Philip Gibbs

“ In every market square where the regiments halted for a rest there was free wine for any thirsty throat, and soldier boys from Scotland or England had their brown hands kissed by girls who were eager for hero worship and had fallen in love with these clean-shaven lads and their smiling grey eyes. In those early days there seemed no evil in the worship of the women nor in the hearts of the men who marched to the song of "Tipperary." Every man in khaki could claim a hero's homage for himself on any road in France, at any street corner of an old French town. ”

“ The shadow of war crept through every keyhole in Paris, and no man or woman shut up in a high attic with some idea or passion could keep out the evil genii which dominated the intellect and the imagination, and put its cold touch upon the senses, through that winter of agony when the best blood in France slopped into the waterlogged trenches from Flanders to the Argonne. Yet there were coteries in Paris which thrust the Thing away from them as much as possible, and tried to pretend that art was still alive, and that philosophy was untouched by these brutalities. ”

“ It was impossible to doubt that they meant well, these soldiers of France greeting their comrades of England. One man behaved like a buffoon, or as though he had lost his wits. Grasping the hand of a young engineer he danced round him, shouting "Camarade! camarade!" in a joyous sing-song which was ridiculous, and yet touching in its simplicity and faith. It was no wonder, I thought, that the French people believed in victory now that the British had come. A Jingo pride took possession of me. These Tommies of ours were the finest soldiers in the world! They went to war with glad hearts. ”

“ Military motor-cars carrying little parties of French officers swept down the roads, and then there were no more battalions but only stragglers, and hurrying fugitives driving along in farmers' carts, packed with household goods, in two-wheeled gigs, overburdened with women and children, riding on bicycles, with parcels tied to the saddles, or trudging wearily and anxiously along, away from the fear where the blood-red sun was setting over France. It was pitiful to see the children clinging to the women's skirts along that road of panic, and pitiful but fine, to see the courage of those women. ”

“ There was just a speck in the sky, a glint of metal, and the far- humming of an aerial engine. Perhaps it was a French aviator coming back from a reconnaissance over the enemy's lines on the Aisne, or taking a joy ride over Paris to stretch his wings. The little shop-girls looked up and thought how fine it would be to go riding with him, as high as the stars—with one of those keen profiled men who have such roguish eyes when they come to earth. Frenchmen strolling down the boulevards glanced skywards and smiled. They were brave lads who defended the air of Paris. ”

“ The German shells were still falling about it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke. For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war. Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells and monstrous marmites had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two, always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. Nevertheless, there were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not leave their city. ”

“ One day the German soldiers carried her the length of their own trenches. Only her head was visible above the ground. She wore a German helmet above the wild hair which blew in wisps about her death-white face, and it seemed like a vision of hell as she passed shrieking with the laughter of insanity.
One turns from such horrors to the heroism of the French soldier, his devotion to his officers, his letters to that chère maman before whom his heartis always that of a little child, to the faith which saves men from at least the grosser brutalities of war. ”

“ After all the soul of Paris did not die, even in those dark days when so many of its inhabitants had gone, and when, for a little while, it seemed a deserted city. Many thousands of citizens remained, enough to make a great population, and although for a day or two they kept for the most part indoors, under the shadow of a fear that at any moment they might hear the first shells come shrieking overhead, or even the clatter of German cavalry, they quickly resumed the daily routine of their lives, as far as it was possible at such a time. ”

“ There is no possible need to doubt that they will maintain the old traditions of their regiments and add new records to their colours. Before this war is finished these soldiers of ours, who are singing on their way, in dapper suits of khaki, will be all tattered and torn, with straw tied round their feet, with stubby beards on their chins, with the grime of gunpowder and dust and grease and mud and blood upon their hands and faces. They will have lost the freshness of their youth: but those who remain will have gained—can we doubt it?—the reward of stubborn courage and unfailing valour. ”

“ The bursts were, like volcanoes above the German lines, vomiting upwards a vast column of black smoke which stood solid on the sky- line for a minute or more before being torn down by the wind. Something within me seemed to quake at these engines of destruction, these masses of explosive power sent for the killing of men, invisible there on the ridge, but cowering in fear or lying in their blood.
How queer are the battlefields of life and the minds of men! Down below me, in a field, men were playing a game of football while all this business of death was going on. ”

“ They were the men who fought in Alsace and Lorraine, when whole battalions were decimated under a withering shell-fire beyond the endurance of human courage, and who marched forward to victories, and backward in retreats, and forward again over the dead bodies of their comrades and corrupting heaps of German dead, in an ebb and flow of warfare which made the fields and the woods one great stench of horror, from which there came back madmen and maimed creatures, and young men, lucky with slight wounds, who told the tale of things they had seen as though they had escaped from hell. ”

“ For the first time men without science heard the name of cerebro-spinal meningitis and shuddered at it. The war became a hopeless, dreary thing, without a thrill to it, except when men wading in water were smashed by shell-fire and floated about in a bloody mess which ran red through all a trench. That was a thrill of beastliness, but gave no fire to men's hearts. Passion, if it had ever burnt in these British soldiers' hearts, had smouldered out into the white ash of patient misery. Certainly there was no passion of hatred against the enemy, not far away there in the trenches. ”

“ It was for Paris that they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiègne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris— Paris the great and beautiful—seemed to be within their grasp, and the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a dread proof of German power. ”

“ Soldiers of France, for nearly a year of war I have been walking among you with watchful eyes, seeing you in all your moods, of gaiety and depression, of youthful spirits and middle-aged fatigues, and listening to your tales of war along the roads of France, where you have gone marching to the zone of death valiantly. I know some of your weaknesses and the strength of the spirit that is in you, and the sentiment that lies deep and pure in your hearts in spite of the common clay of your peasant life or the cynical wit you learnt in Paris. ”

“ They stared at our ambulances curiously, and one of them gave me a prolonged and strenuous wink, as though to say, "A fine old game, mate, this bloody war!" Beyond, the sea was very calm, like liquid lead, and a slight haze hung over it, putting a gauzy veil about a line of British and French monitors which lay close to the coast. Not a soul could be seen along the promenade of Nieuport-les-Bains, but the body of a man—a French marine—whose soul had gone in flight upon the great adventure of eternity, lay at the end of it with his sightless eyes staring up to the grey sky. ”

“ A harvest moon floods the country with silver light and glints upon the stacked bayonets of this British Army in France when the men lie down beneath their coats, with their haversacks as pillows. Each sleeping figure is touched softly by those silver rays while the sentries pace up and down upon the outskirts of the camp. Some of the days have been intensely hot, but the British Tommy unfastens his coat and leaves his shirt open at the chest, and with the sun bronzing his face to a deeper, richer tint, marches on, singing a cockney ballad as though he were on the road to Weybridge or Woking. ”

“ I have written many words about the courage of Paris, courage as fine and noble as anything in history, and in a later chapter of this book I hope to reveal the strength as well as the weakness in the soul of Paris. But if there is any truth in my pen it must describe that exodus by one and a half millions of people who, under the impulse of a great fear—what else was it?—fled by any means and any road from the capital which they love better than any city in the world because their homes are there and their pride and all that has given beauty to their ideals. ”

“ People came running up the street and out of the courtyards. An ambulance glided swiftly through the crowd. A little girl whose name was Suzette was picked up from the edge of the kerbstone out of a pool of blood. Her face lay sideways on the policeman's shoulder, as white as a sculptured angel on a tombstone. It seemed that she would never walk again, this little Suzette, whose footsteps had gone dancing through the streets of Paris. It was always like that when a Taube came. That bird of death chose women and children as its prey, and Paris cursed the cowards who made war on their innocents. ”

“ That day, on the way to a place which was very close to the German lines, children were playing on the roadside, and old women in black gowns trudged down the long, straight high roads, with their endless sentinels of trees.
In a furrowed field a peasant was sowing the seed for an autumn harvesting, and I watched his swinging gestures from left to right which seem symbolical of all that peace means and of all nature's life and beauty. The seed is scattered and God does the rest, though men may kill each other and invent new ways of death... ”

“ More passionate than any other emotion that has stirred me through life, is my conviction that any man who has seen these things must, if he has any gift of expression, and any human pity, dedicate his brain and heart to the sacred duty of preventing another war like this. A man with a pen in his hand, however feeble it may be, must use it to tell the truth about the monstrous horror, to etch its images of cruelty into the brains of his readers, and to tear down the veils by which the leaders of the peoples try to conceal its obscenities. ”

“ Each assault failed against the Belgian infantry, who stayed in their trenches in spite of the blood that eddied about their feet and the corpses that lay around them. Living and dead made a rampart which the Germans could not break. With an incessant rattle of mitrailleuses and rifle-fire, the Belgians mowed down the German troops as they advanced in solid ranks, so that on each of those eight times the enemy's attack was broken and destroyed. They fell like the leaves which were then being scattered by the autumn wind and their bodies were strewn between the trenches. ”

“ It is the most satisfying thrill of horror in the world. How foolish this death is! How it picks and chooses, taking a man here and leaving a man there by just a hair's-breadth of difference. It is like looking into hell and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and burning them in the furnace-fires of shell-stricken towns, and in a devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood. ”

“ They came back to their small flats or attic room rejoicing to find all safe under a layer of dust—shedding tears, some of them, when they saw the children's toys, which had been left in a litter on the floor, and the open piano with a song on the music-rack, which a girl had left as she rose in the middle of a bar, wavering off into a cry of fear, and all the domestic treasures which had been gathered through a life of toil and abandoned—for ever it seemed—when the enemy was reported within twenty miles of Paris in irresistible strength. ”

“ From an eye-witness of this great battle who escaped with a slight wound—an officer of an infantry regiment—I learned that the German onslaught had been repelled by the work of the French gunners, followed by a series of bayonet and cavalry charges.
"The Germans," he said, "had the élite of their army engaged against us, including the 10th Army Corps and the Imperial Guard. But the heroism of our troops was sublime. Every man knew that the safety of France depended upon him, and was ready to sacrifice his life, if need be, with a joyful enthusiasm. ”

“ To most of these French soldiers, indeed to all that I have talked with, the love of France is like the faith of a devout Catholic in his church. It is not to be argued about. It holds the very truth of life. It enshrines all the beauty of French ideals, all the rich colour of imagination, all the poetry and music that has thrilled through France since the beginning of our civilization, all her agonies and tears. ”

“ This is their courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue! ”

“ Students to whom all life is expressed in music, they went on with their work in spite of the war. But war had touched their spirit too, with its great tragedy, and found expression in their art. It was but one glimpse behind the scenes of Paris, in time of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and scraping of palettes and adventures among books. ”

“ The shells were bursting round us now on all sides. Shrapnel bullets sprayed the earth about us. It appeared to me an odd thing that we were still alive.
Then we came into Dixmude. It was a fair-sized town, with many beautiful buildings, and fine old houses in the Flemish style—so I was told. When I saw it for the first time it was a place of death and horror. The streets through which we passed were utterly deserted and wrecked from end to end as though by an earthquake. Incessant explosions of shell-fire crashed down upon the walls which still stood. ”

“ I should have expected them to faint at the sight of blood, and to swoon at the bursting of a shell. Some of them at least were too pretty, I thought, to play about in fields of war among men and horses smashed to pulp. It was only later that I saw their usefulness and marvelled at the spiritual courage of these young women, who seemed not only careless of shell-fire but almost unconscious of its menace, and who, with more nervous strength than that of many men, gave first-aid to the wounded without shuddering at sights of agony which might turn a strong man sick. ”

“ There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that they were like the drabs of the slums and stews. There were young girls who had been sheltered in convent schools, now submerged in the great crowd of fugitives, so utterly without the comforts of life that the common decencies of civilization could not be regarded, but gave way to the unconcealed necessities of human nature. Peasant women, squatting on the dock-sides, fed their babes as they wept over them and wailed like stricken creatures. ”