years after the fighting ended, it should be possible, if it ever will be possible, to gain some perspective on the years 1914–18, to write of what happened with the Olympian kind of detachment a century can bring. Measured against the long history of mankind, four years in the early twentieth century shouldn’t matter very much. A continent of nation-states fell out with each other, the conflict spread across the world, and a rough equivalence between the armies engaged and various technological improvements in military defense (as well as an old one: digging holes) meant that millions of young men would needlessly die. The original reasons for fighting, no matter what revisionist historians might claim, now seem like a form of inexplicable insanity. Alberto Moravia, the Italian novelist, might not have been exaggerating as much as he thought when he termed World War I “an outbreak of collective madness, the reasons for which should be studied by the psychoanalyst rather than the historian.”

If we want to apply even more hindsight to the war, we can see it as another form of collective madness: environmental madness. The Great War (though the thought would not have occurred to a single one of its participants) was a carbon war, releasing huge amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere; indeed, access to Arab oil was one of the strategic prizes the war was fought over.

Environmental scientists now understand that the world’s temperatures and CO2 levels were beginning to rise even by 1914. If statesmen and generals had been granted superhuman powers of foresight, they would have worried about their armies’ carbon footprint and not the gain or loss of a few yards of mud. If civilization in the twenty-first century is heading toward environmental suicide, then surely we must look back on the twentieth with an eye toward those events that contributed to our doom—and, looked at that way, World War I was a senseless distraction that, along with World War II, kept us from understanding where the real existential danger to mankind’s future lay.

In the same way, though with less exaggeration, it’s now possible to draw back from the literature of the period, to see it in perspective—and the first thing that hits you, taking this long view, is that literature not only existed but thrived. Back before computers, before television and radio, before talkies, before color photos, before all the marvels and doodads of the last hundred years, people seeking to understand the world turned automatically to books, novels, poems, essays, and plays as the best means available to understand the world—often, as the only means possible.

It’s plausible to assume that in 1914 there were more serious writers at work and more serious readers willing to read them than at any time before or since; writers never had such power and influence over the minds of men. Simultaneously, the Western world approached the worst catastrophe it had ever known, so these writers and readers were faced with their hardest challenge ever. This is why World War I is the most “literary” war; there was simply no better way for a thinking person to try to come to terms with it than by reading books.

Just as no Great War general ever worried about climate change, no World War I writer worried about the dawning visual age, let alone the future digital age, nor about a future that could very well see the extinction of books as physical objects and the subsuming of what was rather quaintly termed “literature” under the avalanche of mass culture.

But you can focus back on the past too far; lofty detachment sometimes obscures as well as sharpens. The soldier-critic Samuel Hynes found just the right distance when he wrote his 1990 study of Great War culture, A War Imagined. His introduction explains in one pithy paragraph why, even a hundred years later, we still need to care about what the writers of that era had to say.

“The First World War was the great military and political event of its time, but it was also the great imaginative event. It altered the ways in which men and women thought not only about war but about the world, and about culture and its expression. No one after the war—no thinker or planner, no politician or labor leader, no writer or painter—could ignore its historical importance or frame his thought as though the war had not occurred, or had been simply another war.”

It’s through this understanding that the neglected war literature collected in this volume should be approached. World War I, if nothing else, presented writers with a challenging literary experiment few of them would have wished for. Faced with the collapse of civilization, how, as a writer, do you respond?

We’ve seen the answers.

Some respond by giving up their writing and enlisting in the armies. Some respond by getting killed. Some respond by using their words to get other men to enlist and be killed. Some argue about politics, strategy, who’s to blame. A small number—a very small number—protest. Some—Yeats, Pound, Forester, Strachey, Frost—ignore the war entirely. Some try to ameliorate its worst features, to fight toward a better future. Some swallow every lie the government hands them; some intuitively spit them out. Some seek to increase the hatred, others to reduce it. Some try to make money. Some attempt to understand the larger tragedy. Every one of them believes in the permanence of literature, the supremacy of the written word, the primacy of books.

The forgotten literature of the war written by civilians is vaster than one volume can do justice to. If space permitted, it would be good to quote from Hermann Hesse’s heartfelt appeals for peace, or from the pacifist playwright Miles Malleson, or novelist Stephen McKenna, whose Sonia was a bestseller in 1917, or Rose Allatini, whose 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, about a homosexual pacifist, brought her prosecution under the Defence of the Realm Act and the destruction of all copies, or Francis Meynell, among the first pacifist writers in any Allied country. And it would be good to include the antiwar satire of the brave Austrian writer Karl Krauss.

For that matter, it would be good to include those forgotten writers on the war whose best work appeared years afterwards, like American Humphrey Cobb, whose Paths of Glory, published in 1935, remains one of the best Great War novels (and, directed by Stanley Kubrick, one of the best films about the Great War), and the remarkable Mary Borden, whose experimental The Forbidden Zone, published in 1929, is one of the most original of the war’s memoirs. And there’s another: C. S. Forester’s novel The General, published in 1936, which shows how when fate needs hard men to do its dirty work, hard men come to the fore.

Most of these men and women were middle-aged or older; the younger generation of writers, the ones who had actually experienced the fighting, would not have their turn until the 1920s, when their voices, so authentic and “modern,” would help cause much of the writing from 1914–18 to be immediately forgotten.

This book has tried to restore the imbalance. “An ignorant, middle-aged civilian will not write about the war in the way that a young subaltern will,” Hynes reminds us, “but he may write movingly nonetheless.”

To me, it’s their trying that I find moving, a hundred years later. A novelist myself, an “aging non-combatant,” I know what it’s like to sit down at your desk to attempt to comprehend a world that seems engaged in perpetual war. I know, in other words, what H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling feels as he sits down at the conclusion of the novel, his son dead, his civilization in ruins, with nothing to fight back with but his puny ability with words … and for that reason, it’s with Britling at his desk, speaking for all writers in all times, that these excerpts will end.

This book concerns the past, so perhaps it’s appropriate to take a moment and look toward the future. Specifically, to the future of the books I’ve drawn from here. For the past twenty years, almost accidentally at first, then eventually with more purpose, they have been accumulating on the bookshelves in my office, to the point that they take up almost an entire wall. They look good there. For reasons of economy, most of the books published 1914–18 were small, so they match each other, forming neat rows. Most are brown—chocolate brown, reddish brown, khaki brown, trench brown. For the past two years, as I’ve stitched together this book, they were taken down often from their perches, opened and closed, read and perused, and they’ve held up to the usage quite well. Some have bindings that are crumbling, and others, when you turn the pages, flake into rough paper bits, but I’m gentle with them, and they respond by hanging tough; having survived two world wars and a murderous century, they will not mind continuing to fulfill their original purpose: being handled, being read. They are a long way yet from dust.

So they’re survivors, these books—but for how much longer? I’ll keep them for a while, enjoying if nothing else the stolid, knowing way they sit there on my shelves. But when I’m gone, it’s hard to see them surviving me more than a few years. These are, after all, books that have already been discarded, some discarded many times. No library wants them, no collectors. My heirs, with no other recourse, will empty them into a dumpster along with the other life’s accumulations they won’t have use for.

A few of these titles, by then, will have been digitized; if students in the future want to consult them, some will be waiting in the Internet cloud. That’s survival, of sorts, though for some of us, the quaintly old-fashioned physicality is still important, and digital books, whatever else they are, are not the books these writers created, nor the books that people alive in 1918 held in their hands.

But they’ve made their mark, done their job, reminding us, in an age where literature is dying, how writers at the height of their powers faced a catastrophe armed with nothing more powerful than words—and how, against all odds, they did this so successfully that their words, even now, are the best way to understand what mankind suffered in those four fated years.

A Guide to the American Battle Fields in Europe was prepared by the American Battle Monuments Commission and printed by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington. My sturdily bound copy is stamped with the name “A. R. Farless” in the front, of “San Mateo, California.” Mr. Farless, or another reader, tore out a 1919 National Geographic article and folded it in the pages; it’s about Gold Star Mothers—mothers who lost a son in the fighting—traveling to France on organized visits to see where their sons were killed. The photo shows them posed on a liner in mid-ocean, overdressed, hundreds of them, staring up at the photographer on the bridge.

This guide was a quality production, with copious photographs, maps so detailed and beautifully printed they could be hung in a museum, and an informative, no-nonsense text. The preface states, “The publication of this book was expedited in order to have it available for the large number of ex-service men who intend to go to Europe in the fall of 1927”—a pilgrimage to mark the tenth anniversary of America’s entrance into the war.

Henry Williamson served in the war as a twenty-year-old, and went on to a long career as an author; he became famous for his nature books, including the bestselling Tarka the Otter. Later, he wrote a series of fifteen novels based on the war, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Despite a later flirtation with fascism, he’s still read and admired today—a Henry Williamson Society is dedicated to perpetuating his memory. If you go online, you can watch him interviewed, an old man now, in the 1964 BBC series The Great War. It is fascinating, particularly his description of taking part, as a young man, in the famous Christmas Truce in the middle of No Man’s Land in 1914.

“It is sad to think,” he wrote in 1934, “that in a few years the literature of the war of 1914–18 will be forgotten, like that of other wars, in a European war arising not because the last war was forgotten, but because its origins and contributing causes in each one of us were never clearly perceived by ourselves.”

Michelin Tires traces its history back to 1889, when the company patented the first pneumatic bicycle tire; it continues to be one of the world’s largest tire companies today, famous for its emblem, the tire-chested “Michelin Man,” and its Red Guides to European restaurants and the bestowal of the coveted Michelin stars for the world’s best chefs.

Ypres and the Battle of Ypres was published in 1920 in the “Michelin Illustrated Guides to the Battlefields” series. No other book from that era is more evocative, with its photos, maps, and matter-of-fact descriptions of what the devastated western front looked like just after the fighting stopped. I came across a copy in an old bookstore in Vermont—and found it so moving it was one of the inspirations for my own World War I novel, A Century of November.

It’s a small book, designed to be easily carried, with only a single advertisement for Michelin there in the front: a drawing of a woman helping her daughter into an elegant touring car while the chauffeur patiently waits. “The Best & Cheapest Wheel,” the caption reads, “is the Michelin wheel. Elegant Strong Simple Practical.”

On the title page is the dedication.

“In Memory of the Michelin Workmen and Employees Who Died Gloriously For Their Country.”

Stephen Graham, at thirty, already had a reputation as a travel writer when he enlisted in the Scots Guards, thanks to his books on prewar Russia. He wrote two books on the war, A Private in the Guards and The Challenge of the Dead, with its subtitle “A vision of the War and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November 1920.”

John Masefield served as Britain’s Poet Laureate for almost fifty years; I’m old enough to remember having to memorize his “Sea Fever” in school. Thirty-six when the war broke out, he volunteered at a military hospital in France, went to Gallipoli to report on the battle, then spent weeks walking over the Somme trenches after the front line had temporarily moved eastward.

Very much a traditional Georgian poet, “believing that poetry is made out of natural beauty, and plain, traditional words,” he found the war made writing poetry impossible; rather than write “false” war poetry, he spent the war writing prose.

Forty-seven was old to enlist in the British army, so C. E. Montague, an editorial writer for the Manchester Guardian, dyed his white hair black in order to pass the medical. He served as a captain at General Headquarters—responsible for, among other duties, escorting VIP writers like Shaw and Wells around the trenches—before being invalided back to civilian life. His Disenchantment of 1922, “a book about how England turned, and betrayed herself, her soldiers, and her values,” was one of the first books to capture—and perpetuate—the bitter postwar mood.

The Pilgrimage

—Mildred Aldrich

The expected news came early Monday morning. As we anticipated, the order had been given to cease firing at eleven. We had known it would come, but the fact that the order had been given rather stunned us. To realize that it was over! How could one in a minute?

I was up early to wait for the papers. It was a perfect white day. The whole world was covered with the first hoar frost and wrapped in an impenetrable white fog, as if the huge flag of truce were wound around it. I went out on the lawn and turned my eyes toward the invisible north. Standing beside my little house I was as isolated as if I were all alone in the world, with all the memories of these years since that terrible day in August 1914. I could not see as far as the hedge. Yet out there I knew the guns were still firing, and between them and me lay such devastation as even the imagination cannot exaggerate, and such suffering and pain as the human understanding can but partly conceive. Against the white sheet which encircled me I seemed to see the back water of the war which touched here. Four years and four months—and how much is still before us? The future has its job laid out for it. Is ordinary man capable of putting it over?

I had expected that at eleven, when they ceased firing at the front, our bells would ring out the victory. We had our flags all ready to run up. I was standing on the lawn listening, flags ready at the gate, and Amelie stood in the window at her house, ready to hang out hers. All along the road, though I could not see them for the fog, I knew that women and children were listening with me. The silence was oppressive. Not a sound reached me, except now and then the passing of a train over the Marne. Then Amelie came down to say that lunch was ready, and that I might as well eat whether I had any appetite or not, and that perhaps something had happened, and that after lunch she would go over to Quincy and find out what it was.

So, reluctantly, I went into the house.

It was just quarter past twelve when I heard someone running along the terrace, and a child’s voice called, “Ecoutez, Madame, ecoutez! Les carillons de Meaux!”

Far off, faint through the white sheet of mist, I could hear the bells of the cathedral, like fairy music, but nothing more. I waited expecting any moment to hear the bells from Couilly or Quincy or Conde, and the guns from the forts. But all was silent. There were no longer any groups on the roads. I knew that every one had gone home to eat. Somewhere things were happening, I was sure of that. But I might have been alone on a desert island.

I was too nervous to keep still any longer, so I walked up to the corner of the Chemin Madame, thinking I might hear the bells from there. As I stood at the corner I heard footsteps running toward me on the frozen ground, and out of the fog came Marin, the town crier, with his drum on his back and a cocarde in his cap. He waved his drumsticks at me as he ran, and cried, “I am coming as fast as I can, Madame. We are ringing up at four—at the same time the Tiger reads the terms in the Chamber of Deputies and Lloyd George reads them in London,” and as he reached the corner just above my gate he swung his drum around and beat it up like mad.

It did not take two minutes for all our little hamlet to gather about him, while in a loud, clear voice he read solemnly the ordre de jour which officially announced that the war had ended at eleven o’clock, and the inhabitants of the commune were authorized to hang out all their flags, light up their windows, and join in a dignified and seemly celebration of the liberation of France. Then he slowly lifted his cap in his hand as he read the concluding phrases, which begged them not to forget to pray for the brave men who had given their lives that this day might be, nor to be unmindful that to many among us this day of rejoicing was also a day of mourning.

There was not a cheer.

Morin swung the drum over his shoulder, saluted his audience, and marched solemnly down the hill. In dead silence the little group broke up.

The run out to Chateau-Thierry from here took less than an hour in a little Ford car. It was not an ideal day for the trip. It was gray and windy, and there was a fine drizzle of rain now and then. A sunny day would have been less sad, but I doubt it would have suited my mood any better.

Over the line where the first battle of the Marne passed in the fall of 1914 time has effaced almost every trace, so it was not until we neared Bouresches and Belleau that we began to realize that here battles had been fought. These three little hamlets are so tiny that, although they feature on road maps for the guidance of ardent automobilists, you will find no mention made of them in any guide-books. Even by name they were, until June of last year, unknown to every one outside the immediate vicinity. Now, ruined as they all are, each bears at either end a board sign, with the name of the town painted in black letters.

With the ruins of what was once a tiny hamlet on one hand, across a shell-torn field rises the small, densely wooded height whose name is known today to every American—the tragic Belleau Wood. The little hamlet is just a mass of fallen or falling walls, as deserted as Pompeii and already looking centuries old.

The road approaching it is still screaming with reminiscences of the war four months after the last gun was fired. All along the way are heaps of salvaged stuff of all sorts—mountains of empty shell cases of all sizes, piles of wicker baskets containing unused German shell, thrown down and often broken shell racks, all sorts of telegraphic materials, cases of machine-gun belts, broken kitchens, smashed buckets, tangles of wire and rolls of new barbed wire—in fact all the debris of modern warfare plus any quantity of German artillery material left in their retreat—everything, in fact, except guns and corpses.

Across the fields still zigzag barbed-wire entanglements in many places, while in others the old wire is rolled up by the roadside. Here and there is still a trench, while a line of freshly turned soil in the green fields shows where the trenches have been filled in.

In the banks along the road are the German dugouts, with broken drinking cups, tin boxes, dented casques, strewn about the entrances, which are often broken down, while every little way are the “foxholes” in the banks marking the places where the American boys tried to dig in. The ground before the town which the Germans had shelled so furiously, as the Americans were pushing through to cross the fields and clean out the wooded hill opposite, has been swept and ploughed by the artillery on both sides. The American Captain whose guest I was could say, from a glance at the shell holes: “That is one of ours.” “That was one of theirs.” “That is a 75.” “That is an 88.” “That is a 240.” “This place was rushed.” “That place was shelled.”

Nature is doing her best to heal the scarred landscape, but Belleau Wood, across the field from the ruined hamlets, is a sinister sight still. It is a ghastly sort of place to fight in—a thickly wooded slope, a tangle of uncleared brush on the outskirts ideal for masking machine guns; the clearing of it called for a terrible loss of life.

Today the whole hill is shell-shot. The trees hang dead, dried and broken. The ground looks as though verdure could never clothe it again. Everywhere else Nature has already laid her soothing hands, but she has yet to touch that tragic wood. On the gray, rainwashed walls of the little hamlets, green things already trail and wild flowers are beginning to grow. Even the shell-holes in the fields are gay with dandelions and field primroses, paquerettes and boutons d’or. But Belleau Wood, as seen from the ruined hamlet, is an open grief on the face of Nature.

The roads are absolutely deserted—except for Americans. Across the broken fields toward the dark forests, groups of boys in khaki or women in the uniforms of the various relief units, were constantly passing as we sat in the road between the ruins and the woods. At every corner stood an American camion or a camionette, and we passed no other sort of automobile on the road, and no other pedestrians, as we slowly ran over the sacred ground into Chateau-Thierry. Along the quiet roadsides lie buried the American lads who fell here in the long battle which ended the war.

All the little cemeteries are alike—rectangular spaces, enclosed in a wire fence. Usually there are three or four guns stacked in the centre, often surmounted by a “tin hat,” as the boys call their helmets. There are always several lines of graves, each with a wooden cross at the head with a small American flag set in a round disk under isinglass, surrounded by a green metal frame representing a wreath to which is attached a small card-shaped plaque with the name and number.

None of these cemeteries about Chateau-Thierry is large. They are all on the banks on the side of the road, and I can’t tell you how I felt as we approached our first, and stopped the car beside it, and crawled out into the mud. Just now the well-ordered graves are not sodded. I suppose it was the idea of seeing so many graves—we saw at least a dozen of these little cemeteries—and remembering how young they were who slept there that impressed me. Later, I imagine, when the graves are all properly tended, the scene would lose its look of sadness.

An American woman who has been going back and forward over that devastated country said to me the other day, as she stopped at my gate: “Terrible as it all is it gets less terrible every day.”

From When Johnny Comes Marching Home, by Mildred Aldrich; Small, Maynard and Company; Boston, 1919.

Turn Right at Cemetery Gate

—American Battle Monuments Commission

The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery contains 5,962 graves. The majority of the battle dead who sleep here are from the divisions that fought in the vicinity of the Ourcq River and in the territory from there to the north as far as the Oise River. In 1922, the American soldiers then buried in France in the general area west of the line Tours-Romorantin-Paris-LeHavre were removed to this cemetery.

The Cemetery is under direct charge of the American Graves Registration Service, Quartermaster Corps, United States Army, whose offices at this time are at 20 rue Molitor, Paris. An information bureau is maintained at that office, which can be consulted by those who wish to known in which cemetery a particular grave is located.

It is about 18 miles by road from Chateau-Thierry, and slightly more from Reims. Good train service is available to each of these places, where hotel accommodations can be obtained and automobiles hired.

After the cemetery chapel is built, a good view of the surrounding battle fields may be had from its tower.

This point is the most advanced line reached by the 2d Division. The series of attacks which carried that division forward to this line were invariably accompanied by fighting of the most desperate character. BELLEAU WOOD, at the edge of which the observer is standing, in particular lent itself admirably to defensive fighting on account of its rocky character and tangled undergrowth. The wood was the scene of bitter fighting, extending over 21 days, and in honor of its capture by the Marine Brigade of the 2d Division the French changed its official name to the Bois de la Brigade de Marine.

The splendid conduct of the 2d Division in taking Belleau Wood and other difficult positions along its front in spite of a casualty list of approximately 8,000 officers and men, was enthusiastically proclaimed by the French Army and people.

Turn right at cemetery gate. At road fork just beyond, take road to left. This road, from the point where it crosses the railroad to the top of the next hill, was in “no-man’s-land” during the afternoon and evening of July 20. At kilometer post 21.9, by looking back, a good view is obtained of the cemetery and Belleau Wood.

Cross highway (at kilometer post 25.8), taking road straight ahead. STOP at end of road at site selected for American monument on Hill 204.

Information concerning this monument is given in Chapter XI.

The large town, a mile away, lying on both sides of the Marne River, is Chateau-Thierry. On the left, just before reaching the bridge, there is a building of a Methodist institution, established by Americans as a war memorial, and a monument erected by the 3d American Division. The building contains a small museum of war relics ….

From A Guide to the American Battle Fields of Europe, prepared by the American Battle Monuments Commission; United States Government Printing Office; Washington, 1927.

Peasants Go There to Dig

—Henry Williamson

Hill 60 is one of the show places of the Ypres Salient to-day. Every morning about a dozen peasants go there to dig. You see the “souvenirs” they have dug up lying on sacks or lengths of cloth at the edge of the pits in which they are working. There are wooden pipes, both British and German shapes, well preserved in the light sandy soil, fragments of rifles, bayonets, picklehaube eagle-badges, English county and London regimental badges, buttons, straps, bully-beef tins, pistols, bombs, revolvers, boots. Imagine an ant-hill, fifty yards across its base, thrown up a few dozen times by subterranean heavings, and dropping again after each mine-explosion more or less in the same place; always being pocked and repocked with shells; and now set with a small memorial to the 9th London Regiment, and dug over, and strolled over by 10,000 people every week.

All day long charabancs stop in the road opposite Hill 60, and tourists file past the melancholy little group of men and children standing, collecting-box in hand, by the footpath entrance, and hoping to take half a franc off each visitor. By their sad faces they do not own the heap of earth, originally piled there when the railway cutting was made; yet by the occasional gleams of hate in those eyes we deduce that they have stood there with their boxes long enough to believe that they ought to own it.

Along the footpath the pitches of the souvenir-sellers begin. Prices range from 50 centimes for a brass button to 20 francs for a Smith and Wesson revolver.

From The Wet Flanders Plain, by Henry Williamson; E. P. Dutton & Co.; New York, 1929.

Visit to the Battlefield

—Michelin & Cie.

A visit to Ypres Town and Salient requires two days, and may be made most conveniently by taking Lille as the starting point.

Starting point: The Grand Place, Lille.

Take Rue Nationale to the end, go round Place Tourcoing, take Rue de La Basse on the left, then the first turning on the right. At Canteleu follow the tram-lines leading to Lomme. At the end of the village, cross the railway. Go through Lomme by Rue Thiers, leaving the church on the right (transept greatly damaged).

On the left are the burnt ruins of a large spinning mill. In the fields: numerous small forts of reinforced concrete, which commanded all the roads into Lille. The road passes through a small wood, in the right-hand part of which are the ruins of Premesques Chateau, of which only the facade remains. Further on, to the left, is Wez Macquart, whose church was badly damaged. Trenches lead to the road, while in the fields traces of violent shelling are still visible.

Pass through Chapelle d’Armentieres (completely destroyed). After crossing the railway, a British cemetery is seen on the right. ARMENTIERES lies on the other side of the next level crossing.

Belfry, churches and houses are all in ruins.

In everything connected with the spinning and weaving of linen Armentieres was considerably in advance of Germany. Consequently, the Germans destroyed all the mills, factories and metallurgical works, and what machinery could not be taken to pieces and sent to Germany they ruthlessly smashed.

Cross the Cloth Market, then follow the tram-lines along Rue de Flandre and Rue Bizet. Go through Bizet Village (badly damaged houses). Leaving the ruins of the church on the right, turn first to the right, then to the left. Cross the frontier into Belgium a few yards further off. Leaving on the right the road to the gasworks (of which nothing is left but a wrecked gasometer) the first hours of Ploegsteert are reached. The village lay west of the first lines in May, 1918, and was captured by the Germans on April 12.

British cemetery No. 53 lies at the entrance to the village. Go straight through the village (in ruins). On leaving it, Cemetery No. 54 is seen on the right, then beyond a large concrete shelter, Cemetery No. 55. Cemetery No. 56 is on the left, beyond the level-crossing.

Cross Ploegsteert Wood, leaving the road to Petit-Pont Farm on the left. Here the road rises. To the left, on the slopes of Hill 63, are seen the ruins of La Hutte Chateau. On the crest opposite stand the ruins of Messines. In June, 1919, it was not possible to go direct to Messines, the road being cut at the Petite Douve stream.

Stop the car at Rossignol terre-plain and walk a few yards into the little wood on the right; numerous concrete shelters, from the top of which there is a very fine view over the Hills Kemmel, Rouge, Noir and Cats. The last-named can be recognized by its abby, which stands out against the sky.

Return to the car. The road now descends past the “tank cemetery” containing fourteen broke-down tanks. Passing by a few ruined houses—all that remain of the hamlet of Habourdin—a fork is reached, where take the Neuve-Eglise-Messines road on the right. British cemetery on the right. Turn to the right at the first ruins of Wulverghem, then go through the village, passing in front of the cemetery. Next cross the Steenbeck, by the St. Quentin Bridge. The road now rises sharply to the crest on which Messines used to stand. Numerous small forts are seen to the right and left. These machine-gun nests are all that now mark the site of the village.

At the entrance to the village leave the car at the junction of the Ypres-Armentieres road and visit these pathetic ruins on foot.

From Ypres and the Battles of Ypres, by Michelin & Cie; Clermont-Ferrand, 1920.

Cemeteries Become Unremarkable

—Stephen Graham

You make for what was once a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now—thrice thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs, rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there in plenty. Weather-beaten ammunition baskets with shells intact where they fell off the ammunition wagons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles, there are graves. There is all but the blood.

On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned Flemish—what a return!—and they have made shacks of shreds and patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture forth—there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. One comes to a road, and there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:—“In den Niewen wereld.” Half of them seem to be estaminets. It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in one another’s estaminets.

Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently examining the aluminum ribbons on which the names are fixed to the wooden crosses—looking perhaps for her husband’s grave.

Death and the ruins completely outweigh the living. One is tilted out of time by the huge weight on the other end of the plank, and it would be easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death.

From The Challenge of the Dead, by Stephen Graham; Cassel and Co.; New York, 1921.

Back to the Somme

—John Masefield

All the way up the hill the road is steep, rather deep and bad. It is worn into the chalk and shows up very white in sunny weather. Before the battle it lay about midway between the lines, but it was always patrolled at night by our men. The ground on both sides of it is almost more killed and awful than anywhere in the field. On the English or south side of it, distant from one hundred to two hundred yards, is the shattered wood, burnt, dead, and desolate. On the enemy side, at about the same distance, is the usual black enemy wire, much tossed and bunched by our shells, covering a tossed and tumbled chalky and filthy parapet. Our own old line is an array of rotted sandbags, filled with chalkflint, covering the burnt wood. One need only look at the ground to know that the fighting here was very grim, and to the death. Near the road and up the slope to the enemy ground is littered with relics of our charges, mouldy packs, old shattered scabbards, rifles, bayonets, helmets curled, torn, rolled, and starred, clips of cartridges, and very many graves. Many of the graves are marked with strips of wood torn from packing cases, with penciled inscriptions, “An unknown British Hero;” “In loving memory of Pte.—;” “Two unknown British heroes;” “An unknown British soldier;” “A dead Fritz.” That gentle slope to the Schwaben Redoubt is covered with such things.

Where the crown of the work once reared itself aloft over the hill, the heaps of mud are all blurred and pounded together, so that there is no design, no trace, no visible plan of any fortress, only a mess of mud bedevilled and bewildered. All this mess of heaps and hillocks is strung and filthied over with broken bodies and ruined gear.

Once in a lull of the firing a woman appeared upon the enemy parapet and started to walk along it. Our men held their fire and watched her. She walked steadily along the whole front of the Schwaben and then jumped down into her trench. Many thought at the time that she was a man masquerading for a bet, but long afterwards, when our men took the Schwaben, they found her lying in the ruins dead. They buried her there, up on the top of the hill. God alone knows who she was and what she was doing there.

From The Old Front Line, by John Masefield; The Macmillan Company; New York, 1918.

Whose Credulous Hearts the Maggots Were Now Eating

—C. E. Montague

The senior generals need not have feared. The generous youth of the war was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might still flicker on in the minds of a few tired soldiers and disregarded civilians. Otherwise it was as dead as the half-million of good fellows who it had fired four years ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating under so many shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and Picardy. They gone, their war had lived into a kind of dotage ruled by mean fears and desires. At home our places of honour were brown with shirkers masquerading in the dead men’s clothes and licensed by careless authorities to shelter themselves from all danger under the titles of Colonel, Major, and Captain. Nimble politicians were rushing already to coin into votes for themselves—“the men who won the war”—the golden memory of the dead before the living could come home and make themselves heard.

“This way, gents, for the right sort of whip to give Germans!” “Rats, gentlemen, rats! Don’t listen to him. Leave it to me and I’ll chastise ’em with scorpions.” “I’ll devise brave punishments for them.” “Ah, but I’ll sweat you more money out of the swine.” Each little demagogue got his little pots of pitch and sulphur on sale for the proper giving of hell to the enemy whom he had not faced.

“The freedom of Europe,” “The war to end war,” “The overthrow of militarism,” “The cause of civilization”—most people believe so little now in anything or anyone that they would find it hard to understand the simplicity and intensity of faith with which these phrases were once taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of thousands of men who are now dead that if they were killed their monument would be a new Europe now soured or soiled with the hates and greeds of the old. That the old spirit of Prussia might not infest our world any more; that they, or, if not they, their sons might breathe a new, cleaner air they had willingly hung themselves up to rot on the uncut wire at Loos or wriggled to death, slow hour by hour, in the cold filth at Broodseinde. Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain.

So we had failed—had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women’s overshadowed lives at home, the agony and bloody sweat—all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled. So we come home draggle-tailed, sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried to do so well.

From Disenchantment, by C. E. Montague; Chatto and Windus; London, 1922.

The Most Tragic and Dreadful Thing that Has Ever Happened to Mankind

—H. G. Wells

It was now the middle of November, and Mr. Britling, very warmly wrapped in his thick dressing-gown and his thick llama wool pyjamas, was sitting at his night desk and working ever and again at an essay, an essay of preposterous ambitions, for the title of it was “The Better Government of the World.”

Latterly he had much sleepless misery. In the day life was tolerable, but in the night—unless he defended himself by working, the losses and cruelties of the war came and grimaced at him, insufferably. Now he would be haunted by long processions of refugees, now he would think of the dead lying stiff and twisted in a thousand dreadful attitudes. Then again he would be overwhelmed with anticipations of the frightful economic and social dissolution that might lie ahead … At other times he thought of wounds and the deformities of body and spirit produced by injuries. And sometimes he would think of the triumph of evil. Stupid and triumphant persons went about a world that stupidity had desolated, with swaggering gestures, with a smiling consciousness of enhanced importance, with their scornful hatred of all measured and temperate and kindly things turned now to scornful contempt. And mingling with the soil they walked on lay the dead body of Hugh, face downward. At the back of the boy’s head, rimmed by blood-stiffened hair—the hair that had once been “as soft as the down of a bird”—was a big red hole. That hole was always pitilessly distinct. They stepped on him—heedlessly. They heeled the scattered stuff of his exquisite brain into the clay …

From all such moods of horror Mr. Britling’s circle of lamplight was his sole refuge. His work could conjure up visions, like opium visions, of a world of order and justice. Amidst the gloom of world bankruptcy he stuck to the prospectus of a braver enterprise—reckless of his chances of subscribers …

But this night even this circle of lamplight would not hold his mind. Doubt had crept into this last fastness. He pulled the papers towards him, and turned over the portion he had planned.

His purpose in the book he was beginning to write was to reason out the possible methods of government that would give a stabler, saner control to the world. He believed still in democracy, but he was realising more and more that democracy had yet to discover its method. It had to take hold of the consciences of men, it had to equip itself with still unformed organisations. Endless years of patient thinking, of experimenting, of discussion lay before mankind ere this great idea could become reality, and right, the proven right things, could rule the earth.

Meanwhile the world must still remain a scene of blood-stained melodramas, or deafening noise, contagious follies, vast irrational destructions. One fine life after another went down from study and university and laboratory to be slain and silenced …

Was it conceivable that this mad monster of mankind would ever be caught and held in the thin-spun webs of thought?

Was it, after all, anything but pretension and folly for a man to work out plans for the better government of the world?—was it any better than the ambitious scheming of some fly upon the wheel of the romantic gods?

Man has come, floundering and wounding and suffering, out of the breeding darkness of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again. Why not flounder with the rest, why not eat, drink, fight, scream, weep and pray, forget Hugh, stop brooding upon Hugh, banish all these priggish dreams of “The Better Government of the World” and turn to the brighter aspects, the funny and adventurous aspects of the war, the Chestertonian jolliness, Punch side of things? Think you because your sons are dead that there will be no more cakes and ale? Let mankind blunder out of the mud and blood as mankind has blundered in …

Let us at any rate keep our precious Sense of Humour …

He pulled the manuscript towards him. For a time he sat decorating the lettering of his title, “The Better Government of the World,” with little grinning gnomes’ heads and waggish tails …

Mr. Britling’s pen stopped.

There was perfect stillness in the study bedroom.

“The tinpot style,” said Mr. Britling at last in a voice of extreme bitterness.

He fell into an extraordinary quarrel with his style—at his exasperation about his own inexpressiveness, at his incomplete control of these rebel words and phrases that came trailing each its own associations and suggestions to hamper his purpose with it. He read over the offending sentence.

“The point is that it is true,” he whispered. “It is exactly what I want to say” …

Exactly? …

His mind stuck on that “exactly” … When one has much to say style is troublesome. It is as if one fussed with one’s uniform before a battle … but that is just what one ought to do before a battle … One ought to have everything in order.

He took a fresh sheet and made three trial beginnings.

“War is like a black fabric.” …

“War is a curtain of black fabric across the pathway.”

“War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and now—I am not dreaming—it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through. We owe it to all these dear youths—”

His pen stopped again.

“I must work on a rough draft,” said Mr. Britling.

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