C. E. W. Bean

“ When you stand in Pozières to-day, and are told that you will find the front trench across another hundred yards of shell-holes, you know that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least sign of movement. Dry shell crater upon shell crater upon shell crater—all bordering one another until some fresh salvo shall fall and assort the old group of craters into a new one, to be reassorted again and again as the days go on. ”

“ The red ribs of it lay open to the sky. The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open—it lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callous skies with scarcely so much as a blade of grass or a thistle to clothe its nakedness—covered with the wreckage of men and of their works as the relics of a shipwreck cover the uneasy sea.
As we dodged over the last undulations of an unused trench, the crest of each crater brought us for an instant into view of something beyond—something green and fresh and brilliant, like new land after a long sea journey. ”

“ In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.
You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide ocean. In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the crater on a level with your head. When you wandered over from that shell-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you were plunging. The green land of France lay behind you in the distance. But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters. ”

“ Our railway train and the policeman had carried us over endless farmlands, through forests, beside rivers, before we noticed, drawn up along the side of a quarter of a mile of road, an endless procession of big grey motor-lorries. Every one was exactly like the next—a tall grey hood in front and a long grey tarpaulin behind. It was the first sign of the front. Presently a French regiment went by along a country road—not at all unlike our Australian troops in some ways—biggish fellows in grey-blue overcoats, all singing a jolly song. ”

“ There was the church—still recognisable by one window; and a scrap of red wall at the north-east end of the village, past which you then had to crawl to reach an isolated run of trench facing the windmill. Both trench and red wall have long since gone to glory. I doubt if you could even trace either of them now. The solitary arched window disappeared early, and a tumbled heap of bricks is all that now marks Pozières church. One scrap of gridironed roof sticking out from the powdered ground cross-hatches the horizon. There is not so much foliage left as would shelter a cock sparrow. ”

“ You move along the country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home, until, sooner or later, things happen which make you think suddenly and think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows when there is a sharp whiz and a crash, and a shrapnel shell from a German seventy-seven (their field gun) bursts ten yards behind you. You are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that a working party is passing the corner frequently on some duty or another. ”

“ Well, finding the German trench seems to be much the same experience, varied by a multitude of bullets singing past like bees, and with the additional thought ever present to the mind—when will the enemy's barrage burst on you? When it does come, you do not hear it coming—there is too much racket in the air for your ears to catch the shell whistling down as you are accustomed to. ”

“ Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the while. And then for the first time you recall that those grey trees in the distance must be behind the German lines; that distant roof and chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; the pretty blue hill against which the willows in the plain show out like a row of railway sleepers is cut off from you by a barrier deeper than the Atlantic—the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk, eyes are watching for you all day long ”

“ As you scurry past the hinterland of the lines in your motor-car you will sometimes see two or three aeroplanes flying like great herons overhead. They seem to be in company, keeping station almost, and holding on the same course, all mates together—until you catch the cough of a machine-gun, and realise that they are actually engaged in the deadliest sort of duel which can possibly be fought in these days. In a battle of infantry you are mostly hit by an unaimed shot, or a shot aimed into a mass of men. Even if a man fires at you once, it is probably someone else whom he aims at next time. ”

“ The war of trenches is a comfortable out-of-date phase, to be looked upon with regret and perhaps even some longing. The war of to-day is a war of craters and potholes—a war of crannies and nicks and crevices torn out of the earth yesterday, and to be shattered into new shapes to-morrow. It may not seem easy to believe, but we have seen the Germans under heavy bombardment [Pg 137] leaving the shelter of their trenches for safety in the open—jumping out and running forward into shell holes—anywhere so long as they got away from the cover which they had built for themselves. ”

“ Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, God-forsaken up-country township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats, in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving thing. You must not even leave a spider. ”

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

“ As we sit in the narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above our heads. We can hear the swish of our own shells, perhaps 100 feet up, and the occasional rustle of some missile passing overhead a good deal higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer shells making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. ”

“ Whatever may be the case with Paris, these country people of France are one of the freshest and strongest nations on earth.
They are living their ordinary lives right up under the burst of the German shells. Three of them were killed here the other day—three children, playing about one minute at a street corner in front of their own homes before Australian eyes, were lying dead there the next. Yet the people are still there—it is their home, and why should they leave it? An autocracy has no chance against a convinced, united, determined democracy like this. ”

“ The German gives you the impression of being a keener observer than the Turk. The hills and trees behind his lines are really within view of you over miles of your own country, though you scarcely realise it at first, and they are full of eyes. Also every fine day brings out his balloons like a crop of fat grubs—and also our own. In Gallipoli our ships had the only balloons—the Turks had all the hill-tops.
The aeroplane here affords so big a part of the hourly spectacle of warfare, and makes so great a difference in the obvious conditions of the fight, that he deserves a letter to himself. ”

“ Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with—on his back—all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees—sometimes up to his waist—along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell holes—holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he were found, or even might never be found at all. ”

“ And always just ahead of us, a mile or so behind the German lines, there is heaven smiling—you can see it clearly; in this part, up the [Pg 183] opposite slope of the wide, open valley. There is the green country on which the Germans are always being driven back, and up which this monstrous engine of war has not yet begun its slow, gruesome climb. There are the beautiful green woods fading to soft autumn brown and yellow—the little red roofs in the trees, an empty village in the foreground—you can see the wet mud shining in its street and the white trickle of water down the centre of the road. ”

“ There is green grass up to within a few yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which on a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away from the lines. The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy's trenches, or your own—the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as completely as if they did not exist. ”

“ Here the trench divided. There was no sign of a footprint either way. Shells of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially—about ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close—a black burst on the brown hill—two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side—a huge brick-red cloud over the skyline—an angry little high-explosive whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind. It is so that it goes on all day long in the area where our troops are. ”

“ The chatter of one machine-gun—then another, and another, were added to it. Our shells were bursting occasionally flat in the face of the Germans—one big bearded fellow—they are close enough for those details to be seen now—takes a low burst of our shrapnel full in his eyes. A high-explosive shell bursts on the parapet, and down go three others. But they are firing calmly through all this.
Three or four Germans suddenly get up from some hole in No Man's Land, and bolt for their trench like rabbits. Within forty yards of the German parapet the leading men in our line find themselves alone. ”

“ The longed-for relief comes at last—a change to other shell-battered areas in support or reserve—and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception ”

“ Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing hardships undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as "artillery and trench mortar activity"—after the Somme, I say, one found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with me, as "war de luxe." ”

“ The reason of it is not that Australians and New Zealanders dislike being clubbed together. Quite the reverse—the Australians are never more satisfied than when they are next to the New Zealanders. The two certainly feel themselves in some respects one and inseparable to a greater extent than any other troops here. They are proud of Anzac as the name of their corps, and as the name of that hill-side in Gallipoli where their graves lie side by side. ”