Charles Wadsworth Camp

“ From the first glimpse you had known what those rows of dripping, studded, stolid boots had reminded you of—boots, too still, on the feet of dead men.
"You see, we don't waste anything," the officer was saying prosaically.
Even among the little children at the Belgian orphilinat where we had tea that afternoon the war dominated. It lurked in the black uniforms, in the young faces where that eternal question was more pitiful than ever, in the heap of hay at the end of the yard which the babies with a perfect seriousness modelled into the semblance of trenches and redoubts. ”

“ Must we lose them, too? Why do you want to be a soldier, son?"
"I want to kill the Germans, because they killed my poor papa."
His face twitched into an expression at last, and, as he continued to sip his tea, great tears rolled down his cheeks and fell into the cup. But the widow didn't cry. In the great munition factories most of the women wore mourning, too, and the eyes of many were disturbingly like the eyes of the widow. It was not easy at first to watch their slender, dark-clothed figures, their soft and pretty faces, bent over tasks of preparing death and mutilation for men. ”

“ His tomb seemed to brood over the review, and in neighbouring faces you read a perception, nearly superstitious, of the soul of the inspired leader who had brought so much glory to France. Then the band burst into the Marseillaise. As the ranks swung over the bridge the crowd cheered. I have never heard such cheering. It wasn't a matter of volume. It was a curious choked quality that arrested one. It was as if these people tried to give vent to an emotion beyond physical expression and were angry at their failure. Yet for them the music seemed to express everything. ”

“ We walked on through apparently endless lines of trenches with a glimpse at a turning, perhaps, of a bit of brick wall in the shelter of which poilus improvised a meal. In all directions lines branched from the communication we followed. Each was labelled. It was like a hidden city whose inhabitants carried an air of constant expectancy. Covered with mud these creatures slipped by us from time to time. ”

“ The shallow, unfinished appearance of the sap advertised it as a temporary work that could be abandoned at any time the German fire should make it wise. Crouched as I was, strands of the overlapping barbed wire caught at my hat, and the weeds, evidently encouraged to mask the narrow ditch, brushed against my face. The cut debouched into a small square pocket where a solitary figure rested, motionless and sombre. His rifle barrel protruded through the grass. ”

“ From the waterfront I watched transports enter and leave the harbour. On the docks the work of unloading proceeded with a precise efficiency. In the streets, wagons and automobile trucks, to which good-natured Tommies clung, hurried tempestuously. Officers strolled here and there, swinging little canes. Their faces were rather more serious than the faces scanned in London. All at once you realised that you were actually on the soil of war-torn France, within a few miles of the grotesque and deadly battle of the trenches. ”

“ At every turning the sign posts of a social change meet you. I remember a middle-aged woman in black who rode ahead of me one afternoon on the top of a bus. A newsboy in Haymarket burst the bounds of propriety with a strident yell. We all had a partial glimpse of the poster in his hand, announcing the sinking of a British ship.
The woman, who in peace times, you felt, would have been in an automobile, turned to me with a cry of fright. ”

“ We sat in the cars, listening to the ugly roar while we studied this nerve centre of the fighting system.
The headquarters was a large brick château, set across a wide and pleasant yard. On the high verendah a group of officers lounged, smoking and with puzzled faces appearing to listen, too. Sentries paced swiftly up and down before the steps. From a wooden shack at one side a brass horn, like an automobile signal, seemed perpetually ready to scream. ”

“ There was something wanton about this bombardment of a dead city.
Breathing with distaste the strange, repellant atmosphere, we hurried across a market place whose empty shelters of corrugated iron were half tumbled down. Two officers came swinging by, sticks in their hands, their helmets low on their foreheads. They didn't talk. They moved with smooth haste. The striking of their feet against the paving was inaudible because of the turmoil. They were like figures seen in a dream. ”

“ It was clear enough after that that we were behind the British lines. British faces, British khaki, British methods filled the frames of the windows.
At country stations hospital trains lay on sidings, ready to receive from temporary hospitals and ambulances their grim and scarlet freight. Their drab sides were relieved only by red crosses in white squares. But in each car clusters of field flowers splashed colour. ”

“ Williams said, "Fancy being under one of those Black Marias!"
Our fancy, however, was directed to a danger more immediate. We looked up at a whirring overhead and saw a war 'plane, flying high in our direction. As if born of the air five more appeared, sailed over the trenches, swerved back above us, and circled away again. They were too high to make identity certain, so we crouched as close as we could to the wall while we speculated. ”

“ But long before you reach your goal you are aware of that strain which makes it wise to send men back to billets, and all that day the strain grows and colours the days ahead less alluringly.
Our nearness was apparent when, beneath a bland sun which had routed the mist, we swung into a road along a poplar-bordered canal. A sullen roar, exactly like the distant explosion of a giant cracker on the Fourth of July, disturbed the peace of water and shrubbery. ”

“ The houses of the suburbs were marked with shell fragments. One or two men and women glided silently past us, clinging to the shelter of walls.
We swerved into a vast open space. At first I didn't realise. Then I left the car and, holding my breath, unconscious of the rain, stood gazing upward.
The cathedral of Rheims proves how absurdly conservative photography is. A picture of the twin towers and the rose window won't give you a sense of unbelievable tragedy, or an instinct to speak not at all or in whispers. That is because the horror of Rheims from the front is a matter of detail. ”

“ As we drew closer we all noticed a tall, straight young fellow in a Highland uni- form. He walked up and down impatiently, swinging a little stick, glancing with anxious eyes at the crowd of us by the forward rail. The girl and her mother were near. They cried out.
They glanced at each other tearfully. They commenced with jerky motions to wave their handkerchiefs. The young officer, with a piece of shrapnel near his heart, suddenly swung his stick, paused, and stared up at the tear-stained faces.
"Doesn't he look fit?” the girl cried proudly. "But not really fit—never fit for war again." ”

“ He reckoned pridefully what he expected to get for his crop of hay—much more than last year, so just that much more for the government, for even here efficiency was a deity. It expressed itself in the sight of his brood, working at their own trades, remaking shoes, converting jam and butter tins into pails and sprinklers and gasolene funnels, seeing that no smallest piece of rough material went wholly to waste.
He made us gasp at the sight of that extraordinary process of feeding the British soldier. Assuredly it must be a painful scandal to the German. ”

“ In an air battle they will take suicidal chances, but they don't like these quiet rides through the night to lonely places.
It isn't that they are physically afraid. They shrink from the work because it threatens the spy's penalty. The airman, like his passenger, is tried, condemned, and executed as a spy. And these boys, who know less than the quiet, worried men in London, Paris, and Petrograd, or in Vienna and Berlin, have a horror of the spy's work and the spy's death. ”

“ And it is out of this emptiness that the feeling of depression steals. There were with me officers and soldiers hardened to the filth and corruption of war. Some of us had seen devastation more complete and no less excusable than this. Yet no one failed to respond to that sense of suffering which seemed to have survived its physical source. It is, of course, impossible to say how far our knowledge of what had happened here gave birth to such thoughts. It is merely significant that we all experienced them. ”

“ It is a dreadful thing to suspect one's neighbours, to search for guilt behind the eyes of those who, before the war, were one's friends. And no spy could expect mercy from these people. The wantonness of the destruction rankles in the border provinces as it never has in any other war, and when you have wandered through the devastated districts, as the Quaker and I did, you understand why. ”

“ It was possible to see him stretched in the narrow tunnel, digging away as stealthily as possible the soil in front of him, quite at the mercy of the German listeners, perhaps breaking through into a rival sap-head and fighting murderously in a narrow hole. When a mischance occurs during mine work a burial isn't often necessary or possible.
We walked on after that with some thought for what might be going on beneath our feet. Certainly mining alone is enough to keep the other fellow from feeling too much at his ease. ”

“ Abruptly we realised that war for the individual has the quality of a perpetual and tragic disaster. Later, in the cities of Europe, in the devastated districts, in the towns under bombardment, in the front line trenches, that truth was forced upon me. So I have remembered chiefly the human incidents and impressions that will have a real meaning for the individual, who has had the foresight to visualise himself, his family, and his friends entangled in the struggle.
For it isn't easy to understand war in America. ”

“ The semblance of figures, featureless and stripped, nevertheless have something human about them. They are like victims of the ancient trial by fire. Instinctively one glances at the brave little bronze figure on horseback which miraculously has survived each bombardment. ”

“ It recalls what you have imagined of Elizabethan London. And the city does have an air of romance. It is very lovely, too, because everything ugly is crushed beneath the shadows, and everything beautiful acquires a meaning new and sentimental. ”

“ We were glad to follow the brigade officer up a path marked "Sniper's Avenue," which proved to be a communication trench and led us out of the reach of mines. I wonder if we hadn't all counted the hours in the front line. We had, I know, glanced at our watches more frequently than one does at home. I wonder if every soldier who is condemned to the trenches for days doesn't count the hours, the minutes, until he can walk along a communication trench away from the things that keep him from fecling too much at case. ”