Now It Can Be Told

When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and a glorious adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out from London to report the proceedings, and I was one of them.

We went in civilian clothes without military passports⁠—the War Office was not giving any⁠—with bags of money which might be necessary for the hire of motorcars, hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in the antechambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan War, and others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior staff-officers who knew that “K” hated these men and thought the press ought to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into false hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them and were told to buy horses and sleeping-bags and be ready to start at a moment’s notice for the front.

The moment’s notice was postponed for months.⁠ ⁠…

The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of “seeing something,” without authority, and made wild, desperate efforts to break through the barrier that had been put up against them by French and British staffs in the zone of war.

Just at first⁠—though not for long⁠—there was a touch of hostility against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their quarters, wondered why we should come “spying around,” trying to “see things.” I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy clouds in a blue sky. There was a long straight road leading to the village of Vermelles, with a crisscross of communication trenches on one side, and, on the other, fields where corn and grass grew rankly in abandoned fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though this were Arcady in days of peace. It was not. The red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or so away, were sharply defined, as through stereoscopic lenses, in the quiver of sunlight, and had the sinister look of a death-haunted place. It was where the French had fought their way through gardens, walls, and houses in murderous battle, before leaving it for British troops to hold.

There were other men who could not stand shellfire. It filled them with an animal terror and took all willpower out of them. One young officer was like that man who “did not mind rifle-fire.” He, by some strange freak of psychology, was brave under machine-gun fire. He had done several gallant things, and was bright and cheerful in the trenches until the enemy barraged them with high explosive. Then he was seen wandering back to the support trenches in a dazed way. It happened three times, and he was sentenced to death. Before going out at dawn to face the firing-squad he was calm. There was a lighted candle on the table, and he sorted out his personal belongings and made small packages of them as keepsakes for his family and friends. His hand did not tremble. When his time came he put out the candle, between thumb and finger, raised his hand, and said, “Right O!”

Another man, shot for cowardice in face of the enemy, was sullen and silent to one who hoped to comfort him in the last hour. The chaplain asked him whether he had any message for his relatives. He said, “I have no relatives.” He was asked whether he would like to say any prayers, and he said, “I don’t believe in them.” The chaplain talked to him, but could get no answer⁠—and time was creeping on. There were two guards in the room, sitting motionless, with loaded rifles between their knees. Outside it was silent in the courtyard, except for little noises of the night and the wind.

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had the idea.

“It would be a great adventure,” he said, as we stood listening to the gunfire over there.

“It would be damn silly,” said a staff officer. “Only a stern sense of duty would make me do it.”

It was Gullett who was the brave man.

We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living soul.

Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves. There was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry and twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had been once a fair city.

For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers of the sinking sun and the first stars that glimmered in a pale sky, the frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us.

The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from end to end by a thunderbolt.

“Apportez-moi une bouteille de champagne, vite!⁠ ⁠…” said the young officer. Then he waved his arm and said: “J’ai perdu mon cheval” (“A kingdom for a bloody horse!”), “as Shakespeare said. Y a-t’il quelqu’un qui a vu mon sacré cheval? In other words, if I don’t find that four-legged beast which led to my damnation I shall be shot at dawn. Fusillé, comprenez? On va me fusiller par un mur blanc⁠—or is it une mure blanche? quand l’aurore se lève avec les couleurs d’une rose et l’odeur d’une jeune fille lavée et parfumée. Pretty good that, eh, what? But the fact remains that unless I find my steed, my charger, my warhorse, which in reality does not belong to me at all, because I pinched it from the colonel, I shall be shot as sure as fate, and, alas! I do not want to die. I am too young to die, and meanwhile I desire encore une bouteille de champagne!”

The little crowd of citizens found a grim humor in this speech, one-third of which they understood. They laughed coarsely, and a man said:

“Quel drôle de type! Quel numéro!”

But the woman who had touched me on the sleeve spoke to me again.

“He says he has lost his horse and will be shot as a deserter. Those things happen. My boy in the Argonne tells me that a comrade of his was shot for hiding five days with his young woman. It would be sad if this poor child should be condemned to death.”

I pushed my way through the crowd and went up to the officer.

“Can I help at all?”

He greeted me warmly, as though he had known me for years.