Philip Gibbs

“ Some day one of our soldiers now fighting—some young man with a gift of words—will write for all time the story of all this: the beauty and the ugliness and the agony of it, the colour and the smell and the movement of it, with intimate and passionate remembrance. It is a memorable battle-picture in modern history, and in the mass of hundreds of thousands of men, obedient to the high command, which uses them as parts of the great war machine, is the individual with his own separate experience and initiative, with his sense of humour and his suffering, and his courage and his fear. ”

“ Our own men had no bands and no colours. There was not the same sense of drama as they passed, but these clean-shaven boys of ours, hardened by foul weather, by frost, and rain-storms, and blizzard, go forward into the great waste, which the enemy had left behind him, in their usual matter-of-fact way, whistling a tune or two, passing a whimsical word along the line, settling down to any old job that comes in a day's work, and finding as much comfort as they can at the end of a long day's march on the lee side of a shell-broken wall. ”

“ Regimental officers and men know more of the ground in which they live for a while before they go forward over the shell-craters to some barren slope where machine-guns are hidden below the clods of soil, or a line of concrete blockhouses heaped up with timber and sand-bags on one of the ridges. They know with a particular intimacy the smallest landmarks there—the forked branch among some riven trees that are called a "wood," a dead body that lies outside their wire, the muzzle of a broken gun that pokes out of the slime, a hummock of earth that is a German strong point. ”

“ Supply columns of food for men and guns moved forward in an endless tide. Transport mules passed in long trails. Field-batteries went up to add to the mass of metal ready to pour fire upon the German lines. It was a vast circus of the world's great war, and everything that belongs to the machinery of killing streamed on and on. Columns of ambulances for the rescue, and not for that other side of the business, came in procession, followed by an army of stretcher-bearers, more than I have ever seen before, marching cheerily as though in a pageant. ”

“ These tents are themselves like flowers in the darkness when candlelight gleams through their canvas, and at night the scene of war is lit up by star-shells and vivid flashes of light as great shells fall and burst beyond the zone of tents, where British soldiers crouch in holes and burrow deep into the earth. It is under the blue sky of these days, and in this splendour of spring-time, that English boys and young Scots go into the fires of hell, where quite close to them the birds still sing, as I heard the nightingale amidst the crash of gun-fire. ”

“ The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human slaughter. ”

“ The ground is all a swamp and the shell-holes are ponds. The Army lies wet, and all the foulness of Flemish weather in winter is upon them in August. Through the mist the enemy's shell-fire never ceases, and our guns reply with long bombardments and steady barrages. The walking wounded come back over miles of churned-up ground, dodging the shells, and when they get down to the clearing-stations they are caked with mud and very weary. War is not a blithe business, even when the sun is shining. In this gloom and filth it is more miserable. ”

“ Our Army is like an upturned ant-heap in all this mud, and in the old battle-grounds they have dug themselves in and built little homes for themselves and settled down to a life of industry between one shell-crater and another, and one swamp and another, for the long spell of winter warfare which has now enveloped them, and while they are waiting for another year of war, unless Peace comes with the Spring. ”

“ Here it had flung up machine-gun emplacements and made rubbish-heaps of their casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of rifles into matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug-outs, littering earth with their pouches and helmets and bits of clothing. Where I stood was only one patch of ground on a wide battlefield. It is all like that, though elsewhere the dead are not so thickly clustered. For miles it is all pitted with ten-feet craters intermingling and leaving not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity, killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. ”

“ An hour or so later the sun came brightly through the clouds, and these cités of strife, girdled by cornfields in which the stooks are standing, and by green hills across which the tide of slaughter has swept, leaving them in peace again, were flooded with fresh, glinting light, so that the scene was rich in colour. There was not a figure to be seen on Hill 70, not a movement of life among the houses around Lens. The Canadians had gone across in the smoke, and now they were hidden among the ruins. The only life was that of shell-fire, and it has a life of its own, though it is meant for death. ”

“ After passing the area of shell-fire on our side and his, the field of shell-craters, the smashed barns and houses and churches, the tattered tree-trunks, the wide belts of barbed wire, one comes to country where grass grows again, and where the fields are smooth and rolling, and where the woods will be clothed with foliage when spring comes to the world again—country strange and beautiful to a man like myself, who has been wandering through all the filth and frightfulness of the Somme battlefields. ”

“ The British gunners in these frightful battles have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out on the battlefield standing knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek and the Stroombeek and the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the upheaved earth. ”

“ All north of Courcelette, up by Miraumont and Pys, and below Loupart Wood, this wild chaos—all so upturned by shell-fire that one's gorge rises at the sight of such obscene mangling of our mother earth—is strewn with bodies of dead German soldiers. They lie grey wet lumps of death over a great stretch of ground, many of them half buried by their comrades or by high explosives. Most of them are stark above the soil with their eye-sockets to the sky. ”

“ Yesterday as I looked down on Lens the fire had quietened on both sides, as though the guns were tired. For several minutes at a time there was a great quietude over the city of doom, and as the afternoon sun lay warm upon its red walls, and cast black shadows across its deserted streets, where no single figure walked, it was hard to believe that a few hours before swarms of men had been fighting on the edge of those houses, and that the place was full of new dead and old. ”

“ All through the day and last night the Lancashire men were under the streaming bullets of a machine-gun barrage, which whipped the ground about them as fast as falling hailstones, so that no man could put his head above a shell-hole without getting a bullet through his steel hat. I have seen many of those steel hats punctured clean through, but with the men who wore them still alive and able to smile grimly enough when they pointed to these holes. At night the lightly wounded men who tried to get back had a desperate time trying to find their way. ”

“ The strength of the enemy—and he is very strong still—and the courage of the enemy, which is high among his best troops, are not the greatest powers which our men are called upon to overcome in this latest fighting. Given a good barrage, and they are ready to attack his pill-boxes now that we have broken the first evil spell of them. But this mud of Flanders, these swamps which lie in the way, these nights of darkness and rain in the quagmires—those are the real terrors which are hardest to win through. ”

“ Battalions of fighting men, busy not with their rifles but with shovels and duck-boards, worked in the mud—mud baulking all labour, swallowing up logs, boards, gun-wheels, shells, spades, and the legs of men, the slime and filthy water slopping over all the material of war urgently wanted for this morning's "show." The enemy tried to harass the winding teams of pack-mules staggering forward under a burden of ammunition boxes, rations, every old thing that men want if they must fight. Those mule leaders and transport men do not take a lower place than the infantry who went away to-day. ”

“ The weather has been bad for flying men. Impossible, one would say, looking up at the low-lying storm-clouds. Yet on the day of battle our airmen went out and, baulked of artillery work, flew over the enemy's country and spread terror there. It was a flying terror which, when told in the barest words of these boys, is stranger than old mythical stories of flying horses and dragons on the wing. Imagine one of these winged engines swooping low over one as one walks along a road far from the lines, and above the roar of its engine the sharp crack of a revolver with a bullet meant for you. ”

“ Small parties of men dodged them as best they could, and pitched into shell-holes five feet deep in water when they threatened instant death. Then gas-shells came whining, with their queer little puffs, unlike the exploding roar of bigger shells, and the wet wind was filled with poisonous vapour smarting to the eyes and skin, so that our men had to put on their gas-masks and walk like that in a worse darkness. These things, and this way up to battle, might have shaken the nerves of most men, might even have unmanned them and weakened them by the fainting sickness of fear. ”

“ I thought perhaps some of these shell-slashed woods would put out new shoots when spring came, and watched them curiously for any sign of rebirth, but there is no sign, and their poor, mutilated limbs, their broken and tattered trunks, stand naked under the blue sky. Everything is dead with a white, ghastly look in the brilliant sunshine except where here and there in the litter of timber and brickwork which marks the site of a French village, a little bush is in bud, or flowers blossom in a scrap-heap which was once a garden. ”

“ The weather fought for the enemy again and again on the days of our attacks, and the horrors of the mud and bogs in this great desolation of crater-land miles deep—eight miles deep—over a wide sweep of country, belongs to the grimmest remembrances of every soldier who has fought in this battle of Flanders. The enemy may brush aside our capture of Passchendaele as the taking of a mud-patch, but to resist it he has at one time or another put nearly a hundred divisions into the arena of blood, and the defence has cost him a vast sum of loss in dead and wounded. ”

“ It is indeed an astounding chapter of courage all this attack on Langemarck by men who before the attack had been bombarded with gas and other shells, and who then floundered in deep bogs, where they got stuck up to the waist, but worked in small parties up and on, fighting all the way against an enemy who put up a gallant and stubborn resistance and sold every hundred yards of ground as dearly as he could. The runners who went back again and again through that slough of despond under damnable fire were real heroes. ”

“ If you wish to picture our Army out here now, the landscape in which our men are fighting—and they like to think you want to do so—you must think of them marching along roads sweet-scented with lilac and apple-blossom, and over those golden fields to the white edge of the dead land. They are hot under heavy packs all powdered with dust, so that they wear white masks like a legion of Pierrots, and on their steel helmets the sun shines brazenly. ”

“ All this pageant of war in France and Flanders is on fire with sun, and it is wonderful to pass through the panorama of the war zone, as I do most days, and get a picture of it into one's eyes and soul—columns of men marching with wet, bronzed faces through clouds of white dust, or through fields where there is a patchwork tapestry of colour woven of great stretches of clover drenching the air with its scent, and of poppies which spill a scarlet flood down the slopes, and of green wheat and gold-brown earth. ”

“ The drum-fire of the guns never slackened for hours. At nine o'clock in the morning it beat over the countryside with the same rafale of terror as it had started before four o'clock. Strangely above this hammering and thundering of two thousand guns or more of ours, answered by the enemy's barrage, railway whistles screamed from trains taking up more shells, and always more shells, to the very edge of the fighting-lines, and in between the massed batteries, using them as hard as they could be unloaded. ”

“ The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own barrage-fire on their way to our lines. ”