BEHIND THE LINES—II

The lines of communication one can expect to be trailed with interest. There the strings are being pulled—though that is a pitiable figure. It is more than a rehearsal for the soul-shaking drama enacting on the Front; but it is as full of interest as orchestral rehearsal is more interesting than the performance coram publico. Rehearsal in orchestra shows the final performance in the making: here you see the Somme Battle in the making. A French town that is within seven miles of the guns, and is also the Headquarters of the ——th Army, unites the ordered busyness of the base with the fevered activity of the second line. It slumbers not nor sleeps. The stream and the screech and roar of trains is intense and incessant. There is no more appreciable interval between troop-trains, supply-trains, ammunition-trains, rumbling through than there is between the decipherable belchings of the guns over the north-east ridge. The buzz of 'planes is as unintermittent as either. The Army Headquarters in the HÔtel de Ville is as strident a centre by night as by day. "The sea is in the broad, the narrow, streets, ebbing and flowing." These words recur by suggestion with a peculiar insistence. It is the flood military; and to this peaceful pastoral town it is as foreign and as ubiquitous as an encroaching sea. The HÔtel de Ville is the centre of a wide area of civil buildings commandeered for its purposes by Headquarters. This sometime produce-store is now "Reports Office"; that hotel is "Signals"; a private maison adjoining is for "Despatch-Riders." All civilian and pedestrian traffic stands aside for the horde of despatch-riders and their motor-cycles. The cars of the Staff whirl through the crowded streets with a licence which takes account of nothing but their objective. Mounted officers are trooping day and night.

More significant than all this is the unending stream of motor-ambulances. They transport from the dressing stations behind the line to the colony of casualty clearing-stations here; they transfer from them to the ambulance-trains; and what these cannot take they pant away with gently to the nearest base. You may stand on the upreared Citadelle ramparts any night and watch these long processions of pain throbbing quietly down the sloping road from —— into the town. And simultaneously you will see another column climbing the road to —— at the other side. The head lights make a long concurrent brilliance, like the ray of a searchlight.

An advanced C.C.S. behind the line sees a constant ebb and flow. Jaded Sisters will hear with a sense of relief the order to evacuate, glimpsing a respite, however brief. But before the evacuation is completed a causal connection is evident between the order and an attack at dawn on the —st instant, and all its ghastly fruits. And whilst the last of the old maimed are being put gently aboard, the new-comers, stained with mud and blood, are being laid in the still warm beds. There is no time for orderliness here. Life for the Sisters is one fevered and sporadic attempt at alleviation—more than an attempt: the relief is accomplished, but at a cost to the workers which leaves its index on feature and figure.

All this is in piteous contrast with the healing peacefulness of the country-side. If you climb the low ridge behind the town any evening you can see the flap-flap of the gun-flashes like a disorganised Aurora. And if you stay till midnight you'll see it intensify into a glowing wall. So gentle is the landscape immediately about you that you can conceive what it would be without that murderous wall of fire and that portentous heart-shaking thunder. This is war, relentless and insatiable.

The days open dewy and crisp with the first touch of winter's severity, before his tooth is keen. The first breath of a French September morning is elating. The harvest is just reaped and cocked, and stands in its brown and yellow stubble. The head of a slope will give you the landscape gently undulating under its succession of woods and streams and gathered harvest, with frequent villages scattered down the valleys and straggling up the slopes. Over all this you look away to the captive balloons depending over the line spotting for the belching guns; and the song of the little birds that the distant guns cannot quench is swallowed in the buzz of the aircraft engines of a flight of scouters setting off on patrol; to-morrow it will be the whirr of a squadron of battle-'planes tearing through the upper distance on a raid. And any morning the air above you is flecked with the puffs of missiles sent hurtling after a Fokker out of its proper territory. As the peaceful evening settles down you will see a whole school of our craft coming home to roost at ——: eighteen to twenty, like a flock of rooks settling at the end of the day. The Angelus ringing in the belfry of the village Église is drowned in the hum.

The little wayside Calvaries are daily smothered in the dust of motor-lorries. Peaceful French domesticity makes an attempt to live its life in the welter of trains and 'planes, tractors and lorries, cars and cycles, horse and foot. It will get it lived aprÈs la guerre—not before. The children of the villages do not play much; they gaze open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the incessant train of troops and strident vehicles. Unless the War finishes soon, they will have forgotten how to play. The village estaminet is no longer the haunt of the light-hearted, light-speaking, wine-sipping French paysan; it is overcrowded with noisy, sweaty Tommies who have no abiding city, demanding drink. The air of it reeks. The girls are too busy for repartee; they have time only for feverish serving.

Passenger trains are rarely to be seen—traffic militaire by day and by night. Rural domestic journeys on the chemin de fer are over and gone. It is supplies or troops or guns; a frantic railway staff and a frenzied chef de gare who has forgotten what smooth and intermittent traffic on his line is like.