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A Walk to the Trenches

To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who would deny it.

You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless, sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. The country after that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium--or whatever it be--is all gone away, and there stretches for miles instead one of the world's great deserts, a thing to take its place no longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the trenches. Overhead floats until it is chased away an a?roplane with little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him; black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.

You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a railway, perhaps a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a village, and hear English songs, but no one who has not seen it can imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a desert clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country. Would it not be glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like that?

Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only one field from skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one goes with companions that this event in our history has drawn from all parts of the earth. On that road you may hear all in one walk where is the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they laid a drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a farmer lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee crop; you may hear Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.

In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes of exclamation after them, written up on notice boards among the ruins. Ruins and German orders. That turning movement of Von Kluck's near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it we might have had ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may comfort himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny shapes the world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination can have had no place amongst the scheme of things.

Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty regularly you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by, and it can be a very strong wind indeed. One's horse, if one is riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen horses far more frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting in the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no great attention from man or beast.

And so we come in sight of the support trenches where we are to dwell for a week before we go on for another mile over the hills, where the black fountains are rising.

A Walk in Picardy

Picture any village you know. In such a village as that the trench begins. That is to say, there are duck-boards along a ditch, and the ditch runs into a trench. Only the village is no longer there. It was like some village you know, though perhaps a little merrier, because it was further south and nearer the sun; but it is all gone now. And the trench runs out of the ruins, and is called Windmill Avenue. There must have been a windmill standing there once.

When you come from the ditch to the trench you leave the weeds and soil and trunks of willows and see the bare chalk. At the top of those two white walls is a foot or so of brown clay. The brown clay grows deeper as you come to the hills, until the chalk has disappeared altogether. Our alliance with France is new in the history of man, but it is an old, old union in the history of the hills. White chalk with brown clay on top has dipped and gone under the sea; and the hills of Sussex and Kent are one with the hills of Picardy.

And so you may pass through the chalk that lies in that desolate lane with memories of more silent and happier hills; it all depends on what the chalk means to you: you may be unfamiliar with it and in that case you will not notice it; or you may have been born among those thyme-scented hills and yet have no errant fancies, so that you will not think of the hills that watched you as a child, but only keep your mind on the business in hand; that is probably best.

You come after a while to other trenches: notice boards guide you, and you keep to Windmill Avenue. You go by Pear Lane, Cherry Lane, and Plum Lane. Pear trees, cherry trees and plum trees must have grown there. You are passing through either wild lanes banked with briar, over which these various trees peered one by one and showered their blossoms down at the end of spring, and girls would have gathered the fruit when it ripened, with the help of tall young men; or else you are passing through an old walled garden, and the pear and the cherry and plum were growing against the wall, looking southwards all through the summer. There is no way whatever of telling which it was; it is all one in war; whatever was there is gone; there remain to-day, and survive, the names of those three trees only. We come next to Apple Lane. You must not think that an apple tree ever grew there, for we trace here the hand of the wit, who by naming Plum Lane's neighbour "Apple Lane" merely commemorates the inseparable connection that plum has with apple forever in the minds of all who go to modern war. For by mixing apple with plum the manufacturer sees the opportunity of concealing more turnip in the jam, as it were, at the junction of the two forces, than he might be able to do without this unholy alliance.

We come presently to the dens of those who trouble us , the dugouts of the trench mortar batteries. It is noisy when they push up close to the front line and play for half an hour or so with their rivals: the enemy sends stuff back, our artillery join in; it is as though, while you were playing a game of croquet, giants hundreds of feet high, some of them friendly, some unfriendly, carnivorous and hungry, came and played football on your croquet lawn.

We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and past the dugouts and shelters of various people having business with History, past stores of bombs and the many other ingredients with which history is made, past men coming down who are very hard to pass, for the width of two men and two packs is the width of a communication trench and sometimes an inch over; past two men carrying a flying pig slung on a pole between them; by many turnings; and Windmill Avenue brings you at last to Company Headquarters in a dugout that Hindenburg made with his German thoroughness.

And there, after a while, descends the Tok Emma man, the officer commanding a trench mortar battery, and is given perchance a whiskey and water, and sits on the best empty box that we have to offer, and lights one of our cigarettes.

"There's going to be a bit of a strafe at 5.30," he says.

What Happened on the Night of the Twenty-Seventh

The night of the twenty-seventh was Dick Cheeser's first night on sentry. The night was far gone when he went on duty; in another hour they would stand to. Dick Cheeser had camouflaged his age when he enlisted: he was barely eighteen. A wonderfully short time ago he was quite a little boy; now he was in a frontline trench. It hadn't seemed that things were going to alter like that. Dick Cheeser was a plowboy: long brown furrows over haughty, magnificent downs seemed to stretch away into the future as far as his mind could see. No narrow outlook either, for the life of nations depends upon those brown furrows. But there are the bigger furrows that Mars makes, the long brown trenches of war; the life of nations depends on these too; Dick Cheeser had never pictured these. He had heard talk about a big navy and a lot of Dreadnoughts; silly nonsense he called it. What did one want a big navy for? To keep the Germans out, some people said. But the Germans weren't coming. If they wanted to come, why didn't they come? Anybody could see that they never did come. Some of Dick Cheeser's pals had votes.

And so he had never pictured any change from plowing the great downs; and here was war at last, and here was he. The Corporal showed him where to stand, told him to keep a good lookout and left him.

And there was Dick Cheeser alone in the dark with an army in front of him, eighty yards away: and, if all tales were true, a pretty horrible army.

The night was awfully still. I use the adverb not as Dick Cheeser would have used it. The stillness awed him. There had not been a shell all night. He put his head up over the parapet and waited. Nobody fired at him. He felt that the night was waiting for him. He heard voices going along the trench: some one said it was a black night: the voices died away. A mere phrase; the night wasn't black at all, it was grey. Dick Cheeser was staring at it, and the night was staring back at him, and seemed to be threatening him; it was grey, grey as an old cat that they used to have at home, and as artful. Yes, thought Dick Cheeser, it was an artful night; that was what was wrong with it. If shells had come or the Germans, or anything at all, you would know how to take it; but that quiet mist over huge valleys, and stillness! Anything might happen. Dick waited and waited, and the night waited too. He felt they were watching each other, the night and he. He felt that each was crouching. His mind slipped back to the woods on hills he knew. He was watching with eyes and ears and imagination to see what would happen in No Man's Land under that ominous mist: but his mind took a peep for all that at the old woods that he knew. He pictured himself, he and a band of boys, chasing squirrels again in the summer. They used to chase a squirrel from tree to tree, throwing stones, till they tired it: and then they might hit it with a stone: usually not. Sometimes the squirrel would hide, and a boy would have to climb after it. It was great sport, thought Dick Cheeser. What a pity he hadn't had a catapult in those days, he thought. Somehow the years when he had not had a catapult seemed all to be wasted years. With a catapult one might get the squirrel almost at once, with luck: and what a great thing that would be. All the other boys would come round to look at the squirrel, and to look at the catapult, and ask him how he did it. He wouldn't have to say much, there would be the squirrel; no boasting would be necessary with the squirrel lying dead. It might spread to other things, even rabbits; almost anything, in fact. He would certainly get a catapult first thing when he got home. A little wind blew in the night, too cold for summer. It blew away, as it were, the summer of Dick's memories; blew away hills and woods and squirrel. It made for a moment a lane in the mist over No Man's Land. Dick Cheeser peered down it, but it closed again. "No," Night seemed to say, "you don't guess my secret." And the awful hush intensified. "What would they do?" thought the sentry. "What were they planning in all those miles of silence?" Even the Verys were few. When one went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood over the valley: their black shapes seemed to know what would happen in the mist and seemed sworn not to say. The rocket faded, and the hills went back into mystery again, and Dick Cheeser peered level again over the ominous valley.

All the dangers and sinister shapes and evil destinies, lurking between the armies in that mist, that the sentry faced that night cannot be told until the history of the war is written by a historian who can see the mind of the soldier. Not a shell fell all night, no German stirred; Dick Cheeser was relieved at "Stand to" and his comrades stood to beside him, and soon it was wide, golden, welcome dawn.

And for all the threats of night the thing that happened was one that the lonely sentry had never foreseen: in the hour of his watching Dick Cheeser, though scarcely eighteen, became a full-grown man.

Standing To

One cannot say that one time in the trenches is any more tense than another. One cannot take any one particular hour and call it, in modern nonsensical talk, "typical hour in the trenches." The routine of the trenches has gone on too long for that. The tensest hour ought to be half an hour before dawn, the hour when attacks are expected and men stand to. It is an old convention of war that that is the dangerous hour, the hour when defenders are weakest and attack most to be feared. For darkness favours the attackers then as night favours the lion, and then dawn comes and they can hold their gains in the light. Therefore in every trench in every war the garrison is prepared in that menacing hour, watching in greater numbers than they do the whole night through. As the first lark lifts from meadows they stand there in the dark. Whenever there is any war in any part of the world you may be sure that at that hour men crowd to their parapets: when sleep is deepest in cities they are watching there.

When the dawn shimmers a little, and a grey light comes, and widens, and all of a sudden figures become distinct, and the hour of the attack that is always expected is gone, then perhaps some faint feeling of gladness stirs the newest of the recruits; but chiefly the hour passes like all the other hours there, an unnoticed fragment of the long, long routine that is taken with resignation mingled with jokes.

Dawn comes shy with a wind scarce felt, dawn faint and strangely perceptible, feeble and faint in the east while men still watch the darkness. When did the darkness go? When did the dawn grow golden? It happened as in a moment, a moment you did not see. Guns flash no longer: the sky is gold and serene; dawn stands there like Victory that will shine, on one of these years when the Kaiser goes the way of the older curses of earth. Dawn, and the men unfix bayonets as they step down from the fire-step and clean their rifles with pull-throughs. Not all together, but section by section, for it would not do for a whole company to be caught cleaning their rifles at dawn, or at any other time.

They rub off the mud or the rain that has come at night on their rifles, they detach the magazine and see that its spring is working, they take out the breechblock and oil it, and put back everything clean: and another night is gone; it is one day nearer victory.

The Splendid Traveller

A traveller threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the sunset; from crag to crag of gold he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of romance he came through the golden evening.

It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting, the air turned chill, and a battalion's bugles were playing "Retreat" when this knightly stranger, a British a?roplane, dipped, and went homeward over the infantry. That beautiful evening call, and the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact that we live in such a period of romance as the troubadours would have envied.

He came, that British airman, over the border, sheer over No Man's Land and the heads of the enemy and the mysterious land behind, snatching the secrets that the enemy would conceal. Either he had defeated the German airmen who would have stopped his going, or they had not dared to try. Who knows what he had done? He had been abroad and was coming home in the evening, as he did every day.

Even when all its romance has been sifted from an age and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight with the black shells bursting below?

The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as well as with the incidents of the day, incidents that recur year in and year out, too often for us to notice them. If a part of the moon were to fall off in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the comment on the lips of the imperturbable British watchers that have seen so much would be, "Hullo, what is Jerry up to now?"

And so the British a?roplane glides home in the evening, and the light fades from the air, and what is left of the poplars grows dark against the sky, and what is left of the houses grows more mournful in the gloaming, and night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder, for the airman has given his message to the artillery. It is as though Hermes had gone abroad sailing upon his sandals, and had found some bad land below those winged feet wherein men did evil and kept not the laws of gods or men; and he had brought this message back and the gods were angry.

For the wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how shall we tell of them?

England

"And then we used to have sausages," said the Sergeant.

"And mashed?" said the Private.

"Yes," said the Sergeant, "and beer. And then we used to go home. It was grand in the evenings. We used to go along a lane that was full of them wild roses. And then we come to the road where the houses were. They all had their bit of a garden, every house."

"Nice, I calls it, a garden," the Private said.

"Yes," said the Sergeant, "they all had their garden. It came right down to the road. Wooden palings: none of that there wire."

"I hates wire," said the Private.

"They didn't have none of it," the N. C. O. went on. "The gardens came right down to the road, looking lovely. Old Billy Weeks he had them tall pale-blue flowers in his garden nearly as high as a man."

"Hollyhocks?" said the Private.

"No, they wasn't hollyhocks. Lovely they were. We used to stop and look at them, going by every evening. He had a path up the middle of his garden paved with red tiles, Billy Weeks had; and these tall blue flowers growing the whole way along it, both sides like. They was a wonder. Twenty gardens there must have been, counting them all; but none to touch Billy Weeks with his pale-blue flowers. There was an old windmill away to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing by overhead and screeching: just about as high again as the houses. Lord, how them birds did fly. And there was the other young fellows, what were not out walking, standing about by the roadside, just doing nothing at all. One of them had a flute: Jim Booker, he was. Those were great days. The bats used to come out, flutter, flutter, flutter; and then there'd be a star or two; and the smoke from the chimneys going all grey; and a little cold wind going up and down like the bats; and all the colour going out of things; and the woods looking all strange, and a wonderful quiet in them, and a mist coming up from the stream. It's a queer time that. It's always about that time, the way I see it: the end of the evening in the long days, and a star or two, and me and my girl going home.

"Wouldn't you like to talk about things for a bit the way you remember them?"

"Oh, no, Sergeant," said the other, "you go on. You do bring it all back so."

"I used to bring her home," the Sergeant said, "to her father's house. Her father was keeper there, and they had a house in the wood. A fine house with queer old tiles on it, and a lot of large friendly dogs. I knew them all by name, same as they knew me. I used to walk home then along the side of the wood. The owls would be about; you could hear them yelling. They'd float out of the wood like, sometimes: all large and white."

"I knows them," said the Private.

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