Geoffrey Winthrop Young

“ But let us borrow no false colour from an imaginary pomp and circumstance in war itself. It is dissolution and the end of hope that is hidden in the cloud. In England we are happily still free to interpret the obscurity according to our fancy, to picture death in battle as somehow not death. For those who have moved by the edge of the shadow there is no illusion left. The cloud shifts from village to village, from week to week, only to let us see in its track nature outraged, emotion degraded, humanity defaced. ”

“ Drifting aimlessly here and there, ready to move at a rumour, the great army of the homeless, just as in Belgium, moves through the fertile fields. It is depressed, purposeless, puzzled. Turned back from the big towns, reluctant to cross the Channel, uprooted from the home-fields, like plants torn up and swirled endlessly in a weir pool—moving endlessly back and forwards. The generations of peace, the rich product of human progress, that war is killing. ”

“ As we neared the frontier the country seemed to become populous again. The cottages had lights; lights in the fields and through the trees. Only, as we passed, the strangeness increased, for the population had come from a different planet. Quiet cottages, with the glow of uniforms through the wet panes, fields with a few tireless peasant women, helped by good-humoured soldiers, using even the darkness for a desperate effort to get in the forsaken crops. The sight of arms and wagons seemed all the less fitting in the quiet villages because there was no suggestion of war. ”

“ It was familiar at Namur and elsewhere. Uncertainty, constant coming and going, parade, spy-mania, secrecy, and military rule. In such places the civilian is like a child confused in the middle of a race-course; something to be herded and scuffled out of the way; suspicion of others is the only safe outlet for his panic feeling. We do not know this condition yet in England. May we never experience it! To catch an eye is to create an enemy. A sudden movement brings a rush of the silent crowd. An outward routine; an inward volcano of fear, mistrust, and over-strained nerves. ”

“ Then a dark journey under a red moon; a passing sight of camps, and soldiers moving without lights; spaces of water.
And the end of it all, an easy, normal, almost careless passage into a comfortable town, sure of itself and its defenders. For Antwerp lives perfectly tranquilly. Only at night are the dark streets and the unseen movement of people strange. Since the audacious, and fatal, passage of the Zeppelin, no lights are allowed, even in windows, after eight. It must have been a terrifying sight in the dark sky. ”

“ Begins anew the scuffle for the usual permissions to move or exist. As a pleasant contrast to the general flight and upheaval, the United States Embassy and Consulate are looking after the individual anxieties of half the nationalities of Europe with a courtesy and efficiency beyond all praise. Paris is empty, but sunny and still itself. Through the empty street the columns of red and blue soldiers pass, with dusty boots, making bright streaks of colour. Like a mother of pearl shell left on the beach, the colours of Paris remain vivid, though the life in her Government is gone south. ”

“ Our cavalry especially distinguished itself.
Several men wounded, or resting from the front, in these villages, told me the same story: "It began about six—heavy, accurate shell fire; there was a lunch interval; it stopped about dusk every day. Then in the night, often came the charges. One night I couldn't count them! It was awful. Kill, kill, kill, and still they came on, shoving each other over on to us!"
No man but had his story of comrades on either side shot or smashed day after day, of the shriek of shells, of the perpetual groaning of the wounded as they lay in the wet trenches. ”

“ At one village a swarm of little dark-eyed Flemings, in sabots, pretended to shoot us with large bows and arrows made of half-hoops, from behind a sham barrier of branches and wheel-barrows; a half-tragic commentary. At Ghent our car was within a single word of being "requisitioned." The babies fulfilled their object by capturing smiles and safe passage.
At Bruges we have been kept for an hour because "German spies" have been signalled as having passed in a car up the road. Having got so far as to stop all the bridges, the dignitaries can do no more. The world is upset, and must wait. ”

“ A few wounded, supported, bandaged, or carried, come more slowly through the hot fields, along the dusty trenches and entanglements. A German mitrailleuse car, "blindée" (armoured) —that French invention that the Germans have turned to such account—has rushed on a French outpost. These are its victims. But the car is—we are told—"accounted for."
The touch of war is only a momentary disturbance to the quiet, busy work of the red-and-blue and red-and-grey dots, marching and mattocking in the afternoon sun round us.
Paris itself is "empty." ”

“ But what, in a Briton, who has seen the soldiers of several nations reacting under the war-fever, touches a deeper chord of pride, is to see that our countrymen can pass in and out of the "fighting state" with the mental detachment of civilised beings. Even in the "red rage" they become neither blind nor deaf to the call of humanity or reason. They maintain personality against the overwhelming war atmosphere of animal fury and suspicion. ”

“ He brought me up the road north-east from Wavre. We left the car under dark trees; and he directed me to a hillock on the right. After an age of waiting, little dispersed flashes and reports came from the hollow in the dark in front. The Germans were getting into touch. It was the first time I had heard the mitrailleuse, like the ripping of rough canvas.
Answering flash and snarl came from a rough semicircle of shadow in front and on the south side of them. Larger guns came into action on the north, muffled behind slopes. There is little to see by day in a modern battle unless one takes part. ”

“ Death harnessed to a glittering car of Juggernaut. Men went under the wheels in the rush and flame of colours, and to the sound of bands and the applause of multitudes. The car is now hidden in a dull, deadly rolling cloud. We can only hear the rumour of the hidden wheels. Our sons and friends move into the darkness. Of many of them, all we shall ever know is that they have not returned. The greater heroes, that they go as gladly as ever did a chosen knight into crowded lists. The finer men, that they fight as stoutly with no record of their gallantry, no mark even of their death-place. ”

“ Now for the fourth time I was admitted to the improvised ambulance rooms, well knowing what I should find. For the Belgian remains true to his civilisation. The wounded German prisoners, as they came in, were treated with just the same care, their death dignified with the same respect as that of our own friends. And yet the stories that are told of their cruelty to the peasants, and sincerely believed by the soldiers, are terrible. "But"—said a little rough, unshaven peasant infantryman to me—"we are men who feel. Whatever our enemies may do, we shall continue as we have begun—to the end." ”

“ They never contemplated a halt south of the Aisne. It is beyond the river, on the Soisson-Rheims and Soissons-Compiègne curves, that their precautionary trenches were prepared.
Nothing gives a more definite idea of their own recognition of temporary defeat than the sight of their nearer trenches—abandoned without ever being used. The small wrinkle of earth and sods, with the spoon-shaped scoop for a single man behind, that they have taken to making for the retreat. Not so often as before the more elaborate continuous trench for a mass of men. They have learned a little of "open" fighting. ”

“ The alternate passing of our own and the French troops through each other's positions in taking up their fresh lines was an interesting time of intricate manœuvre to watch. Paris has become a pivot; no longer the direct object of defence or attack. Any victory of the German right outside the eastern line of defence, would have the advantage for the Germans of sending both armies intermingled back upon and through the forts, impeding their fire. The new move thus places Paris in the position of the prize of the battle. ”

“ Entering Creil from the north, at first only every house in four or five seems to have been injured. Further down towards the river, every second house; and then whole rows of empty shells, shattered by bombardment, burnt out with fire. Others still standing, with every window broken and the doors smashed in; pillaged and scooped out, as if by the enormous paw of some predatory beast. In the cold autumn wind and driving rain the inhabitants are sheltering in the empty frameworks, doorless, windowless, often roofless. The town is full of the usual tales of suffering. ”

“ And yet the nation is made up of the men; and the machine is made up of the men; and the men die. But for such machines we should know better what is the honour of the nation—that is, of the men—for the men would judge of it, as men, for themselves.
We approached as near as we could venture—for we were behind the enemy—north of Betz and close to the sound of the guns. We saw as much as anyone is likely to see of the fighting in such warfare: the distant sight of greeny-white smoke-balls bursting over trees on a far hill ”

“ The loss has been great, especially on the side of the Germans. The peasants to-day were shovelling into the long trenches the terrible harvest of death. All round us was the litter of battle, smashed muskets, smashed helmets, and broken life.
I could follow the fighting foot by foot from well south of Meaux. Haystacks torn down and scattered over the field for trusses of shelter. Haystacks still standing, their north side torn and holed with shrapnel, with trusses like wings on either side whence the men had fired. ”

“ The result is that though the crisis, after the first few days, is being met in all the capitals with gravity and quiet resolution, Brussels—the most immediately threatened—remains a model of civic life under strict but considerate administration.
The moral, if any, is that even in actual war nations are only the weaker for having to send the whole of their manhood to the front. To convert the whole community, with its varied forces of activity, into a single military machine, is to make the machine itself less effective. ”

“ The valley of the Aisne has a deadly sameness. At Retheuil and Chelles, the silent apathetic peasants—all too few—were heaping remains of men and horses for burning, or dragging them into the long raw trenches that scar the fields with white issues of lime. Anything of value or metal is dragged off, the bodies thrust in, and, for all the pestilent air, the peasant stolidly munches at his bread between whiles. ”

“ We turned at once and waited: the Uhlans, some eight of them, had wheeled back out of sight, where the cottages ran into the wood. The men shouted to the women to keep indoors; a few stray children ran back and forwards in the lane, crying. Then the door of a far cottage opened, and the crippled soldier who had fired the shot was half-carried out. A fine red-bearded fellow. He was perspiring, inarticulate with rage at having missed and with the lust of fighting. We shoved him into the car, with a few more women, and got back to Wavre. ”

“ I could identify only the peculiar uniform of the Senegalese and the light blue of the cavalry, as they moved past through breaks in the trees. Then the rain came down again, fiercely, and the scene lost colour in a grey drift of cloud and wind. Once so far up, and clear of the obstruction of bases, it was well to see all one could. Returning down the line of the Oise, and keeping in the woods, I got to the extreme west corner of the Forest of Laigue, where the Aisne joins the Oise. Most of the bridges have been blown up, and it is well not to approach those that exist, as things are. ”

“ Actual fighting, the killing of men, cannot be done well except by men in the rage of the fighting fever, in the passion that "sees red."—It is no surprise to us that the British soldier can still charge like seven demons. To lie for hours passive under fire, with death close round in the trenches, calls for a still rarer emotional concentration, the white animosity that flares steadily but does not flicker.—To those who know our history, it is no news that the Briton, for cold unshaken courage, can still out-last all [Pg 304] other men. ”