Valentine Williams

“ The shells come crashing over in and around the trench, and the bullets from the front line snap and whinny and whistle in the air as though to proclaim to all men still alive that their mission is not yet accomplished. But a little rain, and these trenches become first quagmires of mud, the sticky whitish clay of Flanders, of which our men speak with horror, or the browner soil of France, then stagnant ponds, knee or even waist deep, in which men, walking alone and struck down by shell or bullet, have been known to drown before help could reach them. ”

“ War in its old guise, the clash of warring Kings and their levies of horse and foot, with victory on the side of the stoutest blows, and triumph reckoned by the number of slain and spoils, may have faded from the European mind, but it still lingers, a brave and picturesque adventure, in the storied imagination of the East. So it happens that, of all the forces in the field to-day, none has a more knightly conception of war, as the word was understood in the days of chivalry, than the levies which India has sent to Europe to fight for the British Raj. ”

“ Of a truth, outwardly there is little enough difference between them all—the same swarm of dust-coloured figures, the same sandbags, the same timber-work, the same mud, the same strip of No Man’s Land ahead, the same devastation behind, the same noises echoing hollow all about. But to me each strip of trench is another corner of the great heart of Britain, where Britons of all stamps—the fair-haired Saxon, the darker Norman, the Scot, the Celt, from many climes, of many races—are playing the part in the work of Empire which is every Briton’s birthright to-day. ”

“ All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world at peace and the world at war. ”

“ They could have painted you a picture of the British in the trenches running through green fields and pastures and woods, with the wrecks of cottages and churches dotted about the landscape, and the grey ruins of Ypres, seen through bursts of black and white smoke, in the background. They could have shown you our men, unshorn, unwashed, their eyes shining whitely out of their faces, begrimed, burnt by the sun, standing at the parapet firing steadily, or digging, filling sandbags and piling them up to close the breaches rent in the parapet by the enemy’s shells bursting on every side. ”

“ My endeavour has rather been to present a picture of the life of our army in Flanders built up out of a series of impressions, to reveal the soul of the army as it has been unbared to me in the actual conditions of warfare.
If I should not seem to paint war as terrible or our task in Flanders as stupendous as it is, you must set it down to the army’s contagious habit of making the best of things. The army knows that, man for man, it is more than a match for the German. ”

“ I have often found myself admiring the physical endurance and the calm courage of these Brigadiers—who are not all young men—and have read the reflection of my own thought in the eyes of the men in the trenches who saluted as we passed.
It is in the firing-line that the relationship between officer and man, which it has taken so many decades to build up in the British Army, comes to full fruition. Its essence is the spirit of the playground. I am sure that the British officer is to his men, more than anything else, the captain of the team. ”

“ He is a national leader, the man to whom it is given to direct that fount of ardent patriotism which has inspired Britons, wherever the Union Jack flies, to lay down their work and follow the drum. No man is more conscious of the responsibility resting on his shoulders than Sir John French. No man is more profoundly convinced of the justice of our cause. No man could appreciate more gratefully the immense confidence which the nation has reposed in him by entrusting to his care the greatest army that the British Empire has ever put in the field. ”

“ Beyond the parapet is broken ground, utterly uninteresting, utterly prosaic, for all that it is the realm of death. Immediately in front of the trench is barbed wire, new and taut and cleanly grey, fastened in a perplexing criss-cross work to lines of stout wooden posts driven deep in the ground; beyond that a stretch of flat field, of corn or grass or stubble, with a ditch here and a tree there, and maybe a pile of blackened bricks that once was a farm. ”

“ On the chaussée by the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, I have seen the humble graves, many of them nameless, in which the poor French victims of the first great gas attack were laid to rest, their rusting rifles and blood-stained uniform close at hand. I have stood in the emplacements of our guns about Ypres amid the putrefying carcasses of horses and piles of empty shell-cases. I have walked through trenches dug across the battlefield where, through fissures in the ground, one yet might see the dead, buried as they died, in uniform. ”

“ The world, I grant you, has never seen so many men of Britain arrayed for battle on their own or any other soil. Yet we were once a military nation. The whole history of these lands of Picardy and Flanders, where our army is now fighting, during the past six centuries proclaims it. Since the days of the third Edward to the present time Englishmen have fought at intervals in these richly cultivated fields. The bones of many a fair-haired, straight-backed bowman of England are crumbling beneath the smiling plains through which our trenches run in a long winding line. ”

“ Then, as you realize with a flash that these are the sounds of war, and begin to distinguish between the rap-rap of the machine-gun, the hard crepitation of the rifle-bullet, and the dull boom of a shell, you find you are in the firing-line.
What the eye focusses is merely a scene of some disorder, where the communication trench debouches into the open and fades away opposite a line of sandbags. ”

“ The despatch of the Indian Corps to take part in the war in Europe was an experiment. That the experiment was possible, that the Indian troops have shown themselves to be loyal and well-behaved while fighting our battles on foreign soil, that India has falsified the hopes of the enemy and the fears of the pessimists as to her fealty to the Empire in the event of a European war, seems to me to be the finest tribute to the wisdom and justice of our administration of India. The loyalty which our rule has fostered has withstood all attempts to corrupt it. ”

“ But, as so often happens, imagination breathes life into the dead bones of reality. As you watch those translucent dots curvetting a mile above your head, you find yourself thinking of the greensward of the busy aerodrome awaiting the return of the aerial scout, even now at grips in the air, of his place at the dinner-table, of the pleasant château where the Flying Corps has its mess, of the comrades who even now, maybe, are scanning the sky towards where the battle front is stretched, for a sign of the missing bird. ”

“ It is an eternal wonder to me that the officers in the trenches are so consistently cheerful. Neither death nor danger depresses their spirits; the monotony does not make them despondent. They do not hide the fact that they hate shell-fire, or that they could contemplate a more agreeable existence than living in a ditch in Flanders. Only they realize that they have a job to do, and they do it. ”

“ Throughout the night heavy fighting, often at close quarters with bomb and bayonet, went on amid a terrific bombardment, whilst from the north the guns thundered incessantly.
That was our last attempt to capture Hill 60. Honeycombed with mines, eviscerated, battered, and blasted, the summit of the hill lay abandoned and desolate when I visited the positions in July. The dead were still lying in the craters, huge yawning chasms of crumbling brown earth, the edges strewn with a wild jumble of rags of uniform, haversacks, splintered rifles, and barbed wire. ”

“ It is looking farther afield to where, on a low platform behind a neat row of sandbags, the sentries are standing immobile beside their rifles. Their bandoliers are strapped across them, their bayonets are fixed. Their backs are turned to you. They look forward with an air of strained attention. They are the look-out men in the fire-trench.
Piles of sandbags and a great deal of timber-work, timber flooring, and timber supports, as neat and prosaic as a street excavation in London, is what the eye sees. ”

“ There were faces in that procession like faces on a Greek frieze, fighters all, radiant with youth and strength and determination to conquer or readiness to die, men who had looked Death in the eyes, and, in that they had withstood the ordeal, had risen above man’s puny fears of the Unknown. It was a spectacle to thrill a soldier, to inspire a poet, to make an Englishman vibrate with pride at the thought that these are his brothers.
The army in the field loves the Guards. ”

“ Here the trench passes a little burial-ground in an orchard, lying between an old farm-house and its deep broad moat, the branches of the apple and pear trees leaning down until they seem to caress with their gnarled fingers the little white crosses of the graves. Now the trench stops by a sunken ditch, where a faint and horrible odour speaks of fallen Germans buried in the slime. The men cross the ditch by its little bridge with exaggerated [Pg 191] sounds expressive of disgust, with a joke, in which horror has no place. ”

“ A man who would lead his platoon fearlessly into the jaws of hell may feel himself inwardly cringing when [Pg 214] he hears the long high whistle of a shell, mingling with the ominous hiss that means it is nearing the end of its journey. But if a man is what the army calls “a good officer,” the first thought that will rise to the surface in him when he comes under fire is, “The men.” ”

“ A shell falls right into the midst of his platoon as he is leading his men to or from the trenches. Maybe the men are fresh from home, and this sudden horror that cleaves its bloody path through their ranks is their first taste of war.
There is one man in that platoon who must not lose his head. That is the officer, boy though he be. Those raw and mangled corpses, those groaning, whimpering men that strew the ground, may affright the rank and file; they may make no visible impression on him. In his hands repose the lives of a couple of hundred men. ”

“ You will never hear a Guardsman disparage the German as a fighter. He thinks the German is a bad sportsman, and, remembering Belgium and the Lusitania, he has a fierce joy in fighting him. But he knows he is a brave man, for our Guards, remember, saw the Prussian Guard advancing in parade order to their death at Ypres in the face of a perfect tornado of shot and shell. ”

“ Pierre, Martinique, nor Messina, nor Kingston, Jamaica—as I have it on the authority of men who visited those places after their destruction by earthquake, and who have also seen Ypres—produced on the mind such an overwhelming impression as the spectacle of this fair city of Flanders smitten with death all standing as it were. An earthquake or a cyclone will all but obliterate a city, will sweep across it, and leave a vast jumble of ruins in its passage. ”