BEHIND THE LINES—I

The road between —— and —— is a fearful and wonderful place in the swift-closing winter evening. The early winter rains are drifting gustily across it. The last of the autumn leaves are whirling away. The far western valley is a gulf of mist; the rain-squalls wash about its slopes.

The road beneath you, between its low flanks, is a channel of mobile black slush, too far churned for striation. Ever since the rains began, two weeks ago, there has been a traffic on it that is continuous—a traffic that has had to be directed and disentangled at innumerable stages along its length. So the road surface (it washes over a solid foundation) is a squirting slime.

The motor-lorry is the vehicle par excellence. The wonder is how it is supplied and maintained at this rate. In most villages is a tyre-press where its wheels are re-rubbered as often as need be—and begad! that's often enough to keep a large and noble army of mechanics hard-worked. Any day you can see the old tyre being prised off and the new, smooth, full, blue one pushed on. The old is like nothing so much as a rim of GruyÈre cheese, with the perforations clean through to the rim, everywhere. The question that always occurs is: Did the lorry run to the last on a tyre like that? The answer is: Yes—had to.

The motor-lorry it is, then, that monopolises the road. There is a stream of them passing either way which is not quite constant, but is nearly so. Lorries are almost as thick as the trees that line every road in France.

Between these honking, rumbling streams, and in the gaps of them, other traffic goes as it can—that is, Colonel's cars, motor-cycles (there are almost as many cycles as lorries; but they can pant an intermittent course through any maze), motor-ambulances, tractors. There are French Colonels, English Colonels, mere Majors, and even Generals, threading impatiently through the maze. It is obviously aggravating to them, this snail's pace. A Colonel likes to tear along, because he is a Colonel. One is speaking now of a main road between railheads. Put them on a side-road, where there is nothing in sight but a few ambulances, a lorry or two, and some cows and women, and they move at a pace that inspires an adequate respect in all who have to stand aside for their necks' sake.

But in this horde of beastly lorries what can a Colonel do, more than glare and gnaw a rain-dewed moustache? There are supply lorries, ammunition lorries, Flying Corps lorries, road-repairing lorries, lorries bearing working-parties, freights of German prisoners, lorries returning empty. Beside, there are always a few 'buses moving troops, and sometimes, participating in the general mÊlÉe, is a troop of cavalry or a half-mile of artillery limbers or a divisional train of horse transport—or all three—making an adequate contribution to the creaking, rattling, lumbering, panting, honking, shouting, cursing, squelching, bobbing, swaying, dodging throng. A military highroad in France behind the line, any time in the day or night, baffles description—especially if it's raining.

Conceive (if you can) what this becomes at ten o'clock at night in an advanced section of the road where lights would be suicidal. But I doubt if you can—no, not unless you've been in the whirl of it.

Far the pleasanter journey you'll have by boarding your motor-lorry on a fine summer morning. The country smiles all about you. Smile is the only word. You catch the infection of green bank, green plain flecked with brown and gold stubble and streaked with groves of elm and beech, poplar and plane: you get infected and rejoice. If you climb the crest of one of the slopes less gentle than most slopes here, you may look down on it all—on the double line of trees setting-off here and there across the plains, up the slopes, down the valleys, marking the roads, of which trees are the invariable index; at the winding stream, banked with hop and willow, flowing through a belt of richer greenness: that's how you know a stream from a height—not by the water, of which you see nothing for the groves that border it, but by the irregularity of these plantations (the roads are planted with a deliberate symmetry) and the deepening in the colour of the lush grasses of the basin.

You'll look down, too, on the villages dropped irregularly along its course. There's the low roof, the gable, the amorphous mass of greys and yellows topped by the pyramidal church spire rising grey slate to its summit. The number of villages you may see in thirty square miles of the Somme district is amazing. The whole Somme Valley is a mazed network of roads and streams, with groves and harvest-fields in the crowding interstices, the whole teeming with grey villages. This is the character of the country; and very lovely it is.

From your hilltop you'll see, perhaps, a bombing-school at play in the valley—the line of murderous, irregular bursts in their white, vapourish smoke, all forced into the extremity of unnaturalness by the deep colour of the wood behind.

In June the depth of the colour in this French country gave the sky itself a depth of colour not known in Australia. The cumulus resting on the sky-line would be arresting in its contrast with wood and pasture, and the blue of the gaps above it heightened too. Sometimes the days were clouded in the vault, but with a clear horizon; then you would get a kind of rich opalescence, the sunlight shut out above deflected and concentrated in the glowing horizon, its streaks of colour intensified fourfold by the depth of green in the landscape. Some such middle afternoons I never shall forget.

Upon the less frequented roads civilian traffic is frequent. It's mostly country-women in carts with pigs or oxen behind or with produce (or merchandise) for a village market. The village markets for a whole district are conducted by a sort of mobile column of vendors. They move (under a pass issued from the gendarmerie) from village to village in a species of caravan. Every village has a set market-day; the vendors move in agreement with it. They sell under booths on the pavements—sell fabrics, fruit, vegetables, fish, drapery, and clothing; and at some corner agreed upon they have the cattle market, with all the beasts tethered by a rope from horns to knee.

Approaching a village which is "holding" its market, you'll meet these beasts being driven in gangs, united in sixes and sevens by a rope connecting their horns. They are almost all conducted by women and boys. The boys are incredibly cruel to them, not only en route, but at the market-place.

It's not the women and girls conducting the market cattle who abuse them. They (and those in the market wagons) give you a smile and "Bon jour, m'sieur." There is a charm about this French usage of looking you in the eye and giving you a frank smile and a cheerful Good-day without ever having met you before.

You cannot go far without traversing some part of a military highroad—such is the frequency and the height of mobility. Especially is this so about those railheads adjacent to the line. Troops of cavalry, infantry, and artillery and horsed transport crowd French routes, even to the exclusion of the motor-lorry. For miles you may see nothing but a sea of yellow, bobbing, wash-basin trench-helmets. Unlovely they are, but useful. In such parts, too, the motor-'buses for rushing up reinforcements prevail. They come in long, swaying processions, filled with grinning warriors, who exchange repartee between themselves and the freight of other 'buses, and spend a lot of time in gnawing biscuit and jam. They gesticulate with these morsels.

The 'buses are just such as you see in the Strand, except for colour, which here is, of course, a dingy khaki. Above and within, when they are stuffed, they have an enormously useful carrying capacity.

At some stages of a route (and at very frequent stages) you pass a lorry-park, in the vicinity of which you are ordered to reduce the pace. There are whole battalions of lorries laagered and parked—miles of them—lining the main roads, lining the side-roads, lined in the fields; hordes of them radiating from the H.Q. at the main road. They are splashed and streaked and pied with colour, like Jacob's ewes, to baffle aircraft. They resemble, indeed, the streaked cruisers off Anzac. Some columns have other decorations. You'll pass, for instance, a Dickens convoy: the lorries are named from the novels—Sarah Gamp preceding Mr. Pickwick, with Little Nell panting in the rear; Bill Sykes, Scrooge, and the rest of them—with (in rare cases) crude attempts at illustration by portraiture.

The fleets of lorries give a sense of efficiency and mobility—even of dignity—as they stand ranked there.

Casualty clearing stations are very frequent indeed in these advanced posts. With a curious appearance of contradictoriness, their marquees are streaked and splashed against aircraft, but here and there bear an enormous Red Cross glaring an appeal at the heavens. The language of all this is: "We're hospital, and you know it from these outward and visible signs. But if you're going to be frightful, we'll make it as hard as we can for you to hit." ... Over the road is the burial-ground, significantly full.

Mostly these hospitals are on a railway-line. Some are not. From the latter the stream of motor-ambulances is continuous at certain seasons. There are Sisters in these advanced stations; they are little more than dressing stations, and more than seldom they are shelled. It's no joke for women; they do not blench. There have been "honours and rewards" made them for continuing to dress cases when suffering wounds themselves.

And who shall describe the strafings suffered by some of the advanced railheads? Shelling of clearing stations may be more or less accidental, but railheads are good game and are shelled very deliberately and very thoroughly. I visited one afternoon a railhead supply depÔt that had been shelled from five to nine that morning. The havoc was good ground for self-congratulation by the enemy batteries that caused it. Nine-inch shell for four hours, if well observed by those who deliver it, can do great things. There were shell-holes all over the station yard—lines ripped up, trucks blown to splinters, supply stacks scattered to the fields, petrol dump smouldering, station-house battered. This is horribly disorganising. Only one thing is worse, of that kind: the strafing of a railway junction by bombs. This is obstructive, and isolating almost beyond retrieve.

The villages about such stations suffer seriously. They bear the marks about the house walls. Villages adjacent to batteries—apart from railheads—get it even worse. Generally they lie behind a wood which conceals our heavy artillery.

At any junction along a military road you are impressed by the usefulness of the military police. They stand there directing the traffic by pantomime, just as in London. Their word is law from which there is no appeal. If a driver grows argumentative it is always the worse for him. District A.P.M.'s will allow no dispute of the directions of their minions. You must wait for their instructions and obey them very exactly. If they tell you to wait you dare not budge; if you do, there's your number glaring on your bonnet, and your goose is cooked. The military police are all-powerful on the road, and proportionately autocratic. A sergeant will step into a stretch of clear rural road and address the driver: "What limit is on your speed?"—"Six miles."—"My instructions to you are to go much slower."—"Why" (irritably), "what am I going now?"—"Never mind that" (with a conclusive gesture); "I've timed you from the last post, and you're too fast. I'm not making a case of it, but you go slower. Hear?" And this monument of British administrative exactitude walks off, after saluting perfunctorily (he gives you no loophole), and throws you permission to go on and behave.

You proceed, with the guns belching over the ridge, the observation balloons overhanging the slope silently spotting and sending down cool and deadly mathematical messages. The 'planes drone above; the multitudinous machinery of war creaks and rumbles down the road; the landscape lies around you incongruously quiet and lovely.