La Bassée

“ Over this low ridge, from the English trenches, rifle-bullets whistled above our heads. In the shelter of a brick farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench service, to go back to La Bassée. They were smallish, mild-looking men, dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed—clothes, boots, faces, and hands—-until they looked like millers.
"How are the English?" some one asked. "Do they know how to shoot?" ”

“ I was back again in derelict Vermelles, with its spattered water tower, and the flat desolate plain in front. Loos is out of sight over the hill; only the great slag heap lies squat and menacing on one's left, with the remnants of Big Willie and Little Willie near to its base in the old blood-soaked Hohenzollern redoubt. Cambrin, Guinchy, La Bassée—silent and haunted, teeming with ghosts, lie stagnant in the morning sun. The cobwebs drift across the Hulluch road, and in the distance, by the first bend, a man pushing a wheeled stretcher comes slowly walking back to the dressing station. ”

“ The Second Corps, which at that time had just been withdrawn for a rest from the La Bassée lines, were the only available reinforcements. When news was flashed south as to the serious state of affairs, two regiments, the 2nd Yorkshire Light Infantry and the 2nd Scottish Borderers from the 13th Infantry Brigade, were sent up in motor-buses by road to the relief. Strange indeed was the sight of these vehicles flying along the Flemish roads, plastered outside with the homely names of London suburbs and crammed with the grimy, much-enduring infantry. ”

“ All you see as you whirl through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there at a second-story window, a company shuffling along a country road.
Women watched us from the doors of La Bassée—still going on living here, somehow, as human beings will on the volcano's very edge—and children were playing in the street. Husbands gone, food gone, the country swept bare—why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any rate, there was a roof overhead—until a shell smashed it—and food soldiers were glad to share. ”

“ The Germans were being furiously shelled. The dawn came up while the Staff were drinking their matutinal tea. The Staff set itself sternly to work. Messages describing events at La Bassée poured in. They were conscientiously read and rushed over the wires to our brigades. The guns were making more noise than they had ever made before. The Germans were cowering in their trenches. It was all our officers could do to hold back their men, who were straining like hounds in a leash to get at the hated foe. A shell fell among some of the gunners' transport and wounded a man and two horses. ”

“ We would start, after an early breakfast, in Hamond's motor-cycle and side-car, and drive through the straggling cottages of Hamel, where the Cuirassiers, in October 1914, protected the left flank of the advancing 5th Division, through Gorre, with its enormous ramshackle chateau, and along the low and sordid banks of the La Bassée Canal. We would leave the motor-cycle just short of the houses near Pont Fixe, that battered but indomitable bridge, draped defiantly with screens of tattered sackcloth. ”

“ You may meet its members in London and in Fiji; in the lands that lie beyond the mountains and at Henley; in the swamps where the stagnant vegetation rots and stinks; in the great deserts where the night air strikes cold. They are always the same, and they are branded with the stamp of the breed. They shake your hand as a man shakes it; they meet your eye as a man meets it. Just now a generation of them lie around Ypres and La Bassée ”

“ Farther south yet another French corps supported and eventually took the place of the British cavalry opposite the lost villages of Wytschaete and Messines. From there ran the unbroken lines of the imperturbable Third Corps, which ended to the south in the trenches originally held by the Second British Corps, and later by the Indians. Across the La Bassée Canal the French once again took up the defence.
It is not an action, therefore, which can be set down to the exclusive credit of any one nation. ”

“ On 25th November the Division took over the La Bassée sector, which included the famous Givenchy Ridge and Cuinchy Brickstacks. After about a month it side-stepped to the Cambrin-Hohenzollern Quarries front of about 5,500 yards, where it remained until the 28th February 1917. All this front had a most evil repute, but so exhausted was the enemy by the Somme fighting that this four months' trench sojourn proved the quietest the Division ever experienced, except before the storm of March 1918, and the casualties would have been far fewer had it not been for several raids carried out by us. ”

“ It is between the two villages of Givenchy and Cuinchy, this side of La Bassée. The journey there was through the village I walked to with Marie Thérèse (which has been shelled twice since we came) , and along the long, wide, straight road the British Army now knows so well—paved in the middle and a straight line of poplars on each side. As far as you could see it was covered with two streams of khaki, with an occasional string of French cavalry—one stream going up to the trenches after their so many days' "rest," and the other coming from the trenches to their "rest." ”

“ Even when there was little to do, the station was not dull. French hussars, dainty men with thin and graceful horses, rode over the bridge and along the canal every morning. Cuirassiers would clatter and swagger by—and guns, both French and English. Behind the station much ammunition was stored, a source of keen pleasure if ever the Germans had attempted to shell the station. It was well within range. During the last week His Majesty's armoured train, "Jellicoe," painted in wondrous colours, would rumble in and on towards La Bassée. ”

“ Vaast is so completely destroyed that one can only tell one end from the other by the orientation of its site.
In the great German attack of April, 1918, the town was saved by the Lancashires when the Portuguese had failed us near Neuve Chapelle, and when we were compelled to give way from Armentières to Merville, a few miles farther north. The same troops ("second-rate troops" the Germans called them) held Givenchy, on the La Bassée Canal. The village has entirely disappeared. ”

“ The best of us are liable to get the 'shakes' at times. You know, Hastings was killed at La Bassée a few months ago,—killed while goin' over the top.
"There were seven in this patrol,—Leftenant [Pg 142] Williams, Corporal French, myself an' four more from B Company.
"About sixty yards from Fritz's trench an old ditch—must have been the bed of a creek, but at that time it was dry—ran parallel with the German barbed wire. Linin' the edge of this ditch was a scrubby sort o' hedge which made a fine hidin'-place for a patrol. ”

“ Basing, the Anglo-Saxon patronymic, "son of Bass," occurs about the twelfth century, in the Liber Vitæ. And Kemble, in his list of Anglo-Saxon "marks," or communities of the early settlers, finds Bassingas, i.e. descendants or followers of Bass, in Cambridgeshire and in Notts, while Mr. Taylor finds offshoots of the same family on the opposite coast in Artois. In Germany we find many instances of Bass, and its High German form Pass, from the seventh century downwards. ”

“ A bass! Only a little fellow, half to three-quarters of a pound, but who ever heard of a bass taking bait thus placidly? Up in a Massachusetts lake that I know the large-mouthed bass take a bait with a rush that carries everything before it. They whirl beneath the water and leap above it, shaking their heads to throw from the mouth the thing that hurts them. Surely Southern languor has gotten into the bones of the bass. Another comes to the hook in the same peaceful way and I land him. Then there is a lull. A wind out of the south blows up river and brings me the odor of palmetto blooms. ”

“ VESTY OF THE BASINS
I THE MEETIN'
Now is it to be rain or a storm of wind at the Basin?
I love that foam out on the sea; those boulders, black and wet along the shore, they are a rest to me; the clouds chase one another; in this dim north country the wind is cool and strong, though it is now midsummer; at sunset you shall see such color!
From a little, low, storm-beaten building comes the sound of a fog-horn. That is the gift of Melchias Tibbitts, deceased, to the Basin school-house. ”

“ Over ledges and salt marshes, and the thin, storm-broken trees, and out there on the water there 's a strange color growing. Even the Basins seldom fail to start, at least, for home by sunset.
So a little white sail puts out on the crimson sea. The breeze is dying out, the waters lap, subside. Notely takes down the sail and rows.
The sea fades to softer colors, hushed, wondrous, near the dim shore.
"It isn't ever known, in any place in all the world, that angels—no, I know—but look, Note!—they almost might."
"Only here at the Basin, Vesty; when that very last light fades. ”

“ A little distance above a rustic bridge spans the stream, under and on either side of which, just in the shadow line, a dozen or more fine bass, weighing up to four pounds each, may be seen at any time. As one crosses the bridge they raise their weather-eye and look up, but do not move, whilst hundreds of young bass, an inch or two in length, shoot from the innumerable crevices like so many fresh-water shiners. The very foundation of the bridge seems to be alive with them. There are also a number of giant sun-fish here which seldom refuse a bait. ”

“ The last hour is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle, he scarcely sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs. ”

“ He had always admired spirit in a woman.
The car rolled on, flashing past swamps of swaying iris bedded deep in the salt marsh-grass, past tangles of fragrant honeysuckle and garlands of clinging clematis, and presently shot out into the sunny stretch of road that like a white ribbon bound the blue waters of the bay. When it reached the bluff where the sand mounted into green-capped dunes, patched in their hollows with shadows of violet, it slowed down and came to a stop before Willie Spence's weathered cottage.
The old inventor and Bob were seated idly on the workshop steps. ”

“ Through the kitchen window pale shafts of light [92] shot across the floor, brightening the colored rugs and making brass and copper glisten. Starting the fire, she threw open the door to let in the salt breeze.
The dampness and chill of the night had disappeared and the air was mild with the breath of coming spring. Mingling with the gulls' cries she could hear the twitter of sparrows and the occasional chirp of a robin. The village, still hazy in mist, was taking on sharper outlines and from the bay the voices of fishermen and the chug of a motor-boat drifted distinctly across the water. ”

“ Bass fishing on the Bay of Quinte is famous for its excellence. Not only is there abundance of fish, but they are exceptionally gamey. Their vigour and eagerness to be caught is illustrated by the member of this tribe that jumped into our boat. Every one has heard of the Florida mullet that, attracted by the light in a boat at night, came jumping over the sides in such numbers that they sank the boat and imperilled the lives of those on board. But a bass is no such fool fish as a mullet. If they do any jumping it is usually away from the boat, not towards it. ”

“ The shade of the cliffs over their heads, and the noise of the surfs breaking at their feet, were the directions by which their course was steered parallel to the coast.
Bass kept the sheet of the sail in his hand, drawing in a few inches occasionally, when he saw a particularly heavy sea following. His friend was steering with an oar, and it required the utmost exertion and care to prevent "broaching to" they knew that a single wrong movement, or a moment's inattention, would have sent them to the bottom. ”

“ Lake Bassing, in the winter, was a very different town from the one they had known in the summer season. Some of the houses were closed, and there was no cheerful Dick Hare and his bus to greet them. Mr. ”

“ Some of the types on the water-side are of the sort that arrest a sketcher, - figures of stalwart, brown-faced Basques, such as I had seen of old in great numbers at Biarritz, with their loose circular caps, their white sandals, their air of walking for a wager. Never was a tougher, a harder race. They are not mariners, nor watermen, but, putting questions of temper aside, they are the best possible dock-porters. ”

“ Five pounds, four ounces, he weighed, and his relatives under the canal bridge knew him no more for ever.
The bass has countless vagaries, and one never knows what he will do under given circumstances. As a father and son were fishing for small-mouth on the St. Lawrence, the senior hooked a fish which broke the snood and went free. Now there is a persistent tradition that, when a bass has been pricked by the hook, he does not bite again until the passing of twenty-four hours or such a matter has served to wipe the experience from his memory. ”

“ This tale was made as sharply incisive as the blow of an axe.
"I shall not go to Batz," said Pauline, when we came to the upper shore of the lake.
We returned to Croisic by the salt marshes, through the labyrinth of which we were guided by our fisherman, now as silent as ourselves. The inclination of our souls was changed. We were both plunged into gloomy reflections, saddened by the recital of a drama which explained the sudden presentiment which had seized us on seeing Cambremer. Each of us had enough knowledge of life to divine all that our guide had not told of that triple existence. ”