J. H. Morgan

“ The German mind has had little but falsehood to feed upon ever since the outbreak of the war, and it now believes, absurd as the belief is, that it is the innocent victim of an unprovoked aggression. When any voice is raised in Germany to proclaim even a part of the truth and to plead for humanity and good feeling, that voice is instantly silenced. Silence will doubtless be enforced as long as the war lasts. ”

“ But even as we searched the landscape with our field-glasses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and blue concentric circles to our glasses like the scales of some huge magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or eight little white clouds like balls of feathers suddenly appeared from nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. ”

“ But in proportion as our conception is high and the German conception is low, it seems to me incumbent on us to place our hopes for the future in the strength of our right arm and in that alone. And if, in Burke’s noble phrase, we are to consider ourselves for the future “embodied with Europe” so that, sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, we feel that nothing human is alien to us, then we must be prepared to support our treaty guarantees of the independence of the small nations with an adequate armed force ”

“ The Germans have broken all laws, human and divine, and not even the ancient freemasonry of arms, whose honourable traditions are almost as old as war itself, has restrained them in their brutal and licentious fury. It is useless to attempt to discriminate between the people and their rulers; an abundance of diaries of soldiers in the ranks shows that all are infected with a common spirit. ”

“ They learnt to walk delicately on the balls of their feet as silently as hares, to see in the dark like foxes, to wriggle like the creeping things of the field, to lower their voices with the direction of the wind, to select a background with the moonlight, and to stand motionless on patrol with muscles rigid like a pointer when the star-shells dissolved the security of the night. They studied to dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary [Pg 68] of nature. They grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. ”

“ Mentem mortalia tangunt—human things touch the heart—acquires for the German Staff a new and sinister significance. Every tender feeling that their enemy has becomes a hostage for his tractability, because it can be violated if he is contumacious. His churches can be profaned, his priests murdered, his boys driven into exile, his women-folk handed over to the lust of a licentious soldiery, and his home destroyed. If his troops defeat one in the field, the civilian population can be made to pay for it with their lives,65 so that eventually he may be disarmed not by defeat but by horror. ”

“ We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. ”

“ It is clear that the treatment of civilians is regulated by no more rational or humane policy than that of intimidation or, even worse, of sullen vindictiveness. As the German troops passed through the communes and towns of the arrondissements of Ypres, Hazebrouck, Bethune, and Lille, they shot indiscriminately at the innocent spectators of their march; the peasant tilling his fields, the refugee tramping the roads, and the workman returning to his home. To be seen was often dangerous, to attempt to escape being seen was invariably fatal. ”

“ Civilians who fire upon invading troops without observing the requirements which the Hague Convention prescribes may, no doubt, be shot according to the customs of war; but there must be some proof that these particular civilians have done so. To put to death a quarter or more of the adult male inhabitants of a village because some shots have been fired, or are supposed by an excited soldiery to have been fired, out of its houses, is mere murder. All the paragraphs in the Manual of War issued by the German Staff cannot make it anything else. ”

“ They have never found him except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine. In the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black flies. Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in front of them. Occasionally one of our men finds them more than usually interesting. ”

“ If one thing is more clearly established than another by my inquiries among the officers of our Staff and divisional commands, it is that châteaux or private houses used as the headquarters of German officers were frequently found to have been left in a state of bestial pollution, which can only be explained by gross drunkenness or filthy malice. Whichever be the explanation, the fact remains that, while to use the beds and the upholstery of private houses as a latrine is not an atrocity, it indicates a state of mind sufficiently depraved to commit one. ”

“ Till the outbreak of the present conflict men who sought for signs of the progress of mankind were cheered by the hope that war would hereafter be waged only between regular disciplined forces on each side; that these forces would abstain from needless cruelty, that women would be protected from lust, and that the lives of non-combatants would not be endangered. There was even a prospect that private property would not be destroyed except in so far as a definite military aim made its destruction unavoidable, as when a hostile force had to be shelled out of its shelter in a village. ”

“ But their voices are the voices of exhortation, and their breath and finer spirit have passed into the drafts that have taken their place. Their successors greet Death like a friend and go into battle as to a festival, counting no price—youth, health, life—too high to pay for the country of their birth and their devotion. The nation that can nurture men such as these can calmly meet her enemy in the gate. ”

“ The voice of America is a voice crying in the wilderness; both groups of belligerents deny the American contention that peace, and with it the commerce of neutrals, should govern the construction of the rules of war. How can it be otherwise in a struggle for existence? I very much doubt whether, for a long time to come, international lawyers can afford to assume, as they have been in the habit of doing, that peace, not war, is the normal conditions of nations. A nation which like Germany will not admit your major premises will certainly reject your conclusions when it suits her convenience. ”

“ But Bailleul has few amenities and no charms. It is, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being a "deodand," and appropriated to charitable uses. For all that, Bailleul stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.
Bethune is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land, for it is the rendezvous of the British Army, and men tramp miles to warm their hands at its fires of social life. ”

“ I doubt if we shall hear very much in future of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or of the sanctity of the levée en masse as a medium of lawful transition from the one to the other; he who studies the German 52 White Book on hostilities in Belgium will see how easily a belligerent, if he be so minded, can dispose with a quibble of the obligations to respect an improvised force which has “no time” to organise. A belligerent contemplating a sudden attack and a belligerent having to meet it will entertain very different conceptions as to what is meant by “no time.” ”

“ The drafts at No. 19, having done a route march the day before, had been turned out this morning to do a little musketry drill by way of keeping them fit. A platoon lay flat on their stomachs in the long grass, the burnished nails on the soles of their boots twinkling in the sun like miniature heliographs. From all quarters of the field sharp words of command rang out like pistol shots. "Three hundred. Five rounds. Fire." As the men obeyed the sergeant's word of command, the air resounded with the clicking of bolts like a chorus of grasshoppers. ”

“ To my mind it is this pathological aspect of the German temperament which presents a far more serious obstacle to a restoration of the European comity based on the readmission of Germany to membership than the German dogma of war. You may, perhaps, extirpate a dogma but you cannot alter a temperament. To regard Germany as the misguided pupil of a military caste which alone stands in the way of her reformation seems to me to ignore the volume of evidence as to the complicity of officers and men in those orgies of outrage. ”

“ It is a brave sight and fortifying to see a Supply Column winding in and out between the poplars on the perilously arched pavé of the long sinuous roads, each wagon keeping its distance, like battleships in line, and every one of them boasting a good Christian name chalked up on the tail-board. For what his horses are to a driver and his eighteen-pounder to a gunner, such is his wagon to the A.S.C. man who is detailed to it. ”

“ I have been told that there are still some individuals in England who cherish the idea that this vast orgy of blood, lust, rapine, hate, and pride is in some peculiar way merely the Bacchanalia of troops unused to the heady bouquet of the wines of Champagne or, stranger still, that it is the mental aberration of a people seduced by idle tales into these courses by its rulers. ”

“ Our town was indeed but one vast hospital—orderly, subdued, and tenebrous. Every hotel but our own was closed to visitors and flew the Red Cross flag, displaying on its portals the register of wounded like a roll-call. The streets at night, with their lights extinguished, were subterranean in their darkness, and the single café, faintly illuminated, looked [Pg 144] like some mysterious grotto within which the rows of bottles of cognac and Mattoni gleamed like veins of quartz and felspar. We were, indeed, a race of troglodytes, and we were all either very young or very old. ”

“ A nation thus acquiring the destructive resources of the West, while retaining the peculiar morality of the East—its ruthlessness, its contempt for human life, its sombre fatalism, its indifference to personal liberty, its chicanery, its love of espionage—might, he apprehended, fall upon Europe in a catastrophic assault as unforeseen as it would be unprovoked, and threaten her with destruction. ”

“ It was the voice of the sentry, and came from behind a barricade of hurdles, thatched with straw, on the crest of the road over the downs. His bayonet gleamed like a silver needle in the moonlight, and he was alone in his vigil. No shepherds watched their flocks by night, neither did angels sing peace on earth and goodwill towards men. ”

“ Neither can we suppose that the declarations of professors, victims of a doctrine and a practice which compels them to approve every act of the State are more to be accepted as expressing what may be felt by the less vocal Germans. We must remember how severe is the German censorship, how accustomed the Germans are to believe what their Government tells them, how habitually mendacious the military authorities have been in the accounts they supply of the conduct of the Allied Powers and their troops. ”

“ Ypres is an uncanny place.
We returned to Poperinghe, our way choked by a column of French troops, pale, hollow-eyed, their blue uniforms bleached by sun and rain until all the virtue of the dye had run out of them. Before resuming our hunt for the procureur du roi—who, we now found, had removed from Ypres to Poperinghe—we entered a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with French officers, with whom a full-bosomed, broad-hipped Flemish girl exchanged uncouth pleasantries, and it possessed a weird and uncomely boy, who regarded A——, the Staff officer accompanying me, with a hypnotic stare. ”

“ Under these circumstances, the Belgian civil population who took part in the struggle could of course make no claim to the treatment to which belligerents have a right. On the contrary, it was absolutely necessary, in the interests of the self-preservation of the German Army, to have recourse to the sharpest measures against these francs-tireurs. Individuals who opposed the German troops by fighting had, therefore, to be cut down; prisoners could not be treated as prisoners of war according to the laws of war, but according to the usage of war as murderers. ”

“ One afternoon early in September—it was the second day of the month, he remembered it because there had been an untimely frost over night—he heard the crackle of musketry on the outskirts of the town, and a column of grey-coated men suddenly appeared in the street. An officer blew a whistle, and, as some of them broke through the gates of the mansion, the concierge fled across the lawn with bullets buzzing about his ears and shouts of laughter pursuing him as he ran. ”

“ The Germans appear in the case of the Russian, as in that of the British, Belgian, and French prisoners, to have taken a malignant and bestial delight in outraging their feelings of self-respect, and men were herded together day and night in cattle-trucks deep in manure, and forced to perform their natural functions where they stood, packed together so close that they could not sit and dared not lie down. ”

“ The Base feeds the Army, binds up its wounds, and repairs its wastage. If you would get a glimpse of the feverish activities of the Base and understand what it means to the Army, you should take up your position on the bridge by the sluices that break the fall of the river into the harbour, close to the quay, where the trawlers are nudging each other at their moorings and the fishermen are shouting in the patois of the littoral amid the creaking of blocks, the screaming of winches, and the shrill challenge of the gulls. ”

“ For their part, they expressly and solemnly protest against a population which has, with the most despicable means, waged a dishonourable war against the German soldiers, and still more against the Government which, in complete perversion of their duties, has given rein to the senseless passions of the population, and even now does not scruple to free itself from its own heavy guilt by mendacious libels against the German Army. ”

“ Most Frenchmen of the middle class wear beards of an Assyrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The maire was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its arms and his hands extended in front of him, the thumb and finger-tips of one hand poised to meet those of the other as though he were contemplating the fifth proposition in Euclid. ”

“ Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as if by a potter's thumb. Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. [Pg 61] The village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not more desolate. ”

“ For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a great peace. The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Cassel, and the horsemen pass by on the other side. ”

“ Thrale's brewery—wheat, beef, fodder, and the four spices dear to the delicate palates of the Indian contingent. Somewhere behind there is a park of ammunition guarded like a harem. In the railway sidings are duplicate supply trains, steam up, trucks sealed, and the A.S.C. officer on board ready to start for rail-head with twenty-four hours' supplies. Beyond the maze of "points" is moored the strangest of all rolling-stock, the grey-coated armoured-train, within whose iron walls are domesticated two amphibious petty officers darning their socks. ”

“ For it is a countryside of interminable straight lines—straight roads, straight hop-poles, and poplars not less straight, reminding one in winter of one of Hobbema's landscapes without their colouring. But to the south of the zone of our occupation, as you leave G.H.Q. for the Base, you exchange these plains of sticky clay and stagnant dykes for a pleasant country of undulating downs and noble beech woods, and one seems to shake off a nightmare of damp despondency.
It may be remarked that I have said nothing of Ypres. The explanation is painfully simple. Ypres has ceased to exist. ”

“ Cassel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees. It has a bandstand—what town in Flanders and Artois has not?—and a church. Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to me profane in more senses than one. I have never been able to make up my mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary facts of life. ”

“ The communication trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic bridge. When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on the surface of the clear amber stream, the orchard through which the communication trench had been cut burst into blossom, the sticky clay walls of the trench became hard as masonry in the sun, and one morning a board appeared with the legend "Hyde Park. Keep off the grass." ”

“ That lonely oratory was the battlefield of the Marne. Seasons will come and go, man will plough and sow, the earth will yield her increase, but those graves will never be disturbed by share or sickle. They are holy ground.
So it is with the fields of Flanders. In those fields our gallant dead lie where they fell, and where they lie the earth is dedicated to them for ever. Of the British Expeditionary Force that landed in France in August 1914 perhaps not 10 per cent remain. ”

“ It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering [Pg 167] above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape were a Japanese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his half-naked body. ”

“ As more and yet more men are called up to the colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like nunneries—with a few aged Fathers Superior. Having had business the day before at the Société Générale, I had had occasion to reflect on these things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone. ”