Douglas Haig

“ As was afterwards revealed, much to the satisfaction of the French people, Sir Douglas Haig had placed himself completely at the service of the French Commander-in-Chief, and had suggested that he should use the British army to weaken the thrust at Verdun. But General Joffre had refused the proffered help. No man knew better than he what his country, with its exceedingly low birthrate, was suffering on the Meuse. ”

“ Major Bullivant gave me welcome, and read extracts from Sir Douglas Haig's report on the Fifth Army Retreat—his 'Times' had just reached him. He asked the doctor whether it was too early for a whisky-and-soda, and showed us a Boche barometer, his latest war trophy. "We've lost quite a lot of men since you've been away," he told me. "Do you realise the Brigade [313] has been only four days out of the line since August 1st? You've heard about young Beale being wounded, of course? I was on leave, and so was Beadle; and Tincler was sick, so there was only Dumble and Beale running the battery. ”

“ And almost before the car had started, Second Lieutenant Dennis Dashwood, of the 2/12 Battalion, Royal Reedshire Regiment, was sound asleep!
"Oh, hang it, Martique! What did you wake me for? I haven't been asleep five minutes," grumbled Dennis. And then he sat bolt upright as he [Pg 130] recognised the handsome face of the man who had shaken him by the shoulder, and saw the amused smile in his eyes.
"It is a good car, I admit," said Sir Douglas Haig. ”

“ But the greatest of all trench delights is the re-discovery, every year, of the sun. Some day in March it is suddenly found to have a miraculous warmth, and everybody off duty comes out like the bees and stands about in the trench, sunning his head and shoulders in the tepid rays and adoring—quite inarticulately—and feeling that all’s well with the world. ”

“ At night you see all the stars well, and on moonlight nights, if you walk the trench softly, you can watch strange friezes sharply silhouetted on the sky line of the parapet, the wars and loves of capering rats, “flouting the ivory moon.” Whole choirs of larks may be heard: neither cannon nor small arms seem to alarm them; and most of the ground has its own hawk to quarter it daily. ”

“ A little north of Arras there begins, almost at a turn of the road, a black country, where men of the South Lancashires feel at home and grant that the landscape has some of the points of Wigan. It is the region of Loos and Vermelles and Bully Grenay, most of it level ground on which the only eminences are the refuse-heaps of coal mines. Across this level the eye feels its way from one well-known stack of pit-head buildings and winding machinery to another. They are, to an English eye, strangely lofty and stand out like lighthouses over a sea. ”

“ There are cities dead, but with their bones still above ground: Ypres is one—many walls stand where they did, but grass is growing among the broken stones and bits of stained glass on the floor of the Cloth Hall, and at noon a visitor’s footsteps ring and echo in the empty streets like those of a belated wayfarer in midnight Oxford. “How doth the city sit desolate that once was full of people!” Again, there are towns like Arras, whose flesh, though torn, has life in it still, and seems to feel a new wound from each shell, though there be no man there to be hit. ”

“ On being pressed to give his reason he said, with some hesitation:
"You see, Mary, it makes a chap feel a bit awkward to be always accepting other folks's civilities when he never has anything of the same sort of his own to ask them back to."
THE PROPER SPIRIT Here is a story our wounded boys have brought back from the front about
Sir Douglas Haig.
Sir Douglas was, some few weeks ago, in a great hurry to get to a certain place. He found his car, but the chauffeur was missing. So Sir Douglas got in the car and drove off by himself. ”

“ Not many men on our side would be killed. But, while the shower went on, everyone on duty in our firing trench felt with crystal clearness that he was on the defensive. At each fresh discharge he would plaster himself upon the front wall of the trench and gaze upwards for the coming evil. If he saw the approaching waddle of a trench-mortar bomb, wagging its tail through the air, he would judge it like a catch in the long field, only with an ardent desire to miss it ”

“ A few miles away it will straighten and loose itself out; you see it run free, in great, easy curves, up the slopes of wide moorlands, the two front lines drawn apart almost three hundred yards. Each is a double band of colour; the white ribbon of its dug chalk and the broader rust-brown ribbon of its tangled wire stand out clear against the shabby velveteen grey of the heath. Here there is less of thrill and more of ease in trench life; by day the sentries peer, hour by hour, into the baffling mist that is woven across their sight by our own and the enemy’s wire ”

“ By night the wire makes, to the sentry’s eye, a middle stratum of opaque dark grey, between the full blackness of the earth below it and the more penetrable obscurity of the night air above. But the darkness is never trusted for long. All night each army is sending up rocket-like lights to burst and hang like arc lamps in the air over the firing trench of the other. ”

“ Here you have a sense of being in a place still alive but pensioned off by nature after its work was done. You feel it at Rye and Winchelsea, at Ravenna, and at any place which the sea has once made great and then abandoned. The wide Ypres landscape drawn by Mr. Bone was all mellow on sunny days at the end of July with the warm brown and yellow of many good crops. Almost up to the British front it was farmed minutely and intensely; in spring I had seen a man ploughing a field where a German shell, on the average, dropped every day. ”

“ But all this countryside has the brooding quietude of a sort of honourable old age, dignity and pensiveness and comfort behind its natural rampart of sand dunes, but not the stir of life at full pressure. ”

“ The deck of a British hospital ship is one of the most cheerful places in the world. Every man is at rest after toil, is about to see friends after separation, can smoke when he likes, and has in every other man on board a companion with whom endless reminiscences can be exchanged, and perhaps the merits and demerits of the Ypres salient, or the most advantageous use of “tanks,” warmly debated, as is the custom of privates of the New Army. Silent or vocal, a great beatitude fills the vessel. ”

“ Some men, perhaps, are wearing German helmets. Everyone’s face has a look of contented collapse, the restful reaction of senses and nerves relaxed after many days of strained attention and short sleep. The weary and happy procession serpentines slowly across the chalk downs, carried along by the rhythm of the swing it has learnt from months of route marching in England. ”

“ It is munitions that, thrown from our howitzers, make level roads through the tangles of wire on which, in the old days, the corpses of whole platoons of our men were hung up to rot and look, from far off, like washing put out to dry on thorned hedges. It is munitions that, when we attack, hold back the hostile supports behind a wall of falling bullets as hard to pass as Adam found the flaming sword at the gate. It is, then, not without reason that in this sheaf of drawings of the war on the Western front are included some drawings of guns and shells in the making. ”

“ At most parts of the line a man in the front trench is cut off from landscape. To look at a tree behind the enemy’s lines may be to give a mark to a sniper hidden in its boughs. By day you see the upper half of the dome of the sky, and, through loopholes, a few yards of rough earth or chalk, then the nebulous wire and, through its thin places, perhaps a few uniforms, blue, grey or brown, lying beyond, among the coarse grass and weeds. ”

“ The rest of trench life is work, contrivance and observation. It has been called monotonous. But, for any man who has not lost the heart of a boy, it has the relish of an endlessly changeful outdoor adventure, a game with the earth and the weather, as well as with the more official enemy. ”

“ A winter in trenches revives, in us children of civilisation, a pre-Promethean rapture of love for the sun; and the dark nights, in which not a match must be struck, makes us, at any rate, think more highly than ever we did of the moon, which halves the strain of the soldier on guard, and of the stars which guide him back overland to his billet, at a relief, to sleep in Elysium. ”

“ Beyond this zone of land merely thrown idle you reach the ultimate desert where nothing but men and rats can live. Here even the weeds have been rooted up and buried by shells, the houses are ground down to brick-dust and lime and mixed with the earth, which is constantly turned up and turned up again by more shells and kept loose and soft. ”

“ Whether on the road between a rail-head and the front, or during a halt by the way, or at rest in their own park, the lorries of a Division keep their proper distance or interval from each other, like men on parade. If one falls lame it is taken in tow; if disabled past towing, it falls out and waits for a first-aid mobile workshop to come and repair it. ”

“ Nothing is lost by the intervention of the foreground houses, as the façade of the south transept, like the famous west front and the choir stalls, is sheathed with sand-bags to a height of thirty or forty feet for protection against German bombs. Patrolling French aeroplanes are seen in the sky. ”

“ However many large guns may have been turned out by the same men before, a glow of pride is always felt in a gun shop when one more masterpiece like this is ready at last to go out to its work in the field. ”

“ The artist has found means to interpret with the utmost sympathy and power the extraordinary romantic quality that there often is about a Highland mess in France, created by the rude setting, the primitive half light amidst cavernous gloom, and the spectator’s sense of an enveloping world of strange dangers and adventures. ”

“ The conditions under which we live in France are so different from those to which people at home are accustomed, that no pen, however skilful, can explain them without the aid of the pencil.
The destruction caused by war, the wide areas of devastation, the vast mechanical agencies essential in war, both for transport and the offensive, the masses of supplies required, and the wonderful cheerfulness and indomitable courage of the soldiers under varying climatic conditions, are worthy subjects for the artist who aims at recording for all time the spirit of the age in which he has lived. ”

“ Many wounded or sick soldiers, British and French, are brought by river or canal from near the front to near a base hospital or the sea. The motion is easy, the men have good air and quiet; any who are well enough to be on deck have pleasant and changeful surroundings to look at. ”

“ Men have stood there, turn by turn, for two years and a half, moving softly and whispering as if in a church, till the shyest of wildfowl have learnt to treat the surrounding marsh as their own, and the only sound is of wild duck and snipe astir between the muzzles of two nations’ loaded rifles, snipe safe among the snipers. ”

“ A few sailors visit the front from time to time and hold curious arguments with the soldiers, each side being deeply convinced that the other has the harder time of it. The soldier’s imagination is struck by the large proportion of deaths among the casualties of naval war and by visions of night duty on vessels at sea in bad winter weather. What strikes the sailor, in presence of the imperfections of dug-outs, is the soldier’s hardship of not being able to “go below” into some small cubic space of warmth and dryness when action is over or a watch is through. ”

“ There are the same wide prospects, the same lack of streams and ponds, the same ledges and curious carvings of the soil; and journeys on foot seem long, as they do on our downs, because so much of the road before you is visible while you march. ”

“ After work the divisional motor transport lorries return methodically to their own parks. During long journeys they rest now and then, tucked into the right of the road or standing in a market place, while the men eat their haversack rations. Mixed with the lorries here are their seniors, the covered vans of French country carriers and, still older, the long, low, French farm wagons now drawn by horses, but built, as is shown by the very low pole, for draught oxen. In the market place there wait also the cars of British staff officers visiting the town. ”

“ Bone draws it, is under their eyes. Drawings like those of “A Fleet Seascape” (LXXXIX) and “A Line of Destroyers” (LXXXVI) awake recollections of guard duty in a small Scotch fishing village; of the majestic seaward procession through the midsummer night, before the battle of Jutland; of the return from the fight, the destroyers streaming tranquilly back to their moorings under the hill, with the great searchlight wheeling to and fro along the sea outside them, like a sentry moving alertly on his post ”

“ A German firing trench is less various. In it you seem to see the minds of a few large and able contractors; in ours the minds of thousands of good campers-out. To put it in another way, the German trench has, in some measure, the quality of a long street built, well enough, to a single design; ours possesses the charm of a92 strip of coast or a long country lane, where nature or man has made every indentation and turn a surprise, and each farmer has made gates and hedges to his own mind. ”