Now It Can Be Told quotes

… young writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen and could not understand.

Because there was no code of words which would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of heroic pageantry.

“Had a good time?” asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly waiting for an answer.

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of that first six months of war—as afterward—came back the tide of wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals crowded with blind and dying and moaning men. …

“Had an interesting time?” asked a man I wanted to kill because of his smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity of cheerfulness in this world of agony.

I had changed the clothes which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons.

I had changed the clothes which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons.

As an onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because they could not understand.

All these things I had seen in the first nine months I put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that some might know; but it was only a few who understood. …

One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield, with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in chalky ditches below their breastworks of sandbags, he turned to a colleague of mine and said in a startled way:

“This must never happen again! Never!”

It will never happen again for him, as for many others. He was too tall for the trenches, and one day a German sniper saw the red glint of his hatband—he was on the staff of the 11th Corps—and thought, “a gay bird”!

“It rather looks,” said my companion, “as though the Germans knew there is a party on in that charming house.”

It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never good to go back before reaching one’s objective. That was bad for the discipline of the courage that is just beyond fear.

Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the château, and as we went in through the gateway a sergeant made a quick jump for a barn as a shell burst somewhere close.

but I was master of myself, and I remember having a sense of satisfaction because I had answered the brigade major in a level voice, with a touch of his own arrogance.

I saw that these officers were afraid; that they, too, had Fear at the back of the brain, and that their conversation and laughter were the camouflage of the soul.

The face of the young A.D.C. was flushed and he laughed too much at his own jokes, and his laughter was just a tone too shrill.

“It’s the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier. The Regular crowd think the war belongs to them … But I liked their pluck.

They’re arrogant to Death himself when he comes knocking at the door.

”

The only alternative to what we wrote would have been a passionate denunciation of all this ghastly slaughter and violent attacks on British generalship. Even now I do not think that would have been justified.

As Bernard Shaw told me, “while the war lasts one must put one’s own soul under censorship.”

After many bloody battles had been fought we were received again by the Commander-in-Chief, and this time his cordiality was not marred by any slighting touch.

He was manacled, and tied by a rope to the mounted man. I caught one glimpse of his face, and then turned away, cold and sick.

There was doom written on his face, and in his eyes a captured look. He was walking to his wall.

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.”

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.”

But the man who was going to die sang on in a clear, hard voice. A faint glimmer of coming dawn lightened the cottage window. There were not many minutes more. The two guards shifted their feet.

“Now,” said the man, “we’ll sing ‘God Save the King.’ ”

The two guards rose and stood at attention, and the chaplain sang the national anthem with the man who was to be shot for cowardice. Then the tramp of the firing-party came across the cobblestones in the courtyard. It was dawn.

… artillery was weak, and when our infantry was ordered to attack fixed positions of terrible strength without adequate support, and not a dog’s chance of luck against such odds, the prestige of the Commander-in-Chief faded from men’s minds and he lost place in their admiration.

It was washed out in blood and mud.

Sir Douglas Haig, who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years.

So that the Staff was not altogether hopeless in its effect, as the young battalion officers, with sharp tongues and a sense of injustice in their hearts, made out, with pardonable blasphemy, in their dugouts.

Nevertheless the system was bad and British generalship made many mistakes, some of them, no doubt, unavoidable, because it is human to err, and some of them due to sheer, simple, impregnable stupidity.

In the early days the outstanding fault of our generals was their desire to gain ground which was utterly worthless when gained.

General Haldane had marked him out as the most promising young soldier in the whole army.

A bit of shell, a senseless bit of steel, spoiled that promise⁠—as it spoiled the promise of a million boys

—and the general was saddened more than by the death of other gallant officers.

He was against bayonet-training, which took the field against rifle-fire for a time.

“No man in this war,” he said, with a sweeping assertion, “has ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first.”

And, broadly speaking, I think he was right, in spite of the Director of Training, who was extremely annoyed with me when I quoted this authority.

Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the duckboards … Or Montague—white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by his apparent fearlessness.

I had no courage on those early mornings of battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we came to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells.

I hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years that seem a lifetime.

Modern warfare has opened the arena to the multitude. They may no longer sit in the Coliseum watching the paid gladiators. If there be war they must take their share of its sacrifice. They must be victims as well as victors.

They must pay for the luxury of conquest, hatred, and revenge by their own bodies, and for their safety against aggression by national service.

After the first quick phases of the war this need of national soldiers to replace the professional forces became clear to the military leaders.

It was a cockney voice.

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and destructive chemistry.

The fighting in front of these lads of the New Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hellfires and killed in great numbers, which made all things different …

“

Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one’s mouth, just because some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has no personal acquaintance.

”

“That’s all there is to it in modern warfare,” said the lanky man. “It’s not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength against your enemy’s, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics and chemistry.

What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when guns kill at fifteen miles?

”

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.

I remember the gist of their conversation, which was partly devised for my benefit. One boy declared that he was sick of the whole business.

“I should like to cancel my contract,” he remarked.

“Yes, send in your resignation, old lad,” said another, with ironical laughter.

This remark was also received by a gust of subdued laughter, silenced for a moment by a roar and upheaval of masonry somewhere by the ruins of the Cloth Hall.

“Soldiers are prisoners,” said a boy without any trace of humor. “You’re lagged, and you can’t escape. A ‘blighty’ is the best luck you can hope for.”

“I don’t want to kill Germans,” said a fellow with a superior accent. “I’ve no personal quarrel against them; and, anyhow, I don’t like butcher’s work.”

The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing them, had an attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated fireworks after a night of orgy.

In a distant field a cock crew.

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated fireworks after a night of orgy.

In a distant field a cock crew.

The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed again nakedly.

He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a strong, fetid smell came from him.

“Hooge,” he said, in a thoughtful way, “is not a health resort.”

He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a leper. He told one or two stories about the things that happened at Hooge, and I wondered if hell could be so bad.

His results were startling, and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, shell-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter in their eyes.

“It’s a pity,” he said, “they have to go off again and be shot to pieces. I cure them only to be killed⁠—but that’s not my fault. It’s the fault of war.”

It was Colonel Campbell who discovered “Willie Woodbine,” the fighting parson and soldier’s poet, who was the leading member of a traveling troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two.

She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile.

Poor châteaux of France! German shells came to knock down their painted turrets, to smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride.

Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust and twisted iron.

How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: “Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!”

“Not so much of your ‘Mercy, Kamerad,’ ” said the cockney. “ ’And us over your bloody ticker!”

It was the man’s watch he wanted, without sentiment.

… the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter.

It was the protective armor of men’s souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.

“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, “it doesn’t do to take this war seriously.”

It was the protective armor of men’s souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.

“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, “it doesn’t do to take this war seriously.”

And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:

“Having a cleanup, my man?” said a brigadier to a soldier trying to wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug.

“Yes, sir,” said the man, “and I wish I was a blasted canary.”

One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it lasted.

they said. Too late, O God! Even when they had had their first spell in the trenches and came up against German strength they kept a queer faith, for a time, that “something” would happen to bring peace as quickly as war had come.

Peace was always coming three months ahead.

Generals and staff-officers, as well as sergeants and privates, had that strong optimism, not based on any kind of reason;

That particular crowd did not get through the next scrap. But the padre’s authority was good.

They had peace long before the armistice.

It was worst of all for boys of sensitive minds who were lucky enough to get a “cushie” wound, and so went on and on, or who were patched up again quickly after one, two, or three wounds, and came back again.

“Not yet,” said one of them, and then they all left the table at which we were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them ardently. They were touching wood.

“Take this with you,” said an Irish officer on a night I went to Ypres. “It will help you as it has helped me. It’s my lucky charm.”

He gave me a little bit of coal which he carried in his tunic, and he was so earnest about it that I took it without a smile and felt the safer for it.

“Aren’t you afraid of this place?” I asked one of them in Bully-Grenay when it was “unhealthy” there. “You might be killed here any minute.”

“Je m’en fiche de la mort!” (“I don’t care a damn about death.”)

I had the same answer from other girls in other places.

“On the front of the Third Army,” wrote Sir John French, “subsidiary operations of a similar nature were successfully carried out.”

From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mothers’ sons they had been a bloody shambles without any gain.

The point of view depends on the angle of vision.

From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mothers’ sons they had been a bloody shambles without any gain.

The point of view depends on the angle of vision.

Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the field—no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood—and from the officers who survived.

“He is not mad,” said a French officer who had lived in England. “It is a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the British sport.”

It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he held it for fourteen hundred yards⁠—the best-kicked goal in history.

Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man’s Land.

Our losses were not worrying him. As a great general he did not allow losses to worry him. He ate his tea with a hearty appetite, and chaffed his staff-officers. They were anticipating the real German counterattack—a big affair.

Away up the line there would be more dead piled up, more filth and stench of human slaughter, but the smell of it would not reach back to headquarters.

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 1915, and issued by the War Office on November 1st of that year, the Commander-in-Chief stated that:

One does not blame. A writing-man, who was an observer and recorder, like myself, does not sit in judgment. He has no right to judge.

He merely cries out, “O God!⁠ ⁠… O God!” in remembrance of all that agony and that waste of splendid boys who loved life, and died.

On Sunday, as I have told, the situation was full of danger.

It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds, and every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in which there was “Nothing to report.”

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dugouts.

They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their “bully,” and endured it all with the philosophy of “grin and bear it!”

That thought of war’s futility inspired an episode which was narrated throughout the army in that winter of ’15, and led to curious conversations in dugouts and billets. Above a German front-line trench appeared a plank on which, in big letters, was scrawled these words:

“Not such bloody fools as all that!” said a sergeant, and in a few minutes the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire.

Another plank appeared, with other words:

A third plank was put up:

“We’re all fools. Let’s all go home.”

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some laughter, and men repeating it said: “There’s a deal of truth in those words. Why should this go on? What’s it all about?

“Likely, ain’t it?” said the other boy.

“Father Christmas would be a bloody fool to come out here⁠ ⁠… They’d be full of water in the morning.”

“You’ll get some presents,” I said. “They haven’t forgotten you at home.”

The snowflakes fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them tenderly.

It was as though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold their wings above the obscene things of war.

For a little while the snow brought something like peace. The guns were quieter, for artillery observation was impossible. There could be no sniping, for the scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches.

To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to Hébuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the Somme.

Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.

I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw the visible reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn there, and told the story of all the struggle there by the upheaval of earth, the wreckage of old trenches, the mine-craters and …

Some of them looked up as I passed, and my eyes and theirs stared into each other. The women’s faces were lined and their eyes sunken.

They had the look of people who have lived through many agonies and have more to suffer.

Not all these citizens of Arras were below ground. There was a greengrocer’s shop still carrying on a little trade. I went into another shop and bought some picture postcards of the ruins within a few yards of it.

They seemed to come out of holes in the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. “Are you afraid of the shells?” I asked. They grimaced up at the sky and giggled.

They had got used to the hell of it all, and dodged death as they would a man with a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his lash.

In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to stay.

So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our little hells.

“Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.”

For days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2’s flinging up volumes of sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs.

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

“It isn’t true,” he said. “I don’t believe it⁠ ⁠… We’re mad, that’s all!⁠ ⁠… The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?”

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise of gunfire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard of snow.

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an amiable suggestion.

“Don’t you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack upon the enemy?”

There was something in those words, “a slight attack,” which is irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern trench war. But they were not spoken in jest.

… years, until it was nothing but a wild scrap heap of red brick and twisted iron, and, in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed to escape all shellfire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a mass of masonry.

Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard of ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.

So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war, and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and men who came out between one battle and another, and by “lorry-jumping” could reach this …

All the types of young English manhood came down this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or more of slaughter.

I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes; and Death was the hunter.

They stared into the shop windows in a dazed way, or strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as masks.

The woman demanded the thirty centimes; kept on demanding with a voice more shrill.

“It was her voice that vexed me,” said the Australian. “That and the bloody injustice.”

The five Australians drank the five glasses of porto, and the tall Australian paid the thirty centimes each without further argument. Life is too short for argument.

The five Australians drank the five glasses of porto, and the tall Australian paid the thirty centimes each without further argument.

Life is too short for argument.

Then, without words, he took each of the five glasses, broke it at the stem, and dropped it over the counter.

“Thanks for your trouble,” he said.

“It was the injustice I couldn’t stick. I always pay the right price. I come from Australia.”

I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above all the passersby. He would be at Pozières again next day.

He laughed foolishly and said:

“Always devil to pay in morning.”

We were soaked to the skin.

“I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was very decent of you. Many thanks.”

The boy was a gentleman when sober.

I wonder if he died at Pozières, or farther on by the Butte de Warlencourt … A week later I saw an advertisement in an Amiens paper: “Horse found. Brown, with white sock on right foreleg. Apply—”

“A good night for a German air raid,” said one of the officers.

“Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep,” said the other man.

The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their shutters.

… cathedral through a side-street going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice—a big, grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways, and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her scales.

There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that woman in stone.

They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition of war for passersby to see. Many of them revealed no faces, but were white masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round their heads.

“Look out! They’re coming! Can’t you see them moving by the wire?”

The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their sleep; lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness.

Sights which they had tried to forget stared at them through their closed eyelids. The daylight came and the night nurse slipped away, and the day nurse shook one’s shoulders and said: “Time to wash and shave. No malingering!”

“You’re merciless!” I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse dabbed my back with cold iodine at six o’clock on a winter morning, with the windows wide open.

“Oh, there’s no mercy in this place!” said the strong-minded girl. “It’s kill or cure here, and no time to worry.”

“You’re all devils,” said the New Zealand general. “You don’t care a damn about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the time the doctor comes around.

… a little square plot of grass bordered by flowerbeds, I had had strange conversations with boys who had revealed their souls a little, after dinner in the darkness, their faces bared now and then by the light of cigarettes or the flare of a match.

“Death is nothing,” said one young officer just down from the Somme fields for a week’s rest-cure for jangled nerves. “I don’t care a damn for death; but it’s the waiting for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the sight of one’s pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear under shellfire, that break one’s pluck⁠ ⁠… My nerves are like fiddle-strings.”

In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between their stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and ditches under frightful fire which had “wiped out” their platoons or companies.

… Away behind, a French farmer was cutting his grass with a long scythe, in steady, sweeping strokes. Only now and then did he stand to look over at the most frightful picture of battle ever seen until then by human eyes.

I wondered, and wonder still, what thoughts were passing through that old brain to keep him at his work, quietly, steadily, on the edge of hell.

For there, quite close and clear, was hell, of man’s making, produced by chemists and scientists, after centuries in search of knowledge.

In a field close by some troops were being ticketed with yellow labels fastened to their backs. It was to distinguish them so that artillery observers might know them from the enemy when their turn came to go into the battleground.

Something in the sight of those yellow tickets made me feel sick.

… Away behind, a French farmer was cutting his grass with a long scythe, in steady, sweeping strokes. Only now and then did he stand to look over at the most frightful picture of battle ever seen until then by human eyes.

That was a physical and mental law. But until that time these flying-men were the knights-errant of the war, and most of them did not need any driving to the risks they took with boyish recklessness.

They were mostly boys⁠—babes, as they seemed to me, when I saw them in their tents or dismounting from their machines.

On “dud” days, when there was no visibility at all, they spent their leisure hours joyriding to Amiens or some other town where they could have a “binge.”

“But,” said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously,

“I don’t want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!”

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man, soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way.

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he was mad. That was not surprising.

We were all mad, in one way or another or at one time or another.

It was the unusual form of madness that astonished me. I envied him his particular “kink.” I wished I could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of knowledge.

Capt. Charles Lowndes—“dear old Charlie”—received us most politely in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, with smoothly paneled walls fitted up with shelves, and good deal furniture made to match.

“This is a nice little home in hell,” said Charles.

“At any moment, of course, we may be blown to bits, but meanwhile it is very comfy down here, and what makes everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy and an unlimited supply of German soda-water.

We were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in every limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again.”

Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about them.

The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to all this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the cold, scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war.

“The stench of the dead lying round us is unbearable.”

“We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts.”

“It is hell let loose.” … “It is horrible.” … “We’ve lived in misery.”

… of their cries of agony one gets to the real truth of war—the “glory” and the “splendor” of it preached by the German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men.

Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death and the same hell.

Behind the lines the German General Staff, counting up the losses of battalions and divisions who staggered out weakly, performed juggling tricks with what reserves it could lay its hands on, and flung up stray units to relieve the poor wretches in the trenches.

… dominated by the fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the feeling of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was through a combination of innumerable circumstances.”

So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like puppets tied to strings and made to dance.

It was the old Dance of Death which has happened before in the folly of mankind.

She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of the old Reverend Mother.

“How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”

Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs, which deal with the strategy and machinery of war.

Croisille and Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places, stayed there too long to dodge them always.

They were inhabitants, not visitors.

The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered.

From what I saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion. Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of intelligence.

If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their own.

General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward north and south of St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was extremely courteous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of duty.

You do not know what Flanders means.

Flanders means endless human endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death.

”

He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.

“Monsieur,” he whispered, “after eighty years I nearly lose my faith in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory? Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!”

One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of our boys lay in pools …

Their steel hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were stark in spirit still.

“Only the mud beat us,” they said. Man after man said that.

“We should have gone much farther except for the mud.”

Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle Suzanne behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an eyelid, though officers in the room were startled.

“Vous n’avez pas peur, même de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of death?”) I asked.

“Je m’en fiche de la mort!” (“I don’t care a damn for death!”)

“Vous n’avez pas peur, même de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of death?”) I asked.

“Je m’en fiche de la mort!” (“I don’t care a damn for death!”)

The Hôtel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes and were noisy.

They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter, such as that in Flanders.

Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children, or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again.

They hated this war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then as an escape from intolerable life under fire.

For weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long.

One laughed, but the specter echoed one’s laughter and said, “Wait!”

The mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one’s spirit in the woods above La Fère, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German “Archies.”

Foch waited to strike.

The genius of Foch was that he waited until the last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of his counter-stroke.

For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but he gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up behind our lines they were withdrawn again.

Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the bloody, futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light had come to them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in this “Great Swindle” against their race.

It was defeat and agony which enlightened them, as most people⁠—even ourselves⁠—are enlightened only by suffering and disillusionment, and never by successes.

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures.

What fools the Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this massacre!

What had anyone gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and revolt.

The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us courtesy and submission.

The waiter drew a diagram on the tablecloth. “I was just there.” The three cavalry officers laughed. “Extraordinary! We were a few yards away.” They chatted with the waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against them in a famous football-match.

They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup.

That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general.

Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in a strident voice.

“Some English gentlemen are swine,” said the young waiter. “But all German gentlemen are swine.”

Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or across the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the “Huns.”

For English soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in the presence of German boys and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, kissed their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.

“Kids are kids,” said a sergeant-major. “I don’t want to cut their throats! Queer, ain’t it?”

Many of the “kids” looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief at this foreign occupation.

Almost every family had lost one son. Some of them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter.

They had paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been drowned in blood.

In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them playing old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That was going too far! I looked round the Café Bauer—a strange scene after four and a half years Hun-hating.

to German soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or buttons. English people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the maintenance of the blockade, would have become hysterical if they had come suddenly to this German café before the signing of peace.

Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature.

Face to face, British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in spite of being a “Hun.” As ecclesiastics would say when not roused to patriotic fury, they had been made “in the image of God.”

Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature.

Face to face, British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in spite of being a “Hun.”

As ecclesiastics would say when not roused to patriotic fury, they had been made “in the image of God.” There were pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses. Blue-eyed girls with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English officers. They were clean.

… a policy no higher than common sense, but as high as that, establish a new phase of civilization in which military force would be reduced to the limits of safety for European peoples eager to end the folly of war and get back to work.

I hoped too much. There was no such peace.

How could they save something out of the remnants of the power that had been theirs? How could they keep alive, feed their women and children, pay their monstrous debts?

They had lost their faith as well as their war.

Nothing that they had believed was true. They had believed in their invincible armies—and the armies had bled to death and broken.

Spy-mania flourished in mean streets, German music was banned in English drawing-rooms. Preachers and professors denied any quality of virtue or genius to German poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars. A critical weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and lack of patriotism.

Truth was delivered bound to passion.

Hatred at home, inspired largely by feminine hysteria and official propaganda, reached such heights that when fighting-men came back on leave their refusal to say much against their enemy, their straightforward assertions that Fritz was not so black as he was painted, that he fought …

Base passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. Greedy was the appetite of the mob for atrocity tales.

The more revolting they were the quicker they were swallowed.

The foul absurdity of the “corpse-factory” was not rejected any more than the tale of the “crucified Canadian” (disproved by our own G.H.Q.)

Let us get back to sanity and save our younger sons. Let us hand over to justice those who will continue the slaughter of our youth!” There was no forgiveness, no generous instinct, no large-hearted common sense in any combatant nation of Europe.

Like wolves they had their teeth in one another’s throats, and would not let go, though all bloody and exhausted, until one should fall at the last gasp, to be mangled by the others.

Yet in each nation, even in Germany, there were men and women who saw the folly of the war and the crime of it, and desired to end it by some act of renunciation and repentance, and by some uplifting of the people’s spirit to …

The Allies did not help them to do so, because of their lust for bloody vengeance and their desire for the spoils of victory.

The peoples shared the blame of their rulers because they were not nobler than their rulers.

They cannot now plead ignorance or betrayal by false ideals which duped them, because character does not depend on knowledge, and it was the character of European peoples which failed in the crisis of the world’s fate, so that they followed the callback of the …

After that, year after year, they flung themselves against the German defense and died in heaps, or held their lines, as at Verdun, against colossal onslaught, until the dead lay in masses.

But the living said, “They shall not pass!” and kept their word.

The people of France—above all, the women of France—behind the lines, were the equals of the fighting-men in valor. They fought with despair, through many black months, and did not yield.

“We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, or five, and in the end we shall smash you,” said the woman who told me this.

The German officer stared at her and said, “You people are wonderful!”

Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred of the Germans, their desire for vengeance, complete and terrible, at all cost of life, even though France should bleed to death and die after victory, is to be understood in the heights and depths of …

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which made the private soldier no more than a number.

They were ordered about like galley-slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being.

Often, as I know, they were detrained at railheads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were weak and famished.

Was it not rather that the masses of men engaged in slaughter were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for one another’s markets, covetous of one another’s wealth, and callous of the lives of humble men?

Surely if the leaders of the warring nations were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or dismemberment at the weekend, they would settle the business and come to terms before the week was out.

I heard that proposition put forward many times by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.