Part 2

Among the wreckage of the countryside you can detect the traces of old standing comfort and rustic wealth. The many wayside windmills show you how much corn was grown. In size and plan they are curiously like the mighty stone dovecotes of Fifeshire. Almost as frequent as ruined windmills are ruined sugar refineries, standing a little detached in the fields, like the one at Courcelette, for which armies fought as they fought for the neighbouring windmill. Beet was the next crop to grain. There were little industries, too, like the making of buttons for shirts at Fricourt, where you see by the road small refuse heaps of old oyster shells with many round holes where the little discs have been cut cleanly out of the mother-of-pearl, though all other trace of the factories has vanished. Each village commune had its wood, with certain rights for the members of the commune to take timber; Fricourt Wood at the doors of Fricourt, Mametz Wood rather far from Mametz, as there was no good wood nearer. All these woods were well fenced and kept up, like patches of hedged cover dotted over a park. It was a good country to live in, and good men came from it. The French Army Corps that drew on these villages for recruits has won honour beyond all other French Corps in the battle of the Somme.

Many skilled writers have tried to describe the aghast look of these fields where the battle had passed over them. But every new visitor says the same thing--that they had not succeeded; no eloquence has yet conveyed the disquieting strangeness of the portent. You can enumerate many ugly and queer freaks of the destroying powers--the villages not only planed off the face of the earth but rooted out of it, house by house, like bits of old teeth; the thin brakes of black stumps that used to be woods, the old graveyards wrecked like kicked ant-heaps, the tilth so disembowelled by shells that most of the good upper mould created by centuries of the work of worms and men is buried out of sight and the unwrought primeval subsoil lies on the top; the sowing of the whole ground with a new kind of dragon’s teeth--unexploded shells that the plough may yet detonate, and bombs that may let themselves off if their safety pins rust away sooner than the springs within. But no piling up of sinister detail can express the sombre and malign quality of the battlefield landscape as a whole. “It makes a goblin of the sun”--or it might if it were not peopled in every part with beings so reassuringly and engagingly human, sane and reconstructive as British soldiers.

G. H. Q., France.

_January, 1917._

XXI

AMIENS CATHEDRAL

The “Parthenon of Gothic Architecture” is seen in this exquisitely delicate and sensitive drawing from the south-east, with the lovely rose window of the south transept partly in view on the left. The wooden spire, which Ruskin called “the pretty caprice of a village carpenter,” looks finer in the drawing than in the original, the relative flimsiness of the material being less apparent. Nothing is lost by the intervention of the foreground houses, as the façade of the south transept, like the famous west front and the choir stalls, is sheathed with sand-bags to a height of thirty or forty feet for protection against German bombs. Patrolling French aeroplanes are seen in the sky.

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XXII

THE VIRGIN OF MONTAUBAN

An image which strangely escaped destruction during the time when the village of Montauban, now utterly erased, was being shelled successively by British and German guns. By a similar caprice of fate the Virgin of Carency, now enshrined in a little chapel in the French military cemetery at Villers-aux-Bois, received only some shot wounds when the village was destroyed during the French advance towards Lens in 1915.

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XXIII

A SKETCH IN ALBERT

Albert, as a whole, is wrecked to the degree shown in this drawing. The building in the middle distance, on the right of the road, with its roof timbers exposed, is a wrecked factory, and many hundreds of bicycles and sewing machines now make an extraordinary tangle of twisted and broken metal in its basement.

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XXIV

TAKING THE WOUNDED ON BOARD

Wounded men from the Somme, ordered to England by the Medical Officer commanding the General or Stationary Hospital in which each man has been a patient, are being put on board a hospital ship at the base. In the centre of the foreground is seen the timber framework of the ship’s large red cross of electric lights. With this, and a tier of some sixty green lights running from stem to stern, a hospital ship at night is a beautiful as well as unmistakeable object at sea.

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XXV

“WALKING WOUNDED” SLEEPING ON DECK

The best place to sleep, on a summer night in a full hospital ship, for a man whose wound is not grave enough to cause serious “shock” and consequent need of much artificial warming.

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XXVI (a and b)

“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP

This drawing was done in the warm early autumn of 1916. All “walking wounded” wear lifebelts, if their injuries permit, during the Channel crossing, and each “stretcher case” has a lifebelt under his pillow, if not on. The necessity for this, in a war with Germany, has been proved by the fate of too many of our hospital ships.

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“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP

The deck of a British hospital ship is one of the most cheerful places in the world. Every man is at rest after toil, is about to see friends after separation, can smoke when he likes, and has in every other man on board a companion with whom endless reminiscences can be exchanged, and perhaps the merits and demerits of the Ypres salient, or the most advantageous use of “tanks,” warmly debated, as is the custom of privates of the New Army. Silent or vocal, a great beatitude fills the vessel.

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XXVII (a and b)

A MAIN APPROACH TO THE BRITISH FRONT

The canvas screen on the left marks a place where the road had been under enemy observation. A “sausage,” or stationary observation balloon, is seen above the road. “Sausages” are not pretty. They exhibit, at various stages of inflation, the various shapes taken by a maggot partly uncurled. But the work done from them, besides being always disagreeable and often risky, is extremely valuable.

[Illustration]

“ROAD LIABLE TO BE SHELLED”

A stretch of high-road which was under enemy observation when drawn. Such roads are, of course, only used with due caution. The whole drawing is remarkably instinct with the artist’s sense of a malign invisible presence--a “terror that walketh by noonday”--infesting the sunny vacant length of the forbidden road.

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XXVIII

TROUBLE ON THE ROAD

War has its tyre troubles, as peace has. In this case the lack of a spare wheel, and the consequent necessity for changing an inner tube, had the compensation of giving the artist time to make the drawing.

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XXIX

BRITISH TROOPS ON THE MARCH TO THE SOMME

A typical Picardy landscape behind the frontal zone of destruction. The crescent-shaped line of troops and transport on the road is a small fraction of a Division moving up to take its place in the front line.

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XXX

A SKETCH AT CONTALMAISON

The place is Contalmaison, but the drawing has caught the spirit of the whole of the shattered country-side recaptured this year.

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XXXI

ON THE SOMME: SAUSAGE BALLOONS

A typical winter scene on the Somme battlefield. The nearer “sausage,” or captive observation balloon, is being run out to its proper height for work, by unwinding its cable from a reel on the ground. The further balloon is already moored high enough and its observer, alone in the small hanging cage, is at work with his map, telescope and telephone.

[Illustration]

XXXII

A WRECKED AEROPLANE NEAR ALBERT

A casualty in the R.F.C. The smashed biplane and the retreating stretcher party on the right explain themselves. On the left, Albert church, to the right of a tall factory chimney, is seen in the distance.

[Illustration]

XXXIII

A MESS OF THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS

The Officers’ mess at the most advanced station of the Royal Flying Corps on the Somme front. The great tent was designed as an aeroplane hangar. An R.F.C. mess usually has an atmosphere of its own. There is more variety of apparel than at other messes; there are more dogs; personal mascots abound, and in many ways there is more expression of individual choice or peculiarity than elsewhere--corresponding, perhaps, to the more individual character of a flying officer’s work and responsibilities and to the temperament which leads to success in flying. The officers are drawn from all sorts of regiments, and each continues to wear his regimental badge. It is winter, and the second figure from the left is wearing a fur jacket.

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XXXIV

WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE ON TRONES WOOD FROM MONTAUBAN

The drawing expresses well the singular aspect of the parts of the battlefield where artillery fire was heavy and where the conical holes made in the ground by high explosive shells were consequently close together. At a later stage these separate pock-marks overlap, like the pits in confluent small-pox, and the whole of the shelled ground becomes soft and loose, as though raked deeply but unevenly. In the distance the detached higher puffs of smoke from bursting shrapnel are distinguishable from the rising clouds of smoke from high-explosive shells.

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XXXV (a and b)

IN THE REGAINED TERRITORY

Both the places drawn were in German hands until July. The first drawing is of a cemetery found behind the old German front line near Fricourt. There were many imperfectly marked German graves near these. They have since been marked, as many thousands of hurriedly made British graves have been, with wooden crosses and metal inscriptions by our Graves’ Registration and Inquiries Units.

The second drawing, with a helmeted sentry at the sand-bagged entrance to a dug-out, conveys the sinister air of a village destroyed, but not quite effaced, by shell-fire.

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XXXVI

A V.A.D. REST STATION

At a base railway station in France. Between the arrivals of hospital trains from the front the V.A.D. workers occupy themselves in the “dispensary” in rolling bandages or preparing hot cocoa and other food for the wounded or sick men who will pass through the station.

[Illustration]

XXXVII

A GATEWAY AT ARRAS

A few hundred yards from this gate the Anglo-French treaty of peace was signed after Agincourt. Part of the city’s later history is written in the curious and beautiful Spanish architecture of its chief squares. It is now in the middle stage of destruction: almost every building is shattered or injured, but enough is standing to make the empty city seem still sensitive, in its very stones, under the enemy’s random shellfire.

[Illustration]

XXXVIII

OUTSIDE ARRAS, NEAR THE GERMAN LINES

At Arras the Germans always seem very near you. In fact they are. No other famous town in the Allies’ hands has a German front trench in its suburbs; nowhere do the two front trenches come so close to each other. The result is a subtle quality of apprehensiveness in the atmosphere of the silent empty city. It seems like someone standing on tiptoe, peering and listening, in a solitary place, for some vague unseen danger, or like a horse nervously pricking its ears, you cannot tell why. This tingle of uncanny dread has been conveyed with remarkable success in this figureless but haunted landscape.

[Illustration]

XXXIX

WATCHING GERMAN PRISONERS

British soldiers watching recently captured Germans on their way down from the front to an Army Corps “cage.” Until removed to the base our prisoners are well housed in huts or tents in a kind of compound fenced with barbed wire and placed well outside the range of their friends’ artillery. There are no attempts at escape. Our men, behind the front line, always watch the arrival of new prisoners with silent curiosity. Those of our soldiers who have themselves fought with the Germans, and captured them, usually befriend them with cigarettes and drinks from water-bottles.

[Illustration]

XL

ON THE SOMME: “MUD”

At a camp, near Albert, whose Church, with the image knocked awry, is seen to the right. With the permission of the officer on the left some soldiers are fishing in the mud for such fragments of old timber, boxes and tins as may be of use to them in their field housekeeping, though they are not worth collecting for deposit at the official Salvage Dumps.

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TRENCH SCENERY.

In one of these drawings Mr. Bone gives a rousing glimpse of trench life at a moment of action. These are its moments of transfiguration, when all the glow of courage, that has been banked down and husbanded through months of waiting and guarding, bursts, at a word of command, into flame. The rest of trench life is work, contrivance and observation. It has been called monotonous. But, for any man who has not lost the heart of a boy, it has the relish of an endlessly changeful outdoor adventure, a game with the earth and the weather, as well as with the more official enemy.

No two points in an Allied front trench are wholly alike. Certain general patterns there are, but no facsimiles. Each traverse or bay has a look of its own; it is personal and expresses, as Robinson Crusoe’s stockade might have done, the nature of some man or men making shift, each after his kind, to put up what they could, in the shortest time, between their bodies and danger. A German firing trench is less various. In it you seem to see the minds of a few large and able contractors; in ours the minds of thousands of good campers-out. To put it in another way, the German trench has, in some measure, the quality of a long street built, well enough, to a single design; ours possesses the charm of a strip of coast or a long country lane, where nature or man has made every indentation and turn a surprise, and each farmer has made gates and hedges to his own mind.

The line goes through wonderful places and charges them with singular thrills of romance. It has made windmills famous as forts, and brought herons into the suburbs of cities. In one place it runs across water and land so intermixed that the sentries of both armies are upon little islands crowned with breast-works like grouse butts; you see them, when the winter evening falls, standing immobile, waist-deep in mist, each man about forty yards from his enemy. Men have stood there, turn by turn, for two years and a half, moving softly and whispering as if in a church, till the shyest of wildfowl have learnt to treat the surrounding marsh as their own, and the only sound is of wild duck and snipe astir between the muzzles of two nations’ loaded rifles, snipe safe among the snipers. At more than one place the two front lines converge until each sentry knows that he is within a gentle bomb’s throw of the enemy. Out of the firing trench, at one of these places, you walk on tiptoe along a short sap that halves this short distance, and from its end you look up at a small heap of rubble--a couple of cart-loads--and know that some German is cautiously listening, like you, on its further side.

Those are the cramped and contorted parts of the front. A few miles away it will straighten and loose itself out; you see it run free, in great, easy curves, up the slopes of wide moorlands, the two front lines drawn apart almost three hundred yards. Each is a double band of colour; the white ribbon of its dug chalk and the broader rust-brown ribbon of its tangled wire stand out clear against the shabby velveteen grey of the heath. Here there is less of thrill and more of ease in trench life; by day the sentries peer, hour by hour, into the baffling mist that is woven across their sight by our own and the enemy’s wire; it is like trying to see through low and leafless, but thick, undergrowth. By night the wire makes, to the sentry’s eye, a middle stratum of opaque dark grey, between the full blackness of the earth below it and the more penetrable obscurity of the night air above. But the darkness is never trusted for long. All night each army is sending up rocket-like lights to burst and hang like arc lamps in the air over the firing trench of the other. From a commanding point you can see, at any moment of any night, scores of these ascending rockets, each like a line drawn on the dark with a pencil of flame, arching over to intersect each other near the zenith of their flight, incessantly tracing and re-tracing the lines of a Gothic nave over all No Man’s Land, from the Alps to the sea. All night, too, there is a kind of pulse of light in the sky, along the whole front, from the flash of guns. From the trenches the flash itself can seldom be seen, but the sky winks and winks from moment to moment with the spread and contraction of a trembling radiance like summer lightning.

At most parts of the line a man in the front trench is cut off from landscape. To look at a tree behind the enemy’s lines may be to give a mark to a sniper hidden in its boughs. By day you see the upper half of the dome of the sky, and, through loopholes, a few yards of rough earth or chalk, then the nebulous wire and, through its thin places, perhaps a few uniforms, blue, grey or brown, lying beyond, among the coarse grass and weeds. At night you see all the stars well, and on moonlight nights, if you walk the trench softly, you can watch strange friezes sharply silhouetted on the sky line of the parapet, the wars and loves of capering rats, “flouting the ivory moon.” Whole choirs of larks may be heard: neither cannon nor small arms seem to alarm them; and most of the ground has its own hawk to quarter it daily.

To men put on this short allowance of natural sights and sounds it is an extraordinary pleasure to find in the rear of their trench a clean rivulet, such as often occurs in chalk land, where the surface water filters rapidly in and comes out at the bases of slopes like so many crystal springs. But the greatest of all trench delights is the re-discovery, every year, of the sun. Some day in March it is suddenly found to have a miraculous warmth, and everybody off duty comes out like the bees and stands about in the trench, sunning his head and shoulders in the tepid rays and adoring--quite inarticulately--and feeling that all’s well with the world. A winter in trenches revives, in us children of civilisation, a pre-Promethean rapture of love for the sun; and the dark nights, in which not a match must be struck, makes us, at any rate, think more highly than ever we did of the moon, which halves the strain of the soldier on guard, and of the stars which guide him back overland to his billet, at a relief, to sleep in Elysium. So, for a man who has all his senses alive and unjaded, the hard and bare life has its compensations. It makes him do without many things; but it also quickens delight in the things which are at the base of all the rest, and without which there could not have been the incomparable adventure and spectacle of life on the earth.

G. H. Q., France.

_February, 1917._

XLI

CASSEL

Cassel has no great part in this war. But it has endured ancient sieges; three notable battles have taken its name since 1070; the last of them led to the annexation of Cassel to France in 1678 and gave her a town finely set on a hill amidst lowlands, and equally good to look at and look from. The many windmills about it give Cassel an air of liveliness as you approach, and this cheerful effect is maintained on reaching the main square, drawn by Mr. Bone, with its lightsome spaciousness and comfortable, well-proportioned houses. The eyes of passing Scottish soldiers find a familiar look in the “step” gables of many of Cassel’s roofs. One is seen on the right.

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XLII

A LINE OF TANKS

Thanks to the imaginative power of the artist, the “Tank” is here seen not as the British soldier sees it--a friendly giant with lovably droll tricks of gait and gesture--but as it must look to a threatened enemy, the very embodiment of momentum irresistibly grinding its way towards its prey. In the presence of “tanks” as here drawn--though there is no trace of exaggeration in the drawing--the spectator is as a crushed worm and, in fact, finds there is more force in that phrase than he knew.

[Illustration]

XLIII

A KITCHEN IN THE FIELD

One of the improvements in our field organisation since the early part of the war is the more general provision of hot meals for the men in the front trenches. From cookhouses like the one shown in the drawing, or from travelling field kitchens, the hot stew and tea are brought up the communication trench in dixies, two to a platoon, each dixie being slung from a pole carried on two men’s shoulders. The cooks work under shell fire and many have been killed.

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XLIV

THE GUN PIT: HARDENING THE STEEL

The drawing shows one of the most thrilling moments in the making of a great gun. The doors of the furnace have just been thrown back and the heated gun tube is about to be lifted by the giant pincers of the crane.

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XLV

THE GUN PIT: A GUN JACKET ENTERING THE OIL TANK

The gun jacket shown here has just been heated in the furnace and is about to plunge into its oil bath. The spectacle is always striking, especially at dusk, when the fierce glow of the huge mass of metal seems more brilliant than ever. The passage is made in a few seconds.

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XLVI

THE GUN PIT: THE GREAT CLUTCHES OF THE CRANE

The figures in the foreground give a scale by which to judge the size and power of the crane that handles the heavier guns in the gun pit. The tube has now been lifted from the oil tank and waits to be carried back to the gun shop lathes.

[Illustration]

XLVII

MOUNTING A GREAT GUN

This is one of the largest guns. At such a scene as its mounting one is always struck by the contrast between the restless stir of the minute figures busy about it and the massive impassivity--for the present--of the thing they have created. “A great gun,” it has been said, “is so _sheer_.” In a gun shop it dwarfs everything round it and seems the embodiment, at the same time, of immobility and of menace.

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XLVIII

“THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS”