Read Ebook: The Challenge of the Dead A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in France seen two years afterwards between August and November 1920 by Graham Stephen

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THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD

A Vagabond in the Caucasus. Undiscovered Russia. A Tramp's Sketches. Changing Russia. With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem. With Poor Emigrants to America. Russia and the World. The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary. Through Russian Central Asia. Priest of the Ideal. Russia in 1916. The Quest of the Face. A Private in the Guards. Children of the Slaves. The Challenge of the Dead.

The Challenge of the Dead

A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November, 1920

Cassell and Company, Ltd London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1921

The Challenge of the Dead

Zeebruges! A party of school-children in "croc" are being escorted along the way by nuns; the Smiths of Surbiton have scrawled their names on the guns. There is a half-way house on the Mole now where one drinks beer and buys a picture postcard, or at the base of the Mole and looking outward toward England, one may dine alfresco at a Grand Palace Hotel. But what of that! The whole is sun-drowned and wind-swept and bare and open with a spaciousness and grandeur which are ample for the soul. The breeze which blows from England slackens nothing ere it reaches those fields where the wild flowers and the rushes bloom.

The mind goes back to 1914 and that great October when Antwerp fell but Ypres was held--when the last transports rolled alongside this glorious Mole bearing the Seventh Division, soon to be called, in faith, immortal, because half its number was destroyed before the war was very old.

October fifth they sailed away Upon the salt sea's raging spray And landed safe in Bruges bay Upon their way to Ypres.

They stepped up from the boats, new, ruddy, well equipped, intact--they rolled forward, with drums beating, o'er the Belgian land. Now all who ever will arrive in Zeebruges from o'er the sea will arrive after the Seventh Division. The war-pilgrim, paying his due of honour to those who came that day, cannot follow very far on their road unless he die also. If he chooses to follow any one soldier, will he not very likely come soon to the road's end and a grey wooden cross where his soldier's destiny dipped into eternity?

Follow, then, the many who ran in the great torch race of the war, where the spent runner handed the torch from his hand to another, who in turn ran with it blazing till he fell, thus from Zeebruges to Ypres; from Ypres, flaming, to Neuve Chapelle; from Neuve Chapelle, flaming, to Loos; then aflame to the defence of the Salient; then a long blaze to the sevenfold altar of the Somme ... man to man, unit to unit, period to period, till the November when the race was won.

Was it not characteristic of the old war that the "Contemptibles" of the Seventh, landing at Zeebruges, should at once be marched thirty miles in the wrong direction and then brought back by train. Antwerp was the beacon; Antwerp was not yet taken; the Naval Brigade was trying to save it. It was to fall, Zeebruges was to fall, Ostende itself was to fall--all very rapidly. When the boys got to Bruges it was rumoured that the Germans had had a set-back; when they got to Ostende they heard that Antwerp had been taken. When they got back to Bruges terror had seized the city. When they got to Ghent they took the Antwerp road--and then they came back, to Ypres.

The cobbled way to Bruges is not marked by destruction. The trees give shade, the houses stand, the fields are ploughed. Alice in an estaminet says she learned French from the French prisoners kept there--her bar used to be crowded with them. The Belfry of Bruges stands against the sky ahead--as if lifted out of the plain up to heaven itself.

"Well, here I am and here I remain," says an old man sitting behind me with a coffee-glass which he has long since drained. "Till England becomes sane, I stay here."

"The cost of living is just as high in Peebles as in London," says a woman sitting opposite him.

"Mad everywhere," says the man. "What I'd like is a flat somewhere near Lancaster Gate, so as I could go out into Kensington Gardens and sit under the trees and smoke."

There was a pause.

Then the woman from Peebles ventured in a thin, small voice:

"I think that Peter Pan statue in Kensington is so sweet. It was put up in the night, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was; and isn't Kensington a delightful place?" says the old man.

It's a shady highway that goes eastward to Ostende. At the village of St. Andrews there is a first war memorial to Belgian soldiers who gave their lives in the war; and then you come to the open ground at Varssenaere where the 20th Brigade did outpost duty, the first resting-ground for many a man, if rest he could, on his first night on the terrain of war--Varssenaere, a mean red-brick village with estaminets and small shops. Next day 'twas Steine and then Ostende.

October 9, 1914, they marched into Ostende station, crowded with wounded men who had been rushed down from the stricken front. Antwerp had fallen. The trains which brought the wounded down took the new army back--back to Bruges, on to Ghent, and tumbled it out into that great old city. The streets were full of refugees, but the khaki tide rolled forward through the crowds, past the cathedral, out by the Lokeren road, to meet the foe.

But now it is midnight again, the night of the 1920 National F?te, and the whole population has got singing drunk and then screaming drunk on beer. Tens of thousands of men and women flock the streets. There are fireworks, there is music, there is dancing. The fronts of the estaminets have been taken out, and seats go from the bar to the middle of the street; long tables on trestles, and plank seats, have been put out; piles of shrimps litter the tables from end to end, and the yellow beer gleams as it streams. Tired children are massed on the cathedral steps waiting for the fireworks to begin, and past those who sit surges a tireless crowd.

In the Groensel Maarkt a truly Dostoieffskian scene. A soldier with one arm, a diminutive woman with dislocated hips, and two children are singing Flemish songs to a ring of people of varying ages. The old soldier has a sheaf of leaflets with the words of the songs and sells them a penny a time, a small boy plays the concertina, "mother" sings all the while a murmuring sing-song which never rises or falls, and keeps time with her wasp-like waist, which seems to hang from the black hump of her hips and sways uncannily back and forth. Father with the one arm also sings all the while he sells, the little girl sings, and the boy playing the concertina sings also. To the tune of "Way Down in Tennessee" they sing:

Ik noem haar mijn everzwijn Mijn voddenmagazijn

They sing too, over and over again, a Flemish song about the war:

Nog niet genoeg dat hij Binst d'oorlog was in 't lij Tot overmaat huns laffe daad Der duitschers vol van haat...

and a haunting chorus which begins:

Hoe ... kan het bestaan Dat men een man, die gansch zijn plicht toch heeft gekweten

and glasses of beer pass over the heads of the audience to the singing family. All in a dark, empty market-place, with somebody's statue looking down on the scene and many a tear softening human eyes.

The rockets shoot up to the height of the cathedral spire and break in coloured lights, the large catherine-wheels are lit, the children clap and chase one another for firework cases.

At two in the morning strings of men and women holding on to one another parade the streets and kick out with their legs, attempting to dance whilst they sing "Tipperary," "Marguerite," "Mademoiselle from Armenti?res," "Hoe kan het bestaan," the new girls in knee-skirts with spindly legs, the old wives in longer heavier ones, exposing when they dance white baggy drawers like Canterbury bells. At four in the morning there are still ten thousand in the streets; men and women have made circles round trees and lamp-posts, and kick out as they try to roll round; knots of men and girls go staggering past with howls and yells; young Flemish fellows are squeezing girls of twenty and pressing down their cheeks with large-mouthed kisses. At six, in the heavenly radiance of a pure morning, pandemonium still rolls on.

What a night! Six years ago on that other night it was different. Anxiety and foreboding throbbed in these streets. Belgian manhood in arms marched away. The British marched away, and by midnight the last soldier had gone. Suspense ... and then at two in the morning the first German, a motor-cyclist, armed, goggled, covered with dust, vigilant.... And from the dawn German order reigned in Ghent--no bacchanalias.

The army went out by night by many roads, making, however, for Bruges. It fell back for the defence, perhaps, of Bruges and of Ostende. Brussels had fallen, and Ghent--there was not much of Belgium left. The first morning out of Ghent saw the army at Somerghem, and the second at Thielt. So tired were the troops that at each halt in the night both officers and men, lying down by the roadside, fell asleep. At the halts the men bumped into one another mechanically, like the trucks of a freight train coming to a sudden stop, and then they just tumbled down and snored.

Newly tarred barges loll slowly along the Bruges-Ghent canal, and there is a vista along the straight water to the belfry of Ghent and the cathedral. The sides of the canal are lush with verdure; health and happiness spread out from its banks. One would say also the war never was here. But in Somerghem the old church on the hill crowning the town has been blown up. Its tower gave a view for leagues around, and the Devil made good use of it when he had a chance and when he had done his task blew it up lest others should follow his example. The Germans evacuated the town just before the end of the war; the Belgian army bombarded it and placed a gas concentration there. It was retaken, but at the price of a most beautiful church. The inhabitants are all back. They remember the Tommies and, of course, the Scots. The Gordons in their kilts made a lasting impression. Somerghem saw much war life before the enemy marched away, and German soldier life, with its violently repressive military discipline and its correspondingly lax morality, was rife. The more perfect their military obedience the less heed there was of God.

One sees in these parts not a few war-babies, and worse than these, for they are innocent enough, one sees war-children in adolescence. The numbers of depraved young girls is appalling. Perhaps there were many before the war, but they look rather like war products. How many of them there are in the beer-houses and backyards of the small towns! It is difficult to avoid adventures with them. Bertha and Martha, depraved little rascals, come running along the canal bank, one in clogs, one in stocking soles. They talk scraps of German and scraps of French, and make disgusting gestures and throw themselves about in hard, coarse laughter. Martha is a strong and brazen little hussy with red face and fat little arms. Bertha is a soft-witted, pallid slip of a girl with full throat and weak lips. Both have long black finger-nails, both are in cotton rags; but Bertha has a large yellow festering wound on her ankle which she says was caused by a bit of shrapnel. Bertha is the younger. Martha may be sixteen; Bertha would be two years younger. And Martha would get Bertha into trouble. "Take Bertha!" she says continually, suggestively making signs. Poor war-children! When the war began Martha was ten and Bertha was eight. Martha was corrupted in it; pale, sickly, weak-lipped Bertha, with the shrapnel wound, perhaps not actually corrupted. When the wound had been examined and their nails cut they concluded they had met a doctor.

They scamper away at last. The dark water of the canal flows peacefully between banks of untarnished green. Nature is unqualified loveliness. At Somerghem, however, behind this veil there has been war, there has been something of the curse. One begins to notice in old walls patches of new brick where shell-holes in human habitations have been cobbled. Re-pointing is going on. The splash where the splinters of iron rived a whole house has been sought to be gently erased. The most virtuous work in the world! But it splashed on to the children too, and who can re-point the Berthas and the Marthas?

On then towards Roulers! 'Tis in gloomier country and with poor people. All high roads are under repair. If shells spared Thielt, they did not spare the roads. Where British army leather beat the cobbles in that long march back from Ghent, whistling shells touched later and blew up the ground that had been beneath their feet. The patient Flemish farmers hung on to their farms on each side of the shell-pitted road, and their cattle grazed in the fields with an equanimity that was sublime. For four years the cannon-thunder never ceased, and every night war flamed around the heavens, but the men on the soil remained true to the soil and drove straightly their ploughs.

"Och slowly, man, slowly. They Chairmans didna leave muckle when they went awa!"

And six years ago the Army continued to fall back. Zeebruges whence it had started, Bruges and Ostende, and Ghent which it had marched through, became enemy country without much shedding of blood. No one stood long for their defence. After Roulers the name of a much less famous place than Bruges or Ghent came on to men's lips. Did they know that they were going to stand for the defence of it? No, it is all unlikely. And as they marched to Ypres they providentially did not know the four years' hell of which they trod the stage. War all over by Christmas was their thought if they thought at all as they marched o'er the ridge of Passchendaele in October, 1914.

The soldier, it is said, has an elementary mind which does not imagine, does not think--a regimental mind. Others therefore must think about him and do the thinking for him. See, the dusty khaki-clad regulars as yet unbaptised by fire, but unknowingly on the brink of annihilation, treading the ground where

Few shall part where many meet... And every turf beneath their feet Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.

Thus they marched into Ypres--"as pretty a town as you'd care to see after a day's march." Oh, it's highly romantic to look back to it now.

Banners yellow, glorious golden, On its roof did float and flow. This, all this, was in the olden time Long ago.

The business centre of Ypres was invested with a dignity which was not merely commercial in those old days when the silver chimes rolled regularly the quarter-hours from the Cloth Hall tower. And the Army arrived, the army for the defence of Ypres. They will dig trenches and throw out wire south of Ypres, looking at Kemmel without knowing its name, walking on Hill 60 before it was numbered and named.

A quiet and little marked country south of Roulers now gives way first to trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks, and then to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farm-houses and cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire--but now as it were in tumultuous conflict with Nature. Chiefly remarkable are the magnificent rushes with their black tops rising from almost every shell-hole. The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest of wild flowers--pink willow-herb, burly St. John's wort in a yellow glare, starry blue of outbreaking chicory, hundred-headed blossoming sweet thistles growing from the hollows where fell, I doubt not, Caledonia's sons, foxgloves flowering upward attempting to take crimson to heaven. Ypres by the compass lies south-west. No, there is nothing on the horizon, not a wall, not a wood, only the bare eminence of Kemmel Hill. Before you is a vast fen. Some Flemings are at work on it in shirt sleeves, but not a soul is traversing it. You constantly change your direction: there is no going directly. It is impassable. You make for what once was a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now--thrice thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs, rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there still in plenty. Weather-beaten ammunition baskets with shells intact lie where they fell off the ammunition waggons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles, there are graves. There is all but the blood. But from the blood has risen flowers.

On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned Flemish--what a return!--and they have made shacks of shreds and patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture forth--there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. It has needed courage to come back to your old ten acres. Few of these Flemish are owners; they are only tenants. Their landlords allow them now three years rent free. From the hut made of salvage starts the regeneracy of the land. In an irregular patch round its gates lies the first reclaimed ground, a mere kail yard, a bean plot. There are wonderful crops of beans, higher than beans are wont to grow, bean-stalks to climb up. Tobacco also has been growing, for the leaves hang wilting from green to yellow on the outside of the unpainted wooden walls. But beyond the oasis the tall black-topped reeds, like Guardsmen of the vegetable world, go rank beyond rank to the eyes' end. One comes to a road, and there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:--"In den Niewen wereld." Half of them seem to be estaminets.

It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in one another's estaminets.

"I wouldn't never have come back had I known it was like this," says a Belgian woman. "I had good job at Rouen all the war, make plenty money, not like this."

"How was that?"

"Me cook in sergeants' mess, huh, plenty food, plenty money."

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